Video: 1080p High Definition / 1.66:1
Audio: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English Original Mono
Subtitles: English SDH
Special Features: Isolated Score Track (2.0 Stereo) / Original Theatrical Trailer / TV Trailer Spot #1
RT: 101 Minutes
NOT RATED
Region-Free
3,000 Unit Limited Edition
“Dandy fantasy adventure, done with great skill and imagination, keyed by a fine Bernard Herrmann score, a pip of this kind.” —The New York Times
“It should thrill the gee-whillickers out of anybody.” —Time Magazine
DVD booklet excerpts by Julie Kirgo:
Mysterious Island (1961) opens with a spectacular clash of signature Bernard Herrmann brass; from then on, it’s a headlong rush from one thrill-packed set-piece to the next. This classic fantasy adventure tale, the best of many screen adaptations of Jules Verne’s sequel to his own Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, is the inspired collaboration of a superb action director—Cy Endfield, who would give us one of the greatest of all true-life epics, 1964’s Zulu—and an authentic Hollywood genius: Ray Harryhausen, inventor of the film’s “SuperDynaMation” stop-motion animation process and a “total” filmmaker, spearheading the story, art direction, and design of such masterworks as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).
Legend has it that Harryhausen’s producing partner, Charles H. Schneer, hit upon Mysterious Island as the team’s next project after reading a public library survey indicating that the book was the “most looked-at” item on the shelves. But the film was also Columbia Pictures’ vigorous answer to two successful Disney movies: an earlier Verne adaptation, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and the more recent Swiss Family Robinson (1960). Mysterious Island would provide the best of both: the Verne fantasy element, featuring the return of the mad genius Captain Nemo (incarnated here by the impressively dignified Herbert Lom), intertwining with a tale of ship/balloon-wreck survival. The extra added attraction, of course, would be the mind-boggling creatures crafted by Ray Harryhausen.
Unlike some of the more fantastical wonders in Harryhausen’s arsenal—drawn from myth or legend, from a prehistoric past or an alien-invaded future—the “monsters” of Mysterious Island have a new kind of strangeness: they are, for the most part, eye-poppingly enlarged versions of everyday fauna, the products of Nemo’s experiments in what he calls “horticultural physics.” As usual, the Captain’s goal is as huge as his gigantic bees, crabs, sea snails, and fowl: where once he attempted to end war by perversely constructing its ultimate instrument, the death-wielding submarine, Nautilus (which makes a cameo appearance here), now he’s focused on conquering what he identifies as war’s causes—famine and economic competition—by guaranteeing “an inexhaustible food supply.”
It’s certainly a big food supply—and one that provides most of Mysterious Island’s most delightful chills and thrills. The castaways—a motley collection of Civil War-era POWs, a newspaperman, and a lone Rebel sentry who’ve all made an exciting escape from a Confederate prison in a storm-tossed balloon, plus two shipwrecked English gentlewomen who propitiously arrive to sew, keep the cave tidy, and provide a bit of pulchritude—not only have to battle nature in order to survive, but a gargantuan nature, transformed by Nemo (read: Harryhausen) to fascinating if terrifying proportions.
For the complete notes see the DVD booklet!
