Monday, September 14, 2009

The Jolly Boys ripping it up in the best Danish film ever

Yeah, here's THE JOLLY BOYS ORKESTER doing the surf in STENBROENS "HELTE" from 1965. STENBROENS "HELTE" is a psychotronic juvenile delinquents masterpiece no less! It was directed by Poul Nyrup and altho only his third film unfortunately it also became his last. Poul Nyrup is our psychotronic pride of Denmark. Needless to say most of Denmark still refuses to even recognise these films' existence and none of them are on official DVD (but ask and ye shall find).



Thanks to Kenno for uploading this!

If you wanna know more about Nyrup and his films here's an old article I wrote 6-7 yrs ago. Oh, I hope you read Danish. :/

2 comments:

  1. That's great.

    Why no show on DVD?

    Are there existing prints?

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  2. Why? Long story. Like so many other low budget films from yesteryear these 3 films (Stenbroens "helte", Villa Vennely/Copenhagen Call-girls, Mellem Venner) came and went. There was a lot of newspaper writings about them when they came out (1963-65) mainly because they dealt with juvenile delinquency (i.e. had violence, nudity and profane language in them). It was at a time when family orientated comedies was what people wanted. They came out on rental vhs in the mid 80s but disappeared again and were basically forgotten until a friend of mine told me about "Stenbroens Helte" which he'd found a old ex-rental copy of. I watched it and got blown away cos I'd never seen anything like this from Denmark. I dug out all the old newspaper bits from the 60s that I could find and wrote a long piece on them in my old fanzine "Stay Sick!" about 6 or 7 years back. Incidentally someone from the Copenhagen Night Film Festival bought my mag and dug out some old prints of the films. The Danish Film Institute has copies (and yes there's no doubt they read about the films in my mag cos they actually ripped off my reviews for their online film descriptions! LOL). Anyway, there was quite a bit of media coverage of the films at the time but it didn't really change the fact that most people here couldn't give two shits for old psychotronic films so the cinemas weren't exactly packed and maybe because of this there's still no dvd releases. I'm aware that Another World Entertainment wanted to put them out but unfortunately the daughters of the late director somehow think they're sitting on a golden goose. Well, the films are great enough but DVD releases probably aren't gonna sell by the bucket load. And that's where the dealings are stuck today: The rights owners want more money than AWE are willing to pay and apparently AWE is the only company who is willing to even consider a release. Ironically, one of the films, VILLA VENNELY, is out on a subtitled bootleg from Something Weird Video in the US (as Copenhagen Call-girls). Needless to say, I have all three films on VHS (and dvd-r) (in Danish, no subs). I asked the guy behind AWE about a possible release recently and he said "maaybe" which I read as a "no". :o(

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