Synapse Films

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Among other things, Synapse will be releasing 27 Nikkatsu roman-pornos next year.

[colinr0380]

Great news about the Nikkatsu films. It might help to put the Angel Guts films into better context! It is also good to note that Jasper Sharp has recently written a fascinating book on the whole area of Japanese erotic films, not only the Roman Porno period but it gives a good overview of that too.

“The good guys always win.....Even in the 80s!”

I recently watched through the latest 42nd Street Forever volume – the Alamo Drafthouse edition – and yet again got introduced to some interesting (and sometimes very funny!) trailers for films that for whatever reason have fallen into obscurity. This volume was made even more interesting for me as the only film whose trailer features here that I had previously seen was the rip off of Rosemary’s Baby featuring Joan Collins (being cursed by a spurned dwarf) and Donald Pleasance: I Don’t Want To Be Born/The Monster/The Devil Within Her! So other than that this was all completely new territory for me!

I usually have a big difficulty that edges over into annoyance with shameless over the top trailer hyperbolics that try any tactic to make a film seem appealing, but somehow going back to watch the breathlessly narrated trailers on this and the previous volumes adds a strange bittersweet nostalgia to the experience with the feeling that many of the films faded away or became cult items far away from the potential mass audiences that these trailers seem aimed at. On this volume there are also some interstitial pieces between the trailers, including Charlton Heston explaining the ratings system during a break in action on a tennis court (and giving Dunlop tennis rackets some free advertising at the same time!)

There is also that wonderful feeling of seeing films distilled down into their purest essence – all exploitation material, that was the prime reason for the film’s existence in the first place, and little to no filler to pad a film out to a ninety minute running time! As with the previous two volumes there is an invaluable commentary giving a little more information on the films themselves as well as other anecdotal pieces of information surrounding the films. A couple of Sonny Chiba films feature, as does Machine Gun McCain, an Italian crime film featuring John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, Britt Ekland and a ‘special appearance’ from Gena Rowlands!

Some terribly unappealing films feature too, such as the Mother Nature shagfest Birds Do It, Bees Do It; the single entendre sex comedy Let’s Do It!; Chatter-Box the film that, along with Pussy Talk, obviously inspired The Vagina Monologues!; The Magic Christmas Tree (Gah!); the bizarre Lovers Guide prefiguring Danish Love Acts in which randy couples defile various pieces of functional furniture and white fur rugs while having slow motion orgasms; Group Marriage – a film that tries to work as a shocking expose of a practice that does not seem to actually exist; Lightning Bolt, a James Bond rip off by Antonio Margheiti starring a callow Anthony Eisley, who seems to prove that his wonderfully wooden performance in The Naked Kiss was not a one off! Awful Italian comedies like The 3 Supermen In The West (with a bizarrely catchy theme tune!) that seem to feature wall to wall bottom kicking as their hilarity highlights! And the excruciating looking Norman…Is That You? with Red Foxx having a gay panic about his son's homosexuality. Featuring the roommate whose catchphrase seems to be squealing “Fabulous!” - the most interesting information to be gleaned from the commentary is that this chap ended up directing almost the self same material thirty years later in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, showing the more things change, the more they stay the same!

And the least said about law suit baiting Karzan: Master of the Jungle starring Johnny Kissmüller Jnr., the better!

This volume also seems to feature lots of films using seemingly unauthorised music from other films which leads to a lot of ‘place that film’ fun! Sting of the Dragon Masters, a Chinese martial arts film trailer uses North by Northwest cues. The weirdly hilarious Lucky Seven trailer in which seven cute children fight crooks (but instead of showing them triumphant ends with them being tossed through plate glass windows and so on, including a moment pointed out on the commentary of one poor girl landing straight on her face on a concrete floor! There is also a brilliantly funny section in which one girl is so busy overreacting in slow motion to a previous knock that her attacker has ample time to grab a chair and smash it over her!) has a strange cute song that sounds suspiciously like it was inspired by Like A Virgin, and then in a cue from the Cat People remake shows that Inglourious Basterds is not the first to have incongruously used music from that film!; James Tont, an Italian James Bond rip off directed by Bruno (brother of Sergio) Corbucci, with a theme song that blatantly rips off the Goldfinger tune just in a slightly different key and slightly different words; and Sorceress uses the score from Battle Beyond The Stars!

I did find a number of films to add to my ever growing “must see” list though after having my curiosity peaked by the trailers:

Mad Monkey Kung Fu – a rather ordinary looking martial arts film turns into something compelling with the addition of a couple of spectacular looking acrobatic scenes at the end. And of course the connection to the Monkey legend is always fun – there’s apparently even a new computer game coming out soon using the legend called Enslaved.

Message From Space – the Kinji Fukasaku sci-fi samurai film with great looking practical special effects, spaceships in the form of galleons with their crews in naval garb (seemingly channelling Space Battleship Yamato), annoyingly cute robots (described in the commentary as looking good in the trailer but moving in the film itself just as if you “threw a trashcan down the stairs”), glowing walnuts of destiny and a pissed off looking Vic Morrow (“I buried my career….in orbit!”). This would be a shoe-in for Lino’s Space Opera list. It certainly looks cheesier, and therefore more fun, than the Star Wars films! Like a sci-fi paperback cover come to life.

The Terrornauts – an incredibly bizarre looking British sci-fi film from Amicus, featuring Charles Hawtrey of all people battling an alien invasion and featuring actual space battles, seemingly conducted on a Doctor Who sized budget! It looks charmingly rough around the edges.

Mindwarp – a intense looking Alien rip off, which features (along with Inseminoid) a female crew member getting space raped by a slimy alien. This seems to emphasise that Alien did the best thing by having John Hurt getting attacked instead, making it somehow seem much less ickily exploitative!

Stacey – I think it might just be the beautiful ass-kicking, pistol packing, race car driving woman at the centre of this thriller (“Caught in a triple cross blackmail double murder case…”) that makes me want to see this. But whats wrong with that?

Pretty Maids All In A Row – another wonderful looking dangerously sexy Roger Vadim film! Like The Klansman from the previous volume it is amazing to think of the calibre of cast involved with such material.

Putney Swope directed by Robert Downey Snr. – not much to be gleaned from the pimple cream parody song used as the trailer. According to the commentary the film itself is about a truthful advertising company which sounds interesting, although I remember feeling the same way about the Dudley Moore film Crazy People before I saw it, and look how that turned out!

Redneck County – it just looks dangerously wrong on so many levels

The Fabulous World of Jules Verne – a strange Czech film combining live action and animation to seemingly create the effect of woodcut prints come to life. I'd love to see if they could have pulled this technique off for a whole picture.

The Magic Kite – a children’s film made by Xerox (!) seemingly featuring a young Causcasian boy being chased in his pyjamas around the Forbidden City by sword wielding palace guards before being befriended by the children of Mao’s modern society through the magic of walkie talkies and flag semaphore! Seems rather dull!

The Secret of Magic Island – a truly bizarre looking film with animals acting out a story in minature sets. I was enchanted by the kitten and the duckling in a balloon but truly knew that I needed to see this film when the narration said it included “a villainous space age monkey”!

Sorceress – for looking far more fun than the Conan and The Mummy films combined, seemingly with a budget to pull the effects off to the required “still cheesy but on just the right side of incompetent” level!

[oldsheperd]

I just ordered the 42nd Street XXXtreme Edition. I heard it's really good.

[colinr0380]

From your previous posts oldshepherd, I believe that you will find it more than satisfactory! And if you've ever wanted to see trailers that Boogie Nights was likely cribbing from at the beginning of that film's move to the 1980s then there are many that fit that description here

Though there are some amazing trailers on there too, including the bizarre "F", the transgender Passage Through Pamela ("what is her secret?"), the thirties musical extravaganza Blonde Ambition and one trailer that uses a piece from Vangelis in an unorthodox (and likely unauthorised!) accompaniment to the on-screen action!

And The Ribald Tales of Canterbury and Scheherazade: 1001 Erotic Nights, which make the Pasolini films seem flawless in comparison.

[Dr Amicus]

The Terrornauts – an incredibly bizarre looking British sci-fi film from Amicus, featuring Charles Hawtrey of all people battling an alien invasion and featuring actual space battles, seemingly conducted on a Doctor Who sized budget! It looks charmingly rough around the edges.

Not wanting to go too off topic, but dear god this has to be seen to be believed. Yes, Charles Hawtrey does get involved (as a comedy accountant) along with Patricia Hayes (as a charlady) which must count as genuinely odd casting.

To add to the wtf nature, it was written by top 60s Brit SF Author John Brunner (just before hitting the big time with All Stand on Zanzibar) and based on a novel by 40s pulp writer Murray Leinster. I spent several pages of my thesis comparing the film to the book - neither are 'good' in any sense of the word, but they are VERY revealing about cultural differences between the US and the UK.

And it is very cheap, the monsters / robots go way beyond anything in Dr Who for !!??!! style - and the plot is a work of genius too. The first time I watched it I thought it was going to be a clear inspiration for the old kids game show The Adventure Game.

What's the trailer like? I tried to hunt down trailers when I was writing my thesis, partly because I find them fascinating and also as they reveal something of how the films were marketed.

[colinr0380]

I loved The Adventure Game as a kid! That and Knightmare!

The film gets a lot of praise on the commentary from the Alamo Drafthouse people, who describe Amicus itself as one of the most interesting of the British horror studios at the time, always willing to push into different areas, of which The Terrornauts was one. They suggest that the filmmakers may have repurposed some of the sets from the Peter Cushing Dr Who films from a couple of years previously for this one, and they end by praising the ideas and ambition of the film, even if the budget was not there to back it up.

It's an American trailer for the film (trumpeting "In Color!" at the end title!), beginning with aliens transporting a building into space (talking of Doctor Who, didn't they do that in one of the more recent series?), then the cast are menaced by a beeping, bleeping robot very reminiscent of the Daleks but with more radars and flashing lights until the charlady sees the shadow of some furry creature on the wall and screams. Then there's a little about a transporter to a different planet with a couple of suns (always a good shorthand for "this is not Earth", even when the location is obviously an out of town quarry!) And then it ends with a space battle directed (I assume telepathically) by the cast wearing shower caps with cables attached and a pre-2001 style twirling spaceship exploding under the title.

Here's the trailer person's hyperbole:

Scientist: "This may be what we have been listening for for the last three years"

Narrator: "At last: contact with another planet, but its really contact with NIGHTMARE! From out of this world, from out of the vast, frightening unknown comes The Terrornauts!"

Scientist: "Something came out of the sky, picked the building up bodily and...tore it out of the ground"

Narrator: "One moment on solid, familiar Earth: the next kidnapped and taken to an enemy world"

Panicking female love interest: "The whole human race will be destroyed or driven into caves like savages unless...", Scientist: "Unless we stop this enemy first!"

Narrator: "You will thrill to the most fantastic intergalactic battle ever. A warring asteroid challenged by a handful of humans a million miles out in space, determined to save the Earth from...the Terrornauts!"

[Matt]

What's the trailer like?

et voila

[oldsheperd]

Thanks, Colin.
I'm actually going to be beefing up my exploitation collection this January when I have some extra funds.
The 42nd Street XXXtreme isn't available through too many e-tailers for some reason.
I keep reading about "F" as one of the more interesting trailers on the dvd.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Message From Space – the Kinji Fukasaku sci-fi samurai film with great looking practical special effects, spaceships in the form of galleons with their crews in naval garb (seemingly channelling Space Battleship Yamato), annoyingly cute robots (described in the commentary as looking good in the trailer but moving in the film itself just as if you “threw a trashcan down the stairs”), glowing walnuts of destiny and a pissed off looking Vic Morrow (“I buried my career….in orbit!”). This would be a shoe-in for Lino’s Space Opera list. It certainly looks cheesier, and therefore more fun, than the Star Wars films! Like a sci-fi paperback cover come to life.

Putney Swope directed by Robert Downey Snr. – not much to be gleaned from the pimple cream parody song used as the trailer. According to the commentary the film itself is about a truthful advertising company which sounds interesting, although I remember feeling the same way about the Dudley Moore film Crazy People before I saw it, and look how that turned out!

I've the the other 42nd Street Forever releases and we just got the Alamo Draft one in at work. I'll be sure to check it out ASAP. If you haven't checked out Message from Space, do it now! It's so cheesy, but I can't deny the amounts of fun I had watching it. Not the best Fukasaku, but certainly one of his strangest.

I'm very surprised to hear the Putney Swope is on it. It's a pretty off-the-wall satire that probably belongs more in the art house than in a grindhouse. It's worth it alone for the commercials in the film which are all pretty brilliant. HVE did an excellent release of it with a great interview with Mr. Downey being interrupted by his cat.

EDIT: I should mention, my link to Message in Space is to the dubbed version. I've looked all around the internet and can't find a Japanese version with subtitles. I would love to own it, but it hasn't been issued on DVD.

[oldsheperd]

I watched the 42nd Street Forever Draft House and Exploitation Explosion dvds with and without commentaries. The commentaries make for an interesting listen. I totally want to see Mind Warp(Galaxy of Terror), it looks pretty f'ed up. Too bad Savage Streets is OOP because I want to see that as well.
In other news I watched some of the 42nd Street XXXtreme edition. Yes, Coli, "F" is a totally bizarre looking film but you can actually get it in Seka Triple Feature dvd from Alpha Blue. I ordered a copy from dvdempire for 1 bucks along with a Doris Wishman Porn Directors of the 70s double feature disc from Alhpa Blue. Totally looking forward to these. Cool thing that my girlfriend is a bit as intrigued as I am to see these plus some of the Something Weird dvds I just bought. Not too mention she's looking forward to seeing the Retard-O-Tron Mixtape dvds I bought. Thank God she's cool!

[colinr0380]

Galaxy of Terror does look interesting - even though all reports say it is terrible it has a fascinating cast: Sid Haig, Robert Englund, one of Zalman King's last acting roles before he moved into writing 9 & 1/2 Weeks and directing lots of erotic thrillers, and Grace Zabriske (!)

Plus apparently James Cameron worked on the Alien-influenced production design, with some examples shown in posts from a special effects-oriented film blog here and here.

[solaris72]

I saw a 35mm screening of Galaxy of Terror (in a double feature with Battle Beyond the Stars) a couple of years back. BBtS was kind of boring but Galaxy of Terror was awesome, highly entertaining schlock.

[Revelator]

The Fabulous World of Jules Verne – a strange Czech film combining live action and animation to seemingly create the effect of woodcut prints come to life. I'd love to see if they could have pulled this technique off for a whole picture.

They did. The picture sags a bit in the middle, and the characters are all cardboardy, but the visuals are consistently stunning from beginning to end. Here's part of the review from Locus Online:

Zeman lets out all the stops. This is a live-action black and white movie — but it uses every camera trick and every form of animation known in 1958... Methods include stop-motion, paper cutout, drawing and painting animation, drawn foregrounds and backdrops, dissolves, miniatures and models, double exposure (probably in-camera and superimposition), still images, traveling and stationary mattes — they're all here. There were at least eight people watching; someone yelled out at one point "There are at least seven different things going on in this scene!" (I counted eight.) And all this before the invention of blue screens!

What impresses most about the film is the sheer fanatical devotion to detail, of the meticulous composition of so many diverse elements in a single shot that occasionally puts even such painstaking stop-motion giants as Willis O'Brien, Ray Harryhausen and Nick Park to shame. In terms of black and white trick photography, you'd have to reach back to films like Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. to find anything even remotely comparable, and this is easily an order of magnitude more sophisticated.

There are lines drawn on sets, and even on people, to keep the original steel-engraving feel. The scenes of ships of the water have been treated with some sort of light, striped screen (probably cloth, probably double-exposed) that makes the moving waves of real water take on the appearance of the engraved lines in a 19th century drawing of the sea. There's a scene of a train coming down a track — the train is drawn; the wheels and the tracks are animated; the (real) engineer stands on an open platform in the engine's cab and (real) people lean out of the (drawn) passenger car. (It's so simple and powerful it takes your breath away.) Actors walk through back-projected sets; at the same time they're walking behind animated full-sized paper cutouts of spinning flywheels and meshing gears, all this in front of a painted set in the middle-background. For maybe five seconds of screen time. There's a scene of an animated shark attacking a real diver in a model set with painted water. We could go on...

The dubbed version of the film is available from Movies Unlimited http://www.moviesunlimited.com/musite/p ... c=director. I've only seen the film in 16mm, but from what I've read the DVDs visual quality isn't bad. In any case, this movie is nowhere as well known as it should be, given that it's one of the most impressive animation-live action hybrids ever made. Zeman continued with this technique in Baron Prásil, aka The Fabulous Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which some say puts even Jules Verne to shame. I haven't seen it yet but have ordered a gray-market copy--I eagerly await its arrival.

[Cash Flagg]

From Blu-ray.com--

Synapse Films is finally entering the Blu-ray arena. The first title from the independent studio, scheduled for December is Vampire Circus, a 1972 horror title from Hammer Film Productions directed by Robert Young and set in a 19th-century village visited by a traveling carnival whose performers are bloodsuckers. Video will be presented in 1080p and 1.66:1, while audio will be monoaural DTS-HD Master Audio.

Special features include:

* The Bloodiest Show on Earth: Making Vampire Circus: all-new documentary featuring interviews with filmmaker Joe Dante, Hammer documentarian Ted Newsom, Video Watchdog editor/author Tim Lucas, author/film historian Philip Nutman and David Prowse
* Gallery of Grotesqueries: A Brief History of Circus Horrors: retrospective featurette
* Visiting the House of Hammer: Britain's Legendary Horror Magazine retrospective on the popular British publication featuring Nutman
* Vampire Circus interactive comic book, featuring artwork by Brian Bolland
* Poster and stills gallery
* Original theatrical trailer

In 2011, Synapse will release Twins of Evil, Hands of the Ripper and the TV series Hammer House of Horror, although at the time it is not known if all will come out in high definition.

[stereo]

I wonder what happened to Thundercrack! ? Does anyone know if/when a release will happen? It was initially slated for 2010 for an anniversary release. It would be great to get Thundercrack! on blu.

[dwk]

When asked if Thundercrack was going to be released this year, Don May posted the following on 8/17 over at AV Maniacs

Nope. The restoration work required is MUCH more extensive than we thought. Next week, I have to go through the only decent existing print of the short version to hopefully fix a couple scene that had splices in the long version. It's exciting, but extremely time consuming and I want to do it right, so, it's taking much more time than anticipated.

[Dr Amicus]

Great news re Vampire Circus. Hammer's 70s output tends to get underrated (admittedly, with films such as Lust For a Vampire or Crescendo these are very hard to underrate), but this is is well worth catching. It betrays a little pre-release meddling (or, more likely, nervousness), but remains one of their best of the 70s. It has a real sense of the fantastic about it, in marked comparison to those of the far more grounded Fisher who really downplayed the fantastic in his Hammer films.

And for Doctor Who fans there's the added attraction of Lalla Ward - in a not remotely family friendly role!

[Cash Flagg]

DVD Beaver on Vampire Circus

[knives]

Should point out that Paranoiac is R0, not B.

[colinr0380]

Well, I've worked my way through the frequently eye-popping trailers on the Nikkatsu Roman Porno Trailer Collection. Some of the films seem quite inflammatory even now but this collection appears to cover a lot of the main subgenres - nurse and teacher films, outright comedies (New Company Girls: 9 To 5 seems like a sex version of the Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton film), dark dramas (Embraced By The Sea and Race Across The Drenched Wetland; both of which I'd like to see in full), period pieces (Affair In The Early Afternoon: Kyoto Tapestry - which looks amazing, and is the film I most want to see from this collection), films set by the sea (Pearl Divers: Tight Shellfish has a very 'Tampopo' vibe in its use of seafood as an aphrodisiac, although Juzo Itami didn't use an octopus in a highly unorthodox manner!), and even finds room for a transvestite/ditzy girl/yakuza love triangle trailer and one trailer for a film that appears to tackle the highly unnecessary subject of urolagnia!

The late Toshiharu Ikeda gets well represented here with two films which might help to pull him out from the shadow of Takashi Ishii - the coastal set It Happened One Summer: Blue Coral Reef and the rather aptly timed Sex Hunter which uses dialogue about 'white' and 'black' swans to describe what seems to be an overheated take on an everyday tale of bondage and ballet (with a use of the classic glass Coca-Cola bottle in a manner that product placement people would likely not appreciate!)

There are some highly amusing overwrought taglines flashing up on the screen throughout the trailers. My favourite would have to be a description of a particular feisty unclothed lady as being "sometimes cute like a squirrel, sometime with fangs bared like a leopard...". Although "Pierce me with your hot pistil" comes a close second. "Using unusual gymnastics to get into the L.A. Olympics" also ranks highly.

After those trailers (I'm still amazed that a mainstream studio devoted seventeen years to this kind of material) the included thirty minute short, Kyoko's Lesbian Flight, is rather bland stuff. Though the fact that it is obviously shot on video, rather than film, suggests interesting things about what was happening to the late period Roman Porno films (competition wth the shot-on-video pink films?) The film itself is also slightly thought-provoking and amusing in the way that the lesbian angle implied in the title in the trist between two flight attendants (one youthful, naive and drunk set against the more mature worldly lady) the night before their trip is immediately dropped once the boyfriend arrives. There are some telling sexual politics going on in the way that the younger girl (the one who drunkenly came over and initiated the lesbian stuff) gets banished to hide in the bathroom, where she has little to do but play with the settings on the shower and voyeuristically peep on the couplings in the other room, while the other girl gets (after coming to a rather one-sided bargain with the younger girl to ensure her bathroom silence) to be returned to the fold of heterosexuality - there's not even the plot development of the other girl's discovery which develops into a threesome(!) and I was left with the impression that the film was suggesting that the lesbian antics were just a warm-up act at best for the main event.

So certainly this is a trailer collection that shouldn't be approached by the faint hearted, easily offended or those who like seeing women remain clothed for more than fifteen seconds. According to the flyer on the back of the liner notes (written by Jasper Sharp, excellently putting the trailers into context) the first two films that Synapse/Impulse Films will be releasing will be Debauchery (which looks from the trailer like some unholy combination of Belle de Jour and The Story of O) and Female Teacher: Dirty Afternoon.

[dwk]

Thou Shalt Not Kill...Except Blu-ray has been delayed a few weeks because the original company hired to do the digital restoration work really fucked up.

[knives]

At least they're good enough of a company to not just put any old crap out (looks to Universal).

[colinr0380]

The 42nd Street Forever Blu-ray edition is excellent as usual, a nice mix of the trailers from the first two volumes and some new ones (the first two DVD compilations still have a few unique trailers though, such as the Peter Cushing starring, perils of laser surgery film Corruption). I'm pretty amazed that the team of commentators managed to keep going for three and three quarter hours although the commentary over Dark Star sounds as if it might have been recorded later and slotted in, perhaps if the trailer itself was a late addition. Talking of the commentary it was amusing that they have a rather appalled reaction during the mondo movie section (and their stony silence during a German trailer for Pasolini's Salo), trailers featuring imagery strong enough to ruin any 'party' mood built up over the previous couple of hours! Only Patrick Swayze in a roller skating disco can recapture the mood!

Perhaps the most exciting trailer on this disc though turns up during the biker gang section, for Devil's Angels, featuring John Cassavetes as perhaps the screen's least convincing bike gang leader, along with Mimsy Farmer as the love interest!

[dwk]

Don announced on his personal facebook page that Synapse is going to be releasing Demons this year

The flu makes you do crazy things... Like tease announcements and such for upcoming Synapse Films titles. Yep. Coming in 2013.
Extras have been in the works for months now (it's been INCREDIBLY difficult to keep this secret).
We will also be correcting the incorrect black levels and the botched day-for-night shots that have plagued other versions. Other things, too. More info as we go along.
Perhaps there will be multiple audio options? Perhaps.

Maybe Synapse also picked up Tenebrae and Phenomena

[dwk]

The next two Nikkatsu Roman Porno titles have gone up for pre-order at Amazon:
3/12 - Fairy In A Cage Blu-ray or DVD
3/12 - Female Teacher: In Front Of The Students DVD only

Fairy In A Cage will be the first Nikkatsu Roman Porno title they release on Blu-ray.