When I was in college, I created a 4.5-hour-long single film out of the Evil Dead Trilogy. I guess on here you'd call it a Composite Edit, since I used DVD and VHS footage -- but my goal was to make it *as long as humanly possible* -- include *every single snippet* of additional, deleted and alternate footage that I could possibly make fit.
If anyone knows anything about the Evil Dead Trilogy, you'll know that the third film -- Army of Darkness -- was cut down from the directors' 97 minutes to a teeny 81 minutes for theatrical release. And no less than FOUR different cuts of the film have surfaced over the years, all with slightly different runtimes and inclusions/exclusions -- and two different endings. The Director's Cut only existed in a Taiwanese laserdisc made from a bootleg VHS. Pee-yew.
Anchor Bay made a sad attempt at re-creating the Director's Cut in 1999, but the end result looked miserable and accidentally left out several shots. I was already hoping to use my college's digital video editing equipment to paste all three films together, so I decided to go for broke and recreate the Director's Cut as authentically as humanly possible.
The result was a 108-minute film that threw in four deleted scenes and portions of BOTH endings. THEN i went to work combining all three films -- which is no mean feat when you consider that the end of Evil Dead 2 takes a substantially different plot tack than the opening of Army of Darkness.
I had a hell of a lot of fun, and I did the absolute best I could considering the source material and the equipment. However -- since then, a *new* DVD of the AoD Director's Cut has been released with a *much improved* video transfer -- and I've learned that the films were actually shot in 4x3 fullscreen!, so the widescreen versions don't ADD visual material to the sides -- they CUT IT OFF the top and bottom!
Plus, I committed the cardinal sin. When I finished with the edit, I put my final cut -- onto VHS.
Long story short, I'd love to take one more whack at it, using the improved video from the new DVD, making the whole thing fullscreen and putting it onto DVD when done.
But, hey, if anyone's interested -- yeah, I've got a 4.5-hour-long Evil Dead movie you can watch. :-)
And I loooove to talk about some of the ingenious ways I made the movies fit together. Ask me about the deleted scene I found for the original Evil Dead sometime!
-Jeph!