From Kino Lorber & the 3D Film Archive: PARASITE 3-D (1982)

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October 16, 2019

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“The 3-D Film Archive puts the icing on the cake.”

PARASITE 3-D (1982) was one of the first titles I acquired in field sequential 3-D about twenty years ago.

It’s a low budget, enjoyable film set in a post-Apocalyptic world where everything has gone to feces and chaos rules which pretty much sounds like 2019 come to think of it with the world descending into chaos while the President of the largest nation on earth behaves like a six year old.

I never thought I’d see this film on Blu-ray so I used 3D Combine to turn my field sequential 3-D dvd into an over/under 3-D Blu-ray so I could project it on my big screen with up to date equipment.

Well, now I can toss that home made conversion aside because the wonderful people at The 3-D Film Archive have given the picture their treatment. That means the picture now looks better than it ever did because in the process errors in the 3-D photography of the day have been corrected.

The big problem with 3-D Movies prior to the digital era was projection. In the beginning two projectors were required to run two separate right and left eye version of the movies.

By the time of PARASITE (1982) that problem had been overcome ( http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/home/The-Bubble?fbclid=IwAR2bb69KNQdviYZk2SL71i0xH8-ENMyfx6njA0Cn5ZmAAyr2OmM5cMKZtt4 )

The system used in PARASITE 3-D is Stereovision developed by Chris Condon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Condon, https://www.questia.com/magazine/1P3-1319167651/the-stereovision-3-d-system, http://la3dclub.com/chris-condon-rest-in-peace/, http://la3dclub.com/chris-condon-rest-in-peace/).

3D is the bastard child of the cinema. It survives because a lot of crazy people (among whose number I am happy to be included) love it.

Until the digital age the vagaries of analog projection pretty much kept 3-D down. I remember one theater in Toronto which ran a 3-D film festival. The problem was that while only one projector per reel of film was now required the second projector in the theater for some reason projected the 3-D image in 2-D which, as you can imagine, was a bummer.

However with digital cinema projectors were manufactured which do 3-D film presentation the justice it deserves.

Now PARASITE 3-D (1982) admittedly is not the greatest movie ever made (though it may be the greatest by its director) but it is a lot of fun, filled with moments that are downright horrific as well as startling. It delivers.

Kin0-Lorber, Studio Canal and The 3-D Film Archive have brought us a little gem about a germ whose existence we are learning daily is not that hypothetical.

While watching this I thought it would be great to double-bill this with the very unsettling National Geographic Documentary, MYSTERIES OF THE UNSEEN WORLD 3D which brings home with vivid clarity the little beasties which make their home on our bodies.

I am providing a plethora of posters from this film because, frankly, they are great posters that do what a poster is supposed to do, at least for myself.

As well I am including links to what a lot of others have had to say. While opinions vary as to the quality of the film itself, most agree that the use of 3-D in this picture is great with some reviewers giving the use of 3-D in this picture a well deserved 5 out of 5.

I’m among them. This is a film I have always enjoyed. The work of the 3-D Film Archive adds the icing to the cake.–Reg Hartt, Toronto, Canada. 2019–01-16.

Mysteries Of The Unseen World
Portrait of a cat flea (magn. 158:1 if printed 12.5cm high). The cat flea’s primary host is the domestic cat, but this is also the primary flea infesting dogs in most of the world. Cat fleas can transmit other parasites and infections to dogs and cats and also to humans. The most prominent of these are Bartonella, murine typhus, and apedermatitis. The tapeworm Dipylidium caninum can be transmitted when a flea is swallowed by pets or humans. In addition, cat fleas have been found to carry Borrelia burgdorferi, the etiologic agent of Lyme disease, but their ability to transmit the disease is unclear.