As many of you may know, I am a huge fan of movies, and in recent years I have become absolutely enamored with the Blu-Ray format — as everyone should, in my humble opinion.

As Halloween is once again racing towards us, I could not help but notice, however, the dearth of releases these days. Sure, DVD is flooded with cheap indie releases and re-releases of titles ad nauseam, but on Blu-Ray, the studios are still holding back their catalog quite severely. It appears as if barely any catalog titles are being transferred onto the high definition format and all we really get are the movies coming off their box office run or new straight-to-home video releases.

Like most people, around the Halloween time frame I love to watch a few good horror movies and as I look through the release schedules, the only horror I find is the shocking realization that nothing is coming…

I mean, seriously, if it weren’t for Blue Underground’s upcoming Blu-Ray version of Lucio Fulci’s Zombie a few days before Halloween and Lionsgate’s recent release of the Peter Jackson horror comedy Dead Alive, there is not a single horror movie in sight that is in any way intriguing or exciting.

Every year, Universal Home Entertainment refurbishes their entire horror line-up, and this year is no exception. The list of films the studio runs in promotions throughout October is almost endless – 69 titles, to be exact! Out of all these films, however, springs not a single new Blu-Ray release. Movies that are available already are re-promoted but none of the other films are making a Blu-Ray debut.

To me, as a fan of classic horror, this is painful to watch. Why don’t we get high definition versions of the monster classics like “Dracula,” Frankenstein,” “The Wolf Man,” “The Mummy” and their many sequels that are once again being offered up on DVD?

Why is Halloween not an occasion to bring to the world a high definition version of Wes Craven’s hauntingly staggering “Serpent and the Rainbow” or John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness,” “They Live” and “Village of the Damned,” all of which are part of a new “John Carpenter: Master of Fear” DVD collection that just hit stores?

But Universal is not the only studio sitting on their hands. MGM Home Entertainment, for example, has yet to release John Carpenter’s “The Fog” and not to mention that they have absolutely no plans to release Roger Corman’s classic Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price in high definition.

And why Anchor Bay is not giving us any of the Hammer movies, is anyone’s guess.

It is a trend that worries me. When DVD was first launched, the studios went into complete overkill, releasing even the most mundane niche films as Special Editions with tons of extras. Now, at a time when home video is really offering theater-quality presentations, they are short-shrifting fans, by holding back way too many films. I can understand that they don’t want to go into a feeding frenzy the way they did during the DVD heydays, but leaving the entire catalog to rot in their vaults?

It kind of reminds me of the early days of DVD when the world was clamoring for George Lucas to release “Star Wars” on DVD or for Steven Spielberg to finally come to his senses and embrace the digital age — remember that? Guess what? Those guys jumped into high definition with both feet, and now the studios as a collective are slacking off.

It’s a crazy, crazy world, I tell you, and it makes me sad to see that yet another Halloween rolls around without any exciting horror releases. Dear studios, I refuse to watch kiddie-style horror remakes created by people who obviously never understood the appeal of the original movies in the first place. Like many fans of horror, I would honestly appreciate any kind of effort you would make to bring some of the film we love to Blu-Ray.

Here is something I simply have to post today. This morning I stumbled upon a Facebook posting made by Peter Jackson. Filming of The Hobbit is officially underway — it started three weeks ago — and Jackson has posted a first production video clip on Facebook!

It is a 10-minute video that takes a look at some of the pre-production for the movie and also shows a glimpse of the first few days of shooting. For any fan of “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit,” this video clip is a must-see, so check it out. It makes me salivate and drool like nothing has in a long time. I can’t wait to revisit Middle-Earth with Peter Jackson and his crew at the helm and the wait until next Christmas will once again be a torturous ordeal, brimming with teasers and more teasers, I’m sure.

So, sit back and enjoy the next ten minutes with you host, the incomparable Peter Jackson himself.

Instead of going on about books all the time, today I’m going to talk to you about movies a little bit. As some of you may know, I am also the editor at DVD Review & high definition and have been reviewing movies for that site for the past, I don’t know, fifteen years or so.

There is a movie I’ve been looking forward to seeing for quite some time — John Landis’ latest movie “Burke & Hare.” The reason for it are manifold. For one I am a fan of John Landis and think he’s not only a really smart but an even wittier guy with an endless array of stories to tell. Talk to him for 30 minutes and you’ll be gasping for breath. Seriously!

The other reason is that I am very interested in his take of the “Burke & Hare” story. Readers of my “Jason Dark: Ghost Hunter” series may recall the adventure “Dr. Prometheus,” which dealt with body snatchers, providing human research material – speak bodies – to a certain doctor. This profession of bodysnatchers — or resurrectionists as they were called in those days — was notorious before the Victorian era and with the introduction of the Anatomy Act in 1832, it pretty much died out as it gave doctors legal ways to obtain corpses for research purposes.

Brendan Burke and William Hare were notorious resurrectionists for the reason that makes great movies and literature — they took it a little too far. Finding that digging up corpses was a dirty job and had its own share of problems, they decided to take a short cut. They simply killed people and sold their bodies to Dr. Knox, a man of the medical profession who decided never to ask where the bodies came from.

All counted, Burke and Hare killed 17 people, mostly destitute people from the street, who they lured to their lodging house and then smothered. They continued their killing spree until their activities were discovered in 1829 by another lodger and reported them to the police.

The extreme to which Burke and Hare went actually spawned the creation and passing of the Anatomy Act, which went into effect 3 years later to prevent such atrocities.

In “Dr. Prometheus” I paid a quick homage to these notorious murderers, as attentive readers of the story might have noticed. One of my body snatchers is called Nathan Burke, and when his colleague asks him whether he has the stomach for the job, he simply replies “Stomach? This line of business runs in my family.”
Why am I telling you all this? Well, first of al, I know some of you are curious where some of my inspirations for the Jason Dark adventures come from, and I think this is a perfect example.

But the real reason is that I want to see John Landis’ “Burke & Hare” version, which stars Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis in the leads and has appearances by Christopher Lee, Tim Curry and many others. Sadly, I can’t, because the film has no distributor here in the US. In the UK, the movie has had a theatrical run and is coming the DVD and Blu-Ray next month, while we, here in the US have zilch… not a way to see the film. Is that a bummer, or what?

A friend of mine working in the film industry told me that the asking price for the US distribution rights were simply too high and therefore no studio picked it up for this market.

I wish I could buy the European Blu-Ray version but I am not sure it will play. Since Blu-Ray has region coding I will have to ensure first that the release that Entertainment Films is putting out will be region free. Not sure how to go about that, but we’ll see. Maybe the information will surface on the Internet, as I am sure there’s more people than just me eager to see this film.

The other way would be to find a way to circumvent the region coding on my PS3. I’ve seen very contradictory information about this on the web where some people clam it is possible, others say, it isn’t and others yet say, the latest version of the PS3 does not even support region coding… blech, not helpful at all.

Anyway, I will keep digging and trying to find a way to get my hands on this film. There has to be some way. Until then, I hope you enjoyed the photos and trailer, which I found over on the website of Horrortalk.com