Customer Reviews:
The Sorcerer's Apprentice.......2007-07-24
Rich and Strange is ok but the reason to buy this dvd is for The Sorcerer's Apprentice. It was made in 1962 and was supposed to be the final episode in Hitch's Alfred Hitchock Presents tv series. It was never aired because it was considered TOO SHOCKING! Of course by today's standards you might wonder what all the fuss was about but it's worth seeing to find out what happens to Irene, briliantly played by Diana Dors.
Amazon.co.uk Review
It's difficult sometimes to fathom how compilers think. This Chiller Theatre threesome consists of two classic silent horror films, plus a low-budget B-movie from the early 1960s. The connection? You decide! Yet these are films that belong in any self-respecting collection, and this package is a good way of acquiring them.
Of those featuring Lon Chaney, it's the original 1923 The Hunchback of Notre Dame that comes across best. Chaney's grotesquerie is shot-through with pathos, and Patsy Ruth Miller's Esmeralda has enduring freshness. Wallace Worsley handles crowd scenes and cathedral stunts with aplomb, and there's an atmospheric "posthumous" soundtrack, though anyone looking for accuracy in the depiction of medieval French society is in for a shock.
1925's The Phantom of the Opera is slow-moving and uneventful by comparison, with Rupert Julian's direction never escaping the narrow Gothic trappings of the novel. Chaney cranks (or is that camps?) up his range of gestures to the limit, and Mary Philbin is an eye-catching heroine, but the denouement in the Paris sewers seems endless--with looped extracts of Schubert and Brahms as a hardly appropriate soundtrack.
Cut to 1962, and The Carnival of Souls--made in Kansas for under $100,000--is an undeniable cult classic. Herk Harvey sustains the increasingly surreal narrative with ease, Candace Hilligoss is striking (if a tad gauche) as the young organist caught on the cusp of this world and the next, and Gene Moore's organ soundtrack is a masterly backdrop for the motley assemblage of ghouls who pursue her around the seaside pier in a memorable closing sequence.
On the DVD: Chiller Theatre is very acceptably remastered--with 1.33:1 aspect ratio and 12 chapter headings per film--and decently if minimally packaged. --Richard Whitehouse
DVD:
- Roy Rogers - Vol. 3 [1952]
- Saw III [2006] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
- Seance On A Wet Afternoon [1964]
- Seven Blood Stained Orchids [1972] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
- Shadow: Dead Riot [2005] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
- Sherlock Holmes - Faces Death [1943]
- Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th [2001] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
- Special Branch Series 1 [1969]
- Sunset Serenade [1942]
- Suspect Zero [2004] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
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