Box Office Prophets: The Best DVD Companies

The Best DVD Companies

By Chris Hyde

July 8, 2003

Not quite perished, my lady love, but some days I wish I had!

There's really nothing like a new technology to help you blow the dust off of the past. Since the advent of the DVD, many companies have sprung up to restore films and bring them back for this relatively recent format. Today, we take a look at some of the best there are and what they've got coming.

There are so many companies issuing releases to DVD presently that in listing out some of my favorites there'll undoubtedly be perfectly good operations that will be unfairly overlooked. For example, you won't see Anchor Bay, Pathfinder, Rise Above, or Fantoma listed below -- even though a selection of what they've got coming in the latter half of 2003 would include gems such as The Hills Have Eyes Special Edition, Disco Dolls in Hot Skin, plenty of Santo Mexican wrestling films, Fassbinder's In a Year of Thirteen Moons and a collection of the films of Kenneth Anger. I'll also be bypassing most of the studio operations engaged in issuing material from their back catalogs, but be sure to look out for releases from the likes of Paramount, Disney and Warner Bros in the months to come. Animation fans need to pay careful attention to the latter two especially, as there are new editions coming in the Walt Disney Treasures series and in November WB will begin the process of issuing the Looney Toon Collection -- which by all accounts should be the definitive version of the timeless classics we all know so well.

But enough about the companies that we won't be covering. Let's get to the nitty-gritty.

Celestial Pictures

While there's been a little carping about whether the cuts of the Shaw Brothers films that Celestial is releasing are always totally complete, few Asian film fans would argue that the company's ongoing reissuing of 700 films from the Hong Kong production company is in any way a bad thing. Having already given us great looking versions of classics for which fans have been waiting years, like Come Drink With Me and The Magic Blade (among many others), a glance at the upcoming schedule shows that there's plenty more to come. As each month tends to bring between five and ten new releases, it's near impossible to detail the wealth of great cinema to be unveiled in a brief paragraph -- but suffice it to say that besides such high profile prizes as Super-Inframan, Heaven and Hell, Spiritual Boxer and The Bamboo House of Dolls, there are tons more coming for rediscovery. While for now these releases are all Region 3, rights for some 50 have now been picked up for domestic release. But who needs a slice when you can eat the whole pie? This is the company that forced me to find a region-free viewing solution, and if you're not on board I see no good reason that it shouldn't be yours as well.

Criterion

Here's one for the highbrow. Though releases from Criterion have a tendency to be priced a bit higher than those from other companies, their product is a case where the quality tends to be so high that it's worth the premium paid. This operation also actually seems to be heavily concerned with film history and will happily release top-notch material that might seem to be of dubious commercial appeal. A case in point is their recent DVD of 26 films by avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, material that it's hard to imagine being issued so lovingly by any other high profile company. A cursory look at the next six months of the year shows that the release slate is chock full of brilliant films that deserve the company's caring touch: The Honeymoon Killers, The Pornographers, Veronika Voss, and Roman Polanski's early thriller Knife in the Water.

VCX and Alpha Blue

Okay now, here's a couple for the lowbrow. Please don't be offended, gentle reader, as I regale you with details on a couple companies that revel in releasing gutbucket porno films from the Golden and Silver Ages of triple-X offerings. If you're looking for "classic" material featuring the likes of Seka, Mai Lin, Ron Jeremy, Desiree Cousteau, Annette Haven, Georgina Spelvin, John Holmes, Uschi Digart, John Leslie or Christy Canyon then these are your purveyors. One might hope that both operations would start taking a little more care with their transfers, and it also wouldn't be so bad if they began to climb on the "extras" bandwagon -- but as far as putting out historic documents of an era when blue films were of a completely different ilk than today, there's no one better than these two outfits. It's a little tough to know what exactly these two companies plan on releasing for the rest of the year as they rarely list their upcoming material, but rest assured that whatever is brought forward will be representative of a now bygone era when triple-X films had a semblance of story and porn stars weren't mostly silicone.

Synapse

Here's a company that specializes in distributing horror and science fiction films, mostly from long ago, though they're not at all averse from releasing recent material if it fits their specifications. A pretty small operation, Synapse doesn't release a lot of films -- but in the parlance of film, what they do release is "cherce." Having already given us Blue Sunshine and Flavia the Heretic in early 2003, we can still look forward to things like Wild Zero, The Deadly Spawn and Let Me Die A Woman during the fall season. Also on the way eventually is a Street Trash Special Edition (when this will come out is anyone's guess -- head honcho Don May Jr. seems determined to not have this DVD hit the street until it's absolutely perfect) and October will bring Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural. I've already seen some direct captures from the 1080p d5 master of Lemora, and I can honestly say they look just phenomenal.

Something Weird

There isn't a trash film fan in the world that doesn't thank their lucky stars for this place. Sure, some of the material that they put out is of dubious merit, but really that's the whole point! I imagine that if it wasn't for Something Weird's fanatical dedication to saving lots of borderline film that very possibly a lot of this stuff could easily have vanished from the face of the earth. For that alone we should thank the company, but in addition to that they also have a tendency to put out their films in respectably priced double features that come loaded with extras. Your average Something Weird disk will come packed not only with the two feature films but also likely will contain a good batch of trailers and shorts. Some also come with great galleries of exploitation art and posters, and the recent line of Mexican horror films come with full half hour episodes of a south of the border children's show. The last two purchases I made from Something Weird (Angels/Getting Into Heaven and Chained Girls/Dominique, Daughter of Lesbos) both cost me under $15, but the DVD's have total running times of over three and a half hours. Now that's bang for the buck. As for what's coming in the second half of this year, hopefully they'll get their rights problems worked out and will be able to release the slew of G. Gordon Murray Mexihorror that they had planned. If not, we'll just have to content ourselves with upcoming triple features (!) such as The Touch of Her Flesh/The Curse of Her Flesh/The Kiss of Her Flesh, High School Big Shot/High School Ceasar/Date Bait and The Atomic Brain/Love After Death/The Incredible Petrified World, or other scintillating offerings like The Thirsty Dead/Swamp of the Ravens and The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield/Labyrinth of Sex. The hits just keep on coming.

MGM

Here's one studio that had to make this list, if only for the strength of their August lineup. MGM does a pretty fair job of getting mileage out of their back catalog overall, and with their Midnight Movie double feature series have also brought plenty of cult favorites back in an inexpensive form. The fun > continues with these next month, and the new batch includes a vampire film pairing, a lot of Poe and Vincent Price (especially of note for the latter being the Jacques Tourneur-directed Comedy of Terrors), a Poltergeist sequel combo and two doubles of Charles Band produced franchises from the 1980s (Troll and Ghoulies). As if that wasn't enough, there are plenty of fine single disc releases coming during the dog days as well: The Brood, Burnt Offerings, Raw Meat, Squirm, Clownhouse and I, Madman. Oh, and I forgot to mention special editions of The Howling (with a documentary, deleted scenes, commentary tracks, etc) and Boris Karloff's The Ghoul (in a transfer taken from original 35mm materials held by the British Film Institute, which the company claims will be far better than anything released within the last 70 years). That's it for August, but MGM piles on the week of September 2nd by putting out the entire second season of the classic '60s TV sci-fi series The Outer Limits. I imagine they have other stuff coming out the rest of the year, too, but frankly, after this summer blitz I don't know if I'll have any money left for any more.

Kino and Milestone

These two firms release a range of films from nearly all eras of cinema, but their work in the archaeology of early film is particularly notable. Kino of late has been bringing to DVD the works of giants like Erich von Stroheim (Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives, Queen Kelly), Alexander Dovzhenko and Vselovod Pudovkin. What's supposedly in the pipeline also looks to be great, as rumored upcoming titles include A Thief of Baghdad, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Fritz Lang's Spies and The Woman in the Moon. Milestone, for their part, often partners with Image Entertainment (another high quality company being mostly overlooked here) in releasing their restored silent classics. These partners seem to be getting along famously, as their release slate holds such diamonds as the French epic The Chess Player, an "ultimate edition" of Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera, a slapstick comedy compilation with new music by the Alloy Orchestra, Andre Antoine's La Terre and films with Mary Pickford and Clara Bow. So if you're looking for favorite films from the pre-sound era, keep an eye on the schedule for these two companies -- there are none better in releasing early gems than these two.

Mondo Macabro

We've already covered some DVD companies that like to delve into the nether reaches of film, but few do it as well as Pete Tombs at Mondo Macabro. A truly huge figure in bringing exotic film to the awareness of a wider public, this man's firm has operations in both the UK and the US, though at this point there have been many more releases in R2 than anywhere else. But with the domestic release of Alucarda and The Diabolical Dr. Z, the process of bringing their amazing lineup to North America has begun. There's more to come as well, with titles such as Mystics in Bali and Mansion of Madness perhaps on the way to R1 before too long. Also notable is their announced August release, an overlooked 1994 American horror film titled Aswang that looks to be utterly over the top -- though that's usually the case with releases from this bunch. But beyond the expected bizarreness of whatever outré films they may choose to unleash on the public, you can rest assured that the film's transfers will be of the highest possible quality and that the disc will come packed with extras that'll make the purchase that much more enticing. Mondo Macabro is simply one of the best at bringing the odd and offbeat to your video screen in packages that are worth throwing down for. For these guys, every release is an adventure.

Blue Underground

I figure we might as well finish this overview of some of my favorite DVD operations with a company that's had perhaps a better 2003 already than any other cult film outlet. After streeting such top quality material in the first part of the year as Vampyres, Daughters of Darkness, Baba Yaga, The Crazies, Salon Kitty and Emmanuelle in America, one might wonder what they're going to do for an encore. Blue Underground isn't in the business of just slapping transfers on a disk and sending them out to the pressing factory either; each selection is accompanied by as many extras as can be jammed onto the platter. Most of the above releases have some sort of commentary track, and there's usually plenty of other material included: interviews, deleted scenes, poster and stills galleries and the like. Blue Underground even sometimes goes so far as to include features on the DVD-ROM portion of the disk, an option that is neglected entirely by most in the business. So given their amazing attention to detail and impeccable taste, what sort of offerings does the company have left to offer fans in the latter half of 2003? The end of July should bring a special two-disc edition of the '80s horror film Dead and Buried, a release this writer is very much looking forward to as this is a movie that somehow flew beneath my radar during its theatrical run. Also in the pipeline are movies like Snuff, Venom and a bunch of Christopher Lee outings (Blood of Fu Manchu, Castle of Fu Manchu, Circus of Fear, The Bloody Judge). And that's not even the full slate, as additionally there's an upcoming onslaught of early Larry Cohen special editions: Bone, God Told Me To and Q, the Winged Serpent. Probably there's plenty else besides on the way from these guys, so just keep your ears open for announcements about whatever bit of celluloid arcana they'll be putting out-no matter what it is, you can be sure the release will be of the finest grade.

So there you have it, an extended diatribe on the companies that I love and some of what they have in store. My apologies to all the other fine operations engaged in re-releasing the treasures of yesteryear that didn't even manage to rate a mention here-there are just far too many places doing too much good work to be completely covered in a piece such as this one. But while the others are sure out there, just make a special effort to keep your eyes peeled for films coming with the imprimatur of any of the above companies. From my experience, it's the mark of quality.