Shout! Factory signs ITV Studios deal

[ScorpionReleasing]

Originally Posted by Aclea

It is incredibly dull, but it has one of the most bonkers openings of any conspiracy thriller, with a lengthy and truly surreal paranoid rant delivered in voice over by a stern Patrick Allen sounding for all the world like the managing director of a ball bearings firm who's been slipped a peyote LSD chaser and handed a script written by an out-of-his head Dennis Hopper after reading too much Franz Kafka as captions reading `ASSASSINATION' (in several languages) and 'WHAT AUTHORITY DO THEY REPRESENT? are intercut with photos and stock footage of murders, state buildings, Vietnam and prison to underline the point that we're all part of a giant conspiracy. You almost expect him to end it with "I'm not wearing any trousers and I've got a gun." It's like something out of an Ed Wood film that even Bela Lugosi wouldn't read:


"Do you believe you decided to come to this theatre today? That it was your own idea? Of your own.. free will? Whether we know it or not, we're all manipulated. It's getting almost impossible to think or even act for ourselves anymore. We're manipulated. Programmed. Brainwashed. Right from the start. Right from the day we're born. By family, by press, by radio, by television. And more and more we know less and less of who THEY are. Who could they be? Is it the boss we work for? Who tells him what to do? Is it the government? Whoever's in power, it seems just the same. So, who's behind THEM? It's reached a point when they could take an ordinary man and so manipulate him that they could get him to kill the most important person in the world. Like the hero of a book written by Franz Kafka fifty years ago, we feel ourselves powerless, unable to control anymore what really happens to us. Perhaps we're all the victim of some appalling conspiracy. What authority could they represent? Listen to me. I want you to watch what happened to this ordinary man. He lived in a country with a legal constitution. All the laws were in force. Like many of his generation he was sent to fight in Vietnam. He survived, fell in love, got into trouble, wound up in jail. Then THEY really started to work on him. He fell victim to what they call the Domino Principle. The irresistible force of chain reaction..."

I actually like this film, and wished I was able to release it on Blu.

a bit of trivia, that opening is not in the U.S Theatrical prints, or subsequent TV airing. it was I believe for the International version, and the old vhs and LD used the UK master. Guess the U.S Distributor must have realized this segment would have had theater audiences in uproar!