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Blood for Dracula has a little shaved off the sides on the new Image transfer compared to the Criterion but, again, the benefits of the high-definition remastering render this a moot point. The hues of the opening sequence have changed a little - Dracula looks quite pale on the Criterion during the credits, on the Image he's literally stone-coloured. The whole castle opening sequence looks (one suspects deliberately) far more gloomy and deathly overall.

Both discs have different screen tests featuring Srdjan Zelenovic, the unfortunate male zombie from Frankenstein, who was Morrissey's first choice to play Dracula, but wasn't able to. Instead of soundtrack excerpts, the animated (and newly expanded) stills galleries feature start-to-finish narrated accounts of each film's production history by Morrissey (he makes an off-puttingly blase remark on Dracula to the "toilet we live with today" compared to the unnamed "traditional values that had gone on for hundreds of years" he laments).

as concerns bootlegs. Does anyone know any information about the Ritek Global Media discs? If they have ever been established as legitimate or fake? For those of you that have a Ritek logo, are the corners of your DVD Cover insert also rounded? I've done searching on this board and haven't been able to find any information about detecting Criterion bootlegs. I apologize if this belongs in a different area.

blindside8zao wrote:I've done searching on this board and haven't been able to find any information about detecting Criterion bootlegs.

Yeah, I suppose the title of this thread is a tad too esoteric.

Who owns the rights to these? What are the chances of getting new transfers and FfF in 3D?

knives wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2020 12:14 am

therewillbeblus wrote: Sat Jan 04, 2020 10:27 pm I’d probably explode

I liked it. This also reminds me that Dom seems to not have posted last year's nominees and I'm curious about his take on several of them.

As to the film this thread is about. I actually agree with your criticisms of its perspective, but if I'm willing to like movies with actually poisonous points of view (e.g. Paul Morrisey's Dracula)

What do you find poisonous about it?

I'm taking Morrisey's words as the way to read the film which is as a deeply conservative borderline monarchists perspective. Maybe that's not the best example I could have given, but Morrisey is always on my mind when I think of great artists with an opposite perspective from my own.

knives wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2020 1:38 am I'm taking Morrisey's words as the way to read the film which is as a deeply conservative borderline monarchists perspective. Maybe that's not the best example I could have given, but Morrisey is always on my mind when I think of great artists with an opposite perspective from my own.

Could you expand on that? I took the film to be a half-assed Marxist parable.

Mr Sausage wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2020 3:08 am

knives wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2020 1:38 am I'm taking Morrisey's words as the way to read the film which is as a deeply conservative borderline monarchists perspective. Maybe that's not the best example I could have given, but Morrisey is always on my mind when I think of great artists with an opposite perspective from my own.

Could you expand on that? I took the film to be a half-assed Marxist parable.

Morrisey was super right wing, for example he said he made Trash to get people to hate junkies though I felt it made them very sympathetic, and viewed Dracula as the sympathetic hero of his film representing a sick Europa. The Marxist character was supposed to be the villain dirtying the nobles with the disease of commonality. The message is one of anti-miscegenation between social classes.

Ah, I see what you mean. Left wing radicalism dismembering the weakened remains of the old aristocracy while also deflowering the previously uncorrupted fruits of civilization. I'm not sure the film by itself does much to lead you to that conclusion (or any other, to be fair), but even so, I'm sure I'm guilty of assuming it was left wing simply because it was a 70s Euro production.

When I first saw it I came away with its right wing impressions only slightly, but upon looking over his comments and re-examining the movie it becomes increasingly obvious to the point of feeling overly blunt in its goal if not necessarily where it settles.

It does invert Stoker in a novel way, taking his various conservatisms (political, social, sexual) but places Dracula on the positive end of them.

How do you read Flesh for Frankenstein, with the Baron's ludicrous vision of an incestuous Nazi state in which he fathers the master race upon his own creations?

I haven't seen that one yet. I've been slowly trying to track down some of the older Criterions this past year, hence why I finally saw Koko, but that is one of the harder titles to come by in any edition.

knives wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2020 7:04 pm I haven't seen that one yet. I've been slowly trying to track down some of the older Criterions this past year, hence why I finally saw Koko, but that is one of the harder titles to come by in any edition.

I only saw it and Blood for Dracula this year for the Horror List project, and there the library helped me out. Was shocked how terrible the Criterions looked. Been a long time since I had to watch a non-anamorphic DVD, too, which didn't help.

I didn't even bother with the Criterion, but rather a later Image disc that if I recall correctly was anamorphic.

denti alligator wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 9:50 pm Who owns the rights to these? What are the chances of getting new transfers and FfF in 3D?

I’m surprised none of the usual suspects have put these out on blu yet

Criterion posted photos on social media of Morrissey visiting them to film disc extras a few years ago (2017?). Did they ever show up on anything?

denti alligator wrote: Mon Jul 17, 2017 9:50 pm Who owns the rights to these? What are the chances of getting new transfers and FfF in 3D?

According to the Severin guys, Paul Morrisey owns these and has no interest in licensing them out.

I wonder if that explains the absence of his Spike of Bensonhurst in any format except VHS. I mean, other than the fact that no one except about six of us saw it back in 1988.