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The first volume in The Weird Tale Collection contains some excellent adaptations of horror author Robert W. Chambers' work including Aaron Vanek's award winning short feature film inspired by the short story "The Yellow Sign" in the book The King in Yellow.
In the movie, a young art gallery owner, Tess Reardon (played by Little Giants star Shawna Waldron), is looking for new talent to spark life into her failing business. Haunted by nightmares, she discovers that an artist she dreamt about, Aubrey Scott, actually exists, and she seeks him out. The eccentric painter agrees to a showing of his art, but only if Tess will model for his new work. She grudgingly agrees and begins to regress into a past life from a parallel world, and that everything is not at all as it seems.
The volume also includes the short films Tupilak, The King in Yellow, the documentary Chambers in Paris, production stills, outtakes, deleted scenes, two audio commentaries, and subtitles in French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Finnish, and Portuguese.
| Catalog Number: MC-875 |
Type: Feature |
Genre: Horror / Bizarre |
| Copyright: 2006 |
Length: 100 minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 (All) |
| TV System: NTSC |
ISBN: |
UPC: 0892586002208 |
| Label: Lurker Films, Inc. |
This title is available in Europe for Wholesale - List Prices: £13.99 / 19.95€
This is a microcinema exclusive title.
Wholesale Purchasing:
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Program MC-875 may be licensed for Exhibition.
2008-10-31 popmatters.com
By Michael Barrett
Volume 1 of The Weird Tale Collection is devoted to the American horror writer Robert W. Chambers, who came to prominence in the 1890s with a collection called The King in Yellow, a book about a book (also called The King in Yellow) with the power to drive its readers to madness. In this way, Chambers affirmed the power of art not only to disturb and change but to cause its audience literally to glimpse new realities. This was seen as a dangerous power, not always positive but one that cannot be resisted. Chambers clearly influenced Lovecraft, who praised his work and adopted some of its tropes.
Aaron Vaneck’s The Yellow Sign, shot in a beautiful, now-vanished Los Angeles hotel (the Frontier or Million Dollar Hotel) updates a Chambers story in a way that could be regarded as a sequel. It concerns a young woman (Shawna Waldron) who works for an art gallery. She’s been having dreams of a strange, reclusive artist named Aubrey Scott (Dale Snowberger), so she goes to visit him. He agrees to sign a contract with her gallery if she poses for him, and he tells her a story about children whose madness signals their powers as a shaman with the ability to live in two worlds.
This 45-minute entry is at least as intriguing as the average episode of Masters of Horror, sometimes more so, although the climax is both talky and abrupt. Perhaps its best production value is the diverse array of startling paintings by Jason Voss, which convince us of an artist whose nightmarish vision extends beyond the veil of our reality. Vaneck and his star provide two commentaries, one allegedly more risqué but with much overlapping material. There are also deleted scenes and goofs, and subtitle options are in English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Finnish, German and Portuguese.
David Leroy’s French film Tupilak was filmed in what the package calls “a 35mm two-perforation pull-down process resulting in a beautiful Scope widescreen format.” It’s called the Multivision 235 process and Leroy identifies it with Sergio Leone and Dario Argento. The film does look pretty as it tells a snowbound anecdote about two Arctic explorers, one who feels guilt about leaving an Inuit man to die two years previously and one who doesn’t. The guilt-ridden man believes they have been cursed by the titular spirit, which will pursue them relentlessly. This film may or may not be about the supernatural, but it’s certainly about the power of guilt. In his notes in the accompanying booklet, Leroy states his intention of making “a classical monster movie without the monster in it. In fact, without any proof there really was a monster at all.”
Lasting only a few minutes, the Italian The King in Yellow feels more like a trailer or preview. Although its basic story is very compressed and has something to do with being trapped in an eternal cycle of hallucination, it spends most of its time having its heroine pursued by monsters down hospital corridors. More than the other films, this has an unfinished “calling card” feel. Indeed, the notes by David Fragale and Leonardo Camastro declare this to be “episode zero” of a series of films.
In Chambers in Paris, we are given a tour of streets and locations that Chambers lived in and wrote about. Our guide and filmmaker is Christophe Thill, who has what may be described as an unconventional screen presence--frankly, a nerd with a lispy accent. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. |
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