Dark Force Entertainment Announces Two First-Time Blu-ray Double-Features For Release On Apr. 28

It was called “bicycling the prints.”  Independent filmmakers often couldn’t afford a national theatrical launch, complete with what is termed “prints and advertising” — just “P&A” for short — so they finished their film and had the nearest lab strike a dozen 35mm prints (maybe a little more, maybe a little less) and then they would take their baby on the road.   

We have news about some of these famous “road stories” this week … making their way to Blu-ray for the first time!!!

Dark Force Entertainment, with sales and distribution expertise provided by MVD Entertainment Group, has a pair of Blu-ray double features — again, all making their first-time appearances on Blu-ray — ready for release on Apr. 28.

Bicycling prints to local venues was common in the 1950s through the 1970s, and then a more efficient way to get micro-budget and indie films out to a wider audience was found in the form of VHS and a new term, “Direct to Video” was born.   

However, Dark Force has some classics that were pre-VHS theatrical releases.  All four films are newly re-mastered from the best surviving source material … in some cases going so far as to go into scene-by-scene correction to achieve Blu-ray standard quality.

So let’s get to it.    First up is Drive-In Double Feature #4, fans get the double-bill of writer/director Harry Kerwin’s summer of 1975 release of God's Bloody Acre (filmed in Florida and bicycled around the area), which is teamed with director Harry Thomason’s 1973 axe-murdering tale, So Sad About Gloria (filmed in Arkansas, released locally in Little Rock and then shelved for two years before being picked up by Libra Films in 1975).

God's Bloody Acre features a trio of backwoods-dwellers, Monroe (played by William Kerwin … a long-time associate of Herschell Gordon Lewis back in the day, starring in Two Thousand Maniacs! and Blood Feast), Benny (Sam Moree) and Ezra (Daniel Schweitzer), who suddenly find that civilization is encroaching on their domain — construction workers — and so they decide to do something about it.

But wait, the victim pool isn’t quite big enough, so enter a footloose couple, David (played by Wayne Crawford, who co-wrote … he also was scriptwriter for the likes of Jake Speed, Valley Girl and Tomcats) and Leslie (Jennifer Stock — Bloodsucking Freaks, Shriek of the Mutilated).   There is also a vacationing couple in an RV.   Now you can have enough for carnage and rape … and of course not everyone makes it to the end-credits.

As to So Sad About Gloria, producer Harry Thomason, who was nominated for Emmys three times for his Designing Women comedy series, got his start here with this story of a would-be heiress — fresh from the nut house — by the name of Gloria (played by Lori Saunders, who had starred for five of the seven seasons in the comedy series Petticoat Junction) who is released to the care of her kindly uncle Fred (played by Dean Jagger).  

As she tries to get back to a normal life, she meets Chris (Robert Ginnaven), falls in love and marries him.   Meanwhile, lovely young ladies are being hacked to pieces by an axe-murderer and all signs point to an unhinged Gloria … but is it really her or someone else?   Whack, whack, whack … who is next?

Also arriving on Apr. 28 from Dark Force Entertainment is the action double-bill titled Drive-In Double Feature #5, which features writer/director Walter Cichy’s 1977 murder spree film, Cop Killers (filmed in and around Tucson, Arizona), starring Jason Williams (Flesh Gordon, Down and Out in Beverly Hills) and Bill Osco (The Being) as two drug runners who see things spin wildly out of control when they are stopped at a road block.  

Teamed with Cop Killers is director William Girdler’s Project: Kill, starring none other than Leslie Nielsen as a government agent involved in a drug-infused mind-control experiment who goes on the run … eventually everyone is after him, either to shut him up or get the secrets he possesses.

This one was shot in the Philippines, which was very popular at the time.  Girdler was on a roll after Project: Kill, with the smash indie hit Grizzly, which was followed by Day of the Animals … he then returned to the Philippines for his next film, The Manitou, but was killed in a helicopter accident.