Is 3D Dead After All?

 You will not find a more obnoxious defender of 3D movies than me. At the very least, you'd be hard pressed to. I've been a fan since 1982 when my 11 year old mind was blown watching Gorilla At Large on New York's Channel 9. I didn't even realize that I wasn't watching 3D as it was really meant to be seen at the time. It worked to me and I loved it. And for much of the 80s and 90s 3D was this rare and wonderful thing that I didn't get to see very often but devoured every time. Then the current boom started up in 2003 with Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over and within a decade I was the proverbial pig in shit. I had a 3D TV, some darn good 3D movies were coming out in the theater and on 3D Blu Ray. The vintage stuff started coming in 2012 (which is actually what prompted me to buy my 3D TV). There was such a selection of stuff that I could pick and choose what I wanted to watch instead of desperately watching anything that was offered. I'm not joking when I say that had utter crap like Texas Chainsaw 3D been offered twenty years earlier I might have gone to see it. But in 2013, I could pass on films that normally wouldn't interest me and watch the stuff I really wanted to. 

Oh, sure, the haters were out there, screaming at clouds about how they hoped 3D would die a painful, awful death and never return. And the haters were angry about it, too, which confused 3D fans like myself. Nobody was forcing them to watch 3D, so just leave us who enjoy it in peace. But that's the way haters are in general. I don't care for gory horror movies, but I don't go on and on about how I wish they'd go away. I let the people who dig that sort of thing dig it and I go watch what I like. But nowadays if someone is offended by something's existence, they will scream about how it must go away. Cancel culture reigns supreme and sadly frequently wins out.

And the haters slowly got their way. 3D TVs stopped being made in 2016. I didn't worry too much because when I buy an electronic, it's my intention to keep it for as long as possible and my TV at that time was only four years old. The first TV I ever owned was a 13 inch black and white TV and believe me when I tell you I had it for 15 years. Then the 3D Blu Rays became harder to get. Disney, who had backed 3D hard just a few years earlier, was the first to pull the rug out from under fans. I had to start ordering 3D titles from Europe. This even happened with Star Wars and Marvel. The last Star Wars 3D Blu Ray in America was Rogue One and the last Marvel title was Spider-Man: Homecoming. Now, even Europe is abandoning 3D Blu Rays. The last 3 Marvel movies have only gotten a 3D release in Japan at an extremely high price. Venom: Let Be There Carnage is apparently not getting a 3D Blu Ray release. Neither did No Time to Die. It appears Spider-Man: No Way Home is going 2D only also.

Vintage titles are beginning to wind down, too. There's four announced for this year: one from the 80s, 2 from the 50s and one 70s porn. You know things are getting bad when the porns are being trotted out. For the curious, if we're very lucky there will be another 3 or 4 from the 50s and possibly six more from the 80s. But don't necessarily count on it.

The reality is that 3D was botched again. Those of us who have been lifelong fans have seen this before. It's the bane of our existence. I'm old enough to remember the boom from the 80s that came and went before you knew it. At least this time, 3D stuck around for a few years. Not like Hollywood in its infinite wisdom didn't try killing it. So why exactly does this keep happening?

There's any number of reasons but a large part of it is due to the theaters. Up until the digital age, projectionists and theater owners routinely found ways to screw up showings. During the dual projector era of the 50s, it was common for one projector to go out of sync. This (and not the glasses themselves) led to headaches, eye strain, and nausea. Arch Oboler and Col. Robert Brenier thought they figured out how to beat that with single strip 3D systems in the 60s. I can tell you horror stories about how badly misprojected single strip 3D films could be. My first time seeing House of Wax in 3D was a misprojected single strip showing in 1991. The wrong type of beam splitter would be used, or it would be put on wrong, or the type of screen would be wrong, etc. If you consider the fact that the 3D films of the 60s through the 90s were all pretty uniformly awful, the bad projection just made things worse.

Indeed, while the 50s produced some pretty terrific 3D movies like Dial M For Murder and Kiss Me Kate, everything from about 1962 to 1997 was pretty bad. Most of the movies concentrated more on the gimmick than actually telling a story. Sometimes this can be a little fun, but some of them were shot pretty poorly, too, with little respect for the proper way to shoot a 3D movie. As such, you can feel like your eyeballs are being ripped out of your head watching some of these titles. I'm looking at you, Comin' At Ya! and Amityville 3-D.

The modern era finally figured out the projection angle. It's nigh impossible to misproject a digital 3D movie. Unless, of course, the theater does something like not bother turning the 3D filter on in the first place. I saw this as recently as Spider-Man: No Way Home. So why is 3D once again on the downslide?

Well, for one, theaters still hate it for some obscure reason. Besides doing boneheaded things like not turning on the filter on the projector, I've had people working the box office ridicule me for seeing 3D movies or outright try to deny me a ticket to one. I wish I was joking about that, but I'm not. Why someone selling me a ticket would not want to sell me a ticket to a 3D movie is beyond me. I mean, hell, they charge extra for it.

The other problem is Hollywood itself. 3D always had a level of showmanship in the earlier decades. The 50s films weren't as nuts with out of the screen gimmicks as in later decades, but when they had out of the screen effects, they made them memorable. Most vintage 3D movies had a gimmick shot you would remember, even in the gimmick laden 70s and 80s films. The paddle ball in House of Wax, Grace Kelly's hand in Dial M For Murder, the avalanche in It Came From Outer Space, the floating tray of beer in The Bubble, Frankenstein's heart on the end of a spear in Flesh for Frankenstein, the eyeball being popped out of a head in Friday the 13th Part 3 were all moments that stuck with audiences. Quick: name a single memorable 3D effect shot in any of the movies made from Spy Kids 3D on. The most memorable ones are in Oz the Great and Powerful. Otherwise, not much. Sacha Baron Cohen in Hugo might count. But consider the fact that 3D fans waited 30 years for a 3D Godzilla movie that ended up not having much monsters out of the screen action. Had that movie been made in 1983, we would have had atomic breath blown right at us. 2014, not so much.

I'm not saying that the 3D movies of today have to be like the ones in the 80s. Some of those films had some pretty silly effects like the frisbee in Amityville and the yo-yo in Friday the 13th. But if I'm paying an extra couple of bucks to see the movie, give me something. How did we have multiple X-Men movies in 3D and not once did Wolverine's claws come out at us? I may not need a baby's bare ass in my face, but how about a fist or a kick like in the old Kung Fu 3D movies? I'll give Oz the Great and Powerful this: it behaved like a 3D movie. The Hobbit movies could have taken some lessons.

Beyond the gimmick shots, the depth in modern 3D movies isn't all that wild either. Again, there's a few that take advantage of the extra dimension--The Walk is truly dizzying--but a lot of times, no. Even the 80s films took the time to put some space on the screen when they weren't throwing things in our face. If you watch a Marvel 3D movie and then watch something like House of Wax, there's a huge difference. 

So yes, Hollywood botched it again. Old school 3D enthusiasts refer to many of the modern movies as being 2.5D instead of 3D. They're not wrong.

Of course, Hollywood helped kill 3D TVs. For decades a 3D TV meant wearing red and blue glasses and watching something that didn't work. They finally get the technology right and...they blow it. First off, 3D TVs started coming out in 2010 in the wake of Avatar. Beyond the fact that the technology still had some bugs, there wasn't even a universal system. You could get passive 3D TVs or Active 3D TVs. The Active ones arguably gave better 3D but had problems handling some of the imagery. The other problem was one of product. Back then, the only things you could get on 3D Blu Ray were the same lackluster movies that were coming out in the theaters. You know, the poor converted ones. Titles that would have sold 3D TVs and 3D Blu Ray players weren't made available. For instance, you couldn't get Avatar on 3D Blu Ray until 2012. No vintage titles were made available until then, too. Some of the most requested titles either didn't come out at all or came out long after the TVs stopped being made. Two of the most (in)famous 3D movies of all time, both of which would have sold TVs had they been out way back when, have only been put out in the past two years: Friday the 13th Part 3 and Flesh for Frankenstein. It Came From Outer Space and Jaws 3D both came out in 2016, the last year 3D TVs were made. Revenge of the Creature came out a year later. You could only get Amityville 3D or Creature From the Black Lagoon by buying expensive box sets at first. Hondo only got a 2D Blu Ray release, as did such requested titles as Money From Home (Martin and Lewis), Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, The Stranger Wore a Gun, and Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. Had at least some of these titles come out in 2010 or 2011, 3D TVs might have done better and stuck around. Seriously, there are horror fans who would have bought a TV just to see Friday the 13th Part 3 in true 3D. 

So that leaves us where we are, dear reader. 3D is on the way out again. Those of us who are die hard fans are going to be depressed as hell when it goes, too. I think it'll limp along for a couple of more years. But I don't think Avatar 2 will be the savior some want it to be. There'll be a smaller number of movies released to the theaters, few of which will make it to 3D Blu Ray. If they do, they'll probably be mad expensive. I paid almost $100 to get Black Widow in 3D. The vintage titles will limp along too, but I see those coming to an end in a few years as well. Sad thing is, it didn't have to be this way.

Silent Madness (1984)

 

Silent Madness was one of those movies that just had a bad sense of timing all around. It came out too late in the 80s slasher craze to make an impression. By the time it was released in 1984, there had already been 3 sequels to Friday the 13th, two to Halloween, and innumerable knock-offs with such titles as My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night, Terror Train, Happy Birthday to Me, and so on. It also came out the year after 3D's big year so nobody was showing 3D movies at that time. It also came out right at the same time as Nightmare on Elm Street, which just totally bumped it out of theatres. As such, very few people saw it as it was originally intended. It didn't help the movie any that it doesn't really do anything that any other film in the genre does. In a bizarre way, it's a mash up between Halloween and the first Friday the 13th. 

The movie starts at Cresthaven Mental Hospital, somewhere in Manhattan. Cresthaven is overcrowded and understaffed, so a couple of incompetent doctors decide to release people back into society that they figure aren't a danger. Due to an absurd clerical error, one Howard Johns, a dangerous psychotic, is released instead of a simpleton named John Howard. Fearless Dr. Joan Gilmore (Belinda Montgomery) tumbles to this and tries to warn the upper management. They brush her off and claim that Johns is actually dead. Meanwhile, Johns somehow manages to get back to his old stomping grounds, Barrington School For Girls. See, Johns was the janitor there 20 years ago when he snapped and killed a bunch of sorority girls with a nail gun. How exactly Johns gets back to the college is never explained especially when we're told the school is over three hours away from the hospital. No matter. He's back and killing a new batch of sorority girls, some of whom don't even get names. Gilmore takes a weekend off and goes back to the school to track Johns down. The hospital decides to cover up and sends two demented orderlies after both Gilmore and Johns. 

Did you follow all of that? No. Doesn't matter. With a film like this you just tend to go along for the ride and enjoy the kills. Even when they're done with a hilarious cartoon ax.

The most creative thing the movie seems to have done is had then 34 year old Montgomery playing the film's Final Girl and not one of the teenagers. Montgomery does what she can with this, but while she seems to be trying to give a performance, Viveca Lindfors as the House Mom and Sidney Lassick as the Sheriff decide to say "to heck with it" and go wildly over the top. As do the insane orderlies. In fact, Montgomery seems to be the only one in the film not overacting!

At the end of the day this is your standard issue stalk and slash. The victims barely have names let alone personalities and the killer is the usual mute madman. Gore hounds will be a little disappointed that a lot of the admittedly inventive kills cut away before getting too gory and there's very little nudity for this type of thing. Is it better than it's kissing cousin Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D? Maybe. The characters act a little less stupid. Well, most of them. The orderlies aren't particularly bright and neither is Lassick's sheriff. Some of the actors are a little better than in the 1982 slasher but that's a pretty low bar to be honest. Bizarrely, there's not one night scene anywhere in the movie. The only other slasher film that I can think of anything like that is the miserable 1997 3D cheapie Camp Blood, a movie so bad it makes this one look like Citizen Kane.

All things considered, I kinda like this movie. No, it's not very good. As I've pointed out before, none of the 80s 3D movies are any good, but this one is one of the slightly better ones. It's not something I'd watch every month or even every year, but I can see myself returning to it from time to time if only to get a laugh. 

Silent Madness came and went in October of 1984, overshadowed by Nightmare on Elm Street. It had a VHS release and a poor bootleg 3D version that wasn't even in the full widescreen. It's long been neglected and mostly forgotten except for by die hard slasher fans and 3D fans. Vinegar Syndrome and the 3D Film Archive decided somewhere along the way that Silent Madness was worth saving and now there's a beautiful 3D Blu Ray of it available. The Blu Ray includes 3 versions of the film: a 3D Blu Ray version requiring the proper TV and Blu Ray player, a 2D version (of course) and an anaglyphic (red/cyan) version that is probably the best anaglyphic video presentation I've ever seen. There's also a mess of extras on it including a fairly interesting documentary on the making of the movie and the original sizzle reel done for the movie.

If you're a 3D completist, you obviously need this disc. The 3D Film Archive worked their usual magic on it and as such it looks a lot better than most of the other 80s 3D films that have gotten a 3D Blu Ray release--Friday the 13th Part 3 included. The inclusion of the anaglyph version allows a wider audience to watch the movie in 3D. As I said, it's a much better anaglyph version than anything I've seen over the last 40 years of watching these things. Supposedly the 3D Film Archive will be doing this more and more on future releases.

I met Belinda Montgomery a few years ago at a Chiller Theatre convention and admitted to her that I liked her in a movie that I knew was a stupid movie. When she asked which one, I mentioned this one. She rolled her eyes and said "That is a stupid movie!"

Yes, Ms. Montgomery, it really is. But I kinda get a kick out of it.

3-D Thursday: Revenge of the Creature (1955)

There's several notable things about 1955's Revenge of the Creature: it was the last 3-D movie of the 1950s, the first 3-D sequel to a 3-D movie, the first 3-D movie shown in 3-D on non-cable broadcast, and personally speaking, the first 3-D movie I ever saw.  It was in May of 1982 and it was an anaglyphic broadcast, the first in the Philadelphia region. Though it really didn't work at all, my 11 year old brain was convinced it did. Mercifully, Universal and the 3D Film Archive restored the film and have released it on 3D Blu Ray which works beautifully.

Revenge picks up a year after the original Creature From the Black Lagoon. The Gill Man is still hanging out in the Amazon. Ocean Harbor Oceanarium sends George Johnson (Robert B Williams) and Joe Hayes (John Bromfield) to capture the Gill Man for scientific study. They enlist Lucas (Nestor Paiva), the boat captain from the first film, to take them to the Lagoon. After a near fatal encounter with the Creature, they manage to capture him and take him back to Florida. Once there, he's studied by Animal Psychologist Clete Ferguson (John Agar) and Ichthyology student Helen Dobson (Lori Nelson). He falls for Helen but gets sick of being hit with bull prods so he eventually escapes, wrecking havoc and killing Joe.  His downfall comes when he kidnaps Helen from a seafood house.

Revenge is not quite as good as it's original. The first half has too many comedy bits in it. First there's Lucas, but he's not too much and anyway, I always liked his character. Then we get some humor with a chimp followed by Clint Eastwood in his first role as a dumb lab tech with a rat in his pocket. It's neat to see Eastwood when he was so young, but the scene is disposable. Then we get Flippy the educated Porpoise who serves no purpose to the film outside of filler. Revenge was shot at Marineland in Florida and much like Jaws 3-D acts as a bit of an infomercial for Sea World, so does Revenge for Marineland. Mercifully the second half does away with Flippy and gives us some good Creature chaos with the Gill Man flipping over cars and tossing around college students like they're frisbees. There's also a few callbacks to the original in the second half. If the first half had been as strong as the second, this would have been fully as great as the original Creature. Unfortunately, the filler makes it a lesser entry.

The cast is good, though not quite up to the casting for the first film. John Agar did a bunch of these things back in the 1950s. This might be his best film. Lori Nelson is attractive enough and you can argue if her or Julia Adams is sexier. The scene in the motel room where she gets ready for a shower is surprisingly sexy for the 50s and predates Janet Leigh's ill-fated shower in Psycho by five years. But the triangle between Agar and Bromfield for her affections doesn't quite have the tension that existed between Richard Carlson and Richard Denning in the original. Paiva and Creature actor Rico Browning are the only two major actors to return from the original. Paiva is great as usual and gets the one genuinely funny line in the film when he says "I hope you're not going to blow up my boat, Mr. Johnson. Like my wife, she's not much but she's all I got". Browning, by the way, is the only actor to appear in all three films. He later assistant directed the underwater sequences in Thunderball. This was also the fourth and final 3-D film directed by Jack Arnold. Arnold held the record for directing the most theatrical 3-D films until Robert Rodriguez did five in the current era.

For decades, most people who got to see this in 3D only got to see it in anaglyphic format, whether it was anaglyphic on TV or 16mm. The 16mm print looked better than the TV print, of course, but seeing it as it was originally intended is an eye opener. The 3D Film Archive did a gorgeous job on this. The 3D is absolutely perfect here. Shots that were in reverse 3D for decades have been corrected and the alignment has been corrected shot by shot. It actually looks better on 3D Blu than the original film. The 3D version is included in the Creature Legacy Collection Blu Ray Set. There was some controversy as Universal accidentally released the 3D version in a Side By Side format as opposed to 3D Blu Ray format, but that's been corrected and the new version looks great. The depth is outstanding and the pop-outs memorable, especially when Agar hits the audience with the bull prod, the one effect that worked in the anaglyphic TV version.

One of the complaints about the film is that taking the Creature out of the Amazon removes much of the terror and mystery of the first film. This isn't totally incorrect though I still think the filler in the first half is what really drags the film down. When it's trying to be suspenseful and scary, it works wonderfully. The opening in the Amazon and the Creature's rampage when he escapes from his captivity are marvelous. The motel room scene is pretty creepy, too. All in all, it's at least half a worthy sequel that just slightly misses the mark. But thankfully we can see it the way it was meant to be seen, since this works much better in it's 3-D format than 2-D.

Why 3-D Isn't As Dead As You Think

Once again, another source, Cheddar News on YouTube, has proclaimed the Final Death of 3-D. Of course, they've done so with a ton of misinformation. What's particularly sad about this is the attempt to educate us about 3-D while knowing nothing about it. So let's go through this once again: 3-D is not as dead as you think or the haters want. Sorry to disappoint the haters.

Let's talk a little about the history for 3-D for a moment. The earliest 3-D experiments date back to at least 1915 with the first feature in 3-D being in 1922. The Cheddar News video does correctly attribute these to being in the anaglyphic (red/cyan) format. There was a mini-boom in the 20s, mostly shorts with a couple of features. Why did it go away in the 20s? I would think mostly because the big experimentation was for sound. Sound and the Great Depression put a kibosh on a number of film experiments at the time, including Widescreen.

During the 1930s, polarized 3-D was being developed. One of the earliest polarized films was shown at the 1939 World's Fair in NY, a stop motion film called In Tune With Tomorrow. It was remade the following year in color as New Dimensions. The shorts were done in dual strip polarized 3-D. According to Cheddar, polarized glasses as yellow and brown as opposed to red and blue. What this proves is that the person doing the video hasn't actually seen any 3-D movies, especially polarized ones. Polarized glasses are clear and made of polarizing filters that are at a 90 degree angle to one another. Yellow and brown indeed.

World War II put a hold on further 3-D experimentation until the 1950s. And frankly, 3-D has pretty much been with us in one way or another ever since. Don't believe me? Let's look at the evidence.

It's generally accepted that Bwana Devil kicked off 3-D in the 1950s, but you can actually take it back a year to the Festival of Britain in 1951. A number of 3-D shorts were shot and shown there and almost all of them ended up in America in early 1953 after the success of Bwana Devil. Bwana Devil and 99% of all the 3D movies of the 50s were done in dual strip polarized 3-D. There were a couple of part 3D Burlesque features in anaglyph, but the mainstream stuff was all polarized. How does dual strip polarized 3-D work? It's shot using two cameras, one for each eye. It's then projected through two projectors. The two projectors have to be in perfect synchronization. The screen has to be an actual silver screen to reflect the light back. And the polarizing filters that the image passes through on the projector have to be changed every few days. They also have to be clean of smudges and fingerprints, as do the glasses. In short, projection of dual strip 3-D was a very precise science and if just one thing went wrong, the whole presentation would blow up.

Naturally, projectionists didn't care to be that precise. If they couldn't get it to sync up right away, they'd just let it go. Even one frame out of sync can lead to headaches and nausea. There reports of film being a full 24 frames--one full second--out of sync. To give you an idea of what that might look like, picture watching House of Wax and your left eye sees a medium shot of Vincent Price and your right eye sees a two shot of Price and Charles Bronson. The theater owners would cheap out as well, painting the screen instead of installing a proper silver screen. The projectionist union demanded two projectionists in a booth for 3-D shows, 3 if the magnetic stereo soundtrack was involved. Theater owners fought that, too. The end result was many shoddy presentations which left patron sick. Audiences began avoiding 3-D movies for this reason.

While all this was going on, 20th Century Fox was developing CinemaScope, a widescreen process that only used a single projector and a special lens. Theater owners, projectionists, and eventually audiences preferred this over the precision of 3-D, so many 3-D movies started getting flat showings only. Universal rolled out one last 3-D movie in 1955, Revenge of the Creature, and that as they say was that.

But not quite. As early as 1957, 3-D movies were being successfully reissued. The first new 3-D movie after Revenge of the Creature was also the first one released in 3-D and CinemaScope: September Storm in 1960. September Storm became the last dual strip 3-D movie. The following year, The Mask became the first of the part 3-D releases, with 3 segments in anaglyphic 3-D. This was followed by a pair of Nudie Cuties also in part 3-D in 1962, The Bellboy and the Playgirls and Paradiso. A third Nudie Cutie, Adam and Six Eves, was shot in 3-D but released flat until it made a 3-D Blu Ray debut last year courtesy of the 3-D Film Archive and Kino. 3-D took another four years off before returning with 1966's The Bubble, the first single strip polarized 3-D film. Single strip 3-D was supposed to solve the problems of projection. Each image was printed on the same strip of film, either side by side or over and under. They were then projected--again on a silver screen--through a special beam splitter. The whole thing should have been idiot-proof. Never underestimate the idiocy of the American projectionist, however. I've seen far too many single strip presentations that were sometimes painfully mis-projected: the wrong type of screen, the wrong type of beam splitter, the beam splitter not put on correctly, as well as the film being cut incorrectly by the projectionists all could and did wreak havoc on unsuspecting audiences for literally decades.

Nonetheless, The Bubble begat a system that was used for decades. It was followed by Paul Naschy's La Marca del Hombre Lobo in 1968, released in the US in 1971 as Frankenstein's Bloody Terror. 1969 gave us the infamous porn The Stewardesses, which set off a decade of similar films. There were some mainstream films in the 70s, including the part 3-D horror film The Flesh and Blood Show,  the 1974 gorefest Andy Warhol's Frankenstein,  the 1976 South Korean Kaiju flick A*P*E, and a couple of Kung Fu movies. While not everything was mainstream, 3-D was still alive and kicking for practically the whole decade.

3-D took a 3 year break before returning with Comin' At Ya! in 1981. That film started a new mini-boom that lasted until 1985 and produced 18 movies in 3-D. Maybe not as much as the 50s boom, but 3-D was very front and center for a few years in the 80s. Why did it die this time? I suspect projectionists had something to do with it as well as the simple fact that all 18 movies are actually terrible movies. The 50s had some bad films, too, but by and large the 50s batch was pretty good. There wasn't a single good movie released in 3-D from 1981 to 1985. I know because I've seen most of them. I can't imagine that the few I haven't seen are much better than the ones I have.

Six years went between 1985's Starchaser: The Legend of Orin and 1991's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, which was another part 3-D anaglyphic affair. But that's not the full story, either since IMAX 3-D was ramping up starting in the mid-1980s and Disney was having a lot of success with Captain EO at their theme parks. In fact, IMAX 3-D (and porn ironically) carried 3-D through the 90s. And it was an IMAX 3-D release, James Cameron's 2003n Titanic documentary Ghosts of the Abyss, coupled with that same year's part 3-D anaglyphic release of Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over that set the current boom in motion. But even before that there were a few more mainstream releases: a terrible 1995 film called Run For Cover with Adam West in it and a 1997 Charles Band horror comedy called The Creeps. Plus there were 3-D made for video horror films in the late 90s like the atrocious Camp Blood. To say nothing of all the theme park attractions in 3-D like T2 3D: Battle Across Time, Shrek 4-D, MuppetVision 3-D, etc.

Ever since Spy Kids 3-D, there hasn't been a year without 3-D movies. Part of the longevity now seems to be the fact that projection is finally Projectionist-proof. Outside of forgetting to turn the 3-D filter for the projector on (I've seen this happen), there's no way the image can be screwed up nowadays. It also helps that there's much better movies being made nowadays as opposed to the batch from the 60s through the 90s. While there's definitely been some stinkers in the past 17 years, there's been plenty of movies like Hugo, Gravity, Life of Pi, the various Marvel and Star Wars movies, etc. that can stand alongside the classics of the 50s. The circular polarized glasses are better, too. More comfortable and you can tilt your head without losing the effect. Of course, Hollywood did itself no favors with some lousy rushed conversions like Clash of the Titans, but now even the conversions look great. Watching The Force Awakens or The Walk, you'd hardly believe they weren't actually shot in 3-D.

Yes, there's not as many 3-D movies as there were 7 or 8 years ago, but there's still some high profile releases. Yes, TV manufacturers stopped making 3-D TVS, but you can still get 3-D projectors for the home. Frankly, bigger is better with 3-D anyhow. There's a huge difference between seeing The Force Awakens in 3-D on a 50 inch TV screen and seeing it on a 100 inch projection screen. And while it is also true that not as many 3-D Blu Rays are being released in America, you can still get many of the big releases from Europe. I've gotten the last half dozen Marvel movies and the last 3 Star Wars movies all from the UK on 3-D Blu Ray, and all region free. On top of that, the 3-D Film Archive is still releasing several titles a year on 3-D Blu Ray. Taza, Son of Cochise will be out from the 3DFA and Kino later this month. And unless Covid-19 kills movie theaters totally forever, there are some high profile releases coming this fall like Black Widow and Wonder Woman 1984.

So no, 3-D is not totally dead. And it really hasn't been totally dead for nearly 70 years. Even when it goes away, it only goes away for a few years before poking back up in some fashion. The longest gap between movies since the 50s has been five, and that was right after Revenge of the Creature. All the other gaps have been an average of 3-4 years. So I have to say it: 3-D, like the Force, will be with us always.

The 3-D Nudie Cuties Collection

In between the Burlesque shorts of the 1950s and the Hardcore porn of the 1970s there was a brief period of time where Nudie Cuties titillated our imaginations. Nudie Cuties followed through on the promise of the Burlesque short by actually showing us naked women, but didn't go as far having anyone have sex like what would follow in their wake. They for all practical purposes were almost innocent in their content and the way they dealt with their subject matter. Perhaps too innocent, which is why they only lasted a few short years before giving way to porn as we know it today. But in that time, a few notable people shot them, including Russ Meyer, H.G. Lewis, and Francis Ford Coppola. Naturally, 3 Nudie Cuties were shot in 3-D in between 1960 and 1962,  The good folks at the 3D Film Archive and Kino Lorber have revived two of them for modern audience perusal.

First up is The Bellboy and the Playgirls, one of two such Nudie Cuties directed by Coppola.* The producers of the film took a 1958 black and white German sex comedy called Sin Began With Eve and told Coppola to shoot some color footage to insert into the film. It was decided to do the finale in 3D, making this one of those part 3D affairs from the 60s and 70s. Most reports say that the 3D footage runs about 20 minutes. It doesn't. It's 14 minutes from beginning to end. Which means we have to endure nearly 80 minutes of some unfunny 2D material.

The film starts off promisingly with a great opening theme. Unfortunately, it's downhill from there. The plot, such as it is, is two-fold. The German footage concerns the trials and tribulations of a theatrical troupe. The director is trying to convince his prudish leading lady (future Bond girl Karin Dor) to do a sex scene on stage by telling her tales of sex through the ages. How exactly that was supposed to convince her, I'm not sure. The color footage concerns George (Don Kenney), the titular bellboy of the Happy Holiday Hotel, who wants to be the House Detective and be popular with women. George is determined to find out what goes on in Room 229 of the hotel, where there are a bunch of naked women, one of them named Madame Wimpepoole  (Playboy bunny June Wilkinson, here credited as June Wilkenson). George assumes she's that type of Madame and all the other girls are Ladies of Ill Refute as Archie Bunker would say. Naturally, the ladies are all lingerie sales models, but George is too stupid to know that. The two plots hang together by way of George, who sneaks over to the theater to observe the director and learn about women then run back to the hotel and screw up.

The problems with this movie are many. It has been accused of being a bait and switch, and not incorrectly. Much of the footage is taken up by George, a character so annoying he makes Jar Jar Binks look like Jonathan Winters. Don Kenney sorta kinda tries as George but his material is hopelessly unfunny. I'm not even convinced it was funny in 1962. Since so much is sucked up by George, there's not a lot of time devoted to exactly why an audience would be watching something like this: the naked women. To make matters worse, the two most high profile women in the thing--Dor and Wilkinson--never even take off their clothes. Dor I can almost forgive given the nature of her character but Coppola blowing getting Wilkinson naked makes me want to smack the man. Wilkinson is frankly the best looking woman in the film. She's also just about the main reason to watch. When the 3D finally shows up, the depth is fairly good and the movie almost lives up to it's potential with a 3 minute segment of just the topless women. Then they bring George back onscreen. Bleh. It doesn't help that some of the 3D footage looks out of focus, no doubt due to either the fact that it was shot on 16mm or it really was out of focus (or both). Watching this, it's hard to believe that a decade later Coppola would go on to direct The Godfather.

Fortunately, there's a second feature to be watched and is it ever a hoot. I won't go so far as to call Adam and Six Eves a good movie, but for this type of movie it's a bona-fide classic. Shot in 1960 using the old NaturalVision rig--previously used on such classics as House of Wax, Bwana Devil, Gog, and Charge at Feather River--Adam and Six Eves was only released flat in 1962. The 3D Nudie Cuties Collection Blu Ray is it's 3D debut. Watching it, I can definitively say 1960s audiences missed out big time.

The movie concerns a fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt prospecting for gold with his wisecracking mule in the desert. He comes across an oasis of beautiful naked women, who do everything under the sun to distract him from his search. He's clueless however, just looking at them with a dopey grin and wondering why they have no clothes on before continuing his search. The donkey comments on everything (no, you didn't misread that). That's literally the plot of the whole thing. But it doesn't matter. If Bellboy and the Playgirls was a bait and switch, this was a bang for the buck if ever there was one. The director wisely focuses his camera on the women, knowing that's what his audience is here for. And my God are the women in this one gorgeous. There's literally someone here for anyone's taste. The prospector's cluelessness is nowhere near as annoying as George and the donkey, while not exactly Triumph the Insult Dog, is actually funny from time to time. Best of all, the movie only runs an hour, so it doesn't overstay it's welcome. To top things off, the 3D in this is spectacular. I mean, it should be considering the camera that was used. But it really looks great. Nice levels of depth and some fun pop outs.

A pair of shorts are also included on the disc, a 1953 Burlesque short called Love For Sale and a study of 3-D Kodachrome nudes from 1951. Both are impressive. It should be noted that Love For Sale was previously available in a cut down anaglyphic version from Something Weird. Seeing it here is a real revelation.

As usual, the 3D Film Archive did a bang up job. The restoration on Adam and Six Eves is perfect. The movie looks like it was made yesterday. Bellboy and the Playgirls doesn't look as good, but they worked with what they had and some of it was never going to look perfect. As a curio and a peek into a time that no longer exists, this is a disc worth getting. Indeed, Adam and Six Eves is worth the price of admission alone. I wish I could say better things about Bellboy and the Playgirls, but that's not the Archive's fault. This disc is literally a case of taking the good with the bad. Fortunately, the good outweighs the bad.

*Coppola's other Nudie Cutie was the 2D release Tonight For Sure. As that film also has Don Kenney in it, this particular reviewer has absolutely no curiosity about watching it. One Don Kenney movie is one too many.

3-D Thursday: 3-D Rarities Vol II

The 3-D Film Archive has done it again. Five years after the incredible 3-D Rarities from the 3D Film Archive and Flicker Alley, we a second installment that's nearly as great as it's predecessor. There may be a little less this time, but what there is, is wonderful.

Vol. II kicks off with A Day in the Country, a 1953 Lippert short. Originally shot in New Jersey in 1941 as Stereo Laffs and intended to beat the Pete Smith short Third Dimensional Murder to the screen, A Day in the Country basically sat on a shelf until Lippert put it out to cash in the 3D craze that was just getting under way. The short was released in anaglyphic format back then, one of the rare anaglyph releases. Narrated by future Stooge Joe Besser, the short is a pleasant if somewhat goofy affair that, like the Smith short, manages to throw everything it can think of out of the screen at you. Incidentally, this is from the only surviving print, a somewhat faded anaglyph. The image might not be the prettiest, but it's the best we'll see on this one.

If you're a little more highbrow than that, the second short should be more up your alley: The Black Swan, a 1951 ballet short shot for the Festival of Britain. It's incredibly well staged in 3D and makes you wonder why more shorts like it weren't done. A couple of other shorts for the Festival of Britain were included on Volume I, so maybe Volume III could complete the collection!*

Hillary Hess narrates the next part, a 20 minute collection of 3-D stills taken from the mid-40s to the late 50s. It's a fascinating look at a time long gone and Hess's narration brings it even more to life. Most fans praise this segment the most and for good reason.

A very odd short done in 1966, Games in Depth, is up next. Shot by the Polaroid company, Apparently intended for Expo '67 but never released until now. It's a mess of different shots set to goofy music, which is pretty bizarre but worth watching at least once.

The prologue to Frankenstein's Bloody Terror follows. I missed my chance to see the film itself in 3-D a few years ago and this two minute prologue really makes me regret that. Following that and rounding out the shorts section is a trailer for the never released clip documentary, The 3-D Movie. It's sad we'll never see this film as it looked like a ton of fun with clips from The Stranger Wore a Gun and Gorilla at Large among other things.

Then comes the centerpiece of the whole thing, the first Mexican 3-D feature, El Corazon y La Espada. Starring Cesar Romero and Katy Jurado, this is a wonderful little swashbuckler about a Spanish nobleman (Romero) out to take back his castle from the Moors. Jurado is the spitfire looking for the formula to turn lead into gold.  Ponce De Leon is also tagging along, looking for the Rose of Youth. There's a lot of sneaking around secret passages, which looks great in 3-D. The sword play won't make it forget Errol Flynn, but the movie is reasonably fun. I've certainly seen worse 3-D movies over the years. The disc allows you to watch it either in Spanish with subtitles or the English dubbed track from the movies 1956 re-release in America as Sword of Granada. A Kickstarter campaign was done to complete the restoration of the film and as it result, it looks spectacular.

The disc finally ends with a selection of 3D stills taken by Harold Lloyd. I've seen at least some of these before since I have a book of Lloyd's stills, but they're even more spectacular here. Harold's granddaughter Suzanne narrates this wonderful look back at a bygone era.

3-D Rarities II is, as I said earlier, nearly as great as the first one. There's less here but it's still great stuff. The only real knock on the disc is that you can't access each short separately like you could the original disc. Nonetheless, this is another must have from the 3-D Film Archive.

3-D Thursday: The Stewardesses (1969)

The Stewardesses is a historically important 3-D movie. That's not the same thing as saying it's a good movie, however.  Point in fact, when I first saw it in 2006 I stood up at the end of the movie and loudly declared "Somebody owes me 90 minutes of my life". Eleven years later, I still haven't got that 90 minutes back.

Made in 1969 for around $100,000, The Stewardesses went on to make an improbable $26 million at the box office. Part of this surely had to be a novelty factor. After all, this was one of the first pornos as we've come to know them today. Softcore, sure, but nobody had really seen anything like it. Add to that the fact it was in 3-D and of course it became one of the most profitable movies ever.

It's fairly pointless to talk about plot with a movie like this. For the benefit of anyone who hasn't seen a porno before, that's because there is no plot. Just a series of vignettes about the sexual escapades of a group of stewardesses in L.A. one night. A lesbian tries seducing her best friend, one stewardess drops acid and makes love to a lamp (you did not misread that), one takes a soldier headed for Vietnam out for the time of his life, etc. The closest the movie comes to a plot involves a stewardess named Samantha (Christina Hart) dating an ad executive (Michael Garret) in an effort to get him to cast her in a commercial. I would never ruin the end of a good movie, so let me spare you some pain and time: he eventually agrees but tells her she'll only ever be a mouth. After essentially raping her, she's mortified so she murders him and commits suicide. The End.

It's worth noting that Hart went on to play Patricia Krenwinkle in the 1976 version of Helter Skelter. She was also at a screening of The Stewardesses in 2006 at the World 3-D Film Expo II. She walked out of the theater during the acid trip scene. I can't imagine why.

There's two major problems with this movie. The first is the tone. What starts off as a stupid sex comedy slowly turns ugly culminating in the suicide mentioned above. The beginning jokes of the movie are at odds with the final scenes. Mind you, there's plenty of sleazy things in the movie. For instance, the acid trip is a whole new level of "what did I just watch?".  But there's different levels of sleaze: this should be sleaze that's fun, not that makes you feel bad for watching it. And yes, by the time The Stewardesses is over, you'll hate yourself for watching it.

The other major problem is the cinematography. It may sound like a weird complaint to make against a porn film, but one would think that a director who created his own 3-D camera would at least have some basic knowledge of how to frame a shot. But the framing in this thing is absolutely abominable.  Heads are cut off constantly. There's an occasional decent 3-D shot, but then there's shots where the effect is pretty much ruined by poor framing. I'm not even talking about close ups of breasts or anything like that. I'm talking about full body shots where the top half of the actor's heads are chopped off and yet they're having a conversation! I admit to being astounded at just how poorly done this movie is. It's not merely a bad 3-D movie, it's a badly shot bad 3-D movie.

Despite the story and the incompetent filming, The Stewardesses became the most profitable 3-D movie ever. Unfortunately, it also inspired a decade of trashy 3-D porn films. Films like this one gave 3-D the black eye it had in the public eye for decades. To not put too fine a point on it, The Stewardesses is arguably the worst thing to ever happen to 3-D.

Now Kino has blessed(?) us with a fully restored 3D Blu Ray. I can't say anything bad about the Blu Ray in particular. The image is sharp and no doubt the best the movie has ever looked. Frankly, it's a shame a movie this bad looks so good. The highlight of the disc isn't the movie, but the bonus short included. 1976's Experiments in Love is also pornographic but is more fun, better shot, and has plenty of pop outs. Whether or not the short is reason enough to get the disc is up to you. As for me, I'd still like that 90 minutes back.

3-D Thursday: It Came From Outer Space (1953)

Fueled by the terrors of Godless Communism, Nuclear War, and the mysterious happenings at Roswell, the 1950s were a Golden Age of Science Fiction movies like no other decade before or since. One of the best of the decade, 1953's It Came From Outer Space is making a long awaited 3D Blu Ray debut courtesy of Universal Studios and the 3-D Film Archive.

The film opens memorably with a meteor crashing into a mine in the desert outside a sleepy town in Arizona. Amateur astronomer John Putnam (Richard Carlson) and girlfriend Ellen Fields (Barbara Rush) witness the crash and go to investigate. Putnam gets a good enough look at the meteor to realize it's actually a spaceship with something alive roaming around inside. The problem arises when the ship is covered over by an avalanche. Putnam tries enlisting help digging the ship out, but the town mocks him. Then weird things start happening and certain members of town begin to wonder if there's something to Putnam's story after all.

Incidentally, Carlson isn't the only cult figure in the movie. Playing the part of George is none other than The Professor himself, Russell Johnson. No, he doesn't get billed as "And the rest". But he does get one of the movie's creepiest scenes, staring blankly into the sun without blinking as one of the Xenomorphs. Joe Sawyer is Johnson's partner. Fans of the Marx Brothers will recognize Charles Drake (A Night in Casablanca) as the sheriff. On the feminine side, we have Barbara Rush in the first of her two 3-D movies and 50s starlet Kathleen Hughes as George's girlfriend. Hughes made a big enough impression that she got a larger role in Arnold's next 3-D movie, The Glass Web. She also amusingly gets a title card at the end despite having less than five minutes of screen time!

One of the best things about 50s sci-fi movies is how intelligent they often are. It Came From Outer Space stands alongside The Day the Earth Stood Still (the 1951 version) as being one of the most intelligent of the lot. Part of that comes from Ray Bradbury. A lot of the dialogue in the movie is his and it absolutely sings in that way that only Bradbury could. It touches on themes common to movies of the era--the unending terror of the Red Under The Bed in particular. The fact that the Xenomorphs could look like and therefore be anyone in town was somewhat unsettling. And yet, there is a special irony in the fact that the aliens actually do come in peace. But as the movie itself points out, we tend to destroy that which we fear and don't understand.

It Came From Outer Space was Universal's first 3-D film. It was also the first of four 3-D movies made by Jack Arnold. Originally projected in dual strip polarized 3-D, the movie was converted to a single strip anaglyphic form in 1972 for re-issue. Since then, that's the way most people have seen the film if they've seen it in 3-D. While I won't go so far as to say that the anaglyphic version is purely awful, it's not as good as the original dual strip version. And surprisingly, the original dual strip version isn't as good as this 3-D Blu Ray.

That's largely due to the efforts of the 3-D Film Archive. Universal gave them access to the materials to do a full scale restoration of the movie. While they didn't have to quite jump through the hoops they did on Gog earlier this year, they still pulled off a mini-miracle. All dirt, scratches, and splices have been fixed along with all alignment issues. All reverse 3-D shots have been fixed. In short, the movie looks better now than any other time in it's history. And yet even that is only the tip of the laser. The soundtrack is where the movie really pops to life.

It Came From Outer Space was one of the early stereophonic releases, shown in a 3 track stereo sound in 1953.That soundtrack has not been heard since then. That's right. Not one single prior home video release of the movie--not the anaglyphic VHS released in 1980 nor the 2D version put out by Goodtimes in the late 1980s nor the DVD from 2003--has had the stereo soundtrack. And guess what? That anaglyphic 35mm and 16mm re-issue from 1972 didn't have it either. In short, not only have people been watching the movie in a fairly sub-par manner for the past nearly 45 years, they've been hearing it in a sub-par manner! This soundtrack rocks.The explosions are Loud. It's a soundtrack as 3-Dimensional as the movie is.

As a postscript, it's worth noting that in 1996, the Sci-Fi channel released a "sequel" called It Came From Outer Space II. Don't feel sad if you've never seen it. It wasn't so much a sequel as a really poor remake that replaced the astronomer with a photographer (why?) and made the aliens a little more malevolent, thereby completely missing the point of the original movie. You can, of course, seek it out if you're in a sadomasochistic mood, but I wouldn't recommend it.

If you've never seen It Came From Outer Space in 3-D, then you've never properly seen the movie. Like so many of the 50s 3-D films, the added dimension adds layers to the story the 2-D version never could. This is one of those 3-D movies that takes place in the desert, and boy does that desert go on forever. The vastness of the desert only adds to the menace.

This new Blu Ray is really the only way to see It Came From Outer Space. And considering the price (under $10!), it's a better bargain than most new 3-D movies.  If you're a 3-D fan, consider this one a must-own release.

3-D Thursday: Comin' At Ya! (1981)

Let's not kid ourselves. Comin' At Ya! is a rotten movie. It has the barest amount of plot it can muster and about as much dialogue. Possibly less. Point in fact, it barely qualifies as a movie. So much so that nobody found a reason to release it on home video in the U.S. until Rhino put out a poor anaglyphic VHS and DVD in 1999, 18 years after it was first released. Its prior home video release was in the mid 80s in the old field sequential format on Japanese VHD. Now its managed a 3D Blu Ray release with the humorous sticker proudly trumpeting the 2D version is included. Please. There's barely a reason to watch it in 3-D, let alone flat.

The bare premise is that after  white slavers kidnap his wife (Victoria Abril) on their wedding day, H.H. Hart (Tony Anthony--God help me, that's his name) gets pissed off and angry and decides to hunt them down. Hart rescues his wife and a bunch of other women, the white slavers recapture them, kill them, and then Hart kills all the white slavers. The End.

If you're thinking that my words are not doing justice to this movie--that surely there must be more to it than that--let me reassure you. No, there really isn't. This is a movie whose plot summary would fit on a postage stamp with room left over.

In an effort to perhaps make the film more interesting, the filmmakers added a gimmick to the gimmick for the reissue. Calling it "Noir 3-D", they went back and made certain shots black and white, or part black and white. It's meant to add a visual flair to the movie, but it's actually an epic fail. It's actually more distracting than interesting.

Like almost every 3-D movie from The Bubble in 1966 to the My Bloody Valentine 3-D in 2009, Comin' At Ya! lost its mind with gimmick shots. Bats, rats, playing cards, guns, knives, spears, flaming arrows, gold coins, coffee beans, and yes a baby's bare ass are flung, tossed, chucked, dropped and otherwise thrust at the audience over the course of 90 minutes. To put it another way, this movie's 3-D is about as subtle as the most garish Hawaiian shirt you can imagine. And while this level of gimmicky goodness does seem to be a lost art today, this particular example is practically a rape of your eyeballs.

It is an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, if you have a 3D TV and are sick of watching 3D movies that have few to no gimmick shots, the 3D Blu Ray of Comin' At Ya! might just be what the doctor ordered. On the other hand, the 3D Film Archive did not work on this release, so there is no correction to the alignment. This means that the film looks fairly brutal. As often happened back then, some of the gimmick shots get way too close to the camera. Virtually every 3D movie of the 70s and 80s did this, causing shots that made you feel like your eyeballs were about to be ripped out of your head.

If you are a completionist of either vintage 3-D or 3-D in general, then absolutely get this disc. If, however, you are subject to headaches from 3-D movies, you may want to skip this disc. I've watched  3-D movies for almost 35 years and even I had difficulty with it. I ended up watching the movie in chunks, partly because of how bad the movie itself is and partly because I need to rest my eyes from the constant assault being inflicted on them.

I am glad to have finally seen the movie in a proper 3-D format. The old Rhino VHS made a pretty brutal to watch movie even more so. I think the restoration could have concentrated less on the black and white and more on correcting the 3-D, but it is what it is. Comin' At Ya! is the first of the 18 3-D movies released between 1981 and 1985, so as a piece of 3-D history, like the equally awful Bwana Devil and The Stewardesses before it, it rates a viewing if you're a 3-D buff. Otherwise, there are better examples of this sort of thing, even from that decade.

3-D Classics on Blu Ray

If you're a fan of vintage 3-D 2016 has been a pretty awesome year so far. MVD kicked things off in January with 1981's Comin' At Ya!. Admittedly, that's a terrible movie--all of the 80s 3-D films fail at being good movies--but it has a lot of goofy 3-D gimmick shots so it's kind of fun in that manner.

Kino Lorber in March released Gog courtesy of the 3-D Film Archive. I've mentioned before what a fantastic restoration it is and it bears repeating. Gog hasn't looked this good since its initial release in 1954. This is a restoration to rival restorations from the major studios, that's how well done it is. If you're a fan of 50s science fiction or classic 3-D movies, you really need to get this one.

Going back to 80s 3-D for a moment, last month Universal finally released all 3 Jaws sequels on Blu Ray. Included in this, of course, is Jaws 3-D. While they didn't make as big a deal about it as it can be argued they should have, that Blu includes the 3-D version listed as a special feature. But it's the 3-D Blu Ray edition, unlike Paramount's anaglyphic release of Friday the 13th Part 3. Some of the gimmick shots get way too close to the camera for comfort but the 3-D looks great. I have a warm spot for Jaws 3-D (despite knowing it's a bad movie) since it was my first 3-D movie in the theaters so I'm glad it's finally out the way it was meant to be seen. Besides, why would you want to watch it any other way?

The most recent release is a 1950s title from Twilight Time. Miss Sadie Thompson starring Rita Hayworth and Jose Ferrer shipped just this week. Sony did a beautiful 3-D DCP restoration a few years ago. I saw that DCP at the 2013 World 3-D Film Expo and it looked terrific. That's what Twilight Time is releasing. I'm looking forward to revisiting this soon.

There's more on the way, too. Kino Lorber and the 3-D Film Archive are working on 1976's A*P*E.  A South Korean Kaiju movie made to compete  with the Dino DeLaurentis remake of King Kong, A*P*E has a ridiculous looking 36 foot gorilla rampaging across Korea, kidnapping Joanna Kerns (the mom from Growing Pains), and flipping off the audience! While it wouldn't be my first choice for restoration, I'm confident the 3-D Film Archive will make it look better than it deserves. More exciting is the potential restoration of September Storm from the 3-D Film Archive. There's a Kickstarter campaign to fund the restoration at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/3-dspace/september-storm-1960-3-d-digital-feature-film-rest. If you are a fan of vintage 3-D, you owe it to yourself to contribute to this.

On top of that, Shout Factory has announced 1983's Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn. Charles Band's second of three 3-D movies, Metalstorm stars Kelly Preston in the second worst sci-fi movie she was in (Battlefield Earth remains the champ) and Richard Moll in the part that got him the role of Bull in Night Court. It has just enough goofy 3-D effects to make it worth watching, too. The 3-D Blu Ray will be released on September 13.

Finally, Universal may be working on the 1953 sci-fi classic It Came From Outer Space. Originally, Panamint in the U.K. had announced a release set for this month but cancelled it when Universal said they were planning a release. It the Universal Blu Ray is the same as what Panamint was planning, it will include the short that originally played with the movie, Nat King Cole and Russ Morgan's Orchestra. Universal hasn't confirmed anything yet, however, so vintage 3-D fans wait eagerly for news.

For those of you who wonder why I get so enthusiastic about these old 3-D movies and not so much the newer ones, it's because I generally find the older titles have better 3-D. They take better advantage of the process with greater depth and more gimmick shots. Even the less gimmicky films of the 50s are deeper and, as a rule, have at least some pop outs. There are more recent titles that have     nothing coming out of the screen at all. They also usually don't take as much advantage of the depth as they could. There are exceptions, of course, but they aren't the rule. So until all modern filmmakers bring the fun back to 3-D, I'll continue to jump at any of these older titles.

HELP THE 3-D FILM ARCHIVE SAVE SEPTEMBER STORM (1960)

I don't normally do this sort of thing. I do not, as a rule, use this blog to promote any Kickstarter campaigns. Not mine and certainly not anyone else's. That said, there is that old saw about rules being made to be broken and this is one of those times. This is special. The campaign at
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/3-dspace/september-storm-1960-3-d-digital-feature-film-rest is for a lost 3-D film, something that instantly caught my attention and it should catch yours, too.

The fine folks at The 3-D Film Archive and 3-D Space: The Center for Stereoscopic Photography, Art, Cinema and Education have teamed up to restore the ultra-rare 1960 underwater thriller September Storm. This was the last 3-D film to actually be shot in the 1950s, having been filmed in Spain in 1959. It is also the first 3-D film to have underwater color photography and it is the first ever 3-D film shot in the CinemaScope process. This is a major but sadly forgotten piece of cinematic history that is on the verge of disappearing forever.

The elements are in real bad shape. They have developed Vinegar Syndrome, meaning that the film has started to warp, shrink, and become brittle. If digital scans are not done soon, the movie will be beyond saving. Being a dual strip 3-D feature, both the left and right eye film elements need to be digitally scanned frame by frame. Any alignment issues will need to be corrected for proper 3-D presentation. On top of that, color restoration and matching is also needed and any damage such as scratches and splices will need to be repaired. It sounds like a tall, expensive order but this is The 3-D  Film Archive we're talking about. They did all this fairly recently with Gog so they can do it here, too.

But they can't do it alone. They need funding to save this one due to the dire shape it's in. That's why they've gone to Kickstarter this time. While it's true that the survival rate of vintage 3-D is pretty impressive, there have been casualties over the decades. 1954's Top Banana only exists in 2-D now. The same year's Southwest Passage--which has Joanne Dru, the star of September Storm--only has half of the movie in 3-D. And as recent a movie as 1983's Rock N Roll Hotel is effectively gone, only existing in a recut 2-D pan and scan VHS. The original 3-D version is gone now. Think about that for a minute. A movie a little over 30 years old is lost. Let's not lose September Storm, too.

I suppose some of you may be wondering if this is a good movie. I have no idea. I saw a few seconds of it a couple of decades ago on AMC in 2-D and pan and scan and chose not to continue. That said, I personally want to see this the way it's meant to be seen: in 3-D and Scope. Besides, does it really matter if it's a good movie? After all, if something as minor as Manos, Hands of Fate is worthy of rescue and restoration, why shouldn't this one be, too? Anyhow, I figure it has some merit. Besides starring Dru, it was directed by the director of 1953's War of the Worlds.

As of this writing, the campaign has raised over 10% of its goal. That's a good start but I've seen these things fail before. Let's not let that happen. Too often films have rotted away due to the indifference of rights holders so this is a chance to contribute to film preservation and keep a historically important movie from vanishing into the abyss.

If you care at all about film preservation or 3-D movies, you absolutely need to contribute to this. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/3-dspace/september-storm-1960-3-d-digital-feature-film-rest

3-D Thursday: The Flesh and Blood Show (1972)

The poster for The Flesh and Blood Show, a 1972 part 3-D slasher film directed by Paul Walker, promises "an appalling amalgam of carnage and carnality". If you're a gorehound and you read that sentence and got palpitations of excitement, please calm down. I can guarantee that you will find the movie a shattering disappointment. I'm no gorehound and I found it to be a shattering disappointment.

The Flesh and Blood Show is the old saw Agatha Christie used for And Then There Were None. A group of people are invited to remote location by an unknown person who starts picking them off. In this case it's a group of actors and the location is an abandoned seaside theatre. They're there to rehearse a Grand Guignol style review called The Flesh and Blood Show.  When one of the actresses is murdered, instead of leaving, the cast and director stick around to continue rehearsals and maybe find the killer. Unlike Christie's classic, the cast isn't stranded at the theater. They can leave anytime they want to. Well, no one ever accused characters in a slasher movie of being intelligent.

As much blood as you will see

Conventional stupidity of slasher movie characters to one side--including those that wander off all alone knowing full well that a killer is nearby--there's a larger problem with the movie. If you haven't seen it and, as I say, are a gorehound, you'd probably expect there to be a lot of gory murders. But there aren't. Point in fact, all of the killings are off-screen. The poster shows us a woman being decapitated and while there is such an incident, she's decapitated offscreen and when we she her head, it doesn't look any different from the other wax heads it's next to. There's maybe six murders in this and not a single one of them happens before our eyes or is even remotely bloody. The bloodiest the movie gets is at the beginning when a guy walks into the room of two of the actresses with a knife in his gut. However, that scene is a practical joke and a fake out. For a movie called The Flesh and Blood Show, you'd expect at least some blood and will likely be confused by the lack of same.

On the other hand, the film does deliver a fair amount of Flesh for that part of the title. Virtually every young actress in the film takes off their clothes at one point or another. One even opens her apartment door in the middle of the night stark naked because of course she does. So, if you like movies with lots of beautiful naked women, you'll like this. If you're hoping those naked women get killed off creatively a la Friday the 13th, you're not going to like this movie.

The Flesh and Blood Show was one of those Part-3-D movies released back in the 60s and 70s. The vast majority of the movie is in 2-D, with a ten minute segment towards the end in black and white 3-D. Why black and white, besides the fact that it was a flashback to the 1940s? Because the 3-D segment was originally in anaglyphic 3-D. Even Paul Walker knew that anaglyphic 3-D in color looks rotten, so he shot that segment in black and white. The only problem is, the segment is so dark that the 3-D is practically non-existent. Kino released the movie on 3-D Blu Ray with both the anaglyphic version and the 3-D TV version and they both look pretty poorly. There's maybe three well lit shots in the entire segment. To make matters worse, to watch this sucker in 3-D, you have to watch the 2-D parts up until the flashback begins, go to the menu, select the 3-D way you want to watch it, watch that segment, go back to the menu, and find the end of the film in the chapter selections! It's too much work for a film this poorly done with 3-D this bad.

This, by the way, was Walker's second 3-D film. He had earlier shot a soft-core sexploitation film called The 3-Dimensions of Greta, also using anaglyphic segments. Something Weird Video has that one on DVD, but after this film, I have no desire to seek that one out. It doesn't help that I've seen Something Weird's other anaglyphic 3D DVDs and they all stink.


One amusing piece of trivia for fans of General Hospital. Both this movie and Greta have a very young Tristan Rogers in them, ten years before he played Robert Scorpio. This explains how I came to watch this movie, too. Being one of the very early vintage 3D Blu Ray releases, I bought it just to support vintage 3D releases. I never had any interest in nor any intention to actually watch the dumb thing. However, a friend of mine came over one day and learning of this movie and Mr. Rogers being in it, begged to watch it. The moral of the story is that if you happen to buy this movie just to support 3D Blu Ray and you have a friend who watches General Hospital every day of his life, don't mention it to him or you, too, will be sadly subjected to this.