Kino's AIP BLACK SABBATH & BLACK SUNDAY Cancelled (1 Viewer)

Apparently the English-language AIP versions of Mario Bava's BLACK SABBATH and BLACK SUNDAY have been abruptly cancelled by Kino, who cites "contractual issues," just over a week before they were supposed to street. I posted this in the Kino Announcement thread, but didn't want to hijack that one.

https://www.facebook.com/kinolorberinc

Doing some more research, it seems that a prevailing theory is that the titles were pulled, not for the aforementioned "contractual issues," but because review copies of BLACK SABBATH are incredibly out of sync, something that, along with similar problems with ON THE BEACH, seems to indicate that there are some serious QC problems at Kino:

http://monsterkidclassichorrorforum.yuku.com/topic/54971/Kino-BLACK-SUNDAYBLACK-SABBATH-AIP-versions-double-feature?page=4#.VCWqmN5BL22

I'm becoming significantly more leery about pre-ordering Kino products anymore, despite the pre-order price advantage; any titles with glitches or sync issues are getting sent back to Amazon as defective.

Hmm I bought both those films on blu-ray recently here in the UK from a company named Arrow video, I haven't watched them yet. 3 discs each movie including DVD and packed with extras including commentaries and a booklet.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Sunday-Dual-Format-Blu-ray/dp/B009WU5YVE/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1411757919&sr=1-1&keywords=black+sunday

The Arrow releases, which include both versions of each film and a host of supplemental material, are pure gold.

I went region free specifically because of the problems with Kino disks. Masters of Cinema and Arrow are a million times better.

Yeah, my region-free mod for my Oppo-95 isn't working (for whatever reason), which was disappointing given I just came back from a trip to the UK. I own the Arrow BLACK SABBATH and have never been able to watch the damn thing!

Yes, the Arrow releases are perfect. This is very peculiar but it felt peculiar long ago.

If they pulled it because of the sync issues, that should mean it will be coming in the future. 10x better than releasing a botched product.

Although "contractual issues"? Come oooon!

Edit: Assuming this was indeed pulled because of rights issues, it would be more disappointing to think they were planning to release a blu-ray with such a major sync issue, dwarfing that of On the Beach.

If it were sync issues then why cancel it? I remember Shout had indicated it would put the AIP version of Witchfinder General in the first Vincent Price Collection and cancelled that. I just wonder it there are legal issues with the AIP versions of these movies. Has the AIP version of any of these films been released in the US?

My guess is that Kino is playing it pretty fast and loose financially. There was clearly a problem with the Nosferatu release, but they stonewalled on it and pretended the problem didn't exist. Why would they do that unless they couldn't afford to do a recall and correct their obvious mistake? Now the Bava film comes back as a check disk wildly out of sync... they just blame it on the replicator and refuse to pay for the shipment, even though the mistake is probably an error in their disk authoring.

As a comparison, look at VCI and White Zombie. When the low bitrate on that was revealed, they could have easily just said it is sufficient bit rate and we intended it to be like that. But they didn't. Same for Image/Blackhawk and their Phantom of the Opera disk. They are both small companies too, but they did the right thing for their customers.

On the one hand, that's disappointing. On the other hand, I'm holding a happy Laserdisc package.