Great Obscure Movies
- Thread starter onomatopoeia
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Winona was already fairly well known from her roles in Beetlejuice and Heathers before 1990. I've never seen Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael.
If.... (1968) - IMDb
Pretty sure that it was Malcolm McDowell's first film and is loosely considered a prelude to A Clockwork Orange.
Pretty sure that it was Malcolm McDowell's first film and is loosely considered a prelude to A Clockwork Orange.
Russ Myer's SuperVIXENS, (1975) is not really obscure, but I'm posting it here because the full movie, (with French subtitles superimposed), is available on YouTube for free viewing. You may need to log in to YouTube to be able to see it; It's rated 'single X', but everyone reading this should be aged 18 or more.
Click here to go to the YouTube page.
Russ Myer wrote, directed and edited many of his films, and also did principle photography on many scenes. He also made the prints of his films, and handled distribution. His movies often played in grindhouse cinemas for about a week in one city, then another week in another city. Most of his films were self financed, with profits from one popular film paying for the cost of the next.
The editing is comparable to the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, in that much of the violence is implied and inexplicit, but the viewer thinks they've seen more than they actually have.
I saw this movie for the first time at age 15. In the suburban town where I attended high school, there was an independent theatre that had double features every day; recent movies, popular favorites, and 'drive in' movies from Wednesday-Saturday, and adult films from Sunday-Tuesday. The double bill of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and M*A*S*H played to a packed house of about 300 every September. A double bill of two Chesty Morgan movies was also standing room only. There was a high school, junior college and university satellite campus all located on a five acre area, So the average age in town during the school year was under thirty.
Click here to go to the YouTube page.
Russ Myer wrote, directed and edited many of his films, and also did principle photography on many scenes. He also made the prints of his films, and handled distribution. His movies often played in grindhouse cinemas for about a week in one city, then another week in another city. Most of his films were self financed, with profits from one popular film paying for the cost of the next.
The editing is comparable to the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, in that much of the violence is implied and inexplicit, but the viewer thinks they've seen more than they actually have.
I saw this movie for the first time at age 15. In the suburban town where I attended high school, there was an independent theatre that had double features every day; recent movies, popular favorites, and 'drive in' movies from Wednesday-Saturday, and adult films from Sunday-Tuesday. The double bill of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and M*A*S*H played to a packed house of about 300 every September. A double bill of two Chesty Morgan movies was also standing room only. There was a high school, junior college and university satellite campus all located on a five acre area, So the average age in town during the school year was under thirty.
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Black Robe, (1991)
Click here to read about it on Wikipedia
Canadian historical period piece drama set in 17th century New France.
Click here to read about it on Wikipedia
Canadian historical period piece drama set in 17th century New France.
Love and a .45
I was very fortunate to find a copy of the DVD on a flea market table for $2. I had seen it many years earlier on 'Rogers First Choice'.
TCM broadcast a French film I'd never heard of before but is considered a landmark of French New Wave: The 400 Blows.
I was surprised to learn that it's in the IMDB Top 250 films of all time. It's a small scale quietly disturbing film that came out at the same time as Ben-Hur.
I was surprised to learn that it's in the IMDB Top 250 films of all time. It's a small scale quietly disturbing film that came out at the same time as Ben-Hur.
Fool's Fire (1992)
This medium length film, (about 57 minutes), is the Crown Jewel of my VHS collection. It was broadcast once on PBS' American Playhouse in March, 1992, and has never been released officially on home video. It's directed by Julie Taymor, (Across the Universe, The Lion King on Broadway, some film adaptations of Shakespearean plays), where the only human cast members are 'little people'; the rest of the cast is grotesque puppets. There are no other films anything like this.
All existing online video of this film is based on my own 2003 .mpg video capture, (this was before divx, xvid, mp4, ts, etc. video formats existed). I still have the Standard Play VHS tape from television, and I own an S-Video VCR which has never been used. An S-video VCR plugs into separate audio and video capture cards on a computer, allowing for .VOB quality video to be created from VHS tape. It can also be used to create .VOB quality video of portions of the VHS tape, and editing such as boosting volume or removing hiss can be done. Stores that advertise VHS to DVD transfers usually have a single machine with VHS Player and DVD burner, so what you get is the whole VHS tape as a DVD, rather than selected portions. I could also make home DVDs of content that was only ever released on VHS tape, if I have them.
I haven't done any new digitizing of VHS in the past fifteen years. I'd need to have the audio and video capture cards moved from the old computer in which they're installed to another computer, then reinstall the software. I'd also need a bigger desk, or have computers in different rooms. That's a bucket list item.
I shared Fool's Fire on the pre-torrent file sharing/ trading apps WinMX and Emule, as well as one private torrent site that banned me nine years ago.
WinMX was mainly for file trading; you usually had to give to get, and you could selectively deny files to some users, or move a friend up in the queue. A common practice was to employ a 'snail' before going to bed. A snail was someone with a 56k dialup Internet connection, where the download speed never exceeded 5 kilobits per second, so it would take them hours to download a single six minute cartoon. This logjammed the upload queue to prevent people who had files you wanted from getting something for nothing.
Emule had all file types including software with crack files, but you couldn't receive more than 8.94 MB from a single user in any one session. It once took me eight months to get one 75 MB cartoon, as the only guy who had it always had 4,000+ people in his queue, and he never gave any one user more than half a megabyte in a single session. Some people who did captures from TV would share a file only until someone else had a complete copy, then it was their responsibility to distribute to other people. I got a great Amy Winehouse concert from a music festival in France that way.
This medium length film, (about 57 minutes), is the Crown Jewel of my VHS collection. It was broadcast once on PBS' American Playhouse in March, 1992, and has never been released officially on home video. It's directed by Julie Taymor, (Across the Universe, The Lion King on Broadway, some film adaptations of Shakespearean plays), where the only human cast members are 'little people'; the rest of the cast is grotesque puppets. There are no other films anything like this.
All existing online video of this film is based on my own 2003 .mpg video capture, (this was before divx, xvid, mp4, ts, etc. video formats existed). I still have the Standard Play VHS tape from television, and I own an S-Video VCR which has never been used. An S-video VCR plugs into separate audio and video capture cards on a computer, allowing for .VOB quality video to be created from VHS tape. It can also be used to create .VOB quality video of portions of the VHS tape, and editing such as boosting volume or removing hiss can be done. Stores that advertise VHS to DVD transfers usually have a single machine with VHS Player and DVD burner, so what you get is the whole VHS tape as a DVD, rather than selected portions. I could also make home DVDs of content that was only ever released on VHS tape, if I have them.
I haven't done any new digitizing of VHS in the past fifteen years. I'd need to have the audio and video capture cards moved from the old computer in which they're installed to another computer, then reinstall the software. I'd also need a bigger desk, or have computers in different rooms. That's a bucket list item.
I shared Fool's Fire on the pre-torrent file sharing/ trading apps WinMX and Emule, as well as one private torrent site that banned me nine years ago.
WinMX was mainly for file trading; you usually had to give to get, and you could selectively deny files to some users, or move a friend up in the queue. A common practice was to employ a 'snail' before going to bed. A snail was someone with a 56k dialup Internet connection, where the download speed never exceeded 5 kilobits per second, so it would take them hours to download a single six minute cartoon. This logjammed the upload queue to prevent people who had files you wanted from getting something for nothing.
Emule had all file types including software with crack files, but you couldn't receive more than 8.94 MB from a single user in any one session. It once took me eight months to get one 75 MB cartoon, as the only guy who had it always had 4,000+ people in his queue, and he never gave any one user more than half a megabyte in a single session. Some people who did captures from TV would share a file only until someone else had a complete copy, then it was their responsibility to distribute to other people. I got a great Amy Winehouse concert from a music festival in France that way.
Used to be a video store I used, that had lots of Japanese, Korean, French...........well, foreign films. If you signed up for email they would send you synopsis of a dozen or so each week. Very helpful. They are gone now. Internet didn't replace them in any helpful way. consequently nothing comes to mind as recently remembered.
I still have my Queen Video membership card.
The place was like a library for obscure film, mainly non-English. The had the complete Chinese Hercules film, I saw at least four. It was the low budget/quick profit franchise starring Bolo Yung after Enter The Dragon - they were a hoot!
The place was like a library for obscure film, mainly non-English. The had the complete Chinese Hercules film, I saw at least four. It was the low budget/quick profit franchise starring Bolo Yung after Enter The Dragon - they were a hoot!
