Archive for October, 2007

Incident In And Out A DVD Player

Thanks to an Australian/US exchange rate my pocket could live with, I was able to purchase the single DVD of Incident On And Off A Mountain Road over the internets and toss my lousy cable-recorded video.

When I originally viewed it, I did so within its context as the premiere of the Masters Of Horror TV series. This time around, segregated from the other episodes I can appreciate it as DC’s tenth motion picture - essentially Don Coscarelli X. It really puts on show much of the interests and skills the man has amassed in his prior filmography - presented in slices of a more accomplished whole. The utter darkness and despair of the Phantasms. The wilderness instinct of Survival Quest. The unique quirks of Joe Lansdale source material. Heck, Angus Scrimm’s character Buddy feels like one of the whacky adult characters from Kenny & Co. (abeit trapped within a nightmare).

To counteract the relatively slim running time of 51 minutes that came with the TV anthology format, the DVD is chock-a-block full of extras. It’s not billed as a Special Edition, but it should be - apart from the advertised features you can find an easter egg featurette on almost every menu page ranging from informative to slice-of-shoot substantial (like a video-shot short doco following co-writer Stephen Romano’s time on set).

Most educational extra? The screenplay, in pdf format. Coscarelli scripts past and present are notoriously hard to get one’s hands on, so tommorows genre screenwriters out there will appreciate being able to comb through DC & Romano’s written blueprint for the film. Most valuable extra? Scenes from the “lost” Jim, The World’s Greatest sandwiched in the Working With A Master doco. Coolest extra? Tucked away in the DVD clamshell was a Don Coscarelli trading card - it’s a good thing the guy’s never made a dud movie, ’cause if it were a lesser creator I’d tape that card to my mountain bike spokes so I could get that authentic tat-a-tat-a-tat sound when I ride.

If you really loved this film and also really love hom-theatre technology, Anchor Bay are releasing it as part of the Masters Of Horror Volume 3 collection on November 13th - in Blu-Ray! This marks the first time a DC film has been released in a high-definition format. Let’s hope it paves the way for a similarly larger-than-life digital version of Phantasm, et al.