What 8mm films did I watch last night?

[Oliver Feld]

I screened my piccolo film (Universal 8) 2-parter of „Jaws“, which is a great edit, but faded to red… It helps me to bridge the time for the new edit by Dave! Can’t wait to screen „the new version“!

[Lee Mannering]

Jurassic Park 600ft new release. Watched it in our family tent camping with 40+ sheep around us. Scared the hell out of em but what a beautiful 8mm print.
projected on my Bolex HID prototype 8ft image and looks fantastic.
That new release will be very valuable in years to come..a sound investment!

[Graham Ritchie]

Lee

Just curious, you say you were in your family tent with 40 plus sheep around you, where did you plug the Bolex into?

[Steve Klare]

Last night I watched a 300 Footer called "The Slim Princess", A film about a visit during the last days of the Southern Pacific narrow gauge line out in the California Desert. This was given to me by a dear friend who found it and knew how much I'd appreciate it.
(-and I do!)

This line was scrapped in the early 1960s. I have a lot of other film of long lost railroad lines, particularly narrow gauge ones. What makes this one special is what almost all of the others lack: sound.

What also is special is who made the film. The copyright at the end belongs to Chadwell O'Connor. I looked him up: he was a mechanical engineer and a keen railroad fan. He'd noticed when filming trains using a tripod, his pans following the trains were often jerky, so he invented the fluid tripod head to smooth them out. He kept this to himself, but it didn't stay a secret too long. One day when he was out filming trains, he met and befriended another railroad fan named Walt Disney, who liked the head so much he agreed to buy a bunch of them for the nature documentary his studio was working on: The Living Desert. Eventually O'Connor opened a manufacturing company to offer these commercially. O'Connor Engineering also got into the engineering side of restoring and building steam locomotives. When Disneyland needed a steamboat, this company built the boiler and engine for it.

Much like his pal Walt, he eventually had a railroad of his own!

[Melvin England]

Still catching up on one or two recent purchases. A nice long evening it has been.


1x 400' - The Odessa File - Yes, I know I watched that one last week, but have since given it a good clean, and so now what was a pretty good copy to start with looks even better now without the speckle marks.

6x 400' - Casablanca - Alleluya! I have been searching for reels 1 and 6 of this feature for years and I have finally tracked down a complete full length feature of it which I viewed for the first time in my super 8 life in its entirety. Utterly superb!......but you already know that!

3x 600' - Days of Thrills and Laughter - Robert Youngson's compilation film of extracts from the silent era featuring all the big stars of the day.... Snub Pollard, Charlie Chaplin, Ben Turpin, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy (separately), Douglas Fairbanks and lots of others. Fascinating stuff.

[Dominique De Bast]

The Incredible Hulk, the 240m/800ft digest. The film is fading but colours are still good in most of the sequences. As usual, the red tint appears on darker pictures. Raising The Titanic, the 180m/600ft Derann scope version. My copy has a French soundtrack on the track 1 and the original sound in English on the track 2. Big mystery for me : on several projectors, it's impossible to read the track 1 only, whatever how I set the buttons.

[Lee Mannering]

OUR ANNUAL BELA LUGOSI MEMORIAL SHOW who passed this day 16th.

Something we have been doing for a few decades now and nice to remember a great of the silver screen.
(16mm Devil Bat)
Super 8mm: Lugosi Interview-Dracula 400ft and the final feature Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Another memorable gathering for the local Lugosi fan base and the first time we have celebrated with HID lighting. Bela looked excellent.

Ended with a short HD video filmed at his memorial in Holy Cross Cemetery kindly filmed by a USA fan for the event.

[Dominique De Bast]

Blackbeard The Pirate (1952), dubbed in French. The film has still good colours. It's a 2x240 m/2x800 ft version but obviousely, slightly abridged. And with my Eumig HID projector (although I usually project only standard/regular 8 films with it) : Mighty Joe Young (1949). My copie has lines but I did enjoy the projection.

[Dominique De Bast]

I set the Eumig hid 860 black to standard/regular 8 and screened A Desert Wooing. Great to see this film with the hid lamp.

[Stuart Budd]

Westworld the other night. Then for some unknown reason, the Eumig 710 discided to chew the leader and part of the written text "Westworld". I'll sort it. Tonight back from work the Bauer T430 had arrived. Smokey and the Bandit. Not a bad print if I say so myself. Of course, my home cine experience is Westworld and Smokey thus far . The Bauer is ok too.

[Steve Klare]

Tonight, kind of Eclectic!

Christmas Trailer #1 from The Reel Image. Mine was part of the second printing and it was well past the Holiday Season when it arrived. With Summer Craziness I just haven't had the chance to view it while keeping the surprise for the rest of the family. I liked it a lot and I'll have to say it's really nice to still be able to buy new Super-8 prints this far into what we used to call "The Future" (-after The Year 2000: ray guns, flying cars and vacations on Mars) when I was a little kid! Since it's still August, we will call tonight an advance preview.

Star Trek Space Seed (3x400' united on a 1200 Ft. Reel). (In this case just because I felt like it.) Here we meet our old friend Kahn from Star Trek II, yet a couple of decades earlier and not nearly so unhinged! It's a great episode, but I think it could have become a training film for Star Fleet Cadets about how NOT to lose your ship to a hijacker. ("Rule #1: Do not give personnel access to Engineering Drawings until they have received proper security clearance.")

This is a Canterbury Films Print (-at least I'm pretty sure...): All things considered, not bad at all: -a little bit reddish, but it has nothing on my Trouble With Tribbles 3x400 which is basically unwatchable.

[Dominique De Bast]

Yes, Steve, it's a miracle that there are still super 8 releases in 2021 !

I've just projected "Crainquebille", a French silent film on standard 8 I wanted to see with the Eumig HID projector.

[Lee Mannering]

Missed your message Graham. Majority of UK camp sites offer power hook up and if we go camping BASIC in a farmers field they let us run a cable.
The great outdoors with a Eumig oh and a wife.


Terminator 2 Scope always a memorable event even with the lumpy bumpy stripe.

[Stuart Budd]

The Sound of Music. My latest purchase. Supposed to be B&W but I seem to be getting colour out of it. Must be the lens on my 822 SonoMatic. Brilliant

Not quite Terminator or scope but I'm chuffed

[Melvin England]

After last weekends dip into 16mm for the first time since my projectors were serviced, I was back to super 8mm this time and a recent purchase. I don't like to wait too long before viewing films..... just in case there is a problem with it.

So tonight.... on the GS1200..... in mono.......but in cinemascope....... 4x 600'........ Raise The Titanic ! Lovely colour, hardly a scratch and crystal clear sound. A superb copy.

The film itself wasn't too bad. Better than many people have said, and I suppose it was okay for 1980 but now we have since seen real pictures of the wreck the shortcomings of the underwater sequences were more apparent..... apart from the fact that we also know that the real Titanic is now too far gone to be moved, even if it were even physically possible to do it, and also we now know it was broken in two which now renders this film factually inaccurate and has really to be treated just as a bit of fantasy and not taken too seriously.
It would be interesting to see the 1x 600' edit......

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