Survival of the Dead (trailer)

Posted one day late (because of DV’s outage yesterday), here’s the trailer of the brand new Romero film. Yes, another Dead chapter, but the trailer does look more promising than the last two movies. Even though a) Diary of the Dead wasn’t as awful as some would have you believe (not that it was good) and b) we should know better by now than to trust those trailers.

The Crazies

If you’d force me to limit my George A. Romero collection to three movies, my choices would be Night of the Living Dead (for evident reasons), Martin (where Romero manages to keep you guessing what’s true and what’s not) and The Crazies. In The Crazies (which occasionally is also named Code Name: Trixie) a small town has more than a bit of bad luck. The water supply gets infected by a biological warfare virus and it doesn’t take long before people start attacking each other. And that’s when the army is sent in.

I had to think of The Crazies as much as of Night when I was watching Diary of the Dead recently. Day of the Dead will probably the bleakest zombie movie (by Romero) up to Diary, but The Crazies manages to outshine Day in its bleak vision. The President appears (well, an actor of course), but his words will only make your blood boil. Romero’s vision is one with hardly any hope, the undertone you’d expect from a movie made in the years of Watergate and Vietnam, made by a director who isn’t afraid to show what’s on his mind (and nowhere does Romero do this more evident than in Diary of the Dead).

The good news is that Anolis Entertainment, an Austrian DVD company, have just released The Crazies. Limited to 1500 editions only, the double dvd release is available as a steelbook with many extras which focus on director Romero and star Lynn Lowry. Anolis is a name you may remember: they were also the ones who released that wonderful velvet edition of Blood and Black Lace (by Mario Bava). This should already tell you someone took care of this release, enough to make it a wonderful must-have.

The extras include two commentaries (one by Romero, one by Lowry), a featurette on Lowry (with the lovely title “The Mute Hippie Girl on Acid with Rabies”) and several trailers (for The Crazies and other films by Romero).

If you don’t own The Crazies by now, it should be one of your next purchases. There are several versions of the movie out right now, but this R2 double disc steelbook by Anolis give this essential Romero a look you’ll cherish forever.

(Anolis will refer you to Amazon.de, but you can also get the movie at Xploited Cinema.)

THE CRAZIES – 2 DISC STEELBOOK
Anamorphic widescreen (16:9)
Language options: English, German
Subtitles: German (optional)

Season of the Witch / There’s Always Vanilla

Preceded by the warning that “this film was transferred with the best available elements which unfortunately don’t measure up to Anchor Bay’s usually high standards” Anchor Bay set themselves up for a lot of ridicule on Amazon’s site.

There’s also a fierce debate as to whether “Season of the Witch” is anamorphic widescreen or hard-matted. Sadly, I have no idea what I’ve just written.
Nevertheless, ever since Mr Lustig left Anchor Bay and started up his own company (Blue Underground), Anchor Bay seems to have taken a tendency to release DVDs of lesser quality.

Is the Season of the Witch a major improvement on the VHS edition? Apparently not ‘major’, but don’t let a bunch of American VHS owners confuse you: in the past years I’ve only seen ONE non-US VHS tape of this film, so it’s pretty hard to track down. Also, if you don’t live in the US your VCR has to play the movie on NTSC playback (which also loses a bit of quality).

Furthermore, “Season of the Witch” is not necessarily the most important reason you’ll buy this DVD release. The DVD also features “There’s Always Vanilla”, a very rare Romero movie (which was never released before).
Now where Anchor Bay could’ve done a better job on “Season” itself, you’ll have to understand that with a movie as rare as “Vanilla” it’ll be hard to get an awesome copy. We’re now talking about a source that’s as easily available as the Turkish heroic movies Mondo Macabro has released last year.

And that’s not all: the DVD release also has a trailer for “Season of the Witch”, a different opening for “Season” (released as “Hungry Wives”), a trailer for “Hungry Wives”, the Romero episode in the AFI Directors series and a featurette called “The ‘Lost’ movies of Romero” where the director talks about his work.

So, to summarize, did we get a crispy new transfer of “Season of the Witch”? No. Did Anchor Bay somehow redeem themselves? Yes, by releasing “There’s Always Vanilla” and tons of extras they did. However, they know as well as I that this release would be purchased for the extras alone, so they probably thought they didn’t need to spend money on getting a perfect transfer for “Season of the Witch”. We’ll let this pass just this one time, okay guys? Next time… bad review!

As for the movie, if you also think that “Martin” was one of the better Romeros, check out “Season of the Witch”. It’s not as good (but still good) and a very interesting case study. And if “Season” isn’t your thing, hey, there’s always vanilla!

You should’ve known I would end with that pun.