Editorials
Best Blu-ray Releases of 2015: The Collections Edition
7. The Fantastic Films of Ray Harryhausen (Via Vision Entertainment)
From one Australian release to another! At 7 I’m going with The Fantastic Films of Ray Harryhausen from Australia-based Via Vision Entertainment. Unlike Cinema Cult’s Vincent Price Collection, this Harryhausen set is region free, so no worries if you just have a standard US Blu-ray player!
This one was one of the bigger surprise releases for me this year. This was my first pickup from Via Vision Entertainment and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Let me tell you that I was blown away! The set includes 4 films – The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (my review), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (my review), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Jason & the Argonauts. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger are the main reasons why you want this set. Both those films were released by Twilight Time here in the US and both are sold out which means you have to pay a TON to 3rd party sellers to get them. You can save a lot of money by importing this set from Australia and picking up two extra films along the way.
The films look incredible and each disc is packed with special features. You get various featurettes and interviews with Harryhausen, plus other big names in the genre like John Landis and Joe Dante pop up just for good measure. If you’re a fan of Ray Harryhausen in the slightest bit you have to own this set. It’s mandatory for any collection.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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