Deaf Crocodile

[TechnicolorAcid]

I’m perhaps far too bias to discuss the announcement of The Man Who Thought Life as I have an essay for it and it’s been my most desired Deaf Crocodile for 3 years now but it is an incredible film, brimming with distressing emptiness, gorgeous cinematography, and an excellent soundscape that feels like what would happen if John Frankenheimer’s Seconds was shot like a Wes Anderson film.

[Lowry_Sam]

The Danish film looks really good, I think that's my most anticipated of those cited so far. Who needs to plan sets for a sci-fi film when you have 50s/60s Danish design?

[MichaelB]

That reminds me of Kim Newman reviewing Luc Besson’s Subway and saying that “various Parisian authorities are to be commended for their imaginative art direction.”

[Finch]

***JULY - DECEMBER 2026 SUBSCRIPTION TITLE REVEAL #10***

We're in the home stretch, the last three titles will be announced this morning, just before we open our doors for subscriptions! For announcement 10, we're welcoming a rare 1981 Anime title into the fold...

FRANKENSTEIN, LEGEND OF TERROR (KYOFU DENSETSU: KAIKI! FURANKENSHUTAIN) – 1981, Toei Animation, 98 min. Dir. Yûgo Serikawa.

Adapted from the “Frankenstein’s Monster” character in Marvel Comics, this rarely-seen Japanese anime feature is surprisingly adult, violent and R-rated – newly restored in 4K for this release by Deaf Crocodile and Toei Animation!

In Japanese w/ English subtitles.

NOTE: The order of title announcements does not correspond to the months of release! All release details will come on Friday, along with the final subscription price.

[What A Disgrace]

I imagine this will be one of their October titles, it's the most horror-centric solo release so far.

[Finch]

***JULY - DECEMBER 2026 SUBSCRIPTION TITLE REVEAL #11***

Our penultimate announcement is a very rare, little-seen film by a Czech director who has been given some much-deserved love by the boutique Blu-ray community over the past few years. Deaf Croc is stoked to present an all-new in-house restoration of Juraj Herz's puzzle box/Moebius strip film from 1997, PASSAGE:

PASSAGE, 1997, Czech TV, 102 min.
An incredible rediscovery from Czech / Slovak master filmmaker Juraj Herz (THE CREMATOR, MORGIANA, THE BEAUTY & THE BEAST), PASSAGE is one of the most obscure and rarely-seen works in his filmography – until now. The very definition of a Kafkaesque / Escher-like / cinematic Moebius strip, PASSAGE follows a businessman, Michal Forman (Jacek Borkowski) caught in a blinding rainstorm, who seems to witness his doppelganger being run down by a car. He takes refuge in the Lucerna Palace, a labyrinthine early 1900s entertainment complex in Prague where he encounters an increasingly surreal, Fellini-esque carnival of characters: an enigmatic woman (Małgorzata Kożuchowska) in spiked heels who apparently screws men to death (!) in a filthy bathroom; homeless punks and harried shoppers, night watchmen and beefy sauna operators; a mysterious film crew who may or may not be making the movie we’re watching unfold … Forman finds himself frustrated in every attempt to leave the maze-like Lucerna, which increasingly resembles a sunken luxury liner or the Paris Opera, with endless passageways and workers and prostitutes all jostled together.

Comparisons abound, to Scorsese’s AFTER HOURS, Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL, Shakhnazarov’s ZEROGRAD – all labyrinthine narratives about worlds that follow their own twisted, impenetrable logic – but PASSAGE stands on its own as one of Herz’s finest undiscovered gems, the film as strangely lost as Forman himself.

(It’s worth nothing that PASSAGE and THE CREMATOR were Juraj Herz’s two personal favorites from his filmography.)

Newly restored after an exhaustive archival search by Deaf Crocodile and Comeback Company for its first-ever worldwide Blu-ray release. In Czech with English subtitles.

#deafcrocodile #bluray #jurajherz #czechcinema #bluraycollector #cultmovies #filmrestoration

[What A Disgrace]

***JULY - DECEMBER 2026 SUBSCRIPTION TITLE REVEAL #12***
It's our final announcement of the July - December 2026 subscription cycle, and we saved one more huge announcement for the grand finale! It's finally here, the first Lipský / Brdečka film in their collaborative "trilogy." Before THE MYSTERIOUS CASTLE IN THE CARPATHIANS, before ADELA HAS NOT HAD SUPPER YET, there was...SODA POP JOE.

SODA POP JOE (LIMONÁDOVÝ JOE ANEB KOŇSKÁ OPERA) – 1964, NFA, 100 min.
A decade before BLAZING SADDLES, there was…SODA POP JOE! Originally released here as LEMONADE JOE, the film opens in Stetson City, 1885, a lawless, booze-soaked town where musical “artiste” Tornado Lou (Květa Fialová) belts out Marlene Dietrich-like tearjerkers: "As the barroom smoke grows thicker/I sit over my liquor/And dream that he will come..." Her dream appears in the form of spotlessly clean Lone Ranger-lookalike Soda Pop Joe (Karel Fiala), who can shoot flies from mid-air, and turns out to be a traveling sales rep for Kolaloka Soda (an entertaining pun meaning “a sip of Cola”), which he relentlessly hawks in the film’s very barbed satire of Western capitalism and consumerism. (His rendition – dubbed/sung by Karel Gott, one of the pop-stars of the era – of "Smith & Wessons on my hip/Nothing else comes near my lips...Kolaloka!" is one of the film’s many musical high points.)

Czech director Oldřich Lipský’s delightful spoof of all things Western (including Karl May’s stories, DESTRY RIDES AGAIN and more) and the dominance of corporates brands like Coca-Cola was the first and best-loved of three comedies he made with writer Jiří Brdečka, followed by ADELA HAS NOT HAD SUPPER YET and THE MYSTERIOUS CASTLE IN THE CARPATHIANS (also released by Deaf Crocodile and Comeback Company.) Co-starring Lipský’s frequent collaborators Olga Schoberová (WHO WANTS TO KILL JESSIE?, THE VENGEANCE OF SHE) as a pure-hearted crusader for teetotaling and Miloš Kopecký (from ADELA and MYSTERIOUS CASTLE) as elegant, trickster villain Hogo Fogo, the film features stunning color-tinted B&W cinematography by Vladimír Novotný and irresistible music by the team of Jan Rychlík and Vlastimil Hála.

Filled with nonstop visual puns and sight gags and an almost Karel Zeman-like Gothic/fantastic touch, the film has been gorgeously restored in 4K by the Národni filmový archiv, Prague. And remember: When whiskey fills the glasses/Then the profits pile up fastest!

In Czech with English subtitles.

[ryannichols7]

I feel for Deaf Crocodile so bad that they're having to release the film as Soda Pop Joe

[MichaelB]

Yes, I’d love to know the story behind this, as it’s been known in English as Lemonade Joe for a full 62 years.

And, unlike something like The 400 Blows, it was never a mistranslation.

(Or rather, The 400 Blows is a literal translation, but the problem is that it’s much too literal, as the French idiom that it translates is meaningless in English.)

[TechnicolorAcid]

Yes, I’d love to know the story behind this, as it’s been known in English as Lemonade Joe for a full 62 years.

And, unlike something like The 400 Blows, it was never a mistranslation.

(Or rather, The 400 Blows is a literal translation, but the problem is that it’s much too literal, as the French idiom that it translates is meaningless in English.)

From the Discord:

Dennis explained this to me better than I can, and hopefully he'll weigh in if I'm getting this wrong, but I think he said LIMONÁDOVÝ is a brand name of a soda pop over there, and that western distributors just saw the word and said, "oh, it's called Lemonade Joe, is it?" Which means we basically have to sell it as SODA POP JOE, but constantly add "also known as LEMONADE JOE" so nobody gets confused. Fun!

[TechnicolorAcid]

Either way regardless of the title I think this is the highlight of the lineup and I think it’s an even better Brdecka/Lipsky collaboration than Adela, if only because of how fully it commits to its comic madness and Brdecka’s clear love of the Western

[swo17]

they're having to release the film as

we basically have to sell it as

Who's making them do this?

What's next? Soda Pop Swo?

[TechnicolorAcid]

they're having to release the film as

we basically have to sell it as

Who's making them do this?

What's next? Soda Pop Swo?

They mentioned this on the Discord but the “they” is the Narondi filmovy archiv, aka the National Film Archive of the Czech Republic

[MichaelB]

I’ve done a bit of dictionary delving, and it seems that “limonadovy” does indeed generically mean what I know as “a fizzy drink” and what Americans call “soda pop”.

But it seems odd to change it now; as my 400 Blows example illustrates, even if the title has been “wrong” from the start, there are cases where it’s so famous that it would be a significant culture shock to change it now. I daresay Criterion did it when they put out Bicycle Thieves under that title (as opposed to the singular The Bicycle Thief, but that’s less of a shift.

That said, I have myself been involved with sanctioning title changes decades after the fact, whether it’s deliberately releasing La notte di San Lorenzo under its American title The Night of the Shooting Stars (on the grounds that the UK couldn’t decide between The Night of San Lorenzo or The Night of Saint Lawrence and the overwhelming bulk of English-language criticism uses the American title), reinstating the planned but previously unreleased Girls Without Shame as the primary English title of Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (since we had a full set of English credits for the former, while the latter consisted of the French credits with “Schoolgirl Hitchhikers” crudely spliced in in an entirely different font), and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, Walerian Borowczyk’s preferred title of his 1981 opus that in any case had had so many different titles (Docteur Jekyll et les femmes, The Blood of Dr Jekyll, Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll, Bloodlust) that one more wouldn’t hurt. And in that particular case the film’s female lead Marina Pierro made it a dealbreaker as regards her involvement, although she was pushing at a door that was already wide open.

And while I normally cringe at overtly American English being imposed on obviously European films, Soda Pop Joe (as I daresay I’ll have to get used to going forward) is such a bizarrely “Americanesque” film that it actually kind of works even to native British English speakers.

[MichaelB]

They mentioned this on the Discord but the “they” is the Narondi filmovy archiv, aka the National Film Archive of the Czech Republic

I can confirm from my own first-hand experience that they prefer licensees to use their favoured English title.

That said, I argued that changing the extremely well-known (as both novel and film) Closely Observed Trains to Closely Watched Trains made little sense half a century later, which they grudgingly accepted, and I believe Second Run made a similar argument over what the NFA wanted released as The Shop on Main Street, which in that case was compounded by the fact that "Main Street" is an overtly American English phrase that would have been jarring in the context of a UK release of a film set in a small Slovak town. So in both cases the UK editions remained Closely Observed Trains and The Shop on the High Street.

[Mr Sausage]

And while I normally cringe at overtly American English being imposed on obviously European films, Soda Pop Joe (as I daresay I’ll have to get used to going forward) is such a bizarrely “Americanesque” film that it actually kind of works even to native British English speakers.

It sounds oddly quaint to my ears. North Americans don’t really say soda pop any more, we say one or the other word depending on region (in Canada we tend to say ‘pop’). It’s like taxi cab in that way. Soda pop makes me think of root beer floats and old fashioned diners and such things from my dad’s generation. Haven’t seen the film, so maybe that’s all very appropriate.

[MichaelB]

“Quaint” actually does work in this particular instance!

[Mr.DarjeelingLimited]

Passage in HD is very exciting.