Out with the Old...

I hadn't planned to purchase a 3-D TV anytime soon. I had planned to wait at least until the technology becomes more commonplace.

But this Christmas, with the drop in HDTV prices, my family decided it was time to replace our 8 year old, overly large 36' CRT cabinet HDTV with something slimmer. Even then 3-D wasn't really a consideration. Along comes the Boxing Week sales and a pretty decent deal on a 3DTV package and we were there. The truth is had we waited and purchased a regular 3DTV within a few years I'd be pestering my wife to upgrade to 3-D anyway.

So it would seem that in addition to reviews on golden age and depthsploitation era 3-D film reviews, I may also be looking at newer home video releases. My first review can be found on Rue Morgue Magazine's blog here: Piranha 3D

More to come.

Free Fangoria "Comin' at Ya!" 3D screening - in Germany

Check out this link:

Free Fangoria "Comin' at Ya!" 3D screening - in Germany

Interesting bit of news for the new millenium revamp of Comin' at Ya, the film credited with starting the 80's 3-D wave of films. I've been aware of it's reinvention for some time and are eagerly awaiting news on where it may screen. Fangoria's involvement is indeed a curiosity. If you love 3D and are in Germany you definitely need to get yourself to this screening!

A Halloween Tale from the 3rd Dimension Part IV

The Christmas edition.

Well, I suppose I need to make at least one New Years resolution for 2011. I won't start posting a multi-part review until it's completely written. This review started for Halloween 2010 is finally wrapping up at the end of the holiday season. I do think I can sneak this one under the wire since it's "little" Christmas, or Ukrainian Christmas Day today. The season has not quite ended for some of us.

TALES OF THE THIRD DIMENSION: VISIONS OF SUGAR PLUMS

While the 3rd segment of Tales from the Third Dimension, “Visions of Sugar Plums”, lacks the 1st segment’s cast of Halloween monsters and the 2nd segment’s atmosphere it makes up for it in cartoon antics.


“Visions of Sugar Plums” is a black Christmas comedy told through the viewpoint of its child protagonists. The plot is pretty simple. Mom and Dad, wishing to spend the Holiday Season someplace warm, unload their two children with Grandma so that they can spend Christmas in Hawaii. Unfortunately for little Susy and Dennis, their elderly wheelchair bound Granny happens to be off her medication and the strain on her sanity is starting to show. Why any parent would choose to leave their children in the care of an infirmed paraplegic grandparent is beyond all responsible parental decision-making? Of course this only goes to highlight the selfishness of the parents’ actions, both to the children and Grandma, which is the point of this zany short film. The children are left to navigate through an adult world without any guidance.

Granny makes toast for Dennis

The following bedtime exchange between the two children sums up the film’s tone and humour.


SUSY: Remember last Christmas when Dad stayed up all night vomiting.
DENNIS: Yah. I can’t wait to grow up.
SUSY: Me too.

The world of the grown-ups is an absurd world, which only becomes more confusing as Grandma’s sanity degrades. Hoping to be saved from the situation the children call the airline to find out when their parents will be home. It’s Grandma on another phone in the house that informs them that the plane from Hawaii has crashed and everyone is dead.
But it’s Christmas Eve when Granny really loses it. 

Saved by Santa

The children’s lives are in mortal danger when Grandma starts packing a shotgun and begins to unload. Thankfully for Susy and Dennis she’s not much of a shot. The children are finally saved from Grandma in a deus ex machina ending, not by their parents, but by the jolly man in red, Santa Claus. Keeping with tone of the film, Santa doesn’t merely show up and make everything right; he disposes of Grandma sending her up the chimney and out into the night sky like a shooting start, another childhood icon darkened by the world of adults.

"Granny with a Shotgun"

“Visions of Sugar Plums” packs a pretty entertaining punch. Its 3-D effects are more of the thrill ride variety than today’s textural approach (it seems the budget was to small to afford snow at Christmas). Grandma is given every opportunity to thrust objects at the audience (a shotgun, oatmeal a rolling pin and an electric carving knife). Although the direction straightforward and underwhelming at times (mostly servicing the script), it’s a shame that writer/director Todd Durham didn’t helm more films for Owensby.


At the close of Tales from the Third Dimension, Igor promises more tales from the 3rd Dimension. Alas no new installments ever materialized. I personally would look forward to a Tales from the Third Dimension - Part 2 in Digital 3D.

The World Loses 3-D Pioneer

Wow, I can't believe I missed this obit until now.


Chris Condon, producer and cinematographer of The Stewardesses (1969), passed away on Dec 19 in Encino, California after suffering a stroke at the age of 87.


Condon is best known in the 3-D world for designing stereoscopic lenses (through his company StereoVision Entertainment) that could be used with a single camera. The Stewardesses was a phenomenal hit, banking over $25M despite its budget of just $100,000 and its vignette style story telling that was extremely light on plot and heavy on soft core sexploitation. His lenses were used on a number of 70's features including Flesh For Frankenstien (1973) and into the the next decade. He served as a stereoscopic consultant on Owensby's first 3-D film Roitwettler: The Dogs of Hell (1982) and he consulted on many more films through the eighties 3-D boom; Parasite (1982) and Charles Band's empire building film Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn (1983), and the Universal Studios release Jaws 3-D (1983).


Together with Joseph Mascelli the authored the American Cinematography Manual of The American Society of Cinematographers.

CHRIS J. CONDON

R.I.P.

1923-2010

Alas Virginia, there is no Santa Claus

…at least not for readers of this blog.

With the holiday season in full swing, I’m just not able to get an informative review of the third segment from Tales From The Third Dimension before Christmas is through.

My hugest apologies.

But I thought I should get something up here as a Christmas treat. A few of us might remember when Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas got the 3-D conversion treatment a few years back. The conversion was adequate but just imagine what it would have been if the film had been shot in 3-D ala Coraline.

Well thanks to Joel Fletcher, an animator on the film, we can. A stereoscopic fan he shot 3 dimensional photographs of a number of scenes in the film. They’ve but up on the web for a while now, but if you missed them grab your anaglyph glasses and check out this link.

http://www.joelfletcher.com/3d-nightmare.html

 Have a Merry Christmas everyone!

A Halloween Tale from the 3rd Dimension Part III in 3-D

TALES OF THE THIRD DIMENSION: THE GUARDIANS

The second segment featured in Tales of the Third Dimension, "The Guardians" is a 19th century period tale of grave-robbing inspired by the works of Poe and Lovecraft.  Things begin with Nigel, a hospitable local graverobber, who returns home fresh from his duties that afternoon, and finds himself entertaining two uninvited vagabonds, Charley and Freddie. After much prompting by the pair, Nigel muses about the people he has buried and the wealth they may have taken to their graves. Quickly after their visit, Charley and Freddie take to robbing that day's newest grave, cutting off the finger of the young dead girl in order to remove a valuable ring.

William Hicks as Nigel, in a performance that channels John Candy's SCTV character Mayor Tommy Shanks.

The next day, Charley, the so-called mastermind of the operation, recalls rumors of secret catacombs hidden under a decrepit church, long since sealed off. The pair return to Nigel and, when coaxing won't work, strong arm him into revealing the entrance’s secret location. After pillaging a few of graves in the catacombs the greedy Charley leaves Freddie for dead, pinned under a gigantic stone that covered a secret chamber. Charley treks deeper into the underground labrinyth and quickly encounters the tomb's guardians.  Rats. More than can be counted.

"Charley"

The "Guardians" is Tales of the Third Dimension's strongest story, though it is not the films most entertaining segment (that is reserved for its last). It is filled with an ambitious visual atmosphere and characters that are as charming as they are dark. Charley in particular is played with devilish flare by Terry Laughlin, while William Hicks’ understated almost non-performance of Nigel services the naive character very well. But the maturity of this segment's direction lies in the hands of E.O. Studios most experienced director, Worth Keeter, a staple at E.O. Studios. Not only did he helm the hillbilly gothic Wolfman (1979) for Owensby (which features an Irish lychanthrope returning to his Carolinian birthplace) but he also had a hand in all of the 3-D productions done at the E.O. studio including its most successful international 3-D project Rottweiler a.k.a The Dogs of Hell (1983). After Owensby’s studios stop producing films he went on to direct a number of straight-to-video features (including 1993’s Snapdragon featuring an early Baywatch Pamela Anderson) finally landing a regular directing gig on the kids TV series Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, overseeing American sequences which were intercut with with the really cool stuff from the Japanese tokusatsu (superhero teams) series of Super Sentai television programs.

Japanese Super Sentai.

The catacombs in "The Guardians" offer ample opportunity to show off depth as the camera tracks past foreground cobwebs and through confined archways filled with skeletal remains. Charley and Freddie must slosh through dank water to enter the bowels of the tomb and past rubber bats on strings (always an entertaining conceit in 3-D films of the era). This is after all a gothic tale on a budget and the rats that eventually devour the greedy Charley are impeccably clean and far less menacing then they should be, despite Keeter's best efforts. But it's not Tales from the Third Dimension's budget shortfalls that keeps "the Guardians" from rising to the showcase segment of the film, as it must have been intended. Indeed it features the movies most grandiose sets and art direction. It's quite simple the story's simple plot and it's all to familiar comeuppance twist ending.

A taste of the 3-D that might exist in the stereoscopic version of the film.

"The Guardians" is a tale well told and finely acted. It must have been a real entertaining treat in 3-D, unfortunately in 2-D it is merely so-so.

Sorry for the Absence

Wow. Has it really been a month and a half since my last post? And I was only a third through my Halloween 3-D picture Tales of the Third Dimension --shame on me for leaving you readers hanging on for so long. But I have a pretty darn good excuse for my extensive absence. Well, that’s only partially true. The truth is I ran out of steam and my full review of the Owensby Studio anthology film still would have spilled past Halloween. The reason for the extensive delay in getting back to business is the birth of my second child. Dirty diapers and the wrangling of a newborn and a two year old have left me pretty exhausted at the end of the day—the result has been very little writing. Not much film going either (it was so much easier with just one child to contend with).

At any rate, I’ll be getting back to the review this week. I owe you two more chapters from the film. It’s not a complete wash though. The last story in the anthology just happens to be a Christmas tale. It seems it could all work out in the end.

For now, why don’t you have a listen to this live musical performance of “Chasin’ Down a Dream” by Mama Said, a song that sings the exploits of Tales of the Third Dimension’s producer Earl Owensby.