Indications of Incoming Indicator Entertainments

[dwk]

Severin's rights to Patrick expired at the same time as Dead Kids and Thirst, so I wonder if Indicator also has those two.

The Survivor is another Ozploitation title that Severin recently lost the rights to (I think around the time they lost Turkey Shoot), so that also could be a possible Indicator release.

[M Sanderson]

Severin's rights to Patrick expired at the same time as Dead Kids and Thirst, so I wonder if Indicator also has those two.

The Survivor is another Ozploitation title that Severin recently lost the rights to (I think around the time they lost Turkey Shoot), so that also could be a possible Indicator release.

I've never seen The Survivor but would be glad for it to get a release if rights are permitting. Indicator have showcased a bit of David Hemmings and this was his big opportunity at directing.

[colinr0380]

Plus The Survivor is one of the few films made of a James Herbert novel, and the only really successful one - the others being Deadly Eyes (loosely based on The Rats) and 1995's Haunted. And the least said about the adaptation of perhaps Herbert's most moving novel Fluke, a tale about a man-reincarnated-as-a-dog which somehow rather than being treated as a dark adult drama about drifting away from the family you love but still with desperately important unfinished business left to attend to before you can allow yourself to be overwhelmed by/submit to your new doggy nature got rather misleadingly marketed as just another one of the numerous cutesy animal family films that characterised the early to mid-90s, the better!

EDIT: Although I had not realised that the 2021 film The Unholy is based on Herbert's book Shrine, which was kind of his answer to Stephen King's Carrie. I will have to track that one down now!

(Did Synapse lose the rights to Dark Forces (aka Harlequin) as well? That's the other Robert Powell-starring, Australian-made film from the same year as The Survivor which whilst not directed by David Hemmings co-stars him. So it would make sense for that and The Survivor to come together as a matched pair)

[GaryC]

The Survivor is another Ozploitation title that Severin recently lost the rights to (I think around the time they lost Turkey Shoot), so that also could be a possible Indicator release.

There are at least two different cuts of The Survivor available - 99 and 82 minutes. I have DVD copies of both, but if I remember rightly one is just a shortening of the other and I don't think the shorter version has any unique footage. Needless to say, presenting both cuts is something Indicator has done in the past, assuming they are releasing this one of course.

[dwk]

(aka Harlequin) as well? That's the other Robert Powell-starring, Australian-made film from the same year as The Survivor which whilst not directed by David Hemmings co-stars him. So it would make sense for that and The Survivor to come together as a matched pair)

Synapse is still selling their DVD, but it got a Blu-ray from Scorpion Releasing in 2013. I would assume that the rights, for both companies, have expired.

The same thing happened with Thirst, Patrick, and Dead Kids. Synapse released them on DVD and sold them for some time after Severin released their Blu-rays.

[Orlac]

Plus The Survivor is one of the few films made of a James Herbert novel, and the only really successful one - the others being Deadly Eyes (loosely based on The Rats) and 1995's Haunted. And the least said about the adaptation of perhaps Herbert's most moving novel Fluke, a tale about a man-reincarnated-as-a-dog which somehow rather than being treated as a dark adult drama about drifting away from the family you love but still with desperately important unfinished business left to attend to before you can allow yourself to be overwhelmed by/submit to your new doggy nature got rather misleadingly marketed as just another one of the numerous cutesy animal family films that characterised the early to mid-90s, the better!

EDIT: Although I had not realised that the 2021 film The Unholy is based on Herbert's book Shrine, which was kind of his answer to Stephen King's Carrie. I will have to track that one down now!

(Did Synapse lose the rights to Dark Forces (aka Harlequin) as well? That's the other Robert Powell-starring, Australian-made film from the same year as The Survivor which whilst not directed by David Hemmings co-stars him. So it would make sense for that and The Survivor to come together as a matched pair)

I've often wondered how many people went to the John Carpenter THE FOG expecting to see schoolboy orgies and mass drownings in Bournemouth? (as depicted in Herbert's novel of the same name)

[MichaelB]

I doubt anyone did, what with the extremely mild AA certificate at a time when few horror films got less than an X.

[Orlac]

I doubt anyone did, what with the extremely mild AA certificate at a time when few horror films got less than an X.

Which is progress I guess. I have British lobby cards for ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE and RODAN, which are perfect for 50s kids...but were rated 'X'!

[Jonathan S]

Leslie Halliwell, ITV's film buyer, noted the irony in his 1970s Film Guide that the X-rated ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE "later played on children's television". I recall that's how I first saw it on ITV. I suppose it might have been cut, but then most films were on ITV, if only for timing reasons.

[MichaelB]

Hammer's The Pirates of Blood River started out as an X, was then cut to an A and finally ended up as a U because Columbia needed a double-bill partner for a reissue of Mysterious Island. The BBFC's John Trevelyan said in his memoirs that it's the only example he could think of where a film was successfully reduced from X to U without making it incomprehensible.

But this needs qualifying: back then, an X only banned under-sixteens and was the only age-restrictive classification in the BBFC's armoury; a decade later it would undoubtedly have been classified AA, and it now has a 12, which seems entirely appropriate given that the unexpurgated version includes gory piranha attacks. The main difference between the three versions is that in the X-certificate version you see the piranhas attacking and blood frothing in the water, in the A-certificate version you see the piranhas about to attack but nothing else, and in the U-certificate version... well, this inspired one of my all-time favourite extra titles, "Yes, We Have No Piranhas", on the Indicator edition. (The piranha attack scene, while memorable, isn't narratively essential, so was surprisingly easy to reduce or expunge without causing serious damage.)

[tenia]

Which makes me think : is there a reason why some BDs are authored so that they skip the censor card (thus starting at 12 or 13 seconds) ? I saw this again on Maria Marten and Sweeney Todd from the Tod Slaughter set, and I wonder if there's supposed to be a playback option to start at 0 and my Region B PS3 isn't setup for it or if it's a conscious choice to keep them in but only as some kind of easter egg.

[colinr0380]

Plus The Survivor is one of the few films made of a James Herbert novel, and the only really successful one - the others being Deadly Eyes (loosely based on The Rats) and 1995's Haunted. And the least said about the adaptation of perhaps Herbert's most moving novel Fluke, a tale about a man-reincarnated-as-a-dog which somehow rather than being treated as a dark adult drama about drifting away from the family you love but still with desperately important unfinished business left to attend to before you can allow yourself to be overwhelmed by/submit to your new doggy nature got rather misleadingly marketed as just another one of the numerous cutesy animal family films that characterised the early to mid-90s, the better!

EDIT: Although I had not realised that the 2021 film The Unholy is based on Herbert's book Shrine, which was kind of his answer to Stephen King's Carrie. I will have to track that one down now!

(Did Synapse lose the rights to Dark Forces (aka Harlequin) as well? That's the other Robert Powell-starring, Australian-made film from the same year as The Survivor which whilst not directed by David Hemmings co-stars him. So it would make sense for that and The Survivor to come together as a matched pair)

I've often wondered how many people went to the John Carpenter THE FOG expecting to see schoolboy orgies and mass drownings in Bournemouth? (as depicted in Herbert's novel of the same name)

Didn't the schoolboy orgy also involve tying the PE teacher to some wall bars, stripping him and then bouncing a medicine ball off his head a few times? Now that's a Gengoroh Tagame tale waiting to be illustrated!

I think that is the main problem with any James Herbert adaptation - to really capture the spirit of his best novels, you need both ultra-violent content and an epic scale to do it justice. Plus instead of being all tied together narratively, his best novels explode out into various shards of disconnected, all the better to be nihilistically horrific, set pieces. Which is not really the way a mainstream film gets structured.

In other words you need the equivalent of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead-scale to do something like the the first two stories in the Rats trilogy, even before you get to final entry of the amazing action-race against time-horror film set in the aftermath of nuclear bombed London, Domain. I am actually fairly surprised to have found out about that recent adaptation of Shrine, because the climax of that sounded a bit too large-scaled as well, although whether in that film they will have done the big set piece horrific moment that occurs in the Carrie-esque final ceremony (in which the hero looks on in horror at someone trying to escape through the back window of a burning car, watching as the glass melts around their screaming face as they push through without it breaking) will be the big test!

As much I would love the, similarly post-apocalyptic alternate history Indiana Jones-esque action story '48 to get adapted, I can see that would take an high budget to do justice to (similarly The Spear, which the recent Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny appears to have appropriated the mythology of in its opening sequence). In some ways it feels that the best book to adapt would probably be Creed, in which an amoral paparazzi takes on a job of investigating a cult only to get much more than he bargained for. Which would allow for some great, much needed, jabs at mercenary journalism. Although in some ways I would argue that the Polanski film The Ninth Gate is already a kind of unofficial adaptation of Creed at least in its tone and main character of a cynical, over confident hero coming a cropper!

(Stephen Laws seems in much the same position, as any adaptation of his stories would require a big budget plus unfettered gore! Although in my mind the video game Evil Within 2 is a kind of adaptation of the setting of Laws' Chasm!)

[MichaelB]

Didn't the schoolboy orgy also involve tying the PE teacher to some wall bars, stripping him and then bouncing a medicine ball off his head a few times?

Shears were involved.

And I suspect that's all I needed to say to jog your memory.

[colinr0380]

Ah yes. Although the guy having his face planed off in the town square of a quaint English village (and I seem to remember in front of a busload of schoolchildren!) in The Ghosts of Sleath felt like a later Fulci-esque setpiece in the same vein!

All of these writers (plus Shaun Hutson) are probably what Garth Marenghi is alluding to in his writings!

[Orlac]

Ah yes. Although the guy having his face planed off in the town square of a quaint English village (and I seem to remember in front of a busload of schoolchildren!) in The Ghosts of Sleath felt like a later Fulci-esque setpiece in the same vein!

[/url]

Yeah, there is definetly a CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD vibe to that scene.

[colinr0380]

City of the Living Dead meets a premonition of Hot Fuzz!

[Orlac]

Do we know when to expect Indicator's February announcements?

[MichaelB]

Haven’t a clue. But I’m out of that particular loop.

[Stefan Andersson]

With Network DVD gone, might Indicator be interested in re-releasing choice Network titles?

Wish list time, maybe...

Off the cuff:
Monty Python
Space 1999
Avengers
Beasts + Murrain
Ghostwatch (1992)
The Stone Tape
Out of the Unknown
Tales of Mystery & Imagination
Orson Welles´ Great Mysteries
Armchair Theatre
Armchair Thriller
More UK TV horror
Network had some BBC stuff, right? Oscar Wilde plays, for example, if I don´t misremember.

Also, 1 vote each for
End of the Road (Aram Avakian)
A Prize of Arms (Cliff Owen)
The Key (Carol Reed)
The Burglar (Wendkos)
Brotherhood of the Bell (Wendkos)

[MichaelB]

Have a guess what the answer might be, based on:

(a) the number of BBC-owned titles that Indicator has released thus far;
(b) the number of ITV-owned titles that Indicator has released thus far;
(c) the number of television titles of any kind that Indicator has released thus far.

Seriously, you're asking the wrong label.

[colinr0380]

Isn't Ghostwatch out on Blu-ray through 101 Films? Or has the edition released last year already gone out of print?

[GaryC]

End of the Road (Aram Avakian)

I would love a Blu-ray of this, but it's owned by Warners. I have the US DVD, which includes an interview featurette - with most of the participants then still alive, plus Avakian's daughter and Terry Southern's son - directed by Steven Soderbergh, no less. (It seems he's a fan of the film and has wanted to film another John Barth novel, The Sot-Weed Factor, for years.)

End of the Road had a UK release in 1972, playing at the ICA without a BBFC certificate. It would get one without a problem nowadays, though the chicken scene might tip it over from a 15 to an 18, and was likely a reason for the MPAA X rating it had originally. I suspect Nicolas Roeg saw it, as you can see a clip from it on David Bowie's television screens in The Man Who Fell to Earth. It's a very interesting film with all sorts of connections, including a hidden one to Alice's Restaurant.

[MichaelB]

I didn't go through Stefan's list title by title, but even at a glance (and discounting the fact that Indicator isn't a television label, so wouldn't be interested in most of this stuff anyway) it was obvious that the overwhelming majority simply wasn't available for licensing, either at all or without jumping through bulk-deal hoops that Indicator isn't financially or logistically equipped to jump through.

As a general rule, if it's owned by the BBC, Disney (including Fox), ITV (including Gainsborough, London Films, Rank and quite a few other major British studio catalogues), post-1950 Paramount or Warner Bros (including pre-1986 MGM), it's very unlikely to be licensable. And Indicator also doesn't have a deal with MGM (United Artists, AIP, Cannon) - I daresay that's feasible, but they have plenty of other deals to work through right now, and plenty of other UK boutiques have MGM deals, so there's no especial urgency there.

[Finch]

Hi Michael, some BR.com users got emails from HMV and other UK retailers that the December releases are getting pushed back by a month. Can you confirm if that is correct? I have an order with Orbit for December titles from Indicator, Radiance and 88's Miami Vice and may have to cancel and re-order with a different title replacing Desire if that is the case, and re-order Desire on its own because I don't want my other titles to be held back by, uhm, Desire.

[Finch]

To answer my own question: the newsletter confirmed that December's slate is going to be with third party retailers in January. Orbit kindly agreed to swap out Desire for 101 Films' edition of Dolls and even refunded the difference. Going to re-order Desire next month. They also teased a western (or several?) in the newsletter.