One Expensive Month

One Expensive Month

Jim Knipfel

With DVD pressing plants backed up for months in the rush to release complete collections of half-popular television series and recent Hollywood flops, it's getting harder and harder for interesting, worthwhile films to sneak through the nets. But it still happens, and even if you're not itching, particularly, to get your hands on those new Gilmore Girls boxes there are a few things of interest scheduled for release in September.

Universal is releasing the first of a series of Bela Lugosi box sets. Granted, an enormous percentage of Lugosi's output was crap, but he had his masterpieces, too-a few of which are included here for the first time. Edgar Ulmer's The Black Cat, for instance, was the first time Lugosi had been paired with Boris Karloff, and by all accounts it should be considered part of the pantheon of Universal's classic horror films. That was certainly the initial intention. Problem is, though, there are no "monsters" here, and so no Aurora model kits to market. All it has are some humans behaving very badly on a set straight put of Caligari, as Lugosi (playing a death camp survivor) seeks revenge against the man (Karloff) who not only ran the camp and murdered thousands, but stole his wife as well.

MGM's nearly-abandoned "Midnight Movies" series makes a hesitant return this month, with an early H.P. Lovecraft double feature (Die Monster Die and the psychedelic Dunwich Horror, starring a stoned Dean Stockwell) and a swell post-apocalypse double bill, with the ubiquitous Last Man on Earth (the first film version of Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend") and the long-awaited Panic in Year Zero, in which Ray Milland heads into the mountains for a family camping trip moments before the bombs hit LA,. Then he turns into a real bastard.

Speaking of LA, a 15 foot-tall alien who can shoot laser beams out of his eyes and has a penchant for decapitation is paying a visit to Brentwood in The Dark, a charming 1979 film starring William Devane, Cathy Lee Crosby, Richard Jaeckel and Keenan Wynn. For some reason, it remains one of my favorites.

Also coming out this month from Subversive Cinema is the only film directed by Guerdon Trueblood. Trueblood was mostly known as the writer responsible for some of the world's finest insect revenge films, but in 1973 he scraped a few thousand dollars together and made The Candy Snatchers, which today remains a classic of brutal early-70s exploitation.

Space is limited here, but September will also see the releases of the 4th SCTV collection, Blue Underground's complete Blind Dead set for all you Knights Templar fans, and the made-for-TV extravaganza Devil Dog: Hound of Hell, a redundantly-titled tale of pet ownership starring Richard Crenna.