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‘Sonic The Hedgehog’ Blu-ray Giveaway!
I’m very excited to announce that I have Five (5) Blu-rays of Sonic The Hedgehog up for grabs. The discs, all of which are sealed, also come with the Digital Code and the DVD! Entry details are below!
Sandra Guldberg Kampp Reflects on Acting Journey And Being “Proud” Of ‘Bloody Tennis’
Sandra Guldberg Kampp had an early taste of working on a film set when she was 11. At the time, she could hardly have imagined that she would one day lead an English language film or join an Assassin’s Creed production. Kampp talked to Deepest Dream about her work in Bloody Tennis, a horror tale that is now streaming on Shudder.
Read more: Sandra Guldberg Kampp Reflects on Acting Journey And Being “Proud” Of ‘Bloody Tennis’
Bloody Tennis centers on Sophie (Sandra Guldberg Kampp), a young American woman who is sent to a tennis academy in the South of Europe. The academy has its share of hungry and opportunistic tennis players, and the environment is run by the stern hand of unpredictable supervisor Mary (Elina Löwensohn). Sophie discovers that to be the best she must sacrifice her sense of comfort and overall sanity. It’s a kill or be killed (literally!) atmosphere, and Sophie is put through the ringer.
Kampp’s love for acting developed as a child, and she never thought she would get to this level in show businees. “I would’ve never dreamt about being here,” said Kampp.
Her first film experience lasted only a few days, and years passed before she acted on a set again. Theater at school helped bring the possibility back into focus. Someone told her she was good at it, and that encouragement stayed with her.
Kampp also remembers being a child with a vivid imagination, and when positive feedback came her way about acting, the dream took shape
“When you’re a kid and somebody says you’re good at something, you’re like ‘Okay,'” said Kampp. “Then I got the few days on set and I found out you can actually make money from it. That’s how I got the idea, I guess. But I was always a very wild kid running around, playing in my parents’ garden. That was sort of an epiphany – that acting could actually be a job.”
Bloody Tennis marks her first lead role in English. Kampp prepared for the film with roughly two months of tennis training before production, followed by more practice on location. She also worked out extensively to meet the physical demands of the role. That said, being a master at serving takes a bit more time. “I was told that it takes years, if you ever get it, actually,” added the actress, who previously starred in the Apple TV series Foundation. “So mine isn’t great (and) I got good at pretending. The whole timing with the ball – that’s something I should probably work 10 more years on to get that right.”
As for her thoughts on Bloody Tennis, Kampp saw the movie when it premiered at Locarno Film Festival. “I still haven’t taken it in,” said Kampp. “There’s a lot of things happening, and I was very pleased at how funny it is as well. I was a bit scared that it would become too intense, but I’m proud of our work. I still need to watch it again because it’s always weird watching yourself and forming an opinion looking at yourself.”
Full interview with Sandra Guldberg Kampp:
Bloody Tennis, co-starring Elina Löwensohn, is now streaming on Shudder.
***We receive a slight commission when you use our Amazon SiteStripe and affiliate links for your purchases. Thanks for your support!
***I give away Blu-ray or Digital code each week to members of our CinemAddicts Movie Club. Join our Facebook Group and become part of our community. Any questions please email me at editor@deepestdream.com.
***I review Bloody Tennis on the latest CinemAddicts episode:
Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Forbidden Planet,’ ‘Days and Nights in the Forest,’ ‘Sons of Anarchy’ (PM Weekly Issue #12)
Somewhere in Sagamihara there is a building kept at between two and ten degrees, at thirty five to forty percent humidity, twenty four hours a day, and inside it are ninety thousand eight hundred and seventy five reels. On Wednesday night at eleven o’clock, the people who run that building finished raising the money to keep the air conditioning on.
The National Film Archive of Japan spent the summer crowdfunding. Not for a restoration, not for a title, not for a project with a poster and a premiere. For its operating budget. The campaign closed on the twenty third with a little over 154 million yen from 5,522 people, against a first goal of 100 million that it passed in the middle of August.
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Forbidden Planet,’ ‘Days and Nights in the Forest,’ ‘Sons of Anarchy’ (PM Weekly Issue #12)
Here is the part that makes it worth the top of this column. Nobody cut the archive’s budget. The Agency for Cultural Affairs said so publicly, and it is right. The grant to the archive’s parent body, the National Museum of Art, went up this year by around 320 million yen, to 8.46 billion. What happened is that the parent body rebalanced its allocations across its seven museums, and the archive’s share of that grant fell to 358.56 million yen from 682.92 million two years ago. The rebalancing follows a target requiring these institutions to cover more of their costs from their own earnings.
That target is reasonable if you run a museum. A museum has a front door, a ticket, a gift shop and an exhibition that people queue for. An archive’s core work has none of those things, because an archive’s core work is that nothing happens. Film sits in the dark a few degrees above freezing and does not decay, and there is no version of that which shows up as revenue. The archive’s fixed costs alone, the power and the building and the fixed-term staff, came to 441.72 million yen. Its allocation was 358.56 million. The gap is not a funding crisis in the dramatic sense. It is an accounting definition, applied evenly, landing on the one institution in the group whose product is an absence.
The archive has never once called it a cut. Its own language is “diversifying and expanding income.” Its director, Akira Tochigi, put the question and answered it himself on the campaign page: why is the National Film Archive doing this? The answer is clear, he wrote, because continuing stable activity requires diversifying and expanding income. That is an institution being careful about who it blames, which tells you something about what it costs to say the other thing.
It has crowdfunded once before, in 2021, for a defined project: digitising a hundred and ten magnetic tapes of a filmmakers’ interview series. It raised five and a half million yen. This time it asked strangers for the electricity bill and got thirty times as much. The only real precedent in Japan is the National Museum of Nature and Science, which went to the public in 2023 over its heating and lighting and came back with about 920 million yen from roughly fifty seven thousand people.
Count what those ninety thousand elements are for a moment. That number is not ninety thousand films, because one film can exist as a negative and a fine grain and three prints of varying completeness, and the archive is careful to say so. It is the raw material. It is what a restoration starts from and what a Criterion or an Arrow or a Radiance disc of a Japanese title eventually traces back to, two or three licences down the chain. Around nine in ten Japanese films made before the war are believed to be gone already. The ones that are not are in rooms like that one, and the rooms cost money whether or not anybody is looking.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
This Week on Disc
- Forbidden Planet (1956), 4K UHD and Blu-ray Limited Edition, Arrow Video
- Go (1999), 4K UHD Limited Edition, Arrow Video
- Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Criterion
- Three Films by Leos Carax, 4K UHD and Blu-ray collector’s set, Criterion
- Dead Poets Society (1989), 4K UHD, Touchstone
- Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), 4K UHD, 20th Century Studios
- Frankenstein: The Complete Legacy Collection, eight films on 4K UHD, Universal
- The Wolf Man: The Complete Legacy Collection, seven films on 4K UHD, Universal
- Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Kino Lorber
- Bullet in the Head (1990), 4K UHD Limited Edition SteelBook, Shout! Studios
- Anthropophagous (1980), three-disc 4K UHD, Severin Films
- Absurd (1981), two-disc 4K UHD, Severin Films
Market Signal
Paramount settled on Sunday. Twelve state attorneys general and the Writers Guild had been suing to block its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, a trial was set for March, and the whole thing has now been resolved by agreement instead.
The terms are about supply. Paramount commits to thirty theatrical films a year for two years and thirty two a year for three after that, at least four of them independent, plus an additional three hundred million dollars a year of American production spending over five years and nine and a half million a year on workforce training. There are editorial independence boards at CBS News and CNN. There are no divestitures. Nothing is being sold off to anybody.
The demand that this column has been circling since Issue #9, that the states and the guild post a bond of 1.88 billion dollars before being allowed to keep suing, died in the same filing. The parties jointly asked the court to take Thursday’s hearing off the calendar and the judge did. It was never ruled on. It was a lever, it worked, and it went away with the thing it was levering. The consent decree itself has not yet been approved, so nobody should write that this deal is finished, but the ticking fees Paramount owes Warner shareholders start at seven million dollars a day on the first of October and the chief executive has told staff he expects to close in about two weeks.
Now read the terms again for what is not in them. Warner and Paramount hold the two libraries that most of the 4K catalogue market runs on, and most boutique licensing besides. Arrow, Criterion, Shout, Vinegar Syndrome’s Iconoscope, all of them are licensing against one or both. The settlement obligates how many films get made and where the money is spent making them. It says nothing about catalogue licensing, nothing about physical output, nothing about preservation, nothing about what happens to two vaults becoming one. That is not an oversight and it is not a scandal. It is that the people at the table were arguing about production and jobs, which are the things antitrust law is comfortable arguing about. What is in the buildings was never a subject anyone was required to raise.
Store of the Week
We Luv Video (Austin, TX)
The store at 100 East North Loop Boulevard holds roughly a hundred and thirty thousand tapes and discs, and almost none of it was bought new.
I Luv Video ran in Austin from 1984 and at its height had five locations. It closed in September 2020, in the part of the pandemic when a lot of things closed and nobody pretended there was a plan. Conrad Bejarano, who founded it, has said the obvious thing about that: when the doors are shuttered, what other option is there. What made this different from every other store that went that year is what happened to the shelves. The collection did not get auctioned off in lots or sold to a liquidator. It went into storage, and in July 2023 a good deal of it came back out.
We Luv Video is a registered nonprofit, run by volunteers, started by Macy Cotton and her husband Ryan Teel. Membership is ten dollars a month, five for students. It opens six to ten Monday through Thursday, four until midnight on Friday, and noon until midnight at the weekend, which is a schedule written by people who understand that a video store is an evening business. It runs as a microcinema too, with screenings and tape swaps. Its motto is that the revolution will not be streamed. Bejarano is still adding stock out of storage, which means the collection is still growing three years after the store that built it closed.
The detail that gets me is the one Cotton mentions. There is so much weird stuff in there, she has said, and a lot of the cases still have I Luv Video’s own staff notes inside them, which they have kept. Somebody who worked a counter in Austin in 1994 wrote something on a card about a film, and the card is still in the box, and it is in the box because a volunteer decided not to throw it away.
CineFile last week survived because one man who already owned a shop on that street decided a second one was not going to close. We Luv Video is the other case entirely. The store did close. It closed completely and it is not coming back. What survived was the collection, and what saved it was a nonprofit and a rota of volunteers, which is the same answer Japan arrived at this week at a hundred times the scale. When there is no business model for keeping something, what is left is people agreeing to keep it anyway.
(Next week: Facets in Chicago, founded in 1975, which has been lending films since the video era and treats a rental counter as a public library.)
The Stack
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Sons of Anarchy: Season One (2009)
Format: DVD, 4 Discs
Bonus Features: audio commentaries on “Pilot,” “The Pull” and “The Revelator”; 35 minutes of deleted, extended and alternate scenes; “The Making of Sons of Anarchy Season One”; “The Ink”; “The Bikes”; “Casting Sons of Anarchy”; and a gag reel, “Anarchy on the Set”
Fox put this out on the eighteenth of August 2009, four discs, thirteen episodes ($49.98).
Every one of those episodes is currently on Hulu and on Disney+. You can be watching the pilot in about nine seconds. You can also buy the season digitally for fourteen ninety nine, which is cheaper than the disc was and cheaper than the disc is now.
None of those places has the commentaries. Kurt Sutter sits down on the pilot with Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman and Katey Sagal. He does “The Pull” with the director Guy Ferland, Hunnam and Maggie Siff. Then he does “The Revelator,” the season finale, with most of the cast in the room at once, and by every account of it that I have read it degenerates in the way those things do when nobody has anything left to promote. That is three hours of the people who made the thing talking about making it, recorded in 2009, and it exists on a disc and on nothing else. Hulu does have an Extras tab for the show. What is in it is promotional material made for the series finale in 2014. Not one item from this set is on it. Disney+ lists no extras at all.
There is a second difference and I want to be careful about it, because I can only prove part of it. The discs carry extended, uncensored cuts of the episodes and the streaming versions are the broadcast cuts. That is documented properly for season three, where somebody has gone through an episode shot by shot and found nearly six minutes of difference. I have not found an equivalent comparison for season one, so I will say only that the disc and the stream are not the same edit of this show and leave the exact figure for the season alone.
And the set is effectively gone. Best Buy lists it as no longer available new. Walmart has one, from a marketplace seller. Nobody is manufacturing it, because why would they, when the show is right there and doing fine.
This is the same shape as the story at the top of the issue, at the smallest possible scale. The film is safe. The show is safe. The record of how it was made is on four discs in my house and in a couple of thousand others, and there is no line item anywhere that pays for it to be anywhere else.
Sign-Off
That is Issue #12. A national archive raising its own electricity money from strangers because the accounting says a vault should earn its keep, a merger settling on everything except what happens to the vaults, a hundred and thirty thousand tapes in Austin kept alive by volunteers and a store that no longer exists, and three hours of commentary that only a 2009 DVD still has. If you know one person who still alphabetizes their shelf, forward this to them. That is the whole engine we have, and it is a good one.
See you Friday.
PM Weekly
Sean Reid
Film & TV Production
seanreid@worldonetv.com
Patrick Brice Talks ‘The Creep Tapes’ Season 3 And Finding Cinema In The Mundane
Filmmakers/writers Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass have been living in the immersive, unsettling world of Creep for over a decade. What began with 2014’s Creep, an intimate found footage feature built from a five-page outline, has evolved into The Creep Tapes. The just released third season expands that canvas, but Brice’s challenge remains deceptively simple: How do you make the mundane cinematic?
Read more: Patrick Brice Talks ‘The Creep Tapes’ Season 3 And Finding Cinema In The Mundane
“That is something that I am constantly thinking about,” said Patrick Brice, who directs the series and co-created it with Mark Duplass. Creep 2, directed by Brice (he co-wrote the script with Duplass) came out in 2017.
The filmmaker points to the upcoming Season 3 episode “Greg” as an example (it premieres September 29th). The story unfolds inside an intentionally nondescript apartment occupied by a solitary man who’s either watching TV or doom scrolling his smart phone. There isn’t much on the walls and the surroundings are purposely barebones (exceput for Peachfuzz, who’s hiding in the apartment!). For Brice, those limitations became an opportunity.
“I liked that challenge of saying, ‘Okay, this is like a truly blank canvas. How do I make this space feel dynamic in some way,’” said Brice, who also directed the features Corporate Retreat and The Overnight.
Part of the answer comes from staying true to the show’s characters. Instead of imposing a conventional cinematic style onto The Creep Tapes, Brice allows the characters’ decisions to dictate the respective episode’s visual language. Case in point is the frenetically shot New York episode “Mo,” which has Peachfuzz consistently ingratiating himself to the titular character.
“For me it’s really thinking about the visuals and thinking about the cinema of it all and how it works together,” Brice said.
Meanwhile, Duplass remains deep locked into his complex, serial killer character. More than a decade into their collaboration, Brice continues to be impressed by what his creative partner brings to the role.
“It’s amazing to be 12 years into this project and him just still completely blow me away with what he’s capable of in terms of performance from both an emotional and a technical standpoint,” Brice said.
Brice recalled that the original Creep was made from a five-page outline without dialogue. He and Duplass improvised the movie and spent roughly a year shaping the feature through additional shooting and editing. Since then, things have evolved in the Creep universe. “We’re definitely allowing ourselves to deviate from the dialogue and sometimes alter the scenarios and what’s happening based on what we’ve already shot because we do shoot these episodes in continuity,” Brice said.
Along with the varied and first rate storytelling in Season Three, The Creep Tapes‘ visual language is its most underrated aspect. ”It was funny ’cause while we were making the first Creep. It was a nuisance to me because I loved the idea of making beautiful composed shots and working with the lighting and DP (director of photography) to craft cinema,” said Brice. “I’ve been able to do that on a few projects. But Creep was one where it was really entirely reliant on me and Mark’s shoulders. Mark is usually having to act, so it’s really on me thinking about that element into the project. It’s something that’s super important to me.”
***Full interview with Patrick Brice:
What do you think so far of The Creep Tapes season three? Share your thoughts in the comments. The Creep Tapes is now streaming on Shudder and AMC+!
***We receive a slight commission when you use our Amazon SiteStripe and affiliate links for your purchases. Thanks for your support!
***I give away Blu-ray or Digital code each week to members of our CinemAddicts Movie Club. Join our Facebook Group and become part of our community. Any questions please email me at editor@deepestdream.com.
***We review The Weight and The Oldest Person in the World on the latest CinemAddicts episode:
RHONY Favorite: Hailey Glassman Is A “Breath Of Fresh Air” On ‘The Real Housewives of New York City’
It didn’t take long for Hailey Glassman to make an impression on The Real Housewives of New York City. For Deepest Dream Podcast co-host Deandra Miranda, Glassman is one of the reasons this RHONY season has a different vibe. “I think that Hailey is a breath of fresh air,” Miranda said. “I think she’s funny and quirky. She doesn’t seem like she’s trying for TV.”
Read more: RHONY Favorite: Hailey Glassman Is A “Breath Of Fresh Air” On ‘The Real Housewives of New York City’
“She is authentically her,” Miranda said of Glassman.
Miranda also believes Glassman’s candid and open demeanor may stem partly from having already experienced tabloid attention. That history, in her estimation, has given the RHONY newcomer a thicker skin and seemingly less reason to manufacture a reality television persona.
Glassman’s description of Erin Lichy as “strawberry jam” was one of my favorite lines from Episode 2. Glassman followed that observation by joking that she would rather read a book than hang out with Erin — and then took the joke one step further by saying she’d rather read Carole Radziwill’s book What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love.
“She’s very open and honest,” Miranda said. “She’s obviously been through public scrutiny where she has some thick, tougher skin.”
That quality could heighten as the season progresses. RHONY doesn’t need Glassman to create conflict when her humor and eccentric personality naturally stand out. Whether she’s blading down a crowded New York street or casually admitting how stoned she was during an earlier get together, Glassman is really one of a kind.
Is Hailey Glassman one of your favorites on RHONY Season 16? Share your thoughts in the comments! Catch The Real Housewives of New York City on Bravo Tuesday nights at 8 pm et/pt (new episodes stream on Peacock the following morning).
Check out our latest RHONY (specifically episode two) recap on the Deepest Dream podcast. Listen via Apple Podcasts or Spotify:
***We receive a slight commission when you use our Amazon SiteStripe and affiliate links for your purchases. Thanks for your support!
Louis Paxton Talks Finding Dark And Comedic Layers Of Scottish Feature ‘The Incomer’
Filmmaker Louis Paxton wanted The Incomer to work as a comedy, but he also wasn’t interested in staying in one creative lane. Set on a remote Scottish island, the 102-minute narrative also has a nuanced level of humanity that doesn’t devolve into saccharine storytelling. Paxton talked to Deepest Dream about The Incomer, a first rate tale that hits theaters September 25.
Read more: Louis Paxton Talks Finding Dark And Comedic Layers Of Scottish Feature ‘The Incomer’
The Incomer centers on Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke), siblings who have lived on a remote island for over 30 years sans their parents. Their father taught them to be wary of visitors and deem that as a threat. Domhnall Gleeson is Daniel, a by the books official who is tasked with having them evacuate the land. Initially wary of Daniel’s presence, the siblings gradually trust this stranger and may even make him their friend.
Amidst all the comedy and awkward interactions among the three, there is a ton of emotional growth needed from all parties. “There’s something I find very fascinating about that kind of arrested development and that idea of being an adult and being a child,” said Paxton, who won the NEXT Innovator Award at the Sundance Film Festival. “There’s also something I find tonally really interesting about things that are quite sweet and kind of innocent, but then also there’s, like, an edge to them.”
Early Tim Burton films were an influence, along with John Waters’ seminal works Cry-Baby and Hairspray. These films may have an accessible exterior, but Paxton was attracted to their complex undertones.
“On the surface they’re family films, but actually underneath it there’s a real kind of complexity and often a sort of dark edge or a really kind of rebellious side to it,” said Paxton. “That was always in my mind when I was writing this and when I was working with everyone.”
Part of Louis Paxton’s storytelling developed during his youth, when he would explore the Orkney Isles. That sense of adventure and discovery shaped The Incomer.
“I was writing scenes based around locations that I’d found during my time up in Orkney in the north of Scotland,” said Paxton. “By the time it came to making the film, I felt like we’d figured a lot of it out. I had real world locations to draw upon and to shoot in when it actually came to it.”
Catch The Incomer, co-starring John Hannah and Michelle Gomez, in theaters starting September 25. Share your thoughts on the film in the comments!
***We receive a slight commission when you use our Amazon SiteStripe and affiliate links for your purchases. Thanks for your support!
***I give away Blu-ray or Digital code each week to members of our CinemAddicts Movie Club. Join our Facebook Group and become part of our community. Any questions please email me at editor@deepestdream.com.
***We review The Weight, The Musical, and The History of Concrete on the latest CinemAddicts episode:
Markus Lehmusruusu Talks “Beautiful” Experience With Finland Oscar Submission ‘The Squirrel’
Director/writer Markus Lehmusruusu (Ricky Rapper and the Strongman) brings his absurdist sci-fi comedy The Squirrel to Fantastic Fest. The movie has its International Premiere today and is part of the festival’s main competition. The Squirrel is also Finland’s Oscars 2027 International Feature Film submission, so it comes to the festival with its share of momentum. Lehmusruusu talked about his feature and the challenge of working with squirrels!
Read more: Markus Lehmusruusu Talks “Beautiful” Experience With Finland Oscar Submission ‘The Squirrel’The Squirrel, set in the far future, centers on Pasi (Miro Lopperi), a synthetic pets designer who discovers the last surviving squirrel. Determined to keep the squirrel alive, Pasi also falls in love. With the squirrel also despressed and his life becoming more unpredictable, Pasi’s controlled life turns chaotic. The director of cinematgraphy is Max Smeds (Bullet) and the composer is Freya Arde (The Hidden Life of Trees). The film, filled with deadpan humor, is described as a mix between Dumb and Dumber and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Amidst the comedy, there is also a perspective on things we may lose as a society even with technological advancements. “I remember when I was writing it, I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (from) Yuval Noah Harari,” said Markus Lehmusruusu. “It has to do with the history of our species and I know that book also got me to think about this perspective. We have been so many things, and we are moving forward at the same time. But we have forgotten also some things. I didn’t want to be nostalgic, but at the same time I was thinking, ‘are we missing something?’ When things are advancing and we are progressing and moving forward, is it always only good?”
As for working with squirrels, they are wild animals which obviously means an easy time is not in the offing. “We were in Germany and we had to have this super silent set because they are really sensitive animals,” said Lehmusruusu. “They get distracted if there’s something happening outside of this kind of studio set. Everybody had to pause whatever they’re doing when the squirrels were on set. We had to have this super closed set (where) there’s no holes anywhere because they will instantly escape . . . it was stressful, but it was beautiful at the same time.”
Full interview with Markus Lehmusruusu:
Catch The Squirrel today at Fantastic Fest and share your thoughts on the movie!
***We receive a slight commission when you use our Amazon SiteStripe and affiliate links for your purchases. Thanks for your support!
***I give away Blu-ray or Digital code each week to members of our CinemAddicts Movie Club. Join our Facebook Group and become part of our community. Any questions please email me at editor@deepestdream.com.
***We review The Weight and The Musical on the latest CinemAddicts episode:
Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Interview with the Vampire,’ ‘Angel’s Egg,’ ‘Nouvelle Vague’ (PM Weekly Issue #11)
Somewhere in a Warner Vault there are scenes from Interview with the Vampire that nobody outside the production has seen. On Tuesday they come out, on a disc, and nowhere else.
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Interview with the Vampire,’ ‘Angel’s Egg,’ ‘Nouvelle Vague’ (PM Weekly Issue #11)
The film reaches 4K for the first time this week, newly remastered with HDR, in standard packaging and a limited SteelBook. What makes it worth the top of this column is not the transfer. It is that somebody went back for the deleted scenes, put director commentary on them, and persuaded Neil Jordan to sit down thirty-two years after the fact and record two new pieces, one with his editor Mick Audsley on how the film was shot, and one with Dante Ferretti on the production design.
Think about what that actually requires. Someone has to locate material cut in 1994, work out what condition it is in, clear it, conform it to a modern master, and then convince a director with thirty years of work behind him since to give up an afternoon for a picture he finished before much of the audience was born. None of that is cheap and none of it is automatic.
And none of it happens for a streaming refresh. The film has been available on services for years. In all that time not one of them has carried a single frame of this material, because a service has no mechanism for caring. A catalogue title on a streamer is a row in a database with an expiry date on it. Nobody at a streaming company has ever been given a budget line for going into a vault, because there is no version of that spend that shows up in a retention metric.
The disc is the only remaining commercial reason for anyone to look. That is the argument compressed into one catalogue title, and it is a narrower argument than the one this column usually makes. Not that the picture is better, although it is. Not that you own it, although you do. That the existence of a physical release is currently the sole economic justification for a studio to go and find out what is still in the building.
Warner has not said how many scenes there are or what is in them. We will know Tuesday. What we already know is that without a disc to put them on, nobody would have gone looking.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
- Interview with the Vampire (1994), 4K UHD and Limited Edition SteelBook, Warner Bros.
- Angel’s Egg (1985), Collector’s Edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray, GKIDS
- Nouvelle Vague (2025), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Criterion
- The Secret Agent (2025), director-approved 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Criterion
- Johnny Handsome (1989), Special Edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Kino Lorber
- Evil Dead Burn (2026), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Warner Bros.
- Scary Movie (2026), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Paramount
- Kriminal (1966), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Cult Epics
- Missing in Action (1984), 4K UHD, MVD Rewind
- ChaO (2025), Blu-ray, Shout! Factory
MARKET SIGNAL
GKIDS is not putting its collector editions in shops any more. Four titles, Angel’s Egg, Look Back, Linda Linda Linda and Love & Pop, are sold only through its own website.
Read that against what retail has spent a decade doing and it stops looking like a boutique affectation. Best Buy is out of discs entirely. Target cut its sections to a token presence and pushed the rest online. Walmart has been shrinking its aisle since before the pandemic. The shelf that labels spent thirty years fighting to get onto has been quietly dismantled, and what survives of it is a bin of new releases near the checkout, which is no use at all to a seventy-three minute Japanese art film from 1985.
So a distributor that put The Boy and the Heron in American cinemas and watched it win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature has concluded that the only retailer it can depend on is itself. Alison Kozberg, who runs home entertainment there, put it in the language of preservation rather than margin: “by investing in thoughtfully curated, enduring releases, we are preserving these landmark works for future generations.” The business case underneath is straightforward. Full margin, no returns, no buyer deciding an art film does not merit facings, and a direct line to the people who actually want the thing.
The cost is the part worth naming, and it is not small. A store exclusive is a discovery problem. Nobody stumbles across a GKIDS release in the GKIDS store. You arrive already knowing, which means the audience for a film like Angel’s Egg is capped at the people who came looking for it, and the accidental buyer disappears, the one who picks something up because the cover is strange and they have twenty minutes. That buyer is how most of us found most of what we love. Boutique labels have been drifting toward direct sales for years and the drift has always been defensible one decision at a time. This is the furthest anyone has taken it, and it is being taken by the label with the best case for wanting a wide audience.
STORE OF THE WEEK
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CineFile Video (West Los Angeles, CA)
CineFile sits at 11280 Santa Monica Boulevard, next door to the Nuart at 11272, the repertory house where Los Angeles has been watching midnight movies since before most of the people in the queue were born. That is not an accident of real estate. It is the business model.
The shop opened in 1999 to “collect and curate rare and excellent films in all genres,” and by 2013 it was going to close, which is what was happening to every video store in America that year. Sebastian Mathews, who ran the Touch Vinyl record shop up the road, bought it instead. He already had a store on a West LA stretch people had started calling Analog Alley, and he decided the block needed the video store more than he needed the money.
Thirteen years later it holds sixty thousand films to rent and to buy, runs on four employees, and opens noon to eight Sunday through Thursday and noon to midnight on Friday and Saturday, which is the schedule of a place that expects you after a film rather than before one. Joining costs five dollars and rentals are five fifty, or you take a monthly membership at twenty dollars for two discs at a time or thirty for four, with no late fees, a store discount and the screenings thrown in. Those run every Thursday at half past eight. This month brought Rushmore, The Faculty, Massacre at Central High and Dead Kids, which is a sensibility rather than a schedule.
It also runs distribution partnerships with Vinegar Syndrome, Shout! Factory and Criterion, which is worth pausing on in a week when a label decided its own website was a better shop than any shop. CineFile calls itself “an archival resource and a bastion for American culture,” which is a large phrase for a small room. But a place holding sixty thousand titles, selling the boutique labels over the counter and putting a 1976 teen revenge picture on a screen on a Thursday night is doing the one thing a website cannot, which is let you find what you were not looking for.
Kim’s Video, last week, was a collection that survived because a film crew went to Sicily and took it back. CineFile is the simpler story and possibly the harder one. It survived because one man who already owned a shop on that street decided a second one was not going to close.
(Next week: We Luv Video, Austin, and the hundred and thirty thousand tapes that came out of storage when a legend closed.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
The Mel Brooks Collection (2012)
Format: Blu-ray, 9 Discs
Bonus Features: audio commentaries by Mel Brooks on Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights; “Back in the Saddle”; “Making Frankensense”; “Spaceballs: The Documentary”; “In Conversation: Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan”; a Robin Hood HBO special.
Mel Brooks turned a hundred years old on the twenty-eighth of June.
Fox put this set out in May 2012, nine films across nine discs in a box with a pamphlet: The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World Part I, To Be or Not to Be, Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
I want to be straight about what is on it, because a box set is never uniform and this one certainly is not. Five of the nine carry almost nothing. The Twelve Chairs, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World Part I and To Be or Not to Be get a trailer and whatever was ported over from the DVD. Blazing Saddles sits on a BD-25 while the rest are on BD-50s, recycled from its standalone release. The 2009 original came with a hefty illustrated book about Brooks and the films. The 2012 reissue I own swapped it for a pamphlet, which is its own small lesson about what a set loses the second time around. If you buy this expecting nine special editions you will be annoyed, and you would be right to be.
The other four are the reason it stays on the shelf. Brooks recorded commentaries for Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs and Robin Hood. There is a forty-two minute documentary on Young Frankenstein, a twenty-eight minute one on Blazing Saddles, and twenty minutes of him talking through Spaceballs with Thomas Meehan.
This week’s lede was about Warner going back for material cut in 1994 and getting Neil Jordan to explain it thirty-two years later, which worked because Jordan is still here and still working. The Brooks material is the same transaction at the far end of it. Those tracks were recorded when they could be recorded. Whatever nobody thought to ask him then does not get asked now, and there will not be a new Blazing Saddles commentary, ever, by anyone who was in the room.
That is not a morbid thought so much as a scheduling one. Every commentary is a person agreeing to sit in a booth for two hours while they still can, and the number of people able to speak first-hand about a film from 1974 only ever goes in one direction. Those two hours ended up on a disc because a disc was the only thing that ever had a reason to hold them. No streaming service has ever commissioned one. No streaming service ever will.
A hundred years old, and he sat down and explained his own films while there was somebody left to ask.
SIGN-OFF
That is Issue #11. Warner going into a thirty-two year old vault because a disc gave it a reason to, a label deciding the only shop it trusts is its own, CineFile still open on Santa Monica Boulevard because a record store owner would not let it close, and nine discs of a man who did the work of explaining himself while he could. If you know one person who still alphabetizes their shelf, forward this to them. That is the whole engine we have, and it is a good one.
See you Friday.
PM Weekly
Sean Reid
Film & TV Production
seanreid@worldonetv.com
Corey Haim And Michael Ironside Horror ‘Watchers’ Hits Blu-ray In October Via Toy Robot Video
Toy Robot Video will release Watchers, a 1988 suspense horror starring Corey Haim and Michael Ironside on October 20. Based on the Dean R. Koontz novel of the same name, the film comes with new Special Features. Check out our post for details!
Read more: Corey Haim And Michael Ironside Horror ‘Watchers’ Hits Blu-ray In October Via Toy Robot VideoIn Watchers, Corey Haim plays Travis Cornell, a teen who befriends a highly intelligent golden retriever. This dog, however, was part of a biological research experienment who escaped after an explosion obliterated a science laboratory. A beast known as OXCOM (Outside Experimental Combat Mammal) also survived the blast, and agents Lem Johnson (Michael Ironside) and Cliff Soams (Blu Mankuma) are tasked with killing both survivors.
Travis, who adopted the dog, puts himself in harm’s way. If you’ve got Michael Ironside on your trail, trouble is right around the corner!
The ensemble includes Don S. Davis (Twin Peaks), Lala Sloatman (Dream A Little Dream), Barbara Williams (Inventing the Abbotts), and Jason Priestley (Beverly Hills, 90210). Williams also worked with Corey Haim in the 1992 feature Oh, What A Night and she co-write the Pauly Shore comedy Jury Duty. Don Hess directed the 91-minute feature and the script was penned by Bill Freed and Damian Lee.
The Watchers’ bonus features include new (and separate) interviews with Jon Hess, Michael Ironside, Lala Sloatman, and Barbara Williams. Watchers’ original theatrical trailer and a still gallery are also part of the extras.
As a Generation X member, one of my goals is to watch as many 1980s movies that I missed from my youth. I’m adding Watchers to my movie list, and would love to hear your thoughts and comments on the film! The movie is currently streaming on Prime Video if you want to give it a shot before its physical media release!
Watchers, starring Corey Haim and Michael Ironside, hits Blu-ray via Toy Robot Video on October 20.
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***I give away Blu-ray or Digital code each week to members of our CinemAddicts Movie Club. Join our Facebook Group and become part of our community. Any questions please email me at editor@deepestdream.com.
***We review The Cycle of Love and Runner on the latest CinemAddicts episode:
I’ll be doing Unboxing Videos for our CinemAddicts Patreon community. Just Posted The First Unboxing On Our Feed
Cassie Workman Crafts “Pretty Eclectic” Comedic Documentary Series With ‘Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF’
Comedian/writer Cassie Workman collaborated with ETCH and Anarchists United Studios to create the new adult comedy series Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF. The show premieres exclusively on YouTube starting September 16 at 8 pm et. Workman (Giantess, Aberdeen) talked to Deepest Dream about the origins of her show.
Read more: Cassie Workman Crafts “Pretty Eclectic” Comedic Documentary Series With ‘Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF’
Cassie Workman is Witchy AF is an eight-part, comedic documentary series that delives into the philosophy and history of magic and occultism. With the use of Direct Message puppetry and practical SFX from Monster in My Closet, the show is set in a fictional occult bookstore owned by Cassie Workman. Guest stars on the show include Shirley Manson (Garbage), comedian Ben Russell, and an interesting figure named King Grimsquawk!
Full video interview with Cassie Workman is below and most of the conversation is also available in Q&A form:
Question: I’m here with Cassie Workman star of Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF. What got this whole thing started?
Cassie Workman: Oh, geez. I guess I was just looking for something to do. I started tossing around this idea, like years ago, and it sort of evolved a bit and then went on the back burner.
And then my agent in New York was like, “You know, do you have any ideas for a show? Let’s make a show.” And I said, “Well, I had this kicking around, and I think it’s really fun and stupid, and let’s make it.” And here we are. We found some really wonderful people in Etch Productions.
We got together in Asbury Park, New Jersey and we put together this crazy little show.
Question: Yeah. It, it was pretty interesting. The ones I saw was the Aleister Crowley one and the Anton LaVey (installment). How many episodes are on this whole season?
Cassie Workman: There’s eight episodes, and so we cover John Dee, the Elizabethan occultist, and we cover Santa Muerte. And the mechanics of magic, you know, how magic works.
It’s pretty eclectic.
Question: All right. It’s definitely a comedy show obviously, but it’s also a biopic of sorts, or a biography of these people. And is there any sort of like journalistic sort of responsibility you have?
Cassie Workman: I am not a journalist. I’m trying to represent the tentpole elements of people’s lives in a half-hour show. So obviously there’s gonna be people who love or know a lot about these historical figures who are gonna say, “Well, there also was this that happened.” I just didn’t have time to talk about it.
But I try to stay as true to the facts as possible. I hope it’s obvious when I’m making jokes because that’s the only time that I’ll stray from the actual real narrative. It’s like a, a good mix of funny and real and people will be able to tell when I go off on a tangent.
Question: What, what’s the writing process like on this? Just from the blank page to what comes on screen, how’s that get there?
Cassie Workman: Well, I was very lucky we had this researcher Morgan who was also a magician and. She was able to give us incredible information about the history of a lot of these characters, stuff that I didn’t know. And then it’s my knowledge on top of that to sort of, you know, color it a bit.
So the basis for each episode was just the research, and then cracking jokes off the research and little one-liners and asides and stuff. And then I was looking for ways to sort of frame the stories in interesting ways to just give it just an extra dimension. It’s a bit more watchable. The episodes were constructed like that.
Of course we have the reenactments which are all marionettes from Direct Message in California who make these beautiful marionettes. And so with that all swirling around in my mind, that’s how I started to build episodes. And it, it didn’t take a very long time to write the episodes.
They came pretty quickly.
Question: So with the marionettes and the puppets, do you have an idea of what they look like and you send it to them? Or do you say, “This is a script. Just go nuts.”
Cassie Workman: Well, yeah. I mean, because there’s so many historical figures, it’s just a matter of saying, “Well, it’s this person,” and find as many photos of them as possible and recreate them. They did an excellent job.
And then we have sort of a cast of players of the other marionettes who change costume here and there and become different people. That was pretty much the system. And then of course there’s King Grimsquawk who I was sitting at the Comedy Cellar.
I was gonna go on at the Comedy Cellar, and they have these little tables there that are like black chalkboard tables, and they give you chalk and you can just doodle while you’re waiting to go and do your set. And I, I drew a little picture of this crow with baby arms. And that was the first ever design for (King) Grimsquawk.
And that’s how we got him.
Question: This show is premiering on Etch. So we’re recording this tomorrow on the, on the 16th. Yeah do you have a season two planned, or is it too early, for that?
Cassie Workman: I have ideas. I’d be ready to go if you know, that were a prospect. Sure. We’ll see how this goes first, and then, you know, if it’s a big success, then sure.
Question: All right. Well, congratulations on the series. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for joining me today.
Cassie Workman: Oh, not at all. Thanks so much!
Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Peking Opera Blues,’ ‘Stranger Things,’ ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ (PM Weekly Issue #10)
Ask what a restoration is and everyone answers with the image. A 4K scan of the original camera negative, Dolby Vision, a colour grade signed off by the cinematographer.
For forty years, the thing actually broken about Hong Kong cinema in the West was none of that. It was the subtitles. Export prints went out with translations done fast and cheap, sometimes off a second-hand script, sometimes seemingly by someone guessing. Jokes vanished. Names changed reel to reel. An entire national cinema reached English-speaking audiences through a fog, and a couple of generations of us learned to love these films while only partly understanding them.
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘Peking Opera Blues,’ ‘Stranger Things,’ ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ (PM Weekly Issue #10)Shout! Factory has been quietly fixing that for a year and a half. Every title in its Hong Kong Cinema Classics line carries the same line on the spec sheet: “optional English subtitles translated for this release.” Not inherited, not licensed from whatever came before. Commissioned. When Blu-ray.com reviewed the City on Fire 4K last August it stopped to note the new translation and pronounced it clean. Peking Opera Blues and City on Fire arrive Tuesday in SteelBooks carrying those same discs, with John Woo’s Bullet in the Head following on the twenty-eighth. The metal case is all the SteelBook adds, which is a fair complaint and not the one I want to make this week.
That deserves to count as restoration work, and it rarely does. Nobody puts new subtitles on the front of the box in the way they put Dolby Vision there, because it does not demo well and you cannot screenshot it for a forum thread. But for a film like Peking Opera Blues, where Tsui Hark is moving between farce, opera and revolutionary politics inside single scenes, an accurate translation changes what the film is far more than another few hundred lines of resolution ever could.
It is worth being clear about what this costs a label. A new 4K scan is a capital expense with a visible result. A new subtitle track is a person, or several, sitting with the film for weeks, and the reward for doing it well is that nobody notices. The audience it matters most to is the audience least able to check the work, which is exactly the condition under which corners have always been cut in this business. Shout! Factory has been doing it anyway, across an entire line, on films that already had discs on the market.
The picture was never the part that was lost.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
- 12 Angry Men (1957), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Criterion
- Peking Opera Blues (1986), Limited Edition 4K SteelBook, Shout! Factory
- City on Fire (1986), Limited Edition 4K SteelBook, Shout! Factory
- Star Trek: First Contact (1996), 30th Anniversary 4K SteelBook, Paramount
- The Pink Panther Masterpiece Collection, five films on 4K plus a supplements disc, Kino Lorber
- Arrival (2016), 10th Anniversary Limited Edition 4K SteelBook, Paramount
- Annihilation (2018), Limited Edition 4K SteelBook, Paramount
- Supergirl (2026), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Warner Bros.
- Batman: Knightfall Part 1 (2026), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
- Minions & Monsters (2026), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD, Universal
MARKET SIGNAL
When Netflix and Arrow Video announced a twenty-five disc box of Stranger Things in March, Netflix framed it as an experiment. The creators talked about wanting the show “owned in its entirety, as a way to preserve the show for decades to come,” and the company made clear that further Netflix titles on disc depended on how this one sold. The verdict came Monday. In Britain it passed £1 million in its first month and now sits at number one for retail value on the year-to-date physical chart, outselling every film released there this year. Five seasons, forty-two episodes, £145 for the standard edition.
There is no American dollar figure, because Circana reports units as an index while the British trade bodies report what the country actually spent. What Circana does show is the set entering the US Blu-ray chart at number three in its release week, behind two new studio titles, and number two on the 4K chart. The number that matters is the format split. Seventy-four percent of American units sold were the 4K edition, 61 percent in week two. With a cheaper Blu-ray on the same shelf, buyers took the expensive one three to one, on a set that opens at $143. That is not a mass-market result and nobody should dress it up as one. It is evidence that whoever is left is buying at the top of the price ladder on purpose.
It is also not a fluke, which is what makes it a signal. On November 3, Criterion adds Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters to the Collection as spine 1333, the fourteenth Netflix original it has taken. The same day, Amazon MGM puts both seasons of The Rings of Power on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD through Alliance Entertainment. Euphoria’s complete series follows on December 15. Notice who is manufacturing all of it. Netflix did not build a home entertainment division, it went to Arrow. Its Oscar winner is going out under a Criterion spine number. The streamers hold the catalogue and the capital, and everyone who knows how to put a film in a box properly still works at a boutique.
The streaming argument was never that discs were inferior. It was that owning things had become an obsolete habit people would drop once they understood they did not need it, and every one of these companies was built on that claim. Netflix tested it on its own biggest property and got back an answer it did not want. The limit is real, and worth saying: these are all enormous titles, this is monetization of the summit rather than preservation, and the mid-budget original with a modest audience still has no disc and no route to one. But the demand was always there, and they were wrong about it.
STORE OF THE WEEK
Kim’s Video (Alamo Drafthouse, Lower Manhattan, NY)
Yongman Kim came to New York from South Korea in 1979, aged twenty-one, and built a chain of video stores that became the reference point for anyone serious about film in this city. Then in 2008 he gave the whole thing away. Roughly 55,000 films went to Salemi, a town in Sicily, on the understanding that former members could visit the collection and that it would eventually be digitized.
Then nothing. For years, nobody outside Salemi could say with confidence where the films were or what condition they were in.
Ashley Sabin and David Redmon went to find out, and the documentary they came back with premiered at Sundance in 2023. What they found in Salemi they describe as sophisticated, creative corruption. What they did about it is the part that makes the film: Kim’s Video ends with a heist.
The collection is now in the basement of the Alamo Drafthouse on Liberty Street. About 15,000 titles restored so far, free five-day rentals, twenty dollars if you also need to borrow a VHS or DVD player, several original Kim’s employees doing the restoration work, and a monthly Kim’s Video Presents screening series upstairs.
Vidiots, last week, was an institution saved intact because somebody made it a nonprofit in 2012. Kim’s is the opposite lesson. The institution died. The collection did not, because a film crew went and physically retrieved it. Not every library gets a documentary made about it. Most of the ones that end up in a warehouse simply stay there.
(Next week: CineFile Video, Los Angeles, and the record shop owner who bought a video store in 2013 to stop it closing.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
Format: DVD, 1 Disc
Bonus Features: audio commentary by director Carl Franklin; Don Cheadle screen test
Carl Franklin’s adaptation of Walter Mosley’s novel came out in September 1995, made about sixteen million dollars, and did not produce the Easy Rawlins series everyone expected. Denzel Washington plays a laid-off aircraft worker in 1948 Los Angeles who takes a job finding a missing white woman because his mortgage is due, and discovers that being good at asking questions is a dangerous skill for a Black man in that city. Don Cheadle arrives late as Mouse and takes the film away from everybody.
This is a permanent part of my collection and it is a DVD, which is the point of putting it here.
The commentary on that disc was recorded in 1999. Franklin sat down and talked through the film, and every premium edition since has carried that track forward. Twilight Time used it. Indicator used it. Criterion’s 4K, the current definitive version, uses it, because there was never going to be a better one. Franklin is thirty years further from the shoot now than he was then, and the version of him that is closest to the film is the one that was captured for a standard definition disc nobody thought of as an archival object at the time.
That is the same argument as this week’s lede, arriving from the other direction. The picture keeps getting improved. Criterion scanned the negative, and the film looks better than it ever has. But the parts of a release that are not the picture, the commentary, the translation, the screen test of a young actor who did not have the part yet, those get made once and then get carried, edition after edition, because nobody can go back and make them again. The transfer is the thing labels advertise. The supplement is the thing that turns out to be irreplaceable.
Criterion’s edition is the one to buy if you are buying now. But the disc I own is where the record starts, and it is worth knowing that a 1999 DVD is still doing load-bearing work inside a 4K box that costs four times what it did.
SIGN-OFF
That is Issue #10. Two Hong Kong classics arriving with translations that finally do the dialogue justice, Netflix running an experiment on whether anyone still wants to own things and getting back an answer it plainly did not expect, Kim’s Video home from Sicily in an Alamo basement, and a reminder from my own shelf that the supplements outlive the transfer every time. If you know one person who still alphabetizes their shelf, forward this to them. That is the whole engine we have, and it is a good one.
See you Friday.
PM Weekly – Sean Reid
Film & TV Production
seanreid@worldonetv.com