Powerhouse Films

[Michael Brooke]

Originally Posted by Nuno_Miranda

I already have my Tod Slaughter box in pre-order. This is one bit of British horror that passed me completely by and I can't wait to discover it. That it has the Powerhouse treatment is all the better.

I really can't wait for the reaction to that. Hand on heart, I don't think I've ever seen such a dramatic improvement in all my two decades plus of working on film restoration projects - a friend recently told me that he'd tried to watch Sweeney Todd on Netflix, but had to give up because the audio was so muffled (English isn't his native language). I happened to have the restoration on my laptop, so I showed him a bit and his jaw properly dropped, Tex Avery-style.

What's really exciting about projects like this isn't just the fact that these films haven't looked this good in eight decades or more (no exaggeration), it's the fact that because they now look this good, they'll hopefully lead to a complete rehabilitation of the films' wider reputation as well. Jonathan Rigby has already taken back what he said about Slaughter in his book English Gothic, which was based on watching abysmal-quality copies - now that he's seen them properly (he was extensively involved with the extras), he's done a complete U-turn.

[Rob4]

Originally Posted by Michael Brooke

The chances of StudioCanal letting Powerhouse have titles of theirs that they’ve already released and which are still in print (and which will presumably remain in print indefinitely, since they own them outright) are basically zero. Sorry!

Thanks Michael. It's what I thought, but hope springs eternal...

Do you have any information on the SC Hammer titles that they haven't released in the UK? It seems strange that they are available in America but not their native country?

[Rob4]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

It would be nice if we could get Moon Zero Two and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth in quality UK releases on Blu-ray.

They are with Warner I think so always a chance of a Warner Archive release now that they have a UK arm.

[Nuno_Miranda]

Originally Posted by Michael Brooke

I really can't wait for the reaction to that. Hand on heart, I don't think I've ever seen such a dramatic improvement in all my two decades plus of working on film restoration projects - a friend recently told me that he'd tried to watch Sweeney Todd on Netflix, but had to give up because the audio was so muffled (English isn't his native language). I happened to have the restoration on my laptop, so I showed him a bit and his jaw properly dropped, Tex Avery-style.

What's really exciting about projects like this isn't just the fact that these films haven't looked this good in eight decades or more (no exaggeration), it's the fact that because they now look this good, they'll hopefully lead to a complete rehabilitation of the films' wider reputation as well. Jonathan Rigby has already taken back what he said about Slaughter in his book English Gothic, which was based on watching abysmal-quality copies - now that he's seen them properly (he was extensively involved with the extras), he's done a complete U-turn.

I hope this is a huge success that leads to other similar projects.

On a side-note, having subtitles is extremely important to me. I'm not a native speaker and, even though I'm a professional translator, I have enormous difficulty separating ambient/extraneous sounds from speech. With a copy with really muffled sound, even with headphones blocking all other sounds it's very difficult and I've had to give up on many low quality copies, even though they were the only available. So a sincere thank you for always including subtitles.

[Michael Brooke]

The subtitles were huge fun to work on. We had to create them from scratch, and while the audio restoration was still ongoing, so I had a slightly unfair advantage over the poor transcriber as I'd get to proof them against vastly clearer sound than they had access to at the time - and since the English is occasionally somewhat archaic, that was a transcription challenge too.

(But I was absolutely right to change "Damn it!" to the obsolete "Damme!", because Jonathan Rigby picked up on this as well and discusses that specific word in his commentary for Crimes at the Dark House.)

[Nuno_Miranda]

Originally Posted by Michael Brooke

The subtitles were huge fun to work on. We had to create them from scratch, and while the audio restoration was still ongoing, so I had a slightly unfair advantage over the poor transcriber as I'd get to proof them against vastly clearer sound than they had access to at the time - and since the English is occasionally somewhat archaic, that was a transcription challenge too.

(But I was absolutely right to change "Damn it!" to the obsolete "Damme!", because Jonathan Rigby picked up on this as well and discusses that specific word in his commentary for Crimes at the Dark House.)

And this is one of the many reasons why we love Powerhouse releases

Since I read the subtitles while listening to the audio, bad transcriptions become very much apparent. Some, on actual professional releases!, are so different from what's actually said that I sometimes wonder if they use some cheap speech-to-text software to make them, with no proofreading whatsoever.

[Michael Brooke]

Even official rightsholder-supplied transcriptions are sometimes useless - I remember ditching the one for No Orchids for Miss Blandish after a few minutes because whoever transcribed it either got it wrong a fair bit of the time or, in the case of particularly tricky dialogue, just ignored it altogether. So I ended up doing that one by ear, which was a challenge and a half since the film is almost entirely cast with British actors pretending to be Americans. Similarly, all the Michael J. Murphy films had to be done by ear because they'd never been subtitled before.

I don't think I've ever worked for a label that's as perfectionist about subtitles as Indicator is. I probably create/edit about 80% myself - it used to be 100%, but the workload just got too big - and typically three other pairs of eyes give them a going-over before they're signed off, which is great because different people spot different things; one of us is a stickler for correct punctuation, for instance.

And, most crucially with regard to the Jean Rollin titles in particular, one of us is a native French speaker, so she and I work very closely together on trying to make sure that everything is as accurate as possible, with the inevitable proviso that the translation has to be conveyed in two-line subtitles of a maximum length, with no space (or time) for explanatory footnotes. The same colleague also speaks Spanish, so she handles the Mexican titles. I have a decent working knowledge of French and Italian, which has proved very handy for quite a bit of Indicator's recent and upcoming slate, although Cold Eyes of Fear proved to be more of a challenge than I'd anticipated when the Italian dub turned out to deviate quite a bit from the English track - I had to work from both by ear.

[Justin101]

It's interesting to hear that Rigby has revised his view of Tod Slaughter after seeing the restored films, I'm currently reading English Gothic where I'm pretty sure he called him a hack director which had made me lukewarm about the box set, but now I'm thinking I should get it!

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Justin101

It's interesting to hear that Rigby has revised his view of Tod Slaughter after seeing the restored films, I'm currently reading English Gothic where I'm pretty sure he called him a hack director which had made me lukewarm about the box set, but now I'm thinking I should get it!

Slaughter wasn't a director, just an actor. And a very theatrical one (I'm being kind) at that.

[Michael Brooke]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Slaughter wasn't a director, just an actor. And a very theatrical one (I'm being kind) at that.

Oh, Slaughter knew exactly what kind of performances he was giving, which is exactly what his audience paid money to see. He first made his name in the mid-1920s reviving conveniently public-domain Victorian melodramas, which he performed in full-blown blood and thunder style, which was carried over to his films. You don't watch a Tod Slaughter film for subtlety, you watch it to see a consummate entertainer who'd hit upon a very successful formula and knew how to milk it for every last drop.

The great thing about Slaughter is that his films are incredibly consistent; if you like one, you're all but guaranteed to like the rest. Of course, the same is probably true if you don't like one!