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Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sun Jul 28, 2024 6:06 pm
by Peacock
I hope they include both of Helm’s interpretations of this, the 1928 silent and 1930 sound. Incredibly exciting if this one (or these!) is released.
DeprongMori wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2024 5:03 pm One other film that is (likely) on Deaf Crocodile’s eventual roster is Alraune (1928) aka A Daughter of Destiny, garnered from conversation with the restorer and correspondence with the label. It was a thoroughly enjoyable twisted tale from Weimar cinema, starring Brigitte Helm and Paul Wegener. I’m pretty thrilled for that one.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sun Jul 28, 2024 6:14 pm
by beamish14
Given their passion for European animation, I’m really hoping to see Piotr Kamler and Raoul Servais’ work

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2024 3:24 am
by Yakushima
beamish14 wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2024 6:14 pm Given their passion for European animation, I’m really hoping to see Piotr Kamler and Raoul Servais’ work
Servais would be fantastic!
My dream is them doing justice to the original version of To the Stars by Hard Ways (1981). The recent German Blu-ray was pretty atrocious.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2024 8:07 am
by MichaelB
I haven't yet picked up the German Blu-ray of Marek Piestrak's Pilot Pirx's Experiment (1979) because it seems like such a plausible title for either Deaf Crocodile or Second Run to pick up - especially since there's an off-the-shelf HD master available.

But I haven't heard any rumours from either camp.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Tue Jul 30, 2024 9:39 pm
by TechnicolorAcid
MichaelB wrote: Wed Apr 10, 2024 5:06 am They also obliquely hinted at Lemonade Joe in a Facebook post, which wouldn’t be the tiniest bit surprising - even if they hadn’t already released an Oldřich Lipský film (and with another confirmed for certain), it could hardly be a more perfect fit for them.
I actually did some inquiry to see if this was actually coming out through contacting their Email and unfortunately it doesn’t sound like it’s happening soon.
Hi [NAME REDACTED] —

Many thanks for your e-mail -- LEMONADE JOE isn't currently available for re-release in the U.S., but we'll keep looking into it, it would be wonderful to put this out along with ADELA HAS NOT HAD SUPPER YET and THE MYSTERIOUS CASTLE IN THE CARPATHIANS!

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2024 12:13 am
by Finch
In his newsletter, Craig confirms Felidae 4K with DV & HDR10 in December. Guess that means The Outcasts for October or November?

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2024 9:25 am
by MichaelB
Deaf Crocodile's Facebook account has confirmed (via a somewhat buried comment) that the rest of the 2024 schedule is:

August: Adela Hasn't Had Supper Yet (Oldřich Lipský, Czechoslovakia, 1977)
September: In the Moscow Slums (Karen Shakhnazarov, Russia, 2023)
October: Trapped Ashes (John Gaeta, Monte Hellman, Sean S. Cunningham, Ken Russell, Joe Dante, US, 2006)
November: The Outcasts (Robert Wynne-Simmons, Ireland, 1982)
December: Felidae (Michael Schaack, Germany, 1994)

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2024 4:33 pm
by domino harvey
Haven’t seen Trapped Ashes but I was warned against it here

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2024 11:24 pm
by What A Disgrace
MichaelB wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2024 9:25 am
September: In the Moscow Slums (Karen Shakhnazarov, Russia, 2023)
Put an asterisk by it, but Sherlock Holmes is entering the Deaf Crocodile collection.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2024 8:29 am
by MichaelB
What A Disgrace wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2024 11:24 pmPut an asterisk by it, but Sherlock Holmes is entering the Deaf Crocodile collection.
And only a month after Nick Carter!

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2024 1:03 pm
by TechnicolorAcid
MichaelB wrote: Sun Aug 04, 2024 8:29 am
What A Disgrace wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2024 11:24 pmPut an asterisk by it, but Sherlock Holmes is entering the Deaf Crocodile collection.
And only a month after Nick Carter!
Now that you bring it up, the real Sherlock Holmes was in Adela so we actually have him in the Deaf Crocodile Collection.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2024 2:41 am
by therewillbeblus
domino harvey wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2024 4:33 pm Haven’t seen Trapped Ashes but I was warned against it here
I haven’t seen it (must’ve passed me by when I tried to complete his filmography a year or two ago), but it’s already a red flag that they had Dante direct the frame story when he’s clearly best suited to helm an omnibus episode

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2024 4:53 pm
by Roger Ryan
therewillbeblus wrote: Mon Aug 05, 2024 2:41 am
domino harvey wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2024 4:33 pm Haven’t seen Trapped Ashes but I was warned against it here
I haven’t seen it (must’ve passed me by when I tried to complete his filmography a year or two ago), but it’s already a red flag that they had Dante direct the frame story when he’s clearly best suited to helm an omnibus episode
Ha! I was going to attempt a belated comment on this film here before realizing that domino linked back to my own assessment from nearly 14 years ago. I even read the whole of the critique before realizing it was I who posted it! I'm actually kind of curious if others find Trapped Ashes a better effort than I did or find more value in Dante's direction of the frame story.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sat Aug 10, 2024 6:11 pm
by ianthemovie
I enjoy blind-buying Deaf Crocodile's releases, but for those who are interested in sampling some of them for free a bunch of titles are now streaming on Kanopy, including Benny's Bathtub, Prague Nights, Solomon King, Ilya Muromets, and Tale of Tsar Saltan (and possibly more).

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sun Aug 11, 2024 2:25 am
by knives
Tubi also has a few.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sun Aug 11, 2024 5:28 am
by brundlefly
If your library has Hoopla instead, here's their selection.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2024 5:22 pm
by TechnicolorAcid
THE GOLDEN FERN (ZLATÉ KAPRADÍ) – 1963, NFA, 115 min. Czech director Jiří Weiss’s breathtaking B&W fairy tale is one of the most unjustly neglected treasures of 1960s fantasy filmmaking, a hauntingly lyrical work with overtones of Wojciech Has’s THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT, František Vláčil's MARKETA LAZAROVÁ and Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. A handsome young shepherd (Jean Marais lookalike Vít Olmer) stumbles across a magical golden fern in the forest. A stunning, enigmatic forest fairy named Lesanka (Karla Chadimová) is sent to retrieve it but instead falls hopelessly in love with him.

When he’s forced to join the army and heads off to war, she sews a seed from the fern into his shirt to protect him. While he’s away, though, he falls for the icily beautiful daughter of the commanding general (Dana Smutná) who demands he perform a series of Herculean tasks to prove his devotion to her. Director Jiří Weiss (1913 – 2004) was internationally acclaimed for dramas such as WOLF TRAP and ROMEO, JULIET & DARKNESS – here he worked with cinematographer Bedřich Baťka (who also photographed the legendary MARKETA LAZAROVÁ) to craft one of the most visually ravishing and hypnotic B&W wide screen fantasies of the era. Released by Deaf Crocodile, the Národní filmový archív and Comeback Company. In Czech with English subtitles.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2024 9:59 pm
by bad future
I've posted before about how I went overboard 3ish years ago watching hundreds of fantasy / fairy tale films from the 50s-70s (at such a pace that there are many I probably didn't give the time they deserved before moving on to the next one) but for what it's worth The Golden Fern was a definite standout, and would have been on my shortlist of discoveries from that project for which I'd hope for a blu-ray release. Ruslan and Ludmila was definitely on that list as well, so I'm quite happy that Deaf Crocodile has come along with such heavy overlap in their interests. But while I appreciated the Ptushko films and Ruslan especially for the scale of their fantastical production, Golden Fern does a lot more with less, managing to evoke the abstract simplicity of a classic fable and a more familiar realist mode in a way that felt to me like the former being corrupted and killed by the latter. Hit me like an unsettling dream.

Since I've had such good luck so far, I'm gonna put it out there that my #1 hope for Deaf Crocodile or another label to tackle from my fairy tale summer is Yuri Illienko's A Story of the Forest - Mavka. Though I think I remember hearing -- maybe even here? -- that Illienko's films were all being preserved at the Dovzhenko Center in Ukraine, so I imagine their status might be somewhat precarious now.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2024 1:56 am
by TechnicolorAcid
THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS (DIE KATHEDRALE DER NEUEN GEFÜHLE) – 2006, Cinegrafik, 60 min. Dir. Helmut Herbst. On a shortlist with Eiichi Yamamoto’s BELLADONNA OF SADNESS and René Laloux’s FANTASTIC PLANET as one of the most surreal, psychedelic and truly cosmic animated features ever made, German director Helmut Herbst’s utterly insane THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS follows a commune of Berlin stoners and intellectuals who get set adrift in space in 1972 in a packing container clutched in a giant flying hand. Various space flotsam smashes into the windshield – enormous insects, Mighty Mouse, a Bird Man from “Flash Gordon” – while hypnotic Krautrock drones in the background moaning “Where am I??”, and a naked man bounces up and down off a massive red pepper. So begins our descent down the psychotic rabbit hole of CATHEDRAL, a true hallucinogenic Space Freakout if there ever was one: imagine Ralph Bakshi animating an R-rated version of John Carpenter’s DARK STAR, or the cartoon equivalent of Can’s “Ege Bamyasi” or Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine.” In other words: set the controls for the heart of the sun. Narrated by the ship’s doctor Quistard in the same synthesized voice everyone uses, the crew includes the female commander Bakunskaja with long gray hair and a pink hippie frock; lizard-tongued head of security Dierksen; and James and Jones, a pair of redheaded and often bare-breasted twins. The crew spend their days staring into the pulsating light of the fusion reactor wondering about the outcome of the Vietnam War, or bemoaning their sexual inertia: “Do you know what an erotically stale situation is? … Eternal lust and unspeakable horror. All empty promises.”

Their descent into moral and political lethargy is interrupted by the arrival of a very attractive young man, Mulligan, who’s discovered in their monthly supply shipment from the discount store. Eventually this screwy crew of seriously baked stoners find themselves searching for the enigmatic Matthew Madson, a Yeti-like wild man who may be the mysterious astronaut who first convinced them to embark on their deranged odyssey. Visually the film is like no other, filled with holographic blue phallus plants and characters morphing into gray fleshy blobs every time they pass a Black Hole, constantly disrobing and attempting to seduce each other (and despite the random nudity, the crewmembers are weirdly androgynous as if genders are becoming meaningless.) The dialogue is equally bizarre, littered with cryptic sound bites: “Did you know that neutrons can smile?”, “I think you are also just fiction” and the film’s mantra, “My eyes are cast down in awe.” The movie’s genesis is equally strange: based on a 1974 film by Herbst called “Die phantastische Welt des Matthew Madson,” CATHEDRAL was eventually finished after a decades-long gestation in 2006 (Herbst passed away in 2021.) One of the rarest and most obscure tiles in world animation and never before officially released on physical media, CATHEDRAL has been newly restored from the original camera negative and sound elements by Deaf Crocodile with the cooperation of Herbst’s wife, Renate Merck. In German with English subtitles.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2024 5:29 am
by therewillbeblus
The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians is another curio from the label, that just feels wacky for the sake of it. It's got some decent absurdist bits, usually coming from the mad scientist sewn into languorous scenes reaching for laughs, but then it also occasionally speeds up and catches onto fun holds for brief stretches. The arrhythmic nature is a turnoff when there seems to be little interest in establishing consistency in character or tone. Jules Verne adaptations require a sense of playfulness but also a concentrated approach to stick its wild landings into a tempo - and this is more of a 'throw everything at the wall' type film, for better or worse, often worse.

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2024 3:20 pm
by karmajuice
TechnicolorAcid wrote: Tue Apr 09, 2024 5:09 pm No I meant like the deluxe editions don’t appear to be limited to a certain amount, apologies should’ve said it more clearer.
Edit: Got official confirmation that it’s not limited.
Deaf Crocodile YouTube comment wrote: Not planning on them being LE. Whether we reprint something will depend on a number of factors though.
As per their most recent newsletter, it looks like they are backpedaling on this:
Nothing lasts forever. That includes our Deluxe Editions.

Deluxe Editions will NOT be reprinted. If you want the beautiful hard slipcase and the booklet of essays, art, and photos don’t delay! Unlike Doritos, we won’t make more!

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2024 3:32 pm
by yoloswegmaster
karmajuice wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2024 3:20 pm As per their most recent newsletter, it looks like they are backpedaling on this:
Nothing lasts forever. That includes our Deluxe Editions.

Deluxe Editions will NOT be reprinted. If you want the beautiful hard slipcase and the booklet of essays, art, and photos don’t delay! Unlike Doritos, we won’t make more!
ughhh

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2024 4:09 pm
by ryannichols7
great, now there will be panic buying and triple digit eBay prices

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2024 4:57 pm
by Mark L.
As per their most recent newsletter, it looks like they are backpedaling on this:
Nothing lasts forever. That includes our Deluxe Editions.

Deluxe Editions will NOT be reprinted. If you want the beautiful hard slipcase and the booklet of essays, art, and photos don’t delay! Unlike Doritos, we won’t make more!
Extremely disappointing. Numbers must be soft. Wasn’t feeling great about Deaf Crocodile’s future when they rolled out the subscription prices.

I got the King Stakh box as a test and it didn’t make me feel like I needed to get the box versions going forward. On disc stuff is great as always, but the physical extras felt a bit more amateurish. Box isn’t the same quality as the Arrow ones and the booklet featured a larger number of stills from the film than I was expecting. I also just can’t help the feeling it’s missing polish. For example, book is missing a table of contents and the j card has an ineffable “graphic design is my passion” feeling to it. All extremely minor quibbles, but does not feel like a premium product in my opinion. Will still pick up the odd standard release here and there though!

Re: Deaf Crocodile

Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2024 5:15 pm
by karmajuice
Mario G. wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2024 4:57 pm
As per their most recent newsletter, it looks like they are backpedaling on this:
Nothing lasts forever. That includes our Deluxe Editions.

Deluxe Editions will NOT be reprinted. If you want the beautiful hard slipcase and the booklet of essays, art, and photos don’t delay! Unlike Doritos, we won’t make more!
Extremely disappointing. Numbers must be soft. Wasn’t feeling great about Deaf Crocodile’s future when they rolled out the subscription prices.

I got the King Stakh box as a test and it didn’t make me feel like I needed to get the box versions going forward. On disc stuff is great as always, but the physical extras felt a bit more amateurish. Box isn’t the same quality as the Arrow ones and the booklet featured a larger number of stills from the film than I was expecting. I also just can’t help the feeling it’s missing polish. For example, book is missing a table of contents and the j card has an ineffable “graphic design is my passion” feeling to it. All extremely minor quibbles, but does not feel like a premium product in my opinion. Will still pick up the odd standard release here and there though!
How would you rate the quality of the essays? That's what I'm most interested in, as far as the deluxe boxes go. I've only read two DC essays so far, and they were fine - relatively short, but well researched. I was hoping the multiple essays in the boxes might dive a bit deeper.