Top-notch entry in 1970s kung fu craze
Saw this as HAMMER OF GOD @ Loew's DELANCEY with Mario Bava's HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON-- -one of the *best* twin-bills I ever saw and I saw hundreds from the mid-1950s till the *end of the double-bill*, as a movie-going fact-of-life, mid-late 1970s.
The DELANCEY was a huge old "movie palace"-style theater, with humongous screen, super sound system, balcony, full-service concession stand in a big-BIG lobby, *the works*.
The big screen is absolutely *vital* to the peak enjoyment of the rich color, speed-of-light action of HAMMER.
The impact of HATCHET on a small home screen must be terribly attenuated, the atmosphere sharply reduced, surely.
BOTH these films were made with *big screens* in mind. The film-makers of that bygone era could not have foreseen today's cracker-box 'plex "theaters" (*hawk-ptooi*) which generally seat >500, in malls built in the ever-popular Birkenau style of architecture.
I'm High Church about the big-theater films of that era ---I simply won't see them again: My *memory* serves me well enough.
It is simply too depressing, too degrading to see the scratched and pitted prints with their bleached-out "colors" and raggedy soundtracks on a tiny home screen.
I wouldn't accept THE LAST SUPPER or LA PRIMAVERA as thumbnails, and that's what watching vintage movies of happy memory is to me today.
Cheers !
The DELANCEY was a huge old "movie palace"-style theater, with humongous screen, super sound system, balcony, full-service concession stand in a big-BIG lobby, *the works*.
The big screen is absolutely *vital* to the peak enjoyment of the rich color, speed-of-light action of HAMMER.
The impact of HATCHET on a small home screen must be terribly attenuated, the atmosphere sharply reduced, surely.
BOTH these films were made with *big screens* in mind. The film-makers of that bygone era could not have foreseen today's cracker-box 'plex "theaters" (*hawk-ptooi*) which generally seat >500, in malls built in the ever-popular Birkenau style of architecture.
I'm High Church about the big-theater films of that era ---I simply won't see them again: My *memory* serves me well enough.
It is simply too depressing, too degrading to see the scratched and pitted prints with their bleached-out "colors" and raggedy soundtracks on a tiny home screen.
I wouldn't accept THE LAST SUPPER or LA PRIMAVERA as thumbnails, and that's what watching vintage movies of happy memory is to me today.
Cheers !
- mhantholz
- Apr 13, 2010