First German-Language Review

I'm fairly sure that the Mondo Bizarr blog just posted the first review of FBN in German. I've ran the piece through babblefish and it appears very positive. I think at one point he even compares the soundtrack to "The Boards of Canada," which I thought was rather neat.

New Review

Check out this new review at DVDSchlock - "...one of the most original films I have ever seen," that's neato.

It also appears as if FBN is the lowest-rated DVD in the "Frankenstein" category at Netflix. Oh well.

Recolorization Experiments

I've always wanted to shoot a film in color, convert it to black and white then go back and totally recolor the image similar to vintage photo "tinting" or the recolorizing of ye' old cinema classics. As much I disliked all that colorized revisionist crap, there's was always something about those plastic, greyish skintones which always fascinated the hell out of me. It feels part technicolor, part otherworldy, especially when it's done right with clean-looking source material. I like it in the same way that I liked redubbed films where the dialogue tracks sounds like it's resonating above every other element because it was recorded in a studio and wasn't properly "world-ized," to misuse a Walter Murch phrase. In this same respect, in colorized images the colors seems to almost be fighting each other; it feels painful but there's something undeniably artistic and satisfying about it when it's done in the right spirit. Sometimes it also reminds me vaguely of some Europeans films with very odd color schemes, like the way that Jean Pierre Melville tried to pull down the colors and get these steel-greyish skintones.

A little proof of concept image is in order here:



The first image is the raw minidv frame, the last one is what happened after I converted to black and white then selectively recolored it, and the middle frame is the color correction which actually made it into the final film (along with a bunch of grain and other stuff). The middle frame unfortunately isn't the exact one as the other two because in the final film that frame is hidden by a fade-up from black but I thought I'd include it anyway for reference. The retouching is a little rough here but I suppose you can get the idea. Perhaps this image wasn't the best example because there's not a wide range of grey values and her hair gets lost there in the black over on the right, but I just randomly picked this one to see what I could do. Of course with modern color correction you can isolate both specific colors or parts of the image and carry out what I suggest with far more accuracy and ease than turning the entire image monochrome and redoing all of the color, but it might be fun to try it anyway.

More New Reviews and Interview

I almost forgot to mention that DVD Maniacs, The Spinning Image, Obscure Horror and Fatally Yours all posted new reviews for the DVD last week. Thanks guys!

Also, I just did a new interview over at Cinehound.

Official Selection - Macabro Festival 2007

I found at last night that Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare has been selected to play at the 2007 edition of the Macabro Festival in Mexico City this August. When I have more concrete details about date and time I'll let everyone know. I guess this will be the first non-US showing of the film.

More DVD Reviews

I just like to thank Miltos at Cinehound and William Simmons at SexGoreMutants for really nice review of the new FBN DVD, while on the not-so-nice front, I get a slight feeling that the guy who wrote the DVD Verdict review wasn't too crazy about the movie.

In addition to print reviews, the live Cult Radio A-Go-Go live broadcast featured a review of the DVD which was the best audio review I've gotten since the Splattercast show and the Dead Pit review which, well, I'd rather not think about very much.

DVD Reviews and Other News

Here's another review of the film courtesy of Movies Made Me Do It. Nice choice of stills as well.

In online retailer news, a bunch of new European companies are carrying the Unearthed release. Even Asian Cult Cinema has a product listing with some screenshots. I also noticed Absurd-Online.dk is carrying FBN for 149,00 DKK, so there you go. The page also reports that the DVD weighs 200 grams, so there you go as well. There you go.

Also, someone just told me that Kim's Video in NY is renting the new FBN DVD. Apparently they were also selling the DVD but it's out of stock! Well, out of stock at Kim's at least, not everywhere in general. So there you go yet again. If anyone else sees it on a videostore shelf I'd be interested to hear about it.