Contents DVD Spotlight: The Sherlock Holmes Collection Volume One: Universal's classic 1940s Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce mysteries are finally afoot on DVD... but do MPI Home Video's release of the UCLA 35mm restorations live up to their promise? Find out as Tim Lucas raises his magnifying glass to Sherlock Holmes And The Voice Of Terror, Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon, Sherlock Holmes In Washington and Sherlock Holmes Faces Death! With rare vintage colour graphics!


Nobuo Nakagawa: Master of Japanesque Horror: Veering from West to East, VW and Bill Cooke bring you the first in-depth English-language study of Japan's supreme maker of kaidan eiga ('ghost story') films, whose works-including The Ghost Of Yotsuya and Jigoku ('Hell')-are currently available as import DVDs!


Dog Bytes: Reviews of reviews of Fred Olen Ray's Alien Dead... Elizabeth Hurley meets a serial killer in Beyond Bedlam... Peter Cushing's swan song Biggles-Adventures In Time... Al Adamson goes blaxploitation in Black Heat... Grand Guignol on the cheap in Dungeons Of Harrow... another little girl with a bouncing ball terrorises people through Fear Dot Com... Frank LaLoggia's debut Fear No Evil... the Richard Christian Matheson-scripted Full Eclipse... an import Hammer box set including Countess Dracula, Twins Of Evil and Vampire Circus... Haskell Wexler's seminal docudrama Medium Cool... snowboarders get slashed in Shredder... masked superhero shenanigans, Italian style, in Superargo Contro Diabolicus... and Crispin Clover starts a new Rat Pack in the remake of Willard!


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: Joe is back with another assortment of early 1970s reviews, this time including Gianfranco Parolini's Adios Sabata, Don Siegel's cop classic Dirty Harry, the British vampire opus The Hand Of Night (aka Beast Of Morocco) and-pardon us as we genuflect-Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West!


DVDs: Our in-depth reviews of The Adventures Of Pinocchio, The New Adventures Of Pinocchio (both with Martin Landau and Udo Kier!) and Roberto Begnigni's Pinocchio... the Coen Brothers' hilarious fantasy The Big Lebowski... the Max J. Rosenberg-produced Bloody Birthday... dark gods, kung fu, exorcisms and enhanced breast nudity in Japan's Dragon Blue... comparisons of the domestic and import discs of the terrifying HK/Thai horror film The Eye... Ken Russell's bizarre home movie The Fall Of The Louse Of Usher... Something Weird's serpentine double feature of Rattlers and The Snake People (with Boris Karloff)... the acclaimed British horror classic of the 1970s, Raw Meat aka Death Line (the subject of our next VW Round Table Discussion!)... Steve Reeves teams with Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava for The White Warrior... plus import reviews of Nicolas Roeg's mesmerizing and transgressive Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession... the Thai horror thriller Bangkok Haunted... Jess Franco's hardcore horror-sex fantasy Doriana Grey... and a new British DVD of Michael Armstrong's legendarily gruesome Mark Of The Devil (complete with a rare colour shot of the legendary deleted scene)!


Audio Watchdog: Douglas E. Winter on Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Scarface and new Italian horror score releases! Need we say more?


Biblio Watchdog: Reviews of three McFarland and Company Releases-The Films Of Tobe Hooper: Eaten Alive At A Chainsaw Massacre... Don Glut's The Frankenstein Archive... and Neil Pettigrew's mammoth The Stop Motion Filmography!

Contents Esotika Erotika Psicotika: A Beginner's Guide to the Best Euro Lounge Soundtracks:

Perhaps you know the names of the all-time greats Morricone, Piccione, Cipriani, Umiliani but where should you begin as a collector? Euro soundtrack authority John Bender defines the territory and provides some valuable pointers in an absorbing new essay! Dozens of essential releases discussed!


DVD Spotlight: Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines: Tim Lucas on Jonathan Mostow's action-packed addition to the James Cameron/Arnold Schwarzenegger franchise, now available from Warner Home Video as a two-disc DVD!


Dog Bytes: Info-packed capsule reviews of Greg Kinnear as sex-addicted Bob Crane in Auto Focus... Klaus Kinski is stalked by his twin brother in The Bloody Dead and Creature With The Blue Hand... angora-clad Charlotte Austin gets pawed by Spanky the Gorilla in the Ed Wood-scripted The Bride And The Beast... Don Knotts spends the night in a haunted house in The Ghost And Mr. Chicken... Karena Lam is plagued by visions of ghosts in the HK thriller Inner Senses... James Best holds giant rodents at bay in The Killer Shrews... you'll believe an iguana is a T Rex (maybe, maybe not) in Bert I. Gordon's King Dinosaur... the Sasquatch stalks Arkansas in The Legend Of Boggy Creek... Al Adamson and Leon Klimovsky 'collaborate' on Mean Mother... Mexico's masked wrestling hero returns in Santo Contro La Hija De Frankenstein and Santo En El Hacha Diabolica... Euro favourite Michel Lemoine becomes obsessed with a woman's portrait and flips out in Seven Women For Satan... and strange creatures run amok in the 'Yokai Monsters' trilogy Spook Warfare, 100 Monsters and Along With Ghosts!


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: In the 21st instalment of this popular column, Joe screens the long-unavailable screen adaptation of Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me... Bob Clark's Ed Gein-inspired Deranged... Toho's popular monster rally Destroy All Monsters... Melanie Griffith's mother getting naked for Don Johnson in The Harrad Experiment... Lee Van Cleef shooting up the screen in the Spaghetti Western Sabata... and Bonnie Bedelia in the low-budget MISERY template The Strange Vengeance Of Rosalie!


DVDs: In-depth reviews of Blue Underground's new Larry Cohen trilogy of Bone, God Told Me To and Q The Winged Serpent... the modern day vampire angst of Cold Hearts... the French-set Spanish horror of Devil's Kiss... Philip K. Dick adapted to the screen once again in Impostor... Malcolm McDowell gets real ugly in Island Of The Dead... Christopher Walken in his first major adult role in The Mind Snatchers... wrestling women, heart surgery and reverse evolution in Night Of The Bloody Apes (plus co-feature, Emilio Vieyra's Feast Of Flesh)... Charlton Heston watches Woodstock and still has time to kill vampires, bed Rosalind Cash and save Richie in The Omega Man... Santo returns to save Earth from alien attack in Santo Vs. La Invasion De Los Marcianos... Michael Findlay's notorious Snuff ('Made in South America-where life is Cheap!')... Roger Corman's elegiac The Tomb Of Ligeia (and co-feature An Evening Of Edgar Allan Poe)... Sonny Bono sprouts foliage in the mind-boggling Troll (plus its even more mind-boggling co-feature, the Italian-made Troll 2)... and Radley Metzger adds skin to the French '50s sexploitation classic The Twilight Girls!


Plus! Import DVD reviews of the Shaw Brothers' sex-and-violence HK classic Intimate Confessions Of A Chinese Courtesan... the excellent South Korean techno-horror Phone... and the German sexploitation items Train Station Pickups (with Katja Bienert) and Ernst Hofbauer's What Schoolgirls Don't Tell (aka Secrets Of Sweet Sixteen)!


Audio Watchdog: Douglas E. Winter on the introductory releases of the new Digitmovies label, including the long-awaited soundtracks of Fellini's Toby Dammit/Satyricon/Roma (Nino Rota)... the alternate score for the Italian release of Godard's Contempt (Piero Piccioni)... Piranha Ii: The Spawning (Stelvio Cipriani)... Crimes Of The Black Cat (Manuel De Sica)... Killing Birds (Carlo Maria Cordio)... Wax Mask (Maurizio Abeni)... and the Mario Bava classic Planet Of The Vampires (Gino Mariunuzzi, Jr.)! Plus Hexacord's 'Wizards of Sound' tributes to Ennio Morricone and Alessandro Alessandroni!


Biblio Watchdog: Reviews of the third edition of Michael R. Pitts' Horror Film Stars and the second, expanded edition of Beverly Gray's Roger Corman biography!

Contents Adrian Messenger Unmasked!: The Many Faces of Jan Merlin: Tom Weaver interviews the familiar character actor about his hush-hush involvement in the filming of John Huston's 1963 gimmick mystery, The List Of Adrian Messenger! Read all about one of the biggest cover-ups in mystery history! See page after page of exclusive photos!


DVD Spotlight: Lon Chaney Collection: Tim Lucas reviews Warner Home Video/TCM Archives' stunning retrospective tribute to silent screen great Lon Chaney, including The Ace Of Hearts, Laugh, Clown, Laugh, The Unknown, Kevin Brownlow's documentary Lon Chaney-A Thousand Faces, the stills reconstruction of London After Midnight and much more!


Dog Bytes: Capsule reviews of The Adventures Of Dr. Fu Manchu, four episodes of a 1950s TV revival of Sax Rohmer's Napoleon of crime... Chantal Akermann's La Captive, an erotic contemporary adaptation of a novel from Marcel Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past... Christopher Lee's Count Regula is resurrected in Harald Reinl's Castle Of The Walking Dead... The Crazies, George A. Romero's biochemical cautionary tale... Henri-Georges Clouzot's rarely-screened spy thriller Les Espions... Hands Of A Stranger, an obscure 1960s American film unofficially based on The Hands Of Orlac... Mandrake The Magician meets The Wasp in a Columbia serial based on Lee Falk's popular comic strip... My Tango With Porn, a documentary about the Canadian film ratings system... Ed Nelson stalks a pre-Alien creature that bursts out of its human host in Night Of The Blood Beast... Pink Floyd Live In Pompeii: The Director's Cut, Adrian Maben's redo of his 1970s midnight movie stoner classic... two Universal serials based on Secret Agent X-9... Barbara Steele in Michael Reeves' directorial debut The She Beast... Hammer's early experiment in television Tales Of Frankenstein (and its companion feature, Roger Corman's The Terror)... Trevor Howard seeks revenge in Cavalcanti's suspense thriller They Made Me A Fugitive... and Reed Hadley dons the mask of Don Diego in the Republic serial Zorro's Fighting Legion!


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: This month, the screening room offers something for Euro oater fans, as Joe jots down his impressions of Ace High (starring Terence Hill as 'Cat Stevens'!)... Lee Van Cleef and Carroll Baker in the Philip Yordan-scripted Captain Apache... A Few Bullets More, a Spanish, pre-Peckinpah telling of the story of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid... A Long Ride From Hell, the final film and only Western of movie great Steve Reeves... and a sprinkling of scares, courtesy of Gordon Hessler's Murders In The Rue Morgue and Brian De Palma's Sisters!


DVDs: In-depth reviews of the Hammer cult favorite Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter... Tony Anthony forms a menage e trois with Luciana Paluzzi and Rosemary Dexter in Cometogether... George A. Romero's trilogy-capping Day Of The Dead... Gary Sherman's Dead & Buried... Criterion's new box set A Film Trilogy By Ingmar Bergman: Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence (plus the documentary Ingmar Bergman Makes A Movie)... Peter Cushing bids au revoir to his beloved Baron in Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell... Herschell Gordon Lewis dumps horror in favour of hillbilly hootch in the double feature This Stuff'll Kill Ya! and The Year Of The Yahoo!... the undead anime Vampire Princess Miyu: Volume One... Plus 'Import' DVD reviews of the latest Asian shock success Ju-On: The Grudge... three new 'Arkoff Film Library' discs of the AIP classics The She Creature, Voodoo Woman and The Undead... and a Shaw Brothers production about a ghost girl with a bouncing white ball, The Siamese Twins!


Audio Watchdog: Douglas E. Winter waxes poetic over several new Bernard Herrmann releases (including On Dangerous Ground and several volumes of his radio and television scores for CBS) and the long-awaited CD debut of Nino Rota's score for Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit!


Biblio Watchdog: Reviews of Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier's Shadowmen: Heroes And Villains Of French Pulp Fiction and Adam Lukeman's Fangoria's 101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen!


Plus! Thrill to some amazing full-colour photos of Paul Blaisdell's creature creations for The She Creature and Voodoo Woman.

Contents The Alien Quadrilogy: It presents eight distinct cuts of four films on nine discs! This 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment release truly raises the bar for what is possible within the home video format! Bill Cooke signs up for the long haul with the sort of definitive, fully illustrated, feature-length review that only VW can deliver!


Dog Bytes: Capsule reviews of Joseph Losey's British underworld drama The Criminal... Republic's Sax Rohmer serial Drums Of Fu Manchu... Neil Jordan's Bob le Flambeur remake The Good Thief... Klaus Kinski meets Edward G. Robinson in the Italian heist caper Grand Slam... Daphne Zuniga stars in the Texas-made slasher pic The Initiation... Metrov's fascinating DVD-R sleeper Little Eden... Jean-Pierre Denis' Murderous Maids, about a 1933 double-homicide that rocked France... Demi Moore and Cherie Currie meet Parasite... Oliver Reed locks and loads for Sergio Sollima's Revolver... Mexico's famed masked wrestler meets the monsters in Santo en Atacan las Brujas ('Santo in Attack of the Witches'), Santo en La Venganza de la Momia ('Santo in The Mummy's Revenge') and Santo y Mantequilla Napoles en La Venganza de la Llorona ('Santo & Mantequilla Napoles in The Vengeance of The Crying Woman')... Sergio Martino and Ernesto Gastaldi give crime thrillers a spin in The Violent Professionals... and Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney are on the lam in Fritz Lang's existential classic You Only Live Once!


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: This month, we tear your tickets for vintage reviews of Alex de Renzy's Censorship In Denmark-A New Approach... Luchino Visconti's Death In Venice... John Boorman's Deliverance... Donovan in Jacques Demy's fable The Pied Piper... and Entertainment Ventures' smut expose Red White And Blue!


DVDs: Oliver Reed and Bette Davis star in Dan Curtis' Burnt Offerings... More chests are bursting with alien thingies in Luigi Cozzi's Contamination... Fredric March and Spencer Tracy interpret two of the great roles in fantastic literature in the 1932 and 1941 versions of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (the topic of next month's Round Table Discussion at www.videowatchdog.com!)... Billionaire J.K. Rowling's brainchild is back in Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets... Robert Wise delivers one of the screen's great ghost stories in The Haunting... Lonelyhearts Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco are The Honeymoon Killers... Suzannah York is a schizophrenic losing touch with reality in Robert Altman's frighteningly fragmented Images... Passion Of The Christ effects man Les Bernstien's turns director with the contemporary noir Night Train... A top-to-bottom examination of all three movies in the Sleepaway Camp Survival Kit... and James Arness is the mind-boggling intellectual carrot that is The Thing From Another World!


Imports: A look at Peter Watkins' pioneering docudramas Culloden and The War Game... Jess Franco's Killer Barbys vs. Dracula... the elaborate Thai mermaid fantasy Phra-Apai-Mani... and John Mills portrays Nigel Kneale's classic sci-fi hero in Thames Television's four-part miniseries Quatermass and its feature-length condensation, The Quatermass Conclusion!


Audio Watchdog: Douglas E. Winter is first on the scene with a review of Claudio Simonetti's score for Dario Argento's latest, Il cartaio ('The Card Player') and CD reissues of his scores for Demons and Opera... as well as Lalo Schifrin's The Hellstrom Chronicle, Danny Zeitlin's Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, and the latest from Film Score Monthly: Ron Goodwin's Where Eagles Dare/Operation Crossbow, Elmer Bernstein's McQ and Miklos Rozsa's Moonfleet!


Biblio Watchdog: Richard Harland Smith reviews a new McFarland and Company title, Serial Killer Cinema: An Analytical Filmography by Robert Cettl!


...and in The Letterbox...Would you believe a letter from Bonnie Bedelia?

Contents Our Lady Of The Fantastique: The Edith Scob Interview: Frederic Albert Levy and Tim Lucas peer behind the mask of Eurocult cinema's seminal star in her first-ever English language interview, covering her work with Georges Franju (Eyes Without A Face, Judex), Luis Bunuel (The Milky Way) and Christophe Gans (Brotherhood Of The Wolf)! With many rare and exclusive photos!


Dog Bytes: Brett Piper's stop-motion bugfest Arachnia... undead George Zucco and his hunchbacked minion Dwight Frye prove to a hick PRC cast that Dead Men Walk... Larry Buchanan raises poor man's goosebumps in the Azalea productions It's Alive! and Year 2889... Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Richard Roundtree and Jim Kelly bring back blaxploitation in One Down Two To Go... Colin Farrell has hang-ups in the Larry Cohen-scripted thriller Phone Booth... Eighties schlock sequelitis runs rampant in Return Of The Killer Tomatoes! and Return To Horror High... the story of The Kung Fu Master [VW 93:14] continues in Revenge Of The Kung Fu Master... Minetaro Mochizuki's yakuza manga gets the live action treatment in Shark Skin Man And Peach Hip Girl... Jess Franco tries his hand at mondo and report movies in Virgin Report... and Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin score in the Richard Fleischer's film of the hit Broadway thriller Wait Until Dark!


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: America quits smoking and goes Cold Turkey... Kurt Russell tops the honor roll at Medfield College in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes... people have sex on camera in He And She... Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee work up a sweat in Terence Fisher's Island Of The Burning Damned... Rock Hudson waxes studly in Roger Vadim's Pretty Maids All In A Row... and Robert Stack and Bibi Andersson test the waters of Italian filmmaking in Leonardo Bercovici's Story Of A Woman!


DVD Spotlight: Bill Cooke examines Kino on Video's new DVD of a true and influential classic of silent fantastic cinema-Paul Leni's adaptation of a Victor Hugo novel, starring the great Conrad Veidt!


DVDs (In-Depth Reviews): Spooky trash times three in the Something Weird triple header The Atomic Brain/Love After Death/The Incredible Petrified World (with John Carradine!)... Rural raunch times two in the Something Weird double bill Common Law Wife and Jennie: Wife/Child (by The Sadist director James Landis!)... Blake Edwards and Glenn Ford conduct an Experiment In Terror... see the first-rate sci fi that most people missed in the recently cancelled Firefly: The Complete Series... Perry Tong's gory indie joins Sam Sherman's 'Cult Cinema Collection' in Hands Of Blood... Roger Corman tackles H.P. Lovecraft in The Haunted Palace and then scarifies Shakespeare with producer brother Gene Corman in Tower Of London (both starring Vincent Price!)... Masayuki Ochiai creates a Mabuse-like thriller in The Hypnotist... Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill's acclaimed graphic novel reaches the screen with Sean Connery at the helm in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen... Black Mask director Daniel Lee Yan-kwong adapts a 20-volume martial arts novel as The Master Swordsman... the monument to absurdity that is Queen Kong... Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis get caught up in some deadly Road Games... Charlton Heston learns the truth about tomorrow's snack food and turns Soylent Green... Oscar-winning writer-director Bill Condon (Gods And Monsters) writes his first script for Strange Behavior... Keith Carradine is back on the street in Sam Fuller's Street Of No Return... classic Toho gets an anime twist in Super Atragon: The Motion Picture... and Barbara Lass is terrorized by hirsute Curt Lowens in the Italian cult classic Werewolf In A Girl's Dormitory! Plus import discs! The Shaw Brothers resurrect their weird HK sex-horror romp Black Magic... and Klaus Kinski goes for the ladies in Jess Franco's thinly-disguised Awful Dr. Orlof remake, Jack The Ripper!


Biblio Watchdog: Gilles Boulanger's John Carpenter-The Prince Of Darkness and Gary D. Rhodes' Horror At The Drive-In: Essays In Popular Americana, reviewed by Brett Taylor!


Audio Watchdog: Douglas E. Winter and his team of sonic experts list their favorites of 2003 in Audio Watchdog's annual 'Best and Rest of...' column!

Contents The Poetic Universe of Georges Franju: Never Before in English! L'Ecran Fantastique founder Alain Schlockoff interviews the father of French horror-fantasy about his classics Eyes Without A Face (1960), Judex (1963) and Shadowman (1974)!


DVD Spotlight: Rediscovering Polanski: Kim Newman revels in a wealth of Roman Polanski titles now available on DVD, including Knife In The Water (1962), Repulsion (1965), Cul-De-Sac (1966), What? (1974), The Pianist (2002) and eight early short films!


Dog Bytes: Frank Agrama brings out the gore of ancient Egypt in Dawn Of The Mummy... William Sanderson explodes the limits of political correctness in Fight For Your Life... Juliana Margulies and Gabriel Byrne seek treasure aboard a Ghost Ship... a 'Big G' triple feature of Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, Godzilla Mothra And King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack and Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla... Dyanne Thorne stars in the pre-Ilsa sleazefest Love Me Like I Do... San Francisco horror host John Stanley writes and directs a Nightmare In Blood... Andreas Schnaas gets medieval in Nikos The Impaler... Carlo Collodi meets The Jetsons in Pinocchio In Outer Space... Laurence Payne and Adrienne Corri star in the Brian Clemens' scripted shocker The Tell-Tale Heart... Jess Franco attends the jungle rhythms of Voodoo Passion (aka Der Ruf Der Blonden Gottin)... and Arch Hall Sr. satirizes late night TV talk shows in The Weird Ones.


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: Dick Van Dyke pays tribute to silent comedy in the cult feature The Comic... Christina Lindberg gets in your face in the West German sexploitation comedy Love In 3-D... Reggie Nalder painfully produces the confessions of witches in Mark Of The Devil and Mark Of The Devil, Part II... Kurt Russell goes back to Medfield College for Disney's Now You See Him, Now You Don't... and Isaac Hayes is a baaaad mutha (shut your mouth!) in Truck Turner! Can you dig it?


DVDs: In-depth reviews of Bruno Bozzetto's animation classic Allegro Non Troppo... a flesh-eating virus is no vacation for the stars of Cabin Fever... Chuck Barris goes from Gong Show host to CIA hit man in Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind... George A. Romero's zombie classic goes five channels in Anchor Bay's new 'Divimax' 5.1 release of Dawn Of The Dead... Paul Naschy offers an interesting approach to Bram Stoker's classic character in Dracula's Great Love... Jess Franco gets his biggest budget in twenty years in the curiously campy horror drama Faceless... Pakistan enters the horror film sweepstakes with The Living Corpse... Evans Chan Yiu-shing charts human geography in the thought-provoking The Map Of Sex And Love... Keanu Reeves plugs back into black for The Matrix Reloaded, while various filmmakers explore Matrix terrain in short form in The Animatrix... Lon Chaney is unmasked, and unmasked again, in two distinct versions of his classic The Phantom Of The Opera... Ajita Wilson rules over a women's prison with a leather whip in Sadomania... Plus! Import reviews of new releases of Dario Argento's The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and Tenebrae... the 3D HK thriller The Park... and Jackie Chan faces the undead in The Twins Effect!


Biblio Watchdog: Brett Taylor reviews Stefan Jaworzyn's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Companion!


Audio Watchdog: Douglas E. Winter listens to the latest from Ennio Morricone... Daniele Luppi's delirious Eurocult pastiche album An Italian Story... and new titles from Film Score Monthly, including Logan's Run: Television!

Contents The Sherlock Holmes Collection: Continuing our overview of Universal's film series (begun in VW 103), Tim Lucas offers an in-depth report on MPI Home Video's The Sherlock Holmes Collection, Volumes Two and Three, containing eight more Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce classics: The Spider Woman, The Pearl Of Death, The Scarlet Claw, The House Of Fear, The Woman In Green, Pursuit To Algiers, Terror By Night and Dressed To Kill!


Plus!: Elsewhere in this issue, Kim Newman reviews an additional 10 Sherlock Holmes films from America, Great Britain and Russia!


DVD Spotlight: Rebecca & Sam Umland embark on the mammoth quest of Reviewing The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers: Special Extended DVD Edition!


Dog Bytes: A Woody Allen lookalike meets Russ Meyer starlets in Bang! Bang! The Mafia Gang... Fred Williamson earns his nickname on the big screen in Hammer... Lene Riefenstahl scales The Holy Mountain... a quality report card on the five movies in Platinum's cheap-o Horror Classics: Bela Lugosi (The Ape Man, The Gorilla, The Devil Bat, The Human Monster And The Invisible Ghost)... the BBC's Christmas production of The Hound Of The Baskervilles... Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke star as Holmes and Watson in The Master Blackmailer and The Eligible Bachelor... Seijun Suzuki stages a Pistol Opera... Edgar Allan Poe, puppet-style, in Puphedz: The Tattle-Tale Heart... the self-explanatory Santo And Blue Demon Vs. The Monsters... Baker Street done Smallville-style in Sherlock... four vintage television episodes are collected in The Sherlock Holmes Collection... Ian Richardson dons the deerstalker cap (at least figuratively speaking) for The Sign Of Four... and Spielberg is beaten to the punch by 1981's Young Sherlock: The Mystery Of The Manor House!


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: Booked in Joe's grindhouse of yesteryear this month are Anthonies Quinn and Frans in Across 110th Street... the Mario Bava classic Baron Blood... Kerwin Mathews follows Harryhausen with hairy makeup in The Boy Who Cried Werewolf... the self-explanatory An Elephant Called Slowly (well, not really-we just don't want to explain it!)... Victoria Vetri stars in the sexy sci-fi of Invasion Of The Bee Girls... The Postgraduate, one of those dreary sex education for adults movies... and Woody Allen, preserved like a TV dinner, awakens in a far-flung future in Sleeper!


DVDs: Sergio Martino's futuristic biker rumble 2019: After The Fall Of New York... innocent grocers get sauced in Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes... Rankin/Bass (and Boris Karloff!) enter the stop-motion business with the Hans Christian Andersen romp The Daydreamer... you thought he was dead, but Snake Plissken returns in Escape From New York: Special Edition... Eddie Albert saves Disney tots from peril in Escape To Witch Mountain... same tots, now pre-teens, run afoul of Christopher Lee and Bette Davis in Return From Witch Mountain... Ang Lee throws some new curves into the Marvel universe with the controversial Hulk... Scilla Gabel is kept young and alive by her insane father in the Italian horror classic Mill Of The Stone Women... William Shatner makes an early acting appearance (behind a mask) in Oedipus Rex... Russia hops aboard the Conan Doyle bandwagon with Sherlock Holmes And Doctor Watson, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes And Doctor Watson: The King Of Blackmail and The Hound Of The Baskervilles... Russian fantasy master Aleksandr Ptushko adapts Pushkin's classic poem in The Tale Of Tsar Saltan... and Christopher Lee serves the reincarnation of a 17th century sadist in Antonio Margheriti's The Virgin Of Nuremberg!


Imports: Five movies (Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors, ... And Now The Screaming Starts!, The Beast Must Die, Asylum And The House That Dripped Blood) are collected in a coffin in The Amicus Collection... Jennifer Connelly follows her Argento experience with another Italian thriller called Etoile... Karine Gambier and Erik Falk run a women's prison in Gefangenefrauen (Caged Women)... the Shaw Brothers remake one of their 1970s classics in Lust For Love Of A Chinese Courtesan... and Jean Renoir offers a unique addition to the Jekyll/Hyde filmography in Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier!


Plus! 'Audio Watchdog' on Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai... 'Biblio Watchdog' reviews Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life... Edith Scob writes to 'The Letterbox'... and much, much more!

Contents Once Is Not Enough! Sergio Leone's Railroaded Masterpiece: Steven Lloyd, a first-generation fan of Once Upon A Time In The West, charts the five different versions of the film which have played theatrically in the United States since 1969-and explains why Paramount's DVD, billed and widely acclaimed as the 'original uncut masterpiece,' is neither uncut... nor the original version!


DVD Spotlight: Kill Bill, Vol. 1: Who better to review Quentin Tarantino's maximum blood-shed revenge opus for VW than Bill himself? Bill Cooke delivers a perfectly honed, steel-edged appraisal of Miramax's domestic DVD release, as well as the more gruesome Japanese and Korean imports!


Dog Bytes (Short Reviews): Fred Olen Ray offers a new remastering of his early opus The Alien Dead... Patrick Bergin suffers more than monthly in Dracula's Curse... jailhouse erotica meets ferocious feminism in the Japanese Female Convict #701 Scorpion... the raucous misbehavior, '70s drive-in style, of The Girls From Thunder Strip... the wholesome spooky shenanigans of I Downloaded A Ghost... Andzrej Vajda's Polish cinema classics Kanal and Ashes And Diamonds... Herschell Gordon Lewis taps into the 'Laugh-In' craze with the very nude Miss Nymphet's Zap-In... Heather O'Rourke is back in Poltergeist Ii and Poltergeist Iii... and the first four adventures of Japan's famous blind samurai/masseur in Zatoichi 1: The Tale Of Zatoichi, Zatoichi 2: The Tale Of Zatoichi Continues, Zatoichi 3: New Tale Of Zatoichi and Zatoichi 4: The Fugitive!


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: Joe pops up a buttery assortment of titles worthy of VW's 'Special Revenge Issue': Lewis Gilbert's overblown epic of Harold Robbins' trashy novel The Adventurers... Russ Meyer's cotton-pickin', bra-stuffin look at the Old South, Blacksnake!... Sam Fuller's Dead Pigeon On Beethoven Street, scored by the great German rock group Can... Lady Kung Fu... the Brother Man goes to the Mother Land in Shaft In Africa... and Barbara Leigh signs up for showers and mistreatment on Terminal Island!


DVDs (In-Depth Reviews): Two different approaches to Patricia Highsmith's 'Ripley' character in The American Friend and Ripley's Game... the first Argentinian vampire movie, Blood Of The Virgins... an H. G. Clouzot double feature of art and suspense in Le Corbeau and The Mystery Of Picasso... Takashi Miike's urban crime/science fiction Dead Or Alive Trilogy (Dead Or Alive, Dead Or Alive 2 and Dead Or Alive Final)... believe it or not, a Tai Chi variation on DR. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, produced by Francis Ford Coppola... it comes from the commode in Ghoulies and Ghoulies Ii... Let's Scare Jessica To Death auteur John D. Hancock returns to suspense with Suspended Animation... Larry, Moe and Curly Joe introduce Martians to pie-fighting in The Three Stooges In Orbit... Walt Disney's 'Rondo Award'-winning live action fantasy masterwork 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea... and Seijun Suzuki's highly decorative yakuza dramas Underworld Beauty and Kanto Wanderer!


Imports: Rutger Hauer's brain is squirmin' like a toad in the deluxe British/German import, The Hitcher... weird monsters arise from the ancient past in Mortuary Blues... and reality TV gets out of hand in My Little Eye!


Audio Watchdog: Douglas E. Winter reviews Vic Mizzy's The Ghost And Mr. Chicken, Capitol's new domestic remaster of Ennio Morricone's The Good, The Bad And The Ugly... and Tangerine Dream's Bootleg Box Set and Bootmoon Series releases!

Contents Universal's Monsters: A Legacy of Blood, Fur & Electricity: Bill Cooke reviews Universal's 'Legacy Collection' box sets and throws the switch on an informative, action-packed overview of the Dracula, Frankenstein and Wolf Man series-fourteen films in all! And wait till you see the rare (in some cases, never-before-published) stills and artwork courtesy of The Del Valle Archive! You'll be blown to atoms!


Re-Arranging the Rue Morgue: You've probably seen Robert Florey's Universal terror classic starring Bela Lugosi... but did you know that it was re-edited against the director's wishes prior to its 1932 release? In this article, Tim Lucas suggests an alternative editing scheme (using the timecodes of Universal's out-of-print laserdisc) that may bring Florey's foiled intentions into sharper focus!


Dog Bytes (Capsule Reviews): Forrest J Ackerman hosts The Creep, the first DTV episode of 13 O'clock Theater... Bela Lugosi avenges himself on being retired from the cologne racket in The Devil Bat... Deborah Kerr wants to join the Irish Republican Army in I See A Dark Stranger... John Cusack and Ray Liotta star in the shocker Identity... Alec Guinness, Herbert Lom and Peter Sellers connive to steal £60,000 in The Ladykillers... wholesome DTV sorcery and mysticism rule in Max Magician And The Legend Of The Rings... Tom Mix takes his last gallop in the serial The Miracle Rider... various macabre short films compose Night Of The Yardsale Monkey... Susan Penhaligon cares for a comatose telepath in Patrick... the adult film industry is profiled, black socks and all, in Red, White & Blue... Hong Kong cinema's Charlie's Angels clone So Close ... Tony Leung stars in Water Margin: The True Colors Of Heroes, a remake of the Shaw Brothers' 1972 classic Pursuit... and Ichi the Blind returns in Zatoichi 5: On The Road, Zatoichi 6: Zatoichi And The Chest Of Gold, and Zatoichi 7: Zatoichi's Flashing Sword!


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: JCliff Robertson scores with Pamela Franklin in Ace Eli And Rodger Of The Skies... Amicus sets a horror anthology in a looney bin in Asylum... British spy sexploitation rules in Big Zapper... John Wayne meets Bruce Dern in The Cowboys... Roy Thinnes meets his doppelganger in the Gerry Anderson production Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun... and Pamela Franklin returns to join a coven ruled by putty-nosed Orson Welles in Bert I. Gordon's NECROMANCY!


DVDs (In-Depth Reviews): Warhol protege Edie Sedgwick gets her moment of glory in Ciao! Manhattan... Classic Dick Tracy Movies collects Dick Tracy Vs. Cueball, Dick Tracy's Dilemma and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (starring Boris Karloff as guess who!)... Toilet Seat Girl becomes Grim Reaper in Dead Like Me-The Complete First Season... Jess Franco dances with Miss Death in The Diabolical Dr. Z... a nuclear-armed warship reverts through time to the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor in The Final Countdown... Osamu Tezuka's Jungle Emperor Leo, the anime classic that may have inspired Disney's The Lion King... Sleazeploitation trailer narrator Joel Holt earns a black belt, but not in filmmaking, in Karate: The Hand Of Death... Mary Woronov stars in a sci-fi twist on an old Cukor favorite in The New Women... Francis Coppola sends out a refurbished edition of his '70s musical fantasy One From The Heart... Criterion offers a definitive edition of Kaneto Shindo's erotic horror masterpiece Onibaba... Klaus Kinski smokes a full pack while ogling Rosalba Neri and Margaret Lee in Slaughter Hotel... home video jumps on the summer blockbuster bandwagon with Universal's animated Van Helsing: The London Assignment and the unauthorized (but Stoker-crediting knock-off) The Adventures Of Young Van Helsing: Quest For The Lost Scepter... Antonio Bido joins forces with Herman Cohen in the giallo Watch Me When I Kill... and VW discovers new layers at the bottom of the barrel in a triple feature review of Nathan Schiff's 8mm messterpieces Weasels Rip My Flesh, Long Island Cannibal Massacre and They Don't Cut The Grass Anymore! Plus Import reviews of Hex (the latest from the Chinese director of Killer Snakes) and the Japanese jolter Ju-On: The Grudge 2!


Audio Watchdog: Douglas E. Winter reviews the latest soundtrack releases from BT (Monster), Francesco de Masi (India), Mario Nascimbene (Footprints In Jazz) and more!

Biblio Watchdog:

Tim Lucas reviews A Quaint & Curious Volume Of Forgotten Lore: The Mythology & History Of Classic Horror Films by Frank J. Dello Stritto!


A lengthy and eye-opening 'Letterbox' report on scenes missing from Warner Home Video's incomplete Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1941)!

Contents Issue #112-October 2004

'Here's to a Son of the House of Frankenstein!': The Donnie Dunagan Interview: Tom Weaver crowns nearly 25 years as an interviewer by finding the most elusive of all Universal Classic Horror stars: the curly-topped moppet of Son Of Frankenstein! A jackpot of priceless stories about the filming of SON, Tower Of London and Walt Disney's Bambi, for which Donnie provided the title character's voice! With many incredible never-before-seen stills from Donnie's personal collection!

Also published as Signature Edition #1 Limited to 500 copies with same interior text and autographed by Donnie Dunagan.

Among the DVDs Reviewed in this Issue: A robotic gambler takes centerstage in the French silent classic The Chess Player... The Lord of the Undead gets probed by modern day lab rats in Dracula Ii: Ascension... Ridley Scott makes his directorial debut with The Duellists... Death comes to collect in Final Destination 1 & 2... VW returns to Baker Street with Paul Morrissey's The Hound Of The Baske+F4859rvilles and the Spielberg-produced Young Sherlock Holmes... Atomic Age paranoia runs amok in Invasion U.S.A.... the serial fun of King Of The Royal Mounted and Radar Men From The Moon... the Grade Z bliss of Manos: The Hands Of Fate... the anime action of Ninja Scroll, Noir Volume 4, Samurai Deeper Kyo, The Twelve Kingdoms and Virus Buster Serge... your favorite masked wrestler goes head-to-head with new monsters in Santo contra los Jinetes del Terror... Al Adamson makes his directorial debut with Psycho A Go-Go... Something Weird offers a demented triple bill of Rent-A-Girl, Aroused and Help Wanted Female, and a prehistoric double bill of When Women Played Ding Dong and 50,000 B.C. (Before Clothing)... Fred Olen Ray has tickets for Scalps... George Stover defies the Undead in STAKES... Maurice Devereaux takes on Reality TV in Slashers... British science fiction hits a commercial high with Village Of The Damned and Children Of The Damned... plus import DVD reviews of The Beheaded 1000 and Dario Argento's latest, The Card Player... and many more!


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: Joe's vintage Film Bulletin coverage of Mauro Bolognini's Arabella... Carlo Ponti's X-rated The Best House In London... blaxploitation favorites Cool Breeze and Trick Baby... the Bondian blaxploitation of Live And Let Die... and it's snakes ahoy in Sssssss! (Don't say it... hiss it!)


Audio Watchdog: Douglas E. Winter on the new CD of incidental music from Dawn Of The Dead.


Biblio Watchdog: Anthony Ambrogio on David Hughes' book The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made.


And a special installment of The Letterbox featuring the return of legendary Eyes Without A Face actress Edith Scob!

Contents Quest for Jonny: In this in-depth essay, David J. Schow scopes out Warner Home Video's Jonny Quest: The Complete First Season, examining each of the 28 episodes, tracing the program's roots back to the 1930s Doc Savage pulp novels of Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent), and giving credit where credit is due to an under-acknowledged key creator!


DVD Spotlight: Tim Lucas takes a look at the fates of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and other greats of Warner Bros.' stable of cartoon characters on the big screen in a lengthy review of Space Jam and Joe Dante's Looney Tunes Back In Action complete with exclusive photos from Joe's own collection!


Other Animation Coverage in this Issue: Witness the dawn of cartoon animation in Winsor Mccay: The Master Edition... DC Comics on the move in Batman The Animated Series Volume One and Justice League: Starcrossed The Movie... Vin Diesel, more animated than usual, in The Chronicles Of Riddick: Dark Fury... and anime thrills in Blue Seed: Perfect Collection, Dangaizer 3: Volume 1, Dai-Guard: Terrestrial Defense Corp. Volume 1-Hostile Takeover, Noir Volume 5: Terminal Velocity and Zone Of The Enders: Idolo!


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: Peter Cushing clamps an artery in Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell... James Earl Jones becomes the first black President of the United States in the Rod Serling-scripted The Man... Mimsy Farmer takes a lot of drugs and takes off her clothes in More... the 3D sexploitation of Prison Girls... Jacqueline Bisset intrudes on a disturbed adolescent's Secret World... and Britt Ekland has a politically incorrect affair with stepson Mark Lester in What The Peeper Saw!


Also Reviewed in this Issue: Beverly Garland trapped in the Louisiana swamps of The Alligator People... the nostalgic ninja fu of Yuen Woo-ping's Chinese Heroes... Lucio Fulci films naked women and werewolves out of focus in Conquest... Zach Snyder's no-holds-barred remake of George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead... the silent screen gives rise to the first superhero in Louis Feuillade's JUDEX... Bert I. Gordon at his best in The Magic Sword... Woody Strode shakes a spear in the vintage TV series Ramar Of The Jungle Volume One... Roger Corman sends Touch Connors up river with a boatload of Swamp Women... superhero mythology is humorously deconstructed in Superguy: Behind The Cape... a group of campers take a Wrong Turn... and Ichi the Blind returns in Zatoichi 8: Fight, Zatoichi, Fight and Zatoichi 9: Adventures Of Zatoichi! All this, plus Import DVD reviews of Jess Franco's La Fille Du Dracula ('Dracula's Daughter') and Danny & Oxide Pang's scary sequel THE EYE 2!


'Biblio Watchdog' reviews of Brad Stevens' Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision and Mickey Knox's memoir The Good, The Bad And The Dolce Vita: The Adventures Of An Actor In Hollywood, Paris, And Rome


Douglas E. Winter's 'Audio Watchdog' audits the soundtracks of Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising, Klaus Badelt's Ned Kelly and much more!

Contents 'Ungawa!': Tarzan, Lord Of The DVDs!: Bill Cooke outdoes himself with a heroic swing through Warner Home Video's The Tarzan Collection, with in-depth reviews and appreciations of MGM's Tarzan The Ape Man (1932), Tarzan And His Mate (1934), Tarzan Escapes (1936), Tarzan Finds A Son! (1939), Tarzan's Secret Treasure (1941) and Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942)! Including rare images of the Eck Bird and scenes cut from the banned original version of Tarzan Escapes! But that's not all! Elsewhere in this issue, Bill continues his expedition through more than a half-dozen other adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs' character currently on DVD, including Tarzan Of The Apes (1918) with Elmo Lincoln, Tarzan The Fearless (1933) with Buster Crabbe, Tarzan And The Green Goddess (1938) with Herman Brix, Tarzan's Revenge (1938) with Glenn Morris, Tarzan And The Trappers (1958) with Gordon Scott, Tarzan The Ape Man (1981) with Miles O'Keefe and Bo Derek, and Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes (1984) with Christopher Lambert!


DVD Spotlight: Kim Newman on Warner Home Video's recent DVD issues of Hammer's Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and Taste The Blood Of Dracula!


Dog Bytes (Capsule Reviews): Don Dohler returns with Alien Factor 2: Alien Rampage, which isn't a sequel but a remake of another Dohler movie that was a remake of Alien Factor (got that?)... A killer in an Elvis mask gets a music video crew all shook up in The Backlot Murders... David Carradine meets a carload of director cameos in Paul Bartel's Cannonball... Edward Arnold meets Mantan Moreland in Eyes In The Night... a woman finds her suburban life beset by The Ghosts Of Edendale... Strother Martin plus King Cobras equals SSSSSSS... Jamie Lee Curtis meets magician David Copperfield on Terror Train... and the latest batch of movies about master samurai Ichi the Blind: Zatoichi 10: Zatoichi's Revenge, Zatoichi 11: Zatoichi And The Doomed Man and Zatoichi 12: Zatoichi And The Chess Expert!


Joe Dante's Fleapit Flashbacks: Angela Mao kicks back (but winsomely) in Deadly China Doll... Woody Strode unholsters his authority in The Italian Connection... Catherine Spaak takes a horsey ride on Jean-Louis Trintignant in The Libertine... Cornel Wilde offers the apocalyptic ecological nightmare of No Blade Of Grass... Adam Roarke commandeers millionaire Jay Robinson's jet in This Is A Hijack... No Blade Of Grass star Lynne Frederick returns to meet the undead in Hammer's Vampire Circus... and Dean Stockwell attacks the President of the United States when a full moon turns him into The Werewolf Of Washington!


DVD Reviews: Martin Scorsese returns to his independent film roots with the quirky black comedy After Hours... Retromedia Entertainment recreates the 1960s double bill of Alfred Vohrer's Dead Eyes Of London and Riccardo Freda's The Ghost... John Marley and Lynn Carlin are the parents tortured by the return of a son from a war he did not survive in Deathdream... a young animated woman takes unusual roads in search of an orgasm in the anime F3 Menage A Trois... the Devil gets the Amazing Kreskin's goat in Horror... a child's hopes are raised by his discovery of a unicorn in Carol Reed's A Kid For Two Farthings... plus ImporT reviews of Piers Haggard's 'witchfinder' classic The Blood On Satan's Claw... The Eye's Angelica Lee Sinjie runs afoul of a kidney thief in Law Chi-leung's Koma... and Roger Corman anticipates the Viking craze of the early 1960s with the marquee-challenging The Saga Of The Viking Women And Their Voyage Into Waters Of The Great Sea Serpent!


Plus! Biblio Watchdog reviews Peter Hutchings' The Horror Film and Chas Balun's Beyond Horror Holocaust... Douglas E. Winter's Audio Watchdog reviews the soundtracks of Hellboy, Collateral and the latest releases from Film Score Monthly!