Films I want on DVD No1: Rituals

July 26th, 2006 Posted by Ian W | Rants & Raves | 3 comments

This is the first in a planned series about lost classics not yet released on DVD.

I was introduced to Rituals by Stephen King; not personally you understand but via his book Danse Macabre. It’s an excellent read and highly recommended for anyone with a love of horror, be it cinematic or the printed word. One of the many films he referred to was this low budget Canadian shocker and he also included in his top 100 horror films at the back of the book.

Now in the early eighties I was a King fanatic (I’m still a big fan) so if the big guy rated it that highly then I wanted to see it. And I did, on a poor quality video cassette rented from the local video emporium, this was in the pre video nasties era when any Tom, Dick or Harry could set up their own video rental business and Blockbuster had yet to invade these shores.

I was impressed or as impressed as I could be with what I could see on-screen and that wasn’t much. The video had been in a lot of machines before ours and at least a few of them must have found it tasty enough to have a chew on, added to this was the fact that a lot of the film takes place at night and the film was low budget to start with so we’re not talking high production values here.

Mother Of All Dust Devil DVD Releases!

July 26th, 2006 Posted by Ian W | Film & TV News | no comments

Subversive Cinema have announced the specs for there Region 1 DVD release of Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil. To say they sound good is a bit of an understatement. See what I mean -

Disc One:
• Dust Devil :The Final Cut: 107-minute version with 5.1 and 2.0 Dolby Stereo sound
• Audio commentary by Stanley and Hill
• Stanley’s production diaries
• A Demon Reborn: The Final Dust Devil featurette
• Making of Dust Devil featurette
• Trailer for the long-lost 16mm version of Dust Devil

Disc Two:
• Bonus CD: Dust Devil soundtrack by Simon Boswell

Disc Three:
• 114-minute reconstruction of the Dust Devil work print, in non-anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen with 2.0 stereo sound
• New Dust Devil comic book by Phil Avelli, story approved by Stanley

Disc Four:
• ‘Voice Of The Moon’ documentary about Afghanistan, with commentary with Stanley and Hill
• ‘The White Darkness’ documentary about Haitian Voodoo, with commentary by Stanley and his production diaries

Disc Five:
• ‘Secret Glory’ documentary about the search for the Grail and the neo-Nazi movement, with commentary by Stanley and Hill and Stanley’s production diaries

This release easily tops the current Region 2 DVD and must rank as one of the best Special Edition releases ever put out. I’ve never seen any of Stanley’s documentaries before but ‘The White Darkness’ and ‘Secret Glory’ sound fascinating. I’m glad I held off buying the current UK release as this is a must have.