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tenia wrote: Thu Feb 27, 2020 3:07 pm It is indeed the same extras than Carlotta, except 101 includes the audio commentary and a booklet, while Carlotta has a big 200 pages book. And their release will be encoded by David M.

Sorry, which one is encoded by David M.?

As for the Carlotta, is it true they force French subs on non-French films, or is it a case-by-case basis?

The Carlotta disc will be encoded by David.
Their forced subs are a case-by-case basis. They however mostly don't force them, rather than the opposite, and it's very rare to find Carlotta releases with forced subs.

Phase IV looks really good with Saul Bass’ shorts on disc two. Alternate ending is awesome btw!

Split Second (1992) gets a really nice edition next week.

Split Second is an absolutely batshit crazy movie where Rutger Hauer chases a Venom-looking demon through a water drenched hellscape. It's not exactly...good but it's a wild time. It's a mish mash of just about every adult eighties genre put together.

Fantastic transfer on Split Second. Really does justice to the film’s visual style, with all its colour and atmosphere, encompassing much in the way of indirect lighting and pulsing lights, and showing off some vivid art direction.

Surprised revisiting how good this film looks. I still enjoy the humour, commitment to comic book mayhem and restless camera movement. A true comic book on film, this one. Hauer was really funny and I like how the film relishes its own absurdity.

Harley Stone’s coffee addiction and the quote ”We need bigger guns. Big FU**ING guns!”

L.A. wrote: Thu Jul 30, 2020 5:46 pm Harley Stone’s coffee addiction and the quote ”We need bigger guns. Big FU**ING guns!”

Indeed, very endearing.

Also i did appreciate how an entire scene used variations on “we need bigger guns.”

The Deep (Peter Yates, 1977) reviewed at Beaver. Also Brain Dead (Adam Simon, 1990) coming this month.

What happened to their August release of Don Siegel’s Black Windmill?

Showing as out of stock everywhere.

Was it ever released in the first place?

101 Films to release Tammy and the T-Rex. For those who haven't seen it, it's the movie where Paul Walker dies and his brain is put into the body of an animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex ... a concept that I think should be seriously considered for Fast & Furious 10.

I imagine most of us know it from it inexplicably being given a UHD release from Vinegar Syndrome

If you had told me a year ago that in 2020 I'd see this movie in a theatre, but not any Marvel movies, I'd have been very confused. But sure enough, that's what happened.

I don't see this mentioned here, so I may as well- eXistenZ has a standard edition available from 101 Films on their site direct (not just in supermarkets) with the same extras as the LE outside of booklet and slipcover

Black Windmill is back on, for 29 March.

Spookies (1986) Limited Edition coming April 26th.

I noticed 101 a couple of times released the same items as MVD Rewind. With Nemesis and Split Second. MVD just released a great version of the 1997 Mr, Dacascos Drive. Wonder if this could be on the horizon for 101 Films?

Upcoming:

Hell Night (1981)
Suburbia (1983)
The Boys Next Door (1985)

Really excited about TBND.

101 Films is releasing The Last Broadcast Blu-ray in the UK in December and in the US in 2022

Shame no one here mentioned the Silent Night Deadly Night LE before it sold out. Such a lovely set for such garbage films

dwk wrote: Thu Oct 21, 2021 7:31 pm 101 Films is releasing The Last Broadcast Blu-ray in the UK in December and in the US in 2022

Oh excellent! Whilst I have qualms about the shift it makes during its very final moments it is still an entertainingly creepy film. Whilst it gets compared a lot to The Blair Witch Project this 2000 Mark Kermode introduction is correct in saying that it probably bears closer comparison to all those more obvious faux-documentaries with authoritative presenters doing voiceovers over rostrum footage that were attached as part of the marketing campaigns to Blair Witch: The Curse of the Blair Witch and Burkittsville 7 which was released to tie-in with Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.

For all of the discussion of The Blair Witch Project revitalising the found footage genre and having the shakeycam and doomed filmmakers that is similar to Cannibal Holocaust, The Last Broadcast is perhaps the film that feels even more in the tradition of the Deodato film as it uses the same structure of a previous group of filmmakers who have been killed in mysterious circumstances with our main group of new filmmakers leading an investigation into reconstructing and viewing their footage to discover whatever could have happened to them. And The Last Broadcast is especially interesting as an early film tackling the internet with its original band of filmmakers and psychic having met online and the events of the night of their disappearance being 'Twitch streamed' decades avant la lettre via IRC!

dwk wrote: Thu Oct 21, 2021 7:31 pm 101 Films is releasing The Last Broadcast Blu-ray in the UK in December and in the US in 2022

Hopefully all these UK labels that are currently making the jump to Nth America aren’t all majority-owned by The Hut Group in 5 years.

"The computer needs me to direct it. It does not know how to reconstruct a circle. Maybe it will have an opening at the side, and I have to teach it to continue the circle. I-I'm a guiding factor"

I just received The Last Broadcast and gave it a watch last night. Apparently the film went through a restoration in 2018, although it still remains a quite delirious jumble of different styles of footage. Despite its rough edges I felt that it still holds up quite well, maybe even better in the current climate than it did in the late 1990s. If Cannibal Holocaust was the big influence on the found footage subgenre, and Blair Witch Project took the cinéma vérité aspects of shakycam to place the audience in more direct communication with the situation of the onscreen characters, then The Last Broadcast tackles the other side of things and focuses much more squarely on the media critique angle. Whilst all the shaky video footage is meant to create a similar sense of verisimilitude (that is never quite as convincing as in Blair Witch), all of that mangled, hard to parse imagery is mediated through the form of a documentary 'investigating' the events that occurred in the woods which led to the murder of two people and the disappearance of a third, with the fourth member of the group being found guilty of the crime by virtue of having been the only other person there and with doctored footage to back up the prosecution's case that he was unstable and violent.

Instead of being there, as in Blair Witch, here we are kept at a safe distance from engagement with the fates of the people in the Pine Barrens on the night of that live broadcast through a veneer of authoritative voiceover and to camera commentary, along with the introduction of new interviews with colleagues of the victims and Experts (with a capital "E") being brought in to offer their own takes on the situation. The most important and sympathetic (and best actor in the film!) character is the ultimate Expert who has the ability (and endearing enthusiasm) to try and restore footage from the mangled pile of tape mysteriously delivered to our documentarian's house the day after the man found guilty of the crime also mysteriously commits suicide in his jail cell. Spoilers follow:

Spoiler

But this idea of safe, impartial distance from full engagement with horror is built up in order to be violated in the final scenes, as our documentarian reveals himself to presumably have been the true killer all along. Which perhaps both explains his extreme interest in the subject (whilst maintaining a clinically detached and emotionally monotone approach throughout) and his detailed level of knowledge about the situation, as his face is revealed in the footage as he both lunges at the people in the tapes in the past and simultaneously the fourth wall is broken as he grabs and suffocates the expert media restorer before she can escape. He then wraps her in plastic before taking her out into the wilderness of the Pine Barrens to either recreate the crime scene, or complete his involvement by taking events full circle. Maybe both.

I particularly love that the final shot is just as chilling as the final shot of Blair Witch, but in an entirely different way, as our putative documentarian is now shown in third person with his videocamera in hand trying out various ways of beginning his final monologue, starting his speech over and over again as the light fades and the shots dissolve into wider and wider pull backs of the figure wandering back and forth in the wilderness, ambidextrously wielding the camera in one hand and microphone in the other! It is a bit like that final shot of Bergman's The Passion of Anna!

Was this always his intention? To create an investigative documentary that would 'explain' his crimes? Or is he just enamoured with the idea of how the same technology that he used to presumably get involved with the web show and eventually track and kill the hosts of it on their live broadcast evening could also eventually be powerful enough to discover his involvement if he fed enough clues into the system?

Or is it a story about a filmmaker who gets so involved with their subject that they eventually will themselves into the footage as the face of the killer to provide the proper climax for their film? As with Cannibal Holocaust (or something like The Element of Crime where the main character has to eventually commit the final murder in the series himself so as not to spoil his thesis on the murderer's motivations) is there a danger of projecting oneself too much into the darkness at the heart of an ambiguous and otherwise inexplicable situation in order to provide the necessary sense of closure?

It is really a film skewering the assumptions that we in the audience have of the media, and the assumptions that the media has of itself, by trying to use its own tricks of its trade (of creating a coherent story from messy reality, whether 'true' or not) against it. The police are entirely credulous about whatever imagery that they see, because how could it possibly lead to any other conclusion? The prosecution cynically cut up the footage available to them at the time of the trial to achieve their own goals of a successful guilty verdict. The witnesses feel safe to talk about the situation from a distance of closure now that the trial has come to a conclusion ("The truth is what time has made of this event. It has been good for business. Often murder is. So many involved have benefited from this event. The inevitable book deal is being replaced with a career in the business of image control, and most of the people interviewed are willing to embrace it"). The documentarian creating the feature that we are watching is himself creating a narrative out the events, one in which he has inserted himself as an intrepid investigator, which in his emotionless philosophical pronouncements comes across as rather self-aggrandising and arrogant in a detached way:

Spoiler

until it becomes revealed as an actual psychopathic trait at the twist.

And the expert sees themselves in a detached manner as well, safely investigating footage from an old crime from the comfort of their editing desk full of equipment that can deal with any situation being thrown at it, until she is too good at her job and reveals too many secrets that should have remained hidden. The unforeseen danger of the expert unleashing forces they cannot control, and had never considered because their view was so narrowly focused on their specialised skillset that they unfortunately couldn't see the woods for the trees until it was too late.

Beware 101 Film's new £25 Johnny Mnemonic is a hazy PAL speed transfer that looks noticeably inferior to other versions