The great critic James Agee compared producer Val Lewton to the greatest filmmakers of his day, including Orson Welles, and he was right. Working on tiny budgets and mostly in the horror genre at RKO, Lewton and his stable of directors, actors and writers produced a collection of nine horror films unsurpassed in their use of mood, presentation and unalloyed smarts. Lewton discovered that not showing the scary stuff was somehow scarier than actually seeing it. These nine films were released in the 1990s in an amazing laserdisc box set, and some have been available on import DVDs and VHS tapes, but now Warner Home Video is putting out a new 5-disc box set including all nine films, new commentary tracks (by Robert Wise, William Friedkin and others), and a new documentary. Titles include Cat People and Curse of the Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Body Snatcher, The Leopard Man and The Ghost Ship, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam, and The Seventh Victim with the new documentary Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy. I love them all, but I'm partial to the two Cat People films -- the first for its sheer bloody lunacy and the second for its gentle heart. The discs will be sold seperately for about $20 each, and the box set will sell for about $60.
| :: posted by Jeffrey M. Anderson, 6/21/2005 | Comments (2) Links to this post |
2 Comments:
Is there pre-order info out there somewhere? I've got my plastic ready.
I haven't seen it listed at any sites yet, but we'll keep you posted.
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