Vinegar Syndrome Announces It October Slate Of New Film Restoration • Street Date Will Be Oct. 26

Vinegar Syndrome announced its late October film restoration slate this past week.   The street date for the five-strong slate of films heading home as Blu-ray product offerings will be Oct. 26.

Leading the parade is writer/director Thomas R. Rondinella’s 1989 film release of Blades, which was originally a Troma Entertainment theatrical release.   It has been around forever as VHS and, as near as we can figure, on DVD from Troma back in 2004 as part of a triple-feature promotion.  

This is a new 2K film restoration from Vinegar Syndrome — from the original camera negative — and the Oct. 26 date will mark Blades’ Blu-ray debut.

Blades was Rondinella’s directing debut.  He was a film school grad from NYU, got real-world experience as the AD on writer/director John P. Finnegan’s 1985 film, Girls School Screamers and then became both a college professor and a film producer (mainly short films and documentaries under the Catfish Studios banner).

Filmed in New Jersey, we find that a killing spree is taking place at The Tall Grass Country Club, but it is not your run of the mill serial killer on the loose.   Instead, it is an industrial-sized lawnmower that is grinding up those on the links.  

Troma made no secret of it at the time, Blades, was Jaws on a golf course.  It was a spoof, a horror-spoof of Spielberg’s Jaws.   It literally wrote itself, all of the elements of Jaws were baked into the production, including a dead-on riff of the music.

It falls to Deke Slade (Jeremy Whelan), Roy Kent (Robert North), a former pro golfer who has seen better days, and rising amateur Kelly Lange (Victoria Scott), to hunt down the land-shark (er, lawnmower) before the big tournament arrives.   Otherwise, it could be a national disaster.

Bonus “divots” include commentary from filmmaker Thomas R. Rondinella, who is joined by co-writer William R. Pace, plus there is the featurette titled “Fore Warning.”

Also on the Blu-ray release calendar from Vinegar Syndrome on Oct. 26 are director Jim Clarke’s 1981 adult film release of Debbie Does Dallas, Part II, starring Bambi Woods; director Russell Mulcahy’s 1999 direct-to-video serial killer thriller, Resurrection, featuring Christopher Lambert; director Richard Styles’ Shallow Grave and the French-language import, Devil Story.