Friday, August 05, 2005

Thursday's movie


Last night we watched House on Haunted Hill with Vincent Price. We'd seen it before but this version is the new DVD with commentary by Mike Nelson from Mystery Science Theater 3000. (Do I really need to type that out? Most folks reading this are likely to know what MST3K means.) It's a fun, silly movie, a William Castle classic starring Price and as Nelson points out, the guy from TV's The Big Valley and Robert Mitchum's sister. The commentary was the reason we picked up this DVD and Carnival of Souls; they're in the Off Color Films series from Legend Films that also includes Reefer Madness. We rented that one a few weeks back and had some good laughs from that. Sometimes a goofy, 85-minute movie is the best medicine for a stressful day. You know, instead of pot, which is stinky and far less legal.

Off Color Films does colorized versions of their movies, but they're creatively colorized so they're just enhancing the picture a little without pretending this is the color the filmmakers always intended and they totally would've shot in color if the poor saps had been able to do so, a la Ted Turner. All the DVDs have the option of watching the film in the original black and white. It defaults to color when the commentary track is on, or you can select the colorized version for normal viewing. They have fun with the colors; in Reefer Madness, the puffs of smoke coming from the teenaged dope fiends are tinted in a variety of non-standard smoke hues, like green and pink. Each disc contains a short video on how they acheive their colorization, but I haven't watched it yet.

We'll probably see Carnival of Souls this weekend sometime, and they still have Reefer Madness and the remake of Night of the Living Dead for sale, but we haven't snagged those yet. Technically, House on Haunted Hill won't be released for another month, but you can order one autographed by Mike Nelson and have it shipped now. I don't profit from any of this, but their product has my free endorsement.

3 comments:

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  2. Hey, you're getting spam comments! Big time, big time. Now I've forgotten what I was going to say... Oh yeah! Carnival of Souls = Scariest movie EVAR!!! Dude, seriously. I saw that guy's face in my rearview mirror at night for years. Then I saw Lost Highway, and it all started again!!!

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  3. Hooray, I figured out how to delete spam comments!

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