A Romanian Sci-Fi Adventure

The Romanian film poster for the 1984 animated science fiction fantasy DELTA SPACE MISSION.

In recent years streaming options for entertainment – movies, TV shows, music – have increased and become more commonplace in the average U.S. household but, at the same time, physical media like Blu-rays and DVD continues to prosper among movie lovers and film collectors. Specialty distributors like Severin Films, Vinegar Syndrome and Kino Lorber are releasing new acquisitions at an astonishing rate and obscure genre films and forgotten art house fare are suddenly available on Blu-ray in presentations that look better now than they did during their original theatrical release such as The Five Days (1973, Severin), cult director Dario Argento’s rare non-horror period piece, Ulli Lommell’s witchcraft thriller The Devonsville Terror (1983, Vinegar Syndrome) and Francois Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid (1969, Kino Lorber). Deaf Crocodile, a distributor based in Los Angeles, stands apart from its competitors for restoring and releasing movies from around the world that many film buffs never even knew existed. Among their recent releases are Zerograd (1988), an absurdist Soviet satire, The Unknown Man of Shandigor (1967) by Swiss filmmaker Jean-Louis Roy and Solomon King, a lost Blaxploitation indie from 1974. The real surprise for me, however, is Misiunea Spatiala Delta (English title: Delta Space Mission), an animated science fiction fantasy from Romania that was released in 1984.  

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The Unknown Man of Shandigor

Daniel Emilfork plays nuclear scientist Herbert Von Krantz, creator of a device that can neutralize atomic bombs in the 1967 espionage farce THE UNKNOWN MAN OF SHANDIGOR.

Swiss filmmaker Jean-Louis Roy only made two feature films and two made-for-TV movies during his lifetime but, on the basis of his debut feature L’inconnu de Shandigor (English title: The Unknown Man of Shandigor, 1967), he should be famous among cinephiles. The reason you probably haven’t heard of him is because The Unknown Man of Shandigor vanished after its premiere at Cannes in 1967 and never received a theatrical release in the U.S. Only in the past few years has the film resurfaced as a DVD-R from Sinister Cinema and most of those who have seen it have been delighted and amazed by this pop-art curio from the sixties.

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