Kickstarter: Howl From Beyond the Fog

[Gigantis_99]

Didn't see this posted anywhere so I thought I would put a link to it. Keizo Murase, who made the suits for Varan, Matango, et al., is making the puppets for a new kaiju film. So check it out.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/38 ... hanks_link

[klen7]

This is so wonderful. I'm in

[Gwangi]

Cool!

[DannyBeane]

This looks bad ass. I am going to put in the $50 for the blu ray reward. It'd be worth it just to get the detailed suit making instructions!

[lhb412]

This is just so cool, especially since the story it's based on inspired the movie that inspired Godzilla! To go back and readapt the story in a culturally Japanese context is awesome!

[tbeasley]

[mr.negativity]

Backstage of Pilot Movie "Howl from beyond the Fog"

[Dai]

I spent a long time mulling over whether I could justify £28 for a 30-minute short, but finally bought it. The movie itself is impressive, especially the atmospheric lighting and air of melancholy to the story. Unfortunately it's ruined by the worst subtitle track I've seen since Mill Creek's first pressing of Gamera 3. Yes, it's that bad. There are numerous instances of translation errors, awkward wording, and typos. Some are just distracting; the worst reduce some lines of dialogue to gibberish. How something with a mere 30-minute runtime was released in this state is beyond me, especially with such a high price tag.

I emailed SRS two weeks ago to ask if there's a corrected disc, but haven't received a reply yet.

[Dai]

Regarding the problems I mentioned above, I made three attempts to contact SRS in April and May, twice by email and once on Facebook. They never replied. If you're ever planning to buy one if their products, be aware of the shoddy quality control and total lack of customer service.

[Benjamin Haines]

Yeah, SRS Cinema has always been a very small-time outlet that traffics in the lowest-budget independent fare. The number of units they produce for their DVD and BRD releases is usually very limited and the company probably has fewer than a dozen employees total, so their quality control is always a crapshoot and I'm not surprised that they've shown you no customer service. The only reason that you and I and other kaiju fans own anything released by SRS Cinema is because they started licensing obscure tokusatsu a few years ago, the kind with such niche sales potential that no other distributor ever goes for it.

Which edition of Howl From Beyond the Fog do you have? They released it on BRD in 2020 and then they re-released it in 2021 with cover art by Matt Frank along with a DVD edition. I have the 2021 BRD and I don't know if the subtitles were cleaned up at all from the first pressing. There are a few typos here and there but the only part where it really gets garbled is the mother's dialogue near the end, otherwise I think the biggest issue with the subtitles is the timing, how some of the longest lines are onscreen for only a couple of seconds.

[Dai]

^ My copy has a reversible cover and a 2021 copyright date on the back, so it must be the reissue.

The SRS Facebook feed definitely gives the impression of them being a fairly small company, but deprioritising customer service is still a business choice. There's an anime distributor in the UK called MVM who are famous for their excellent customer service despite being a two-person operation. They always do a new pressing to fix disc problems, replace faulty products without a fuss, and engage with the fan community. If SRS had replied to say they couldn't afford to fix the problem it would be one thing, but them not even bothering to reply is irritating.

[Benjamin Haines]

^ MVM sounds like a class act of professionalism. SRS Cinema seems to be the opposite!

[lhb412]

The one time SRS's unprofessionalism benefited me was when I preordered the (less expensive) DVD of Wangmagwi and, months later, relieved the Blu-ray instead!

[Benjamin Haines]

^ Ha! That's awesome.

Space Monster Wangmagwi is the perfect example of why we still end up buying SRS Cinema's products. That Korean movie is from 1967 but it has never had any other official home video release in any country in the world! They'll also be releasing Keizo Murase's Brush of the God soon. There's just no other distributor going for movies like this.

It definitely makes me miss the days of the mid 2000s when Media Blasters released a lot of tokusatsu DVDs. They're a small operation too and they had a hard time making their own release dates but the quality of their DVDs was solid no matter how much fans complained, and MB always understood the importance of quality subtitles.