In the opening act of Bruno Mattei’s oft-maligned 1980 zombie opus Hell of the Living Dead (né Night of the Zombies né Zombie Creeping Flesh né Virus) a cell of violent eco-terrorists demand the dismantling of the HOPE project, a global humanitarian effort that has established HOPE Centers throughout the third world. It may have taken a while, but between 2003 and 2011 their demands were met.
Sort of…
Hell of the Living Dead, being a co-production between Mattei’s Beatrice Film s.r.l. and Spain’s short-lived Films Dara, spent a good deal of its production shooting in and around the city of Barcelona, with many of the exteriors (and, likely, interiors) from its first and final acts completed at the central termica del Besos complex; a sprawling electrical plant on the delta of the Rio Besos that doubles as the film’s Papuan HOPE Center.
Hell‘s opening image, an ominous wide-angle shot of an industrial facility at dusk, is a view northward from the southwest corner of original Besos plants I and II (the latter in the foreground), a pair of 150MW conventional steam turbine groups that were in operation from 1967 (1972 for II) to 2003. Images from around the time of filming are hard to come by, at least in my hunting, though a brief documentary report – Inauguracio de la Central Tèrmica del Besòs, dir. Joan Capdevila Nogués (available at archive.org) – does show a similar angle of Besos I, circa its official inauguration in August of 1968. That film is the source of this article’s header image.
The Besos I and II facilities were deactivated and dismantled beginning in 2003, a year after the 400MW Besos III and IV groups went on-line. Their demolition was completed in July of 2007, with the felling (by 30 kilos of Goma-2 explosives) of the grouping’s 394-foot-tall chimney.
In the background left of that same opening shot, looking uncharacteristically small, is a veritable symbol of 20th century Catalonian power generation, las tres chimeneas – then the central termica de Sant Adria. This trio of 350MW generator groups was practically new at the time of Hell of the Living Dead‘s production, having been brought on-line (from back to front in the image below) in 1973, ’74, and ’76, and appear occasionally in the background of the picture. One notable telephoto shot of them, seen through some lamp posts, appears late in the film.
It’s a shame they weren’t utilized more by the production, as their brutalist concrete construction is monolithic and imposing on a whole other scale from Besos plants I and II. At a height of 200 meters – 656 feet – the structures tower over the surrounding urban landscape of Sant Adria de Besos, and have become iconographic in the 50 years since they were constructed. Rendered obsolete by the activation of Besos V (an 859MW capacity combined cycle plant) in 2010, fully deactivated by 2011 and initially slated for total demolition, the town hall of Sant Adria de Besos (with considerable popular support) instead opted to preserve the three chimneys as a piece of the area’s unique cultural and industrial heritage.
Though Besos I and II are long gone and the three chimneys have stood long enough to have become nostalgic local iconography, some irony arrives by way of the Mattei film and the less charitable aspects of the plants’ own histories. The HOPE Centers of Hell of the Living Dead are said to have been constructed for the betterment of the third world nations they inhabit, but this is just a smokescreen. In the world of the film they are instead the machinations of an insidious multinational conspiracy to resolve the perceived crisis of overpopulation through mass extermination, an experimental program in mad science that aims for genocide and births the apocalypse. After a critical failure in one of its modules leaves its workers dead, dying, or worse, the Papuan HOPE Center spews green clouds of noxious gas out into the surrounding countryside, poisoning all who dwell there and raising the dead to eat the living.
By grim contrast central termica del Besos I and II and, especially, the central termica de Sant Adria were locally notorious in their own time for their pollution of the city around them. While towers I and III were converted in the 1980’s to also burn natural gas the central chimney of Sant Adria, which ran only in times of peak demand, burned fuel oil. In the ’00s Sant Adria II became synonymous with ferrous “black rain” and with the persistent soot that afflicted nearby property, a fact that inspired official investigation and forced the plant’s closure in 2002. There are few images to be found online of it as it was known then, when it was often marred black by the oil it burned. It feels appropriate, if a bit hyperbolic, that it be immortalized as a source of deathly zombifying emissions in a cult horror picture.
A tour of central térmica de Sant Adria del Besos, from 2008 (when facilities I and III were still operating), is below:
An unnamed housewife is expecting a few friends over for bridge, but her floors are scuffed and time is short!
Such is the dilemma presented by ‘Nick of Time, a brisk 30 second ad spot produced by Cascade Pictures of California, Inc., at the behest of Wisconsin-based SC Johnson for their “push button floor care” product, Pronto. The solution to the problem in this case is foregone, of course. After all, Pronto “perks up floors fast!”
I have no date for this production, though the late 1960s / early 1970s are suspected (any later than that seems highly unlikely, given the aesthetic aspects). The film is printed to reliably faded Eastmancolor, and is the only 35mm currently in my possession that retains its original head and tail leader. It is in relatively good condition, though the inconsistent fading has led to significant flickering in playback.
Continuing on from my efforts with the Il Mostro Invinibile trailer, I scanned this significantly shorter subject (under 750 frames, leader excepted) using a Pentax K-70 DSLR mounted with a HD Pentax-D FA 100mm macro lens, with the Valoi easy35 again serving as my film carrier. I still like this combination a lot, though I’ve had to isolate the camera and the carrier from one another; the easy35mm is intended to attach directly to the camera lens, but the seemingly insignificant play between the two as the film is wound through is enough to cause the lens to drift out of focus.
Workflow from there was fully lossless via Adobe After Effects. The raw .PEF captures were converted directly to lossless AVI at 24fps. Subsequent stabilization and grading was also done in After Effects, with final tweaks done in Kdenlive and final export (to x265 at 92mbps) done with AVIDemux. Sound was again captured at 48khz/24bit using AEO-Light 2, though it suffered from some clipping in places. This was remedied using Audacity.
I actually undertook this project twice over the past week. Results from the first pass were unsatisfactory, a combination of ill focus (lens aperture set too high) and my own forgetfulness – there’s a lot of slightly out of focus dust visible in my first scan, as I neglected to dust my backlight beforehand. Rookie shit, etc., though easily enough remedied by just scanning the film again. The learning curve from my first scanning effort has certainly paid dividends: Scanning this print took less than an hour in both instances. Practice, practice, practice.
I’m very happy with how this project turned out, all in all. The commercial itself, old-fashioned as it can seem 50 years after the fact, is quick on its feet and assuredly made. To set up and pay off a story, however simple, is no mean feat with half a minute of runtime at your disposal. You’ll find the finished project below, with additional versions (including my initial attempt, leaders and all) available in my bonus playlist.
Sometime over the holidays I acquired a 35mm film print.
Sometime over the holidays I decided to scan it.
I did not decide to have it scanned, mind. No. That would have been sensible. Instead I decided, despite my near total lack of experience in this regard, to scan it myself, using the off-the-shelf photography gear already at my disposal: a Pentax K-70 DSLR camera (with HD Pentax-D FA f2.8/100mm macro lens affixed), a nice Oben tripod, and the Valoi easy35 (a contained lightbox and extension tube setup with a simple “gate” that allows for perf-to-perf overscanning).
While I had zero experience working with motion picture film prior to this project, analog film is not alien to me. I have plenty of exposed, developed, and scanned medium format and large format negatives in my history, as well as the odd roll of 36exp 35mm here and there. This print, a trailer running 2 minutes 12 seconds, amounts to roughly forty of those full 35mm rolls, or a little over 200 feet of total film. It’s a lot of film, to be sure, but nothing outrageous. It felt doable.
And it was. Though it was also, inevitably, a huge pain in the ass. I intended this project as a bit of a proof of concept, a step towards a larger project that I may try to tackle in the near future. I’m quite pleased with the end result, room though there yet is for grading, restoration, etc. It worked, dammit, and it honestly didn’t take that long.
The film:
The print in question is an Italian theatrical trailer for the 1968 Japanese children’s tokusatsu feature Gamera vs. Deep Space Monster Viras, which went straight to television in the United States as Destroy All Planets. The film follows a pair of boy scouts who find themselves in the middle of an alien invasion by the squid-ish denizens of planet Viras. With the armies of Earth helpless against the Virasian’s super-science it falls upon Gamera, guardian of the Universe and friend of all children, to set things right.
Gamera vs. Viras was a cheap film. Very cheap by studio standards. Production studio Daiei had suffered from rampant over-spending for most of the ‘60s, when it attempted to break into foreign markets with several lavish 70mm period epics. As recently as 1966 the Gamera franchise had been seen as A-budget material, but just two years later the studio was struggling. Daiei had already lost one of its key stars (Shintaro Katsu, who left Daiei to form his own company in 1967) and was soon to lose another (superstar Raizo Ichikawa, who passed tragically in 1969), and was in desperate need of a turn-around. A turn-around was not forthcoming.
It was in this environment, with a budget slashed to a third that of the previous year’s Gamera vs. Gyaos, that Gamera vs. Viras was made. As a feature it suffers from the obvious constraints. Locations are limited, and interiors even more so. There are significantly fewer special effects setups than in past efforts, and director and special effects supervisor Noriyaki Yuasa (The Little Hero) is obviously stretched thin. As a result the film runs short, just 72 minutes. International versions, in keeping with distributor-mandated feature running times of an hour and a half, were saddled with an extensive stock footage replay of the major moments of the past two Gamera films, a slogging montage that runs a full 18 minutes.
The film is, to be blunt, a mess, but it’s also full of imaginative details… the Virasian’s psychedelic mala spaceships, their crews of abducted / possessed human beings with psychically-controlled detachable limbs and flashing yellow eyes, and a central villain who absorbs his crewmates and grows to kaiju proportions. Gamera’s bizarre space-age charms are well in evidence, and the effects that bookend the feature, though brief, are well done.
As a feature Gamera vs. Viras almost inevitably falls short, pitched as it was against the cost-cutting machinations of a studio in decline, but it cuts a damn fine trailer.
The Trailer:
In Italy Gamera vs. Viras was marketed as The Invincible Monster (Il Mostro Invincibile), and “ilmostro generoso” Gamera was re-christened King – the same distributor, Distributori Europei Associati, also released 1969’s Gamera vs. Guiron (under the highly litigible title King Kong contro Godzilla), and one assumes (the posters have no distributor listed) they were responsible for 1970’s Gamera vs. Jiger ne Kinkong L’impero dei draghi as well. Viras was in distribution there for a while it seems, and plenty of memorabilia in evidence of its various issues and reissues is available at any given time at online auction.
To which specific release my trailer print belongs is unknown – the earliest would have been in 1969. It has no distributor marks, but carries the first-run title (the film was eventually retitled Ai confini del mondo: Il Mostro Invincibile). While several cuts are missing from the head and tail, which accounts for the short running time of 2:12, the trailer otherwise follows the continuity of the one produced by Daiei for the film’s domestic release and was obviously cut from a clean element of the same.
Audio likewise follows the Daiei trailer, but is fully dubbed with Italian narration and dialog, and is mixed over a clean version of the trailer’s original music and effects. It includes sections of both versions of the “Gamera March” produced for the film (vinyl 7” promotional releases of these were issued each year from 1968 to 1971 as tie-ins with those years’ Gamera adventures) as well as a selection of recycled cues from Tadashi Yamanouchi’s score for the previous series entry, Gamera vs. Gyaos.
The trailer and its monophonic optical audio were printed to Kodak Safety Film, which hasn’t aged especially well in its 50 plus years. Several sections are warped or stained, the perfs are brittle and in some sections broken, and the image has shifted powerfully to the red throughout. Darker sections can look quite blotchy, and there is significant print damage. It is not, at least by my estimation, in any kind of traditionally screenable condition.
The Scan:
I scanned each of the trailer’s three thousand one hundred and seventy-three frames by hand at a resolution of 5600×4000 (including perf overscan), with my camera set on a 2-second delay to ensure stability. I began with the standard Valoi easy35 mat, which cuts off most of the film perfs, but found the results too difficult to work with, forcing a re-scan of around a third of the print. This process took around fifteen hours, which were divided across four or five days. I ran pixel-mapping on my camera regularly (every five hundred frames or so) to mitigate the issue of dead pixels.
From there my workflow was entirely digital, and aside from the final grading and export (which were done at ‘Scope matted 4k, 3840×2160) all work was done at the capture’s native 5600×4000 resolution.
The full list of software, a mix of mostly free / GNU public video applications, is as follows: AVIdemux (for initial image sequencing and later transcoding), Adobe CC After Effects (used to stabilize the images in-motion), Kdenlive (for general editing and grading), AEO-Light 2 (a lossless audio extractor for archival optical film soundtracks), and Audacity (used to trim head and tail of the audio).
I can’t recommend any of these tools enough, though I wish I could have managed an open source solution instead of After Effects. Blender is promising in this regard, though my tests were unsatisfactory – marred, no doubt, by user error. Fusion has been recommended as well, though for the moment irresoluble dll errors have prevented me from using it.
Once the initial scan was complete the full digital workflow took around fifteen hours, again spread over several days. The scanning process, which invariably results in geometric inconsistencies from scene to scene and often frame to frame, required a lot of work to correct, though that process was easier than I anticipated. After Effects’ “warp stabilizer”, set to merely position, rotate, and maintain scale, was invaluable.
I opted for a what-you-see approach to the process, eschewing any restorative work (dust removal, noise reduction, spot repair, etc.) beyond an effort to bring back some of the trailer’s original color. Matching Daiei’s comparatively bright and saturated trailer (as shown on the Kadokawa blu-ray of the film) was impossible owing to the deterioration of my print, which improves marginally in this regard as one nears the end. I have, of course, archived my scans of the film and the original sequences of the same, in case I get bored someday and decide to revisit this project with a more reparative mindset.
The Results:
Shared below are the end product (x264 encodes from my UT Video originals) in two flavors, one showing the raw output with After Effects stabilization and the other the complete color corrected and cropped trailer – a full playlist for this project is here. I opted to show more of the frame rather than crop accurately to theatrical ratios, which leaves the title element off-center the few times that it appears. Subtitles are provided in English via Youtube Captions, and were translated from an AI transcription of the trailer’s audio.
They aren’t perfect. Banding is evident in places, a combined effect (I suspect, at least) of camera limitations and the shear amount of adjustments that went into correcting the heavily shifted color. The image also isn’t as stable as I’d have liked, which is down to limitations of my current setup. It is what it is: A first attempt, with plenty of room for improvement in the future. And in that respect I’m quite proud of it.
This is by no means the end of my efforts to scan 35mm motion picture film, though I’m definitely going to take a break. Most of the work detailed above was done at my standing desk, and while having the completed trailer viewable on any screen (instead of stuck in a box someplace, as it has been for the last half century) is very rewarding, it does nothing to ease my back pain.
Presented today are a set of curiosities; five lobby cards dating from the theatrical release of Shochiku’s perennial kaiju cash-in The X From Outer Space. Details are scarce, unfortunately. X saw its first domestic Japanese release in March of 1967, at the height of the Apollo-inspired space craze, but it was in regional theatrical distribution for the next couple of decades. Where the Philippines release falls on that timeline is, at least to the author, unknown.
Further complicating matters is the text that appears on several of the cards, much of which appears to have been deliberately lopped off at some point. The title iconography remains, as does the format hype for the color ‘Scope feature – here it is presented in ‘METROCOLOR’ and ‘Super Ultra Dimension SCOPE’. While the latter is a nonsense rebranding of the film’s generic anamorphic production, the former suggests the involvement of MGM (or at least an MGM film lab) at some point in the process.
The cards themselves are in rough shape, obviously theater-used and well aged, with plenty of tears, crinkles, sunburn and foxing. The most interesting is presented first, an image which was ‘colorized’ at some point in the process. The garish neon hues aren’t especially convincing, but they do lend the image a peculiar aesthetic. The rest are monochrome, each marked with a bit of hand-written script. One retains a tantalizing, indecipherable remnant of the further text that was cropped from these cards.
This full-page ad, which appears as the back cover for the industry publication Motion Picture Herald’s April 27th 1966 issue, dates from just a few days after Gamera vs. Barugon‘s domestic release in Japan. No mention is made of an available English track (as Daiei did for some available features), though one was produced and has been presented on some video editions.
The film follows Barugon, loosed from its giant gemstone egg by treasure hunters, as it lashes out against the cities of Kobe and Osaka and comes into conflict with the giant monster Gamera. Gamera vs. Barugon debuted in Japanese cinemas on April 17th, 1966. Shortly thereafter American International Pictures’ TV imprint released an abridged English version straight to US television as War of the Monsters.
Motion Picture Herald was a trade publication primarily for exhibitors and owners of theater chains, and was in publication from 1931 (when it was consolidated under that banner from a number of other trade publications owned by Chicago-based publisher Martin Quigley) until 1972.
