Synapse Films
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Synapse Films is a DVD label owned and operated by Don May, Jr., partner Jerry Chandler, and Charles Fiedler. The company specializes in cult horror, science fiction, and exploitation films.
Synapse's focus has been to provide quality restoration and video transfers to genre films usually neglected or granted shoddy release on home video. May has brought to the company an expertise in video mastering and film restoration gleaned from nearly a decade of experience in the LaserDisc industry, and personal enthusiasm for exploitation film of all stripe.
The Synapse catalog ranges from European horror touchstones like Vampyros Lesbos, and Castle of Blood, to important genre documentaries including Roy Frumkes' Document of the Dead, from drive-in favorites like The Brain That Wouldn't Die to Leni Riefenstahl’s controversial classic Triumph of the Will.
In 2004, Synapse released a definitive edition of the controversial Thriller - A Cruel Picture, a DVD which was not without controversy itself. Notoriously difficult director Bo Arne Vibenius repeatedly sent threatening dispatches from Europe to the Synapse offices, sometimes under false names, claiming the company had not secured the rights to release the DVD. The DVD was released without legal incident.
Recently, Detroit film scholar Nicholas Schlegel released his documentary The Synapse Story in its entirety on YouTube. The documentary details the history and vision of the label and its founders.
List of releases
As of February 2009, Synapse Films had released, or had announced the future release of, the following titles and films on DVD:
- 42nd Street Forever
- 42nd Street Forever Volume 2: The Deuce
- 42nd Street Forever: XXX-Treme Special Edition
- 42nd Street Forever: Volume 3 - Exploitation Explosion
- 42nd Street Forever: Volume 4
- The Asian Cult Cinema Collection
- Bacchanales Sexuelles
- The Beast From Haunted Cave
- A Better Place
- Bizarre
- Black Roses
- Blue Sunshine
- Brain Damage
- Brain Damage - Special Edition
- The Brain That Wouldn't Die
- Brutes and Savages
- Budo: The Art of Killing
- Castle of Blood
- Christmas Evil
- Cold Hearts
- Dario Argento's World of Horror
- Deadbeat at Dawn
- The Deadly Spawn
- The Deli
- Document of the Dead
- Entrails of a Beautiful Woman
- Entrails of a Virgin
- Evil Dead Trap
- Fantasm
- Fantasm Comes Again
- Fatal Frames
- God Has a Rap Sheet
- The Grapes of Death
- The Image
- Invasion USA
- Jess Franco's Exorcism
- Lemora
- Let Me Die a Woman
- Maniac Cop
- Night Train
- Olga's Girls
- Organ
- Rock and Roll Nightmare
- She Killed in Ecstasy
- Sick Girl
- Singapore Sling
- Six Days in Roswell
- Small Gauge Trauma
- Stacy
- Stalingrad
- Star Warp'd
- Stillwater
- Street Trash
- They Call Her One Eye
- Thriller - A Cruel Picture
- Triumph of the Will
- Vampyros Lesbos
- Wild Zero
