Goddamn Brownies

Not that it should be any surprise to anyone, but we, the horror consumers, are being screwed over yet again. This time Warner Bros. is the offending party with the new Blu-Ray release of the George A. Romero/Stephen King horror anthology classic Creepshow.



I'm sure the transfer has been cleaned up a bit for this high def medium, but where are the extras? The only other Creepshow release in the US was bare bones, yet Creepshow 2 received an awesome two-disc release. I think the fans deserve some bonus features. We don't really need them to do anything new, just port over the extras from the awesome double disc release from the UK over a year ago.

A guy named Michael Felsher, Red Shirt Pictures, produced some behind the scenes stuff for a non-existent special edition of Creepshow. This is the guy behind all of your favorite features from recent releases such as The Monster Squad, Dark Sky's special edition of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hellraiser and the upcoming Children of the Corn Blu-Ray. After everything was edited he went to Warner with all of the extras ready to go. They passed. He tried a few more times to reason with the studio, according to a Q&A I heard, to no avail. Across the pond the rights are owned by Universal and they jumped at the chance to do a sweet special edition for the fans. Why shouldn't they, the UK seems to get all the cool releases - Phantasm sphere set, Hellraiser lament configuration box set. The Creepshow SE has tons of great things like commentary with Romero and Tom Savini, around fifteen minutes of deleted scenes, thirty minutes of Savini's personal behind-the-scenes footage and Felsher's 90 minute (!) retrospective documentary. Who wouldn't want this?

I don't know why Warner is being so stubborn and releasing this Blu-Ray version with no extras when they are available and could easily be thrown on the disc. They would need to be converted to HD first, but Felsher probably already has them that way in anticipation. I will not buy this Blu-Ray release, even though I love the movie, in hopes they will eventually release a better version. It is annoying that they even consider doing this when they could do it right the first time, but you cannot win. Studios will do what they want and we are left to suffer through their mediocre releases, both mentally and economically.

Will it ever end?