What the fuck? Surely this wasn’t originally in 16:9?

Gah! They’ve cut this down from 1.85:1 to 1.77:1! The edges are gone!

Now I don’t know whether I want to watch this… I was pretty suspicious of this box set — it’s got all the Freddy movies — on four bluray discs.

Except for the mutilation, the restoration looks pretty OK, though.

I was gonna relax with some trash after having watched over thirty quality films, and now it’s ruined. RUINED I TELLS YA

This movie is still kinda scary, though. I haven’t seen it since I was a teenager, and I remember being scared shitless.

Such teenagers they have in high schools!

It’s just such a good idea. I mean, Nightmare on Elm Street — nightmares are the scariest things most people experience (hopefully), and this film harnesses that expertly. And Wes Craves can play around endlessly with the viewer’s expectations — “did she nod off? is this real and we can relax? or is she asleep and we have to be prepared for Freddy to jump out of the mirror?”

The concept is just so much more exciting than the other major horror franchises like Halloween or (*zzz*, ironically) Friday the 13th. There’s just so much more scope for a writer to play around with.

Allegedly this series was the main thing that kept New Line Cinema afloat for a decade.

I’ve seen some of the subsequent films before, but not all of them, I think.

Not just a TV in bed — but shoes!?!

Oh, I didn’t realise until just now that it’s Johnny Depp. His first role?

Very ergonomic.

The 80s was a more … hopeful time, I guess? People in horror movies at the time often take a totally rational approach to what’s happening, try to work out the rules and vanquish the evil. (See Poltergeist, for instance.) I think that in most recent films of this ilk, we just see people crying, running around, and then crying some more until the film is over?

It’s a pretty good movie. I’m never sure how to throw the die on horror films like this — I mean, it’s not a “good movie”, but it’s a good horror movie. Let’s go with:

A Nightmare on Elm Street. Wes Craven. 1984. ⚄

Geez. There’s a lot of big names here (and names that are gonna be big later)…

I saw this movie back in the 90s, but I remember absolutely nothing about it.

This is a really callous movie. If it had a few more jokes, it’d almost be a John Waters movie. (Or perhaps that’s just the Kathleen Turner presence speaking.) It’s very stylish, and very cynical.

Aaah! Kirsten Dunst isn’t Kristen Bell! This explains so much!

There’s something really odd going on with the white balance in some of the shots. I guess these days it would all be colour graded into something less odd-looking.

Like what I said about the white balance…

Anyway, I didn’t dislike the start of this movie — it was kinda mysterious, even if a bit icky. But now it’s just “oh, abusive parents gonna abuse”, which isn’t that interesting.

This is the kind of movie I want to love? But I don’t? It’s probably just me, and the movie is a masterpiece. But I’m going with:

The Virgin Suicides. Sofia Coppola. 1999. ⚂

*gasp* Not terror!

This is from a box set of Columbia noir movies — the picture looks nicely restored, but there are some audio/video sync issues?

Hm… but only when some people are speaking? Perhaps some people were dubbed and the problem was always there?

This is an odd movie. I mean, I don’t know where it’s going at all, and that’s unusual. And I like it.

The performances are rather stiff, though, as if the director didn’t know quite how to direct people… but the (credited) director, Vincent Sherman, is an old veteran of the business, so that’s not it at all.

Ah:

Aldrich called the movie “the first pro-labor picture; in it I am trying to emphasize another particular aspect of our times – the tragedy of the small businessman, caught between the ever expanding large corporations and the pressures of organized labor. The small businessman has often, in order to stay alive, compromise with graft and blackmail….[the film] should be an unusually frank film.”

[…]

Sherman says Cohn then asked him to finish the picture. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” said Sherman. “I re-shot, I would say, about seventy percent of the picture in about ten days time.”

So Aldrich was fired, and Sherman re-shot most of the film in a very short amount of time. I guess that explains the general weirdness of the film.

Nice hat!

The cinematography on this is really on point. Lots of striking shots…

The tough-guy union man is also adept at changing nappies. That’s an unusual detail to put in…

There’s just a lot of stuff going on here — as if this movie was designed to appeal to students writing term papers on it thirty years later. There’s the union thing, of course, but also the Italian mobsters vs Italian organisers, and Jewish manufacturers, and the apparent love interest being the (obviously) soon-to-be-widowed wife of the organiser (with the nine month old baby), and…

Was all that in the original script, or is it this messy because of the change in directors?

(She’s breastfeeding the baby.)

About the half-way point, the movie just seems to get a whole let interesting. I mean, on a scene-to-scene basis. It’s more pure melodrama instead of being a kinda odd thing? Perhaps the remaining Aldrich scenes are towards the beginning (if they filmed it chronologically)?

Yeah, the first half was weird and great, and the last half is just snooze-ville: No nerve, no interest, no fun.

So… this is one of those things where your mileage will vary a lot. Some of the early scenes are so great you might want to ⚄ this, and the last half is so boring that ⚀ seems too good. So I’m going with:

The Garment Jungle. Robert Aldrich & Vincent Sherman. 1957. ⚂