Thursday, August 6, 2009

BONUS BLOG -- 1972: HORROR EXPRESS

What’s it about?

Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.

As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.



Is it any good?

I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.

But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)

There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.

Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.

A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.

It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.

On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.

It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?

I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.

Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.

6 comments:

  1. I'm not really sure where I stand on the public domain. On the one hand, I prefer the wide availability of films to the quality of the copies available. At the same time, acknowledge that I would like my most treasured films to be treated with a modicum of respect. I think that, these days, the idea that films are something to be looked after is pretty strongly ingrained in our society, and that most of the films which have since become cultural touchstones - even to a very minor extent (this is, after all, a world where the films of Jean Rollin all have restored special-edition DVDs) - will be kept in good condition even after they are no-longer copyrighted materials with a high profit margin.

    There's also the possibility that public domain will equal a greater competitiveness in terms of distribution. Yes, it means that there will be a glut of cheap editions, but there's also the possibility that some companies will realise that, in order to differentiate themselves and capture a greater share of the market, it's necessary to provide a better quality product at a lower price. I realise that film restoration is expensive, but I'm not even necessarily talked about restored prints - just the realisation that, if you want someone to buy your version of something over someone else's, you'd better given them a damned good reason to do so.

    Of course these days file-sharing is playing havoc with the industry. But at the same time, the sorts of people who are most likely to want to watch weird old cult movies are also the sorts of people who are mostly likely to be weird and obsessive enough to want to buy the DVD. They are collectors, and hobbyists, and as a consequence they are a limited sort of insurance against the encroachment of internet downloads. I mean, I know I've spent a lot of money I don't have on DVDs of films that I could have downloaded in a couple of hours, instead of having to wait several weeks for them to arrive from a warehouse in New Jersey.

    So I suppose that I am arguing for a boutique industry, which is alreayd what we have, largely. I mean, the fact that Alice in Wonderland is out of copyright doesn't stop people from producing lavish new full-colour coffee-table versions of it every year.

    It's for this same reason that I believe that bands should put more effort into the packaging of their CDs.

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  2. Regarding Horror Express, I think a part of why I might like it more than you is that I tend to approach it with low expectations as yet another cheap SF horror film, and as a consequence I am pleasantly surprised by the ways in which it tweaks the traditional Hammer/H.G. Wells/General British SF approach, especially since it is actually Spanish. Conversely, you seem to judge it from the abstract and are disappointed when it winds-up being just another cheap SF horror film.

    There's also the fact that it manages to collect a surprising number of my interests - spies, mad monks, ancient cosmic evil, the Victorian era, Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee, old-timey rail travel - into a single film. And it does so in odd and oddly compelling ways. I think this is also why I can find mildly positive things to say about Ultraviolet, the Amicus Burroughs adaptations and the like.

    At the same time, I wouldn't argue that the perception of this film as "good" rests purely in one's sharing my own peculiar psychology. Even if it isn't breaking any molds, this film still stands-up quite well as an interesting, albeit possibly minor, example of its genre, checking all the boxes and adding a couple of neat twists of its own. So that's why I like it. Because it's funny and it's nicely put together and it has a psychic ape.

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  3. I did like HORROR EXPRESS better the second time I saw it. The music is really great, and the revelation that the monster is actually a bodysnatching parasitic alien is neat.

    But there are still way too many characters with either implausibly convenient or totally inexplicable motives. And I cannot stand the ending where Telly Savalas's character is built up as practically a force of nature, but then proceeds to do absolutely nothing.

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  4. Matthew! Get back here and type!

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  5. I was on vacation for 10 days! I would have said something before hand, but that's how BURGLARS find out WHICH HOUSES TO ROB.

    New entries Monday and Thursday next week!

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