Friday, July 25, 2014

Mickey Spillane IS Mike Hammer... in HD!

On October 14th, Scorpion Releasing presents the 1963 film, The Girl Hunters, starring author Mickey Spillane as his own hardboiled P.I. hero, Mike Hammer, on Blu-ray and DVD. The Blu-ray version will be a limited edition and will be sold only on the Kino-Lorber website. It will feature a brand new 16x9, 2:35 HD master, as well as an audio commentary with Max Allan Collins, and vintage on-camera interviews with Mickey Spillane and Shirley Eaton (Goldfinger). MSRP for the Blu-ray is a hefty 29.95, while the DVD edition will retail for 19.95.

I am deeply annoyed that this will be an expensive Limited Edition online exclusive, but I'll have to get it anyway. I'm a big fan of the movie, and it'll be nice to finally have a quality video edition

Interesting note: back around '95, when I was working at TeknoComix as editor of the comic book series, Mickey Spillane's Mike Danger, I gave Mickey my personal VHS bootleg of this movie because he didn't have a copy and said he hadn't seen it in a decade or two!

Now, if only somebody could release the 1982 version of I, The Jury on Blu-ray...
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2 comments:

  1. Max Allan Collins11:12 AM

    Describing the interviews as "vintage" is a little misleading, and I'd hoped Scorpion's press release would be more specific. Both the Spillane and Eaton interviews were done for my 1999 documentary, MIKE HAMMER'S MICKEY SPILLANE, a revised cut of which is on the Criterion KISS ME DEADLY Blu-ray. In a documentary, of course, you can only use sound bites. So this is the raw footage, with only minor editing, of everything Mickey said about THE GIRL HUNTERS in a five hour interview with him, and everything Shirley said about the film in an hour or so one. Couldn't agree more about the desirability of a Blu-ray of the Assante I, THE JURY, but I also would really, really like a Blu-ray of the 1953 version...particularly in 3D.

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  2. Christopher Mills2:47 PM

    I received my copy of the new GIRL HUNTERS Blu-ray today and watched the first 15 minutes of it. While it's certainly the best-looking version of the film I've seen, it does appear that the company applied some digital edge-enhancement, creating some odd halos around the actors at times. It's not egregious, but it is occasionally distracting.

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