In ten minutes, Sundance Channel will be showing the Taylor/Burton anti-classic BOOM! in its OAR. If you've only seen this deliciously awful film in pan & scan, you're in for a treat.

damn! I would so like to see this one widescreen!

I had a friend record a showing from last week, along with SECRET CEREMONY (are they having a Losey festival?)

SECRET CEREMONY is actually not so bad, and looks incredible in widescreen

Like you, I had not seen this or BOOM in widescreen. I recently saw BOOM from the pan/scan VHS. You can tell you're missing a lot visually, so I look forward to that although I doubt it will help that deliciously awful film all that much.

What makes BOOM! even more enjoyable in its OAR is the stagey, overwrought framing in some scenes. There's a great shot(around the time of the immortal line, "Then! Then is when!") that gets obscured in P&S where Michael Dunn's guard dogs are barking furiously at Burton's arrival on the island and the dogs are so foregrounded they seem like 30 ft. tall cocker spaniels. The dinner scene with the Witch of Capri and the scenes on the terrace need the full Panavision frame just to keep all the characters(including the monkey and bird Greek chorus) on-screen. Then there's the birth-canal-in-reverse opening shot, but that gets letterboxed even in P&S versions since it's during the credits. Sundance has got to show this again at some point, or maybe one of the other channels in the Showtime family will add it to their schedule.

"overwrought" is the perfect word to describe this film. This just HAS to show up on DVD one of these days.

SECRET CEREMONY reairs on Sundance at 1pm EST on Tuesday, Jan. 30. BOOM! started working my last nerve by the time it ended but CEREMONY is engrossing, with Taylor, Farrow, and Mitchum all excellent. A double-feature DVD is in order.