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Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Tue Sep 25, 2018 8:57 am
by MichaelB
Full specs announced - including new information like the 4K restoration of the Tingler colour sequence, which is a night-and-day difference over the previous one. For some bizarre reason, Sony don't have 35mm materials of that sequence any more - hence all their video releases suddenly and notoriously plunging in quality even on SD - although thankfully the BFI National Archive had a release print in excellent condition (at least at that point, which was all that we needed):

The Tingler:

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13 Ghosts:

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Homicidal:

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Mr. Sardonicus:

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Re: 94-97 William Castle at Columbia Volume 1

Posted: Tue Sep 25, 2018 9:40 am
by Boosmahn
What do the "alternative audio" options and "restored bathroom scene" refer to for The Tingler? I haven't seen the film so these terms don't make much sense to me.

Re: 94-97 William Castle at Columbia Volume 1

Posted: Tue Sep 25, 2018 9:41 am
by MichaelB
Boosmahn wrote:
Tue Sep 25, 2018 9:40 am
What do the "alternative audio" options and "restored bathroom scene" refer to for The Tingler? I haven't seen the film so these terms don't make much sense to me.
It means that this is the best and most conscientiously thorough version of The Tingler ever released on home video, and by some distance.

Re: 94-97 William Castle at Columbia Volume 1

Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2018 3:49 pm
by domino harvey
To clarify, this set will not contain a physical Ghost Viewer reproduction, just on-disc recreations of what it would look like to use it?

Re: 94-97 William Castle at Columbia Volume 1

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 5:05 am
by MichaelB
Volume 2 announced:

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WILLIAM CASTLE AT COLUMBIA, VOLUME TWO

ZOTZ! (1962)
13 FRIGHTENED GIRLS (1963)
THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1963)
STRAIT-JACKET (1964)


Release date: 10 December 2018
Limited Blu-ray Edition (UK Blu-ray premieres)

Renowned for his imaginative and eccentric marketing ploys, William Castle became synonymous with delivering lurid horror films backed-up by his trademark publicity gimmicks (‘Illusion-O’; ‘Percepto’; the ‘Punishment Poll’; ‘Fright Breaks’, etc.). WILLIAM CASTLE AT COLUMBIA VOLUME TWO features four more weird and wonderful films from the outrageous showman’s illustrious career with Columbia Pictures, all presented on Blu-ray for the very first time in the UK. Containing a wealth of new and archival extras this stunning Limited Edition Blu-ray Box Set from Indicator is strictly limited to 6,000 units.

INDICATOR LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY BOX SET SPECIAL FEATURES:
• High Definition remasters of all four films
• Original mono audio
• Alternative presentations of The Old Dark House – the black and white 1963 US theatrical presentation (87 mins); the cut-down A-certificate 1966 UK presentation (77 mins); and the complete uncut colour presentation (87 mins)
• Zotz! audio commentary by Diabolique Magazine’s editor-in-chief Kat Ellinger
• 13 Frightened Girls audio commentary by Daughters of Darkness’ Samm Deighan
• The Old Dark House audio commentary by celebrated horror and fantasy authors Kim Newman and Stephen Jones
• Strait-Jacket audio commentary film historians Lee Gambin and Emma Westwood
• Stephen Laws Introduces ‘Zotz!’ (2018): an appreciation by the acclaimed horror author
• Kim Newman on Ray Russell (2018): an appreciation of novelist and writer of Zotz! by the critic and author of Nightmare Movies
• 13 Frightened Girls: William Castle’s original 'The Candy Web' opening / closing 'Danger Card' messages
• 13 Frightened Girls: four alternativee opening sequences created for international release versions
• Jonathan Rigby on ‘The Old Dark House’ and ‘Strait-Jacket’ (2018): new appreciations by the author of American Gothic: Six Decades of Classic Horror Cinema
• ‘The Old Dark House’ in Eastmancolor (2018): Paul Frith, Senior Research Associate, School of Art, Media and American Studies at UEA discusses the film's cinematography
• Joan Had Me Fired! (2018): an interview with actor Anne Helm
• On the Road with Joan Crawford (2018): an interview with publicist Richard Kahn
• Battle-Axe: The Making of 'Strait-Jacket' (2007, 15 mins)
• Joan Crawford Wardrobe Tests (1964, 4 mins)
• Joan Crawford - Axe Test (1964, 1 min)
• How to Plan a Movie Murder (1964, 5 mins): star Joan Crawford, director William Castle and author Robert Bloch discuss making Strait-Jacket in this vintage piece
• Super 8 version of Strait-Jacket
• Isolated music & effects track on all four films
• Original theatrical trailers
• Strait-Jacket trailer commentary with David DeCoteau
• 13 Frightened Girls original UK trailer introduction
• Alternative 13 Frightened Girls 'The Candy Web' trailer
• Promotional and on-set photography, poster art and archive materials
• New and improved English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
• Limited Edition box set exclusive booklets for each film with new essays by Joe Jordan, Racheal Nisbet, James Oliver and John Oliver, archival interview materials, contemporary reviews and film credits
• World and UK premieres on Blu-ray
• Limited Edition box set of 6,000 numbered units
• All extras subject to change

#PHILTD098
BBFC cert: 12
REGION FREE (except STRAIT-JACKET, which is REGION B)
EAN: 5037899071830

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 9:32 am
by domino harvey
Great cover!

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 10:52 am
by knives
Why the difference in Strait-Jacket? Based on the US releases I would assume it would be the same licence?

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 11:48 am
by Feego
Maybe Shout! Factory obtained exclusive Region A rights for their edition? It's the only film to have a stand-alone Region A Blu-ray release outside of the Mill Creek double feature sets.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 1:05 pm
by alacal2
Hugely impressive.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 3:17 pm
by kcota17
If I have the Region A of Strait Jacket already, are the other 3 films worth getting / watching?

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 4:23 pm
by MichaelB
Mondo Digital on Volume 1.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 6:40 pm
by knives
kcota17 wrote:
Thu Oct 11, 2018 3:17 pm
If I have the Region A of Strait Jacket already, are the other 3 films worth getting / watching?
Maybe Zotz! is objectively awful, but the other two are okay if lesser works.

Re: 94-97 William Castle at Columbia Volume 1

Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2018 6:07 pm
by MichaelB
Boosmahn wrote:
Tue Sep 25, 2018 9:40 am
What do the "alternative audio" options and "restored bathroom scene" refer to for The Tingler? I haven't seen the film so these terms don't make much sense to me.
This Caps-a-holic comparison offers the proverbial picture worth a thousand words.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2018 10:40 am
by Gerald Christie
MichaelB wrote:
Thu Oct 11, 2018 4:23 pm
Mondo Digital on Volume 1.
Looks great as expected! I'm just dying to get my William Castle and Night of the Demon set, too bad I'll have to wait till November to get them though :cry: Wow, that WCV2 set looks terrific and awful tempting, but unfortunately I'm going to pass on this one. I love William Castle and his movies, but I feel like the first volume includes his best films while this one is more of his lessor efforts. I just can't justify buying this one considering I only really think one of them is good and like, Strait-Jacket, while the rest are mostly duds.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2018 1:32 pm
by Feego
Gerald Christie wrote:
Sun Oct 14, 2018 10:40 am
I love William Castle and his movies, but I feel like the first volume includes his best films while this one is more of his lessor efforts. I just can't justify buying this one considering I only really think one of them is good and like, Strait-Jacket, while the rest are mostly duds.
It looks like they chose to release them chronologically, with the four earliest titles in Volume 1 and the four later ones in Volume 2. But it might have been a shrewder business decision to divvy them up so that each set would contain at least two fan favorites. As you say, Strait-Jacket is probably the one popular title in Volume 2, whereas The Tingler, 13 Ghosts, and Homicidal in Volume 1 are all highly regarded by fans.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2018 3:22 pm
by Lowry_Sam
So will these boxes eventually get broken up & sold as individual titles once they sell out? I really want Strait Jacket, but don't feel like shelling out for the whole box......Would have loved a Joan Collins camp box set with everything she did (including tv work & interviews) after Whatever Happened To Baby Jane.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2018 10:14 am
by Gerald Christie
Feego wrote:
Sun Oct 14, 2018 1:32 pm
Gerald Christie wrote:
Sun Oct 14, 2018 10:40 am
I love William Castle and his movies, but I feel like the first volume includes his best films while this one is more of his lessor efforts. I just can't justify buying this one considering I only really think one of them is good and like, Strait-Jacket, while the rest are mostly duds.
It looks like they chose to release them chronologically, with the four earliest titles in Volume 1 and the four later ones in Volume 2. But it might have been a shrewder business decision to divvy them up so that each set would contain at least two fan favorites. As you say, Strait-Jacket is probably the one popular title in Volume 2, whereas The Tingler, 13 Ghosts, and Homicidal in Volume 1 are all highly regarded by fans.
Yes, I agree it might have made more sense for them to have mixed them up a bit. IMO, the weakest film of the first collection is Homicidal maybe they could have switched that with Strait-Jacket? The second volume still looks terrific and I'm happy for the fans, but I don't see it selling as well as the first one.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2018 10:28 am
by Gerald Christie
Lowry_Sam wrote:
Sun Oct 14, 2018 3:22 pm
So will these boxes eventually get broken up & sold as individual titles once they sell out? I really want Strait Jacket, but don't feel like shelling out for the whole box......Would have loved a Joan Collins camp box set with everything she did (including tv work & interviews) after Whatever Happened To Baby Jane.
Don't you mean Joan Crawford? Although I would buy in heartbeat a Joan Collins boxset with her more "trashy" work like Fear in the Night, Dark Places and Empire of the Ants. As for Joan Crawford, there's so many great titles from her filmography waiting to be released but most of these are out of Indicator's reach. I would love for them to release the underrated Harriet Craig and Queen Bee. As far as I know, neither ever got a legitimate release and were only relegated to the MOD treatment. Besides, it could actually happen as both films are with Sony.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 10:24 am
by What A Disgrace
I'd like to place my pre-order for this as soon as possible, but Amazon really drags its feet when it comes to making Indicator releases available to pre-order.I think I'm more interested in hearing these audio commentaries than watching the movies themselves.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 5:23 pm
by Florinaldo
The assortment of extras in Volume Two is at least as extensive and interesting as in the first one! Quite the royal treatment for Castle, and sweet revenge (albeit from beyond the grave) for someone who was often dismissed as a gimmicky shlockmeister, not entirely unjustly in the case of some of his films.

One missing bonus might be a replica of the medallion handed out at screenings of Zotz!, but that might have put packaging and production costs over the level of acceptability. It's already admirable that Indicator regularly manages to put together such packages, considering how much money must be involved in buying rights, production and compensating their various contributors who provide the various commentaries, analyses, introductions, etc.
What A Disgrace wrote:
Wed Oct 17, 2018 10:24 am
I think I'm more interested in hearing these audio commentaries than watching the movies themselves.
It is probably a safe bet that the bonuses in those sets are more interesting than a good chunk of the primary material.
knives wrote:
Thu Oct 11, 2018 6:40 pm
Maybe Zotz! is objectively awful, but the other two are okay if lesser works.
As I remember it, despite Tom Poston's best efforts it is rather unfunny for a comedy. Direction and script are the main reasons; Ray Russell was a very good writer of gothic tales and supernatural fiction, but humour was not his forte judging from this one. Perhaps the accompanying material would make me appreciate more this time around.

Re: 94-97 William Castle at Columbia Volume 1

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2018 2:17 am
by swo17
domino harvey wrote:
Wed Sep 26, 2018 3:49 pm
To clarify, this set will not contain a physical Ghost Viewer reproduction, just on-disc recreations of what it would look like to use it?
Yes. There are four different ways to watch the film. You can skip to chapters 4, 7, 9, or 11 to quickly sample how each of them appear:

1. The Illusion-O version. Presumably this was how the film screened and it would work with a physical viewer if you have one. (I guess a standard pair of red/blue 3D glasses would do the trick.) The screen turns blue with red ghosts that would be mostly blocked out if you saw them through a blue lens.

2. Simulated ghost viewer for believers. For relevant parts of the film you would be looking through the red part of the viewer so the screen turns red and the ghosts are all at their most visible. You decide to watch the film this way at the beginning, not sporadically throughout.

3. Simulated ghost viewer for skeptics. These same scenes play in blue and you can still faintly make out the ghosts though that won't convince you will it you heartless skeptic.

4. Black-and-white version of the film. Ghost visibility is between options 1 and 3. This seems like it would be a boring way to watch the movie though.

In conclusion, if you enjoy viewing ghosts, 2>1>4>3. Visual representations of what the ghost viewer actually looked like are presented both on screen and on the disc's cover sleeve, though this may be no substitute for the tactile sensation of holding a cheap piece of plastic close to your face. Also, a third on-screen viewer option for believers with weak stomachs (starting red but then switching to blue when the ghosts get too frightening) might have been appreciated.

NB: Our own MichaelB is credited in the booklet as having come up with this idea...

94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2018 3:55 am
by MichaelB
If you have an Angle button on your remote, you can also switch the ghosts on and off while you’re watching the film, in case things get too scary.

And yes, I was playing around with the master and thought “I wonder what would happen if I electronically removed all the blue from the image?”. So I tried it, and the results were far more vividly rendered ghosts. And then I tried removing all the red, and they all but vanished.

Of course, if anyone other than David Mackenzie had been doing the authoring, I’d probably have abandoned the idea at that point - but he was happy enough to push it further (in fact, it’s the most technically complicated disc that I’ve ever overseen, not least thanks to Spine Tingler!’s hard-of-hearing subtitles, literally dozens of which needed careful repositioning to avoid existing onscreen text).

The one annoyance was discovering that not all remotes these days have an Angle button, hence the pop-up menu workaround, but I always conceived this as being primarily something that you could switch on and off on the fly when watching the film.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2018 10:08 am
by swo17
MichaelB wrote:
Thu Oct 25, 2018 3:55 am
If you have an Angle button on your remote, you can also switch the ghosts on and off while you’re watching the film, in case things get too scary.
Oh cool, I'll have to try it that way

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2018 5:18 pm
by MichaelB
CineOutsider on volume 1 - unsurprisingly, the most detailed review by far.

Re: 94-101 William Castle at Columbia Volumes 1 and 2

Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2018 4:12 am
by MichaelB
The Digital Bits on Volume One.