Every year those “Why aren’t these films on DVD?” lists get smaller, or else the titles get more obscure. Not only is the vast majority of obvious stuff out on DVD by now (even late arrivals like the original King Kong), but stuff you’d never rationally expect to see comes out too. For a bit over thirty bucks recently–thanks again, Charles G.–I just got beautiful clean copies of The Giant Claw (whee!), Creature with the Atom Brain, The Zombies of Maura Tau, The Werewolf; and four pretty decent Karloff flicks; The Man They Could Not Hang, The Black Room, The Boogie Man Will Get You, and Before I Hang. Even I haven’t seen several of those titles, and some of the others I haven’t seen since I was a wee typke. And those were but some of a far greater amount of films I got at similarly reasonable prices this Halloween (thanks, Best Buy, for those Universal sets). And there were a lot more available I didn’t buy.
Anyway, this is a typically long-winded way of saying that one of my two major “Where are they?” titles, the Cornel Wilde action flick The Naked Prey, is finally to hit disc in January. And it’s from Criterion, so you can’t go wrong there. (The company will also be releasing a box set of five of Kurosawa’s obscure post-war films, most of which have been nearly impossible to see in this country.)
OK, now if somebody would just release The Green Slime…
