Lost and found

Imagine my surprise when I found a reference to Lionsgate Entertainment releasing a "Lost Collection" tomorrow while reading the Wikipedia entry for Repossessed. Searching for "the lost collection" on Amazon yielded the following movies:

My Best Friend's a Vampire
Repossessed
Slaughter High

For the sake of completeness, here are the non-horror titles in the collection:

Hiding Out
Homer and Eddie
Irreconcilable Differences
Morgan Stewart's Coming Home
Night Before

According to the profiles on Amazon.com, the DVDs will include special trivia tracks. However, they also seem to indicate that all the DVD transfers are in the 1.33: 1 aspect ratio (fullscreen). I couldn't find any information about the original aspect ratios for any of the horror titles, but the Internet Movie Database pages for Hiding Out, Homer and Eddie, and Irreconcilable Differences note that those titles have an aspect ratio of 1.85: 1. So unless it's an error on the part of Amazon or the IMDB, this could mean that the transfers were cropped from their original aspect ratios. The only other option I can think of is that the films were shot open matte, which basically means that nothing will be cropped out when the film is presented in fullscreen.

I can only hope that Lionsgate did not choose to use cropped transfers, as it would be a giant step back from their widescreen releases of Alligator and The Monster Squad. If they didn't, then I hope that the next batch of forgotten 80's films includes Blood Diner and Demonwarp.

I also found out that, thanks to a chance reading of Entertainment Weekly at the doctor's office, Warner Brothers is opening a website called warnerarchive.com. The Warner Archive Collection will offer over 100 movies that have previously gone unreleased for sale via DVD and paid downloads. I haven't had the time to go through the list of films, so here's hoping that some horror and sci-fi movies get included in the mix.