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From the folks at the Brutal as Hell website:

Here’s some killer news for fans of Hammer Horror. Yesterday Hammer announced that they would be partnering with several film outlets to bring over 30 of their classic horror flicks to Blu-ray in the coming months and years … What makes this a notable project is that Hammer is investing heavily in the restoration of these films, as opposed to taking the lazy man’s road and creating basic upconverted dumps.

source: Hammer Films to Launch Monumental Restoration Project | Brutal As Hell. Retrieved January 20, 2012, from http://www.brutalashell.com/2012/01/hammer-films-to-launch-monumental-restoration-project/

You can read more at Hammer's official WordPress blog here.

I don't have a Blu-ray player, but this should eventually be good news for streaming, too. Gawd, I wish I was in the film restoration business.

Related Content:

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• HammerFlix

A few weeks ago I finally put HammerFlicks online. The project is a programmatic approach to learning which Hammer Horror titles are available for streaming on Netflix. And while there's always room for improvement, the thing actually works and I'm using it.

Unfortunately, the true horror is that there just aren't that many titles that are available to "Watch Instantly". In fact, in the time I launched the project I've only become aware of one new title that I was able to watch online that I hadn't already seen …

"Evil of Frankenstein" features Peter Cushing once again as the good Doctor Frankenstein. Unlike as in "Frankenstein Must be Destroyed", Cushing casts a sympathetic figure in this one, with the local authorities and a hypnotist named Zoltan as the true monsters. Frankenstein is kind to his loyal assistant (not his servant) Hans and even displays dashes of modesty about his scientific breakthroughs. It's not as grand a film as some of the other Cushing/Frankenstein Hammer films, but it's still fun.

When I checked HammerFlicks today, both "Evil of Frankenstein" and "Frankenstein Must be Destroyed" are no longer available to stream on Netflix. In fact, 'Evil' is not available in any format from Netflix as of this writing. That's just, well, shocking!

By the way, I just stumbled on this cool write-up on 'Evil'. Makes me want to watch it again. Oh wait, I can't.

Related Content:

• Frankenstein and the inverse guitar
• Hammer prepares to nail restoration efforts
• HammerFlicks
• HammerFlix 3: Village of the DOMed
• HammerFlix 2: Terror of the lost API Keys

Update, November 27, 2011: If you're looking for a live list of Hammer Films streaming on Netflix you can see it here.

To read more about the HammerFlicks project, click here.

…

Grrr. Obsession is a good ally for creativity, but it's still annoying.

I woke up today and decided to have a decent breakfast and do some very light work on HammerFlix – a small project to use the Netflix API to discover which Hammer Films movies are available on Netflix's Watch Instantly.

Basically, I just added some buttons/Javascript that will allow one to filter out the non-matches, show only Hammer films that HammerFlix thinks are on Netflix, or show only the ones that are apparently available for streaming.

Sure, there's still some work to be done to improve the reliability of the results as I mentioned yesterday, but I'm not too worried about it for now.

If you're wondering why the search for "The House Across the Lake" from 1954 shows "Them!" as a streaming match it's because "The House Across the Lake" isn't on Netflix and "Them!" is the first match the API returns. In this case, both movies happen to share 1954 as the release year. Currently, if HammerFlix sees that the first API returned result matches the release year, it reports the movie as available on Netflix. So, I need to make it a little smarter than that, but not this weekend.

Anyway, you can see the latest results here.

Dorks can view the source files in this folder. The best thing in there is the MIT license generated by the Spiteful Open Source License Generator.

No more coding this weekend … time for a long walk sans electronics.

…

Update: OK, so I lied. I couldn't resist. I just added a score for how reliable the match is.

Go here to see the HammerFlix results from about 10pm EST tonight. on September 26, 2011.

There's now a "match score" under each thing HammerFlix claims is on Netflix. This is done by comparing the title from the Wikipedia filmography against the "short" and "regular" titles from the Netflix API XML result (i.e. two scores). I used the PHP similar_text() function to get the score for each and then averaged them for the "match score".

There's occasionally a PHP "undefined offset" error for a couple of films. That's no big deal and I'll fix it later by just making sure I test for some stuff before printing to screen. But it seems to work pretty well. The "The House Across the Lake"  vs. "Them!" mismatch only gets a 20% rating, so that tells me it might not actually be the same movie.

And as a reward, I'm watching "To the Devil, a Daughter" now …

Related Content:

• HammerFlicks
• HammerFlix 2: Terror of the lost API Keys
• HammerFlix
• HammerFlicks and the Netflix API … in the grave?
• HammerFlicks and pOAIndexter source codes available

Update, November 27, 2011: If you're looking for a live list of Hammer Films streaming on Netflix you can see it here.

To read more about the HammerFlicks project, click here.

…

So, like six months ago I posted about an idea involving the Netflix API and trying to get a list of Hammer horror films available for streaming.

The good news is I've decided to carve out some time each Saturday and actually make this into a little pet project.

The bad news is that in editing the information about my app, I accidentally deleted my API keys and have to wait … and wait … on the news ones getting approved, which apparently is a process experiencing some delays lately.

Bummer.

Anyway, there are some interesting things that have happened since last time.

1. The Netflix API is now totally about the Watch Instantly (streaming) catalog. See here.
2. This PHP code example of hitting up the API which used to work out of the box now seems to require that I surround the keys like "term" and "output" with quotation marks a la:

$arguments = Array(
'term'=>'fargo',
'expand'=>'formats,synopsis',
'max_results'=> '1',
'output'=>'json'
);

3. Netflix now has this open OData API in the works, too. So I might not even need to use the old API that requires a key …

That's to say that while I need to read more, if the ODdata API is also only for streaming titles then I can still retrieve the Netflix movie identifier from the OData API for given titles. What this means is that I should still be able to pass a list of Hammer film titles to the OData API and scrape the results for the movie's identifier. This in turn means I can create a link so I can start streaming the movie by clicking on a hyperlink.

Here's an OData example for "The Name of the Rose" taken from the Netflix developer site:

http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=Name%20eq%20'The%20Name%20of%20The%20Rose'

Looking at the source for the results reveals the Netflix movie identifier like so:

<d:Url>http://www.netflix.com/Movie/The_Name_of_the_Rose/70000552</d:Url>

With that identifier, I should just be able to pass a link to the streaming page like this (must be logged into Netflix):

http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70000552

Ok, I just clicked on that and now there's a good possibility I'll be watching "The Name of the Rose" tonight … or not.

Related Content:

• HammerFlix
• HammerFlicks
• HammerFlicks and the Netflix API … in the grave?
• HammerFlix 3: Village of the DOMed
• in the can: another HammerFlix update

Update, November 27, 2011: If you're looking for a live list of Hammer Films streaming on Netflix you can see it here.

To read more about the HammerFlicks project, click here.

…

It's been a while since I've posted … I'm prepping to leave Tuscaloosa, AL for a new job (more on that later), but I thought I should get myself, as this blog is primarily a reference point for me, up-to-date.

So let me get right to it.

I have Netflix.

I use their Watch Instantly feature often.

I use this feature to watch films made by the Hammer Film Productions company, often.

Hammer made a lot of great off-beat horror films and they just have a certain style that I love. The films I've seen of theirs feature, more-often-than-not , well-crafted and well-acted tales of strangeness with sympathetic characters and beautiful women – where story, and not spectacle, rules the day.

In fact, my first Hammer Film was Dr. Jeckyll and Sister Hyde. I won't give it away, but I highly recommend it. It has all the traits mentioned above that I associate with Hammer Films.

Anyway, Netflix, to my knowledge, doesn't allow me to search by production companies. But I want to know which Hammer Films are available on Netflix and if I can stream them. Unless and until Netflix ever allows this search, it seems I'll have to roll my own solution.

The idea is to use the IMDB data files to get a list of the film titles where Hammer was the production company. Then, using the Netflix API, I can get a report on those titles in the Netflix catalog.

This is a pretty simple idea, but one that I'd personally find very useful.

I've just started working on it and I'll share my work as soon as it's done. I'm not sure if I can offer this sort of searching as a service – there might be some legal issues – but I can at least share the methodology.

Now, if anyone out there knows of a way to already do this, please let me know.

Related Content:

• HammerFlix 2: Terror of the lost API Keys
• HammerFlicks
• HammerFlicks and the Netflix API … in the grave?
• HammerFlix 3: Village of the DOMed
• in the can: another HammerFlix update