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.

3-D Thursday: Amityville 3-D (1983)

Amityville 3-D holds the distinction of being the last of the major 3D releases of the 1980s. A few more independent films limped out in 1984 and 1985, but this November 1983 release was the effective end of the road for the process for nearly 20 years (a couple of minor 1990s releases notwithstanding).

It also holds the distinction of being on Siskel & Ebert's Worst of 1983 list. I'm not entirely convinced I agree with that distinction, however. After all, 1983 also gave us The Man Who Wasn't There and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn, both of which threaten to make this film look like Casablanca.

The funny thing about this is the fact that, like so many other bad movies, one watches Amityville 3-D and is left wondering just how it went so wrong. It shouldn't be as bad as it is. It has a decent enough cast, a pretty good idea for the story, and the director of such classics as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fantastic Voyage, and Tora! Tora! Tora!. Despite all this, the film manages to lay an absurdly sour egg.

The story has magazine journalist John Baxter (Woody Allen alumni Tony Roberts) buying the Amityville Horror house. As he makes his career debunking hoaxes, he doesn't believe in the stories about the house. So far so good. I can dig a guy with cajones buying up a haunted house. Of course it doesn't take long for weird stuff to happen and people to start dying. Baxter, for his part, just blows it all off.

The Realtor who sold him the place dies in the house? Happens all the time!
Baxter's photographer partner Melanie gets attacked by the house and later is burned to a crisp in her car? Mere coincidence!
Baxter's daughter drowns after a séance where the house threatens her? It's tragic, but what can you do? That's life!

Sheesh, is this guy boneheaded! In fact, Baxter is hilariously boneheaded even after he's attacked in an elevator. Me? I would have been suspicious after the realtor, concerned after the elevator, and convinced after my photographer died. But then, I'm not the victim of bad screenwriting.

The script is just one of the frustrating things about this film. There seem to be two types of people in this movie: stupid people and whiney people. As stupid as Baxter comes across, it can't beat the stupidity of paranormal investigator Eliot West (Robert Joy). This genius decides that the best way to save Loughlin's spirit from the demon in the well is to lean near the well and, when he sees the demon coming up yell to her spirit to save herself. That's it. Naturally, the demon gets him instead. Good plan, there, bub. Didn't think to bring any holy water or anything, did you?

While it's true that none of the 1980s 3D movies are what you would traditionally call "good movies", this one should have been. Besides Roberts and Joy, Candy Clark plays Melanie, Lori Loughlin is the daughter, and Meg Ryan her best (only?) friend. Yes, that Meg Ryan. So this isn't exactly the cast of a Friday the 13th movie. I know, I know. Someone is going to point out that some of those movies have good casts. They don't. What they usually have is one or two (if that) good actors and a bunch of nobodies. This cast isn't a bunch of nobodies. They're a good cast doing a lousy job.

The only one who almost acquits herself is Loughlin and she doesn't get much to do. Even worse, almost all of her scenes are with Ryan, who is embarrassingly bad here. How bad is Ryan? Her performance has all the subtlety of a nuclear explosion. It's bizarre to think that by the end of the decade she'd being doing movies like When Harry Met Sally. Watching her here, however, you would swear she was never going to be anybody.

You can almost excuse those two, however, since they actually were nobodies at the time. Candy Clark, on the other hand, had been in American Graffiti ten years earlier, so she has no excuse. She starts out okay but as the film goes on her performance gets steadily worse. Her next to last scene, where Roberts tries to find out what happened to her in the house is so bad it's painful. Her death by spontaneous combustion scene is so over the top ridiculous as to be unintentionally funny.

Roberts ex-wife is played by an exceedingly shrill Tess Harper. Literally, all she seems to do is whine her way through the part. In fact, she is so annoying, you actually wish she was in the car with Clark when it goes up in flames.

As far as Roberts goes, he plays Baxter in such a blasé manner as to defy belief. You would think that an actor who worked with Al Pacino and Woody Allen would be able to bring some life to his character. But he doesn't, which makes it impossible to feel anything for him but contempt for being so stupid and banal a character. Not good for an actor who has to carry a whole movie. It's like watching a Friday the 13th movie where the character stands by the open door screaming while Jason slowly walks over to them instead of running like hell. They literally deserve what they get.

True, it's not necessarily the fault of any of the actors as the characters themselves are written that way. But the fact that none of these people--except for Ryan who goes way over the top--can make their characters the least bit interesting damns the whole project. And Ryan isn't interesting, she's just goofy and over the top.

Director Richard Fleischer had worked in 3D 30 years earlier with a movie called Arena, so he was better qualified to work with the process than any other director of an 80s 3D movie. He knows plenty about depth and it shows since the depth in the movie is fantastic, far better than most 3D movies today. But the film suffers from what all 80s 3D movies seem to suffer from: so many gimmick shots that many of them are just plain silly. Clark's charred corpse is pretty effective but it's hard to take a movie seriously that spits straws and Frisbees at you. Especially when the Frisbee effect is handled pretty clumsily. Still, if you have a 3D TV and are going to watch this movie, the 3D Blu Ray is the way to go.

In the end, Amityville 3-D ends up being only moderately better than most of it's contemporaries. This, Jaws 3-D, and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone remain the best of the 80s 3D movies. But that's not really saying much.

Though I will give the movie this: there is at least one effectively creepy scene in the movie. Harper is in the house and she sees a very wet (and silent) Loughlin walking up the steps. She follows her right up to the attic and gets the door slammed on her. What she doesn't know is that outside at that very moment, Roberts and some paramedics are trying desperately to revive the already dead girl. It's a well done sequence which shows what the movie could have done with a little more effort. Shame there weren't more scenes like it.

More 3D Classics Come To Blu Ray (UPDATED)

Last year(!) I blogged about the 3D Blu Ray releases of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder and the horror classic Creature From The Black Lagoon. Jump forward a year, and we finally have two more classic 3D movies released on 3D Blu Ray. Some may take exception at my listing one of these as classic, but I'll explain my logic when I get to it.

First, and most importantly, is the movie that, for many people is The 3D Movie of all time. Before Avatar, before The Avengers, there was 1953's classic chiller House of Wax starring Vincent Price. If your only familiarity with this particular title is the so-called "remake" that is best remembered for the death of Paris Hilton, then you need to see some better movies. I can't even call this the original since a)it's actually a remake of a 1933 movie called Mystery of the Wax Museum and b)the 2005 debacle has nothing at all to do with this movie. But, this is one of the films that made Vincent Price a superstar (which realistically didn't happen until he started doing the Poe films in 1960) and is one of the most famous 3D movies of all time. With good reason.

Price plays Professor Henry Jarrod, a brilliant but not terribly successful sculptor of wax statues. Price prefers creating beauty and history over violence and mayhem. His partner (Roy Roberts) wants out and decides that the fastest way to do so is to burn down the museum. Jarrod is scarred in the ensuing fire but apparently escapes.

Not long after that, a ghoulish figure starts murdering people, starting with the ex-partner, who he hangs in an elevator shaft (a fairly gruesome murder for a 1953 film, btw). The partner's girlfriend Cathy Gale (a wonderfully ditzy Carolyn Jones) is next. When Jones's roommate (Phyllis Kirk) walks in on the killer, a foot chase through the fog shrouded streets of New York ensues. Kirk just barely escapes the ghoul.

Not long after this, Price reappears, set to open a new wax museum. Kirk's boyfriend (Paul Picerni of TV's The Untouchables) gets a job there and that's when Kirk notices that Joan of Arc looks an awful lot like Cathy. That's okay, since Price decides that Kirk looks an awful lot like Marie Antoinette. The cops and Picerni dismiss Kirk's ideas about the museum as crazy, but she decides to carry on and prove she's right, hopefully not becoming a wax statue in the process.

As I say, for many people, House of Wax is the greatest 3D movie of all time. While I prefer Kiss Me Kate a bit more myself, I get where they're coming from. The 3D in the movie is amazing, and I don't just mean the gimmick shots. This is an insanely deep looking 3D movie with the shots composed for maximum depth. Totally unlike most of the 3D movies made today. And this from a director who famously only had one eye and couldn't see 3D but, as legend has it, mathematically worked out every single shot. Incidentally, Andre De Toth wasn't the only one eyed 3D director of the 50s. Raoul Walsh also had monocular vision and also knocked one out of the ballpark with Gun Fury. But that's for another blog.

There isn't a ton of gimmick shots, either, but what ones there are, are amazing. There's a reason the paddle ball sequence is so famous. It's one of the all-time great gimmick shots and a perfect way to bring the audience back into the film after the intermission. For years, people just looked at it as a stupid gimmick shot and that's because the intermission card was gone. Once you realize there was an intermission and the scene's placement in the movie, it makes a little more sense. Plus, Price gets in a jab at it by commenting "once we're established, we won't need that sort of thing".

Mention also needs to be made of the supporting players. Frank Lovejoy and Dabs Greer are the cops trying to figure the case out. Lovejoy was a radio actor who was trying to make it into movies. He gets a decent part in another Warner Brothers 3D film, Charge at Feather River, where he famously spits at the audience (Lee Marvin does the same thing in The Stranger Wore a Gun and the gimmick is done again in the next film in this blog's entry). Sadly, he died a few years later without ever becoming a major star. As for Dabs Greer, try finding something he wasn't in. He's Shaky in the 1950s Dick Tracy show. He's one of the cops that harasses Richard Kimble in the pilot episode of The Fugitive. And modern audiences will recognize him as old Tom Hanks in The Green Mile. The guy got around.

But the most notable supporting player is a fairly young actor named Charles Buchinsky. He plays Price's creepy deaf mute assistant Igor and gets the films most notable 3D effect shot. He kept that name for another 1953 3D movie, the Rita Hayworth starrer Miss Sadie Thompson before changing it to the name we all knew him as. Fellow did some real good movies after that like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape and even when he started doing mindless crap in the 1980s, he still pulled off a couple of good movies like the TV movie version of Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus. I refer, of course, to Charles Bronson, who does a good, creepy job in this.

My friend Bob Furmanek of the 3D Film Archive stated that for all the times and ways he's seen House of Wax, this blu ray restoration is the best the film has looked. I've seen this a few different ways and times myself and I wholeheartedly agree. Warners did scans from the original YCMs---that's six different scans, three for each eye. This is one gorgeous blu and a showcase 3D blu. Writer R.M. Hayes in his infamous book on 3D movies wrote that if you were going to see only one 3D movie in your life, it should be Treasure of the Four Crowns. R.M. Hayes was a moron. If you see only one 3D movie, House of Wax is the one. And if you haven't seen it in 3D, you haven't seen it.

The second "classic" isn't quite in the same ballpark as House of Wax. Oh, hell. It's not even in the same universe. Nonetheless, as the first of the 1980s films to get a proper 3D Blu Ray release, Amityville 3-D deserves a little love, too. The third of the Amityville Horror films, this one comes to us in a box set with the first two from Scream Factory. I have no particular interest in the first two, though I may end up watching them. I did read the book and found it to be, by and large, a load of crap. Okay, let me clarify that. The book by Jay Anson, like Oliver Stone's JFK is a decent work of fiction. It is, at times, even moderately scary. But anyone who believes that it even remotely happened...well, I got a bridge to sell you as they say.

The third film advertised itself as "not a sequel" which basically translates to it being a movie designed to cash in on the success of the earlier films but having nothing to do with the characters in those films. At the very least, it's the first film to outright admit it's a fiction, so I give it points for that. The movie's tagline was also "In this film, you are the victim", so I also give it points for truth in advertising. I tend to remember Siskel and Ebert listing this on their worst of 1983 list (along with Jaws 3D). I'm not certain I would go quite that far. I tend to remember Deal of the Century and The Man Who Wasn't There being quite a bit worse from that year. Just saying.

Anyhow, the plot has a journalist (Tony Roberts) who makes it his career to debunk paranormal claims deciding to buy the infamous house on 112 Ocean Avenue. Problem is, the damn house actually is haunted. He ignores that fact, even when people start dropping dead left and right around him, starting with the realtor who sells him the house and has an encounter with the flies in the attic. Then his partner (Candy Clark) meets a particularly gruesome end in a burning car. Then his daughter (Lori Laughlin from TV's Full House) drowns. It's only when his daughter's ghost is spotted that he starts thinking there might be something to the stories and calls in his physic investigator friend, who ends up meeting the most ridiculous looking demon you ever saw.

Reading the above description and then going back a few paragraphs and reading about House of Wax, you may be wondering why in the world I'm including this movie in this particular post. It's not that Amityville 3-D is a good movie. None of the 1980s 3D movies are, realistically. This is one of the better ones, along with Jaws 3D and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. But that doesn't say much, now does it? I mean, Plan Nine From Outer Space and Bride of the Monster are Ed Wood's best movies, and they still stink.

Still, this is a worthy enough purchase, if only for the fact that it's a pre-2003 3D movie released on 3D Blu Ray. Somebody is gonna cite Friday the 13th Part 3 being on Blu Ray in 3D, but that's in the anaglyph format, which frankly sucks compared to 3D Blu Ray technology. I know since I released two shorts in anaglyph and ran tests for an over under version compatible on 3D TVs and it's night and day.  If supporting films like this means we could potentially get more, then good.  And regardless of what you may think of the movie, the 3D is actually pretty good. There's some decent depth. And one of the fun things about the 80s 3D movies is the fact that they weren't ashamed to jab the audience in the eye. Again, mostly the antithesis of what we see today. Oh, sure, a number of the gimmick shots in Amityville are corny as all get out--Meg Ryan blows a straw at the audience and someone tosses a Frisbee out of the screen among other things.

But let's be fair, here. Gimmick shots, corny and otherwise, are part of what has made 3D fun over the years. Even the 50s films, which rarely went overboard with the gimmick shots, knew that and would stick them in, sometimes organically and sometimes just out of left field. Again I cite the paddleball sequence in House of Wax, which is arguably as goofy a gimmick as the ones in Amityville 3-D or Friday the 13th Part 3 which had it's infamous eyeballs, but also had weed joints, wallets, yo-yos, and popcorn tossed at the audience. Most modern 3D films are terrified of gimmick shots, so it's kinda fun once in a while to toss something like Amityville 3-D on and grin like a little kid at the stuff flying out of the screen. In recent years, Spy Kids 3-D, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Hugo, and Oz the Great and Powerful are most noteworthy for gimmick shots and are probably the films least terrified to actually be in 3D.

In other words, don't watch Amityville 3-D for great cinema. Watch it for being a goofily fun 3D movie.

By the way, you did not misread. A very young (and cute) Meg Ryan plays Loughlin's friend. She gets the obligatory scene where she describes in detail the real life DeFeo murders from 1974. Her future ex-husband Dennis Quaid, of course, was in Jaws 3D. I understand they argued frequently over who made the worse 3D movie. (For those who don't get my humor, I'm kidding).

So we now have four pre-modern era 3D movies on 3D Blu. Thank goodness for that much. 2014 promises at least four more, including the recently announced Man In The Dark coming out in January from Twilight Time. It is also to be hoped that Warners makes good on releasing Kiss Me Kate next year and hopefully Universal will get off their butts and get It Came From Outer Space, Jaws 3D, and Revenge of the Creature out, too.

At any rate, now is a pretty good time to be a 3D fan indeed.