Dario Argento

Brody goes yellow

Source: ComingSoon.net

Its production has been pushed back and it appears to have lost almost its entire original cast (which included Ray Liotta, Vincent Gallo and Asia Argento), but Dario Argento’s latest film, Giallo, looks set to go begin shooting in Turin on May 12th, this time boasting Adrien Brody and Emmanuelle Seigner in the cast. Brody, who will executive produce the film along with Oscar Generale, Claudio Argento, Luis De Val, David Milner, Billy Dietrich, Patricia Eberle, Donald Barton and John Hicks (co-production, anyone?), must be a particularly impressive casting coup for Argento, giving the impression that the maestro may, after several false starts, be about to crack the mainstream, and to tell you the truth I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that.

I must confess that, as happy as I am to hear that Argento is working on another film so soon after Mother of Tears, what I’ve heard about Giallo doesn’t exactly fill me with hope. He’s once again working from someone else’s pre-written script, again the product of an American duo, Jim Agnew and Sean Keller, and it sounds like this will be very much a nudge-nudge wink-wink “homage” to gialli, albeit hopefully not in the same way that Scream was to the Halloween-inspired slasher movie gravy train. I hope I’m pleasantly surprised, but this sounds a bit ho-hum and fairly pointless for Argento at this stage in his career. I’m yet to be convinced that this will do anything Sleepless didn’t already do.

We changed our minds

Source: Mobius Home Video Forum

The British Board of Film Censors are on quite a roll lately. Back in January, Aldo Lado’s exploitation shocker Night Train Murders was finally passed for release in the UK with all previous cuts waived, and now, it’s the turn of the film which spawned it, Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left. Craven’s film has long been something of a Video Nasty poster child, a prominent item on the DPP list, not granted a UK release until May 2003, and only then with 31 seconds of cuts.

Well, gee whiz, it’s great and all that the BBFC have now decided that the film has suddenly stopped being likely to “deprave and corrupt”, but wouldn’t it have been nice if they’d reached this conclusion in the first place? For example, they could have made up their minds that it wasn’t a “threat” before more or less anyone with any interest in seeing the film already did so via the black market or by importing a copy from a less suppressed country. They might also have decided this before the previous UK rights holder, Blue Underground, frittered away a considerable amount of money in their appeal against the BBFC’s ruling of 16 seconds of cuts. (When their case was thrown out, the BBFC enacted gleeful revenge by demanding a further 15 seconds of cuts.)

It’s nice to know that these people have such a vested interest in our safety, isn’t it? Why, if it wasn’t for them, I might have seen The Last House on the Left uncut before the date of March 17th 2008, when it would no doubt have scarred me permanently. Luckily, though, I now feel safe in the knowledge that, watching it after March 17th, it will no longer hold any power to deprave and corrupt.

Now that it has been granted an 18 “certificate” (note that I put “certificate” in quotation marks because I believe the term is a misnomer, falsely conveying the notion that the big red logo on the DVD cover is some sort of award), you can expect to see it in your local HMV or Zammo (or whatever the fuck Virgin is called now) among copies of other former training videos for rapists and murderers such as The Evil Dead, Tenebrae and The Exorcist.

For those who are interested in this sticky subject, I suggest reading this article from Mark Kermode (who gave evidence at the appeal in defence of the argument that the film should be granted an uncut release).

(Oh, and they banned Murder Set Pieces at roughly the same time that they passed The Last House on the Left. Good to know that these bobbies are still patrolling their turf.)

Mother of all cover designs

Cover art for the UK release of Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears, due out on April 28th from Optimum, has appeared online at various retailers, including Amazon.co.uk. It’s quite a classy design, for once, similar to the artwork used for the cover of Variety’s Cannes Film Festival 2007 issue, albeit tinted red.

According to John White over at DVD Maniacs, who has seen a check disc, it’s bare-bones barring a trailer, and has a 2.39:1 anamorphic transfer with English Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Given that it looks like the upcoming Italian release is dubbed into Italian (a good 90% of the dialogue you hear in the film is what was spoken on set by the actors in English), and the currently available Russian release is cropped to 1.78:1, this release would appear to be the one to get.

They’re at it again

“Great” news, folks - those much-vaunted Suspiria remake plans have resurfaced and are once again doing the rounds. This project has cropped up so many times and in so many different guises in the last couple of years that I’m now fairly confident that it will, thankfully, probably never see the light of day, but I still feel compelled to report on the latest buzz surrounding this travesty.

Today, courtesy of the MTV Movies Blog and Shock Till You Drop, I introduce you to David Gordon Green, the man best known for such southern coming of age hits as George Washington and All the Real Girls. The perfect choice, I’m sure you’ll agree, to stamp his own distinctive mark on a horror classic, particularly given his plans to turn this “low budget Italian 70’s gore movie” into “a pretty amazing, ambitious, artistic (version)”.

Um, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t there already a pretty amazing, ambitious, artistic film called Suspiria?

The writers of the articles in question seem to have a lot more respect for the original than Green does. The MTV piece describes it as “an indisputable horror classic” (and I detect a hint of sarcasm in the discussion of the choice of director for this proposed remake), whereas Green, with his “oooh, aaah, I’m going to take this weird little low budget gore movie and turn it into Art, but I’ve got so many other ideas for projects so you might have to wait for a while before you can bask in the glory of my creativity” attitude, does indeed come across as a smarmy git. If he loves the original so much, I can’t for the life of me fathom why he would want to remake it.

It might not be the next thing on Green’s plate to direct since he has a lot of ideas including a big-budget action movie, adapting John Grisham’s non-fiction book “An Innocent Man” and a “medieval project.”

It certainly wouldn’t be Green’s last venture into horror if the other idea he told us about comes to fruition. “I’d also like to start a straight-to-video action company that just does genre movies. Me and my friend Darius just finished the script called “One in the Chamber.” It’s just a guy going to get his kidnapped son out of prison. Give me a couple million bucks to go explore some schlock. I’d like to be the next Roger Corman. He would have his hand in freakin’ ‘Piranha’ but also in Fellini. I like that idea. I would love to do some genre stuff but also some crazy intimate, no-budget movies. That’s my problem. I only have one me, and I have a limited number of years before I die, and the biggest problem is that I like to do a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with movies and movies are very time-consuming, so you have to make choices, and that’s really frustrating.”

Boy, this guy has so many “ideas” I’m surprised his head isn’t bursting. It must be hard being so creative.

It’s funny if it’s not you

For some reason, it seemed as if everybody had seen Juno except me. This offbeat, heart-warming tale about unwanted pregnancy and surrogate parenting appeared out of nowhere, catapulting its star, Ellen Page, and its first-time screenwriter, the intriguingly named Diablo Cody, to centre stage. Of course, it didn’t hurt that it bagged itself an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. So, today, I had the opportunity to see it for myself and find out whether the hype was justified.

The answer, in reality, is probably “no”. I wouldn’t call it the greatest film of the last year by any stretch of the imagination, but, at the same time, it’s hard to deny that I enjoyed it considerably. What I liked about this film is that, although superficially the plot is straight out of Movie of the Week territory, it does an admirable job of avoiding sentimentality or mawkishness.

Highlight below to reveal spoiler text:

I can’t say I was particularly enamoured by many of the characters, though. I found the script to be incredibly smug and, occasionally, verging on obnoxious, with the dialogue often sounding like an imitation of the sort of speech patterns that were to be found in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and yes, it’s true, everyone in this film more or less does speak with the same “voice”). The whole thing is a massive overdose of pop culture references and calculatedly “quirky” dialogue… oh, and I can only put Juno’s summation that Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Wizard of Gore is a better film than Suspiria down to the assumption that being pregnant does strange things to your system. I’m still slightly amazed to hear the name of Dario Argento actually being spoken in a mainstream film, though.

I did enjoy it overall. I wouldn’t class it as a masterpiece, but it’s fun and at times quite amusing - one of the few feel-good films I can think of that doesn’t make me want to go and throw up afterwards.

Oh yeah, and has anyone seen this video? I must confess it made me laugh more than the film itself. (“Oscar, I smell ya later!”)

Blu Underground

Source: Film Talk

Well, this has got to be just about the most unexpected piece of news to round off the month, but perhaps also the most pleasant. Blue Underground, who hold the US DVD rights to most of Dario Argento’s catalogue, not to mention a vast sea of other European cult titles, have added a placeholder page to their web site announcing their intentions to get into the high definition market in the near future:

We are proud to announce that a number of high definition Blu-ray™ releases are in the works. We will have more information soon.

There we go - there’s no actual information besides their statement of an intention to release on the format, but I must say I’m absolutely thrilled. I pretty much gave up any hope of seeing the likes of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, Suspiria and Inferno in HD any time soon after the rights to these films ended up at Blue Underground and various statements came from the company indicating that they didn’t perceive the market to be large enough to make HD releases viable. I can’t wait to see what their first titles are, and it goes without saying that they should constitute a sizeable improvement on the filtered, edge enhanced standard definition transfers that Blue Underground routinely put out.

My most wanted titles:

• Baba Yaga
• The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
• Deep Red
• Don’t Torture a Duckling
• The Fifth Cord
• Inferno
• Night Train Murders
• Opera
• Short Night of the Glass Dolls
• Suspiria
• The Stendhal Syndrome
• Who Saw Her Die?

Now, obviously, I’m not naïve enough to assume that anything approaching all of these titles will show up, but if even a handful of them get the HD treatment, I will be a very happy gentleman.

Garbage baby garbage

Yesterday, I received a copy of the US Blu-ray release of Gone Baby Gone from DeepDiscount. I watched it tonight, and was less than impressed.

This film gained some level of notoriety in the UK when distributor Buena Vista cancelled its theatrical release, which was scheduled uncomfortably soon after the disappearance of British child Madeleine McCann, and I must confess that my interest in seeing it, while due primarily from the positive write-ups it received, did to some extent stem from the parallels drawn between the McCann case and the one portrayed in the film. (Perhaps Buena Vista’s marketing department should have made a donation to the Maddy fund for the free publicity?) And the parallels are quite striking. Not only does the missing child, Amanda McCready, bear a great deal of physical resemblance to Madeleine McCann, the circumstances surrounding her disappearance are similar: in both cases, a neglectful mother left her child alone in an apartment to get wasted (Kate McCann on alcohol, Helene McCready on cocaine) at a local bar, and later lied about the length of time for which she had abandoned the child. In both cases, a toy belonging to the missing child becomes a vital piece of iconography. And finally, in both, frustrated by the police’s lack of progress, the family of the missing child hires private investigators.

Unfortunately, the most significant similarity between the two cases is how annoying they both are. The media furore surrounding the McCann disappearance, and the manner in which her parents shamelessly and (I believe) insincerely manipulated the media, made me gag. The mawkishness and falseness of the front they adopted was irritating in the extreme, and, unfortunately, Gone Baby Gone is every bit as mawkish and false. This is a film which doesn’t just tug at the heartstrings - it claws desperately at them, using every cliché in the book in a desperate bid to make the audience care about what is, ultimately, a dull, confused and poorly plotted story.

More annoying than all of that, however, is Casey Affleck, who delivers all his dialogue (most of which seems to be about “respec’”) in the same deadpan mumble and is virtually incomprehensible half of the time. This film was co-written and directed by his older brother, Ben Affleck, and I can only assume that this proves that nepotism is alive and well in Hollywood. Similar criticisms are sometimes made of Dario Argento when he casts his daughter in his films, but Asia Argento seems to have a better grasp of English than Casey Affleck and is considerably less annoying to boot. Ed Harris, meanwhile, stumbles over his ridiculous dialogue as best he can, and Michelle Monaghan’s role is so pointless that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was written in minutes before shooting began because the producers realised, at the last minute, that it would look rather bad if all the women in the film were drug addicts and/or negligent parents. I like both of these actors, I really do, but there’s a limit to what they can do without a worthwhile script. The only actor to escape with any sense of self-respect is Morgan Freeman, who I tend to find elevates the perceived quality of just about any material he gets his hands on.

In short, I don’t rate Ben Affleck as an actor, and, based on this, he isn’t much better as a director or writer (bearing in mind that I haven’t seen Good Will Hunting). It’s definitely one of the weakest films I’ve picked up in high definition since its inception, and definitely not worth the $27 I paid for it. Oh, well - you win some, you lose some.

Anchor Bay sails again

Fangoria has got the scoop on the long-delayed special edition re-releases of Dario Argento’s Tenebre and Phenomena from Anchor Bay, due out at some point this summer, accompanied by some fairly dodgy cover art. Originally announced in an unofficial capacity a good 2-3 years ago, I forget precisely where they were first mentioned, but it seems to have been common knowledge for some time that these were in the pipeline. Anyway, the specs provided are as one would expect: these two titles, both originally non-anamorphically, will both be receiving new 16x9 enhanced transfers in their original aspect ratios of 1.85:1 and 1.66:1 respectively. Additionally, they will carry over all the extras from their previous releases, in addition to a new retrospective featurette - Voices of the Unsane for Tenebre, and A Dark Fairy Tale for Phenomena.

Unfortunately, the real questions aren’t answered. Namely, will these releases be properly uncut? The previous release of Tenebre was missing a few seconds of footage at various points, while Phenomena lacked over six minutes’ worth of (mostly minor) material in comparison with the longer integral cut. (Both films were released on DVD in their full length variants in various other territories.) Additionally, while the Fangoria article states that each film will feature a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track, what I really want to know is whether or not the original mono (or should that be stereo for Phenomena?) mixes will also be provided. Ideally, I’d like to see the original audio mixes provided for both English and Italian, with subtitles… although this is Anchor “you don’t need subtitles if the film is in English” Bay we’re talking about, so I won’t get my hopes up.

Finally, where are the Blu-ray releases?

Anyway, I’ll continue to keep an eye on the buzz surrounding these releases, but with some trepidation. I already own a copy of Tenebre (the Dutch Shadows release from A-Film) which I’m pretty happy with, barring some colour timing issues, and the Integral Japanese version of Phenomena that I own is nice, but for the fact that certain stretches of dialogue are in Italian on the English language track. Ah, we’ll see. I might be tempted by review copies…

Mater Lacrimarum revisited

Today, I had the opportunity to watch the English version of Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears. This was my second viewing of the concluding part in the Three Mothers trilogy, after watching it in Italian on Christmas Day. The viewing conditions weren’t ideal (the version I saw was cropped from its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio to 1.78:1), but overall the quality was better than my Italian copy. (A Russian DVD appears to be available now, but it seems to have been the source of the cropped version I saw, so I would recommend holding out for a different release. Medusa will be releasing it in Italy on April 9th, while Optimum are supposedly putting it out in the UK on April 28th.)

In most respects, the English version improves things somewhat, although Asia Argento’s performance is still uneven, closer to Trauma than to The Stendhal Syndrome. With the benefit of the English audio, Valeria Cavalli (Marta) definitely emerges as the best actor of the group, giving a strong and believable performance (the monkey is still great, though). Adam James (who has previously appeared in Casualty and Waking the Dead) is, like Asia, uneven. In some scenes he is quite effective (his final scene is quite chilling), but in others, such as when he is going nuts after his son has disappeared, he comes across as quite weak. Oh, and I don’t really see the big deal about Udo Kier’s performance. A lot of people described it as hammy, but it didn’t strike me as problematic in any way.

On the downside, Moran Atias (Mater Lacrimarum) is awful, and I mean awful. She looks ridiculous and can’t act her way out of a paper bag. She really made me yearn for Ania Pieroni. Her bald, male lackey is also hamstrung by some really atrocious dubbing, and the gothic witches continue to make me cringe. Actually, if anything, they came across as worse rather than better on a second viewing. I knew they were coming this time, but it didn’t make the experience any less painful. Really, Dario, what were you thinking?

On a related note, watching the film again revealed all sorts of squandered opportunities to throw in some of the bravura colours and lighting from the first two instalments. I can only imagine how much more magical moments like Sarah lighting the fire in Michael’s apartment and Marta summoning the spirits would have been had Argento used them as an excuse to unleash some Technicolor brilliance. And what happened to the idea of Mater Lacrimarum’s jewel-studded robe casting primary colours on the faces of her grovelling followers? All we get now is a red T-shirt with glitter writing on it.

My original rating of 7/10 still stands. It’s not a bad little film, but, as a conclusion to what was started in Suspiria and Inferno, it’s a let-down. I never expected it to be on the same level as them, so I can’t claim to be disappointed, but it remains a middle of the road entry in Argento’s filmography - better than Trauma and The Phantom of the Opera but weaker than all his other theatrical ventures (it’s better than his three recent TV projects, though, especially those embarrassing Masters of Horror episodes).

Day After Day

There’s something of a sense of predictability to Day After Day, a giallo novel by Carlo Lucarelli, better known to some as the co-writer of Dario Argento’s Sleepless. As the second book to focus on the character of Inspector Grazia Negro, the first being Almost Blue (itself turned into a film by Alex Infascelli), it continually evokes its predecessor in terms of plot points and overall style. Once again, the scenario is that of a serial killer who proves to be a master of disguise, and once again, the key to catching him seems to lie in the lap of a socially maladjusted young man with an affinity with technology, who stumbles upon the killer by pure chance.

Like Almost Blue, the novel is a brisk and pacey affair, and once again I suspect that the translation, by Oonagh Stransky, has a lot to do with its effectiveness, given the rhythmic quality of the language. Lucarelli has quite a flair for getting inside the heads of his characters, particularly the villains, describing what they see and what they are thinking in such a way as to make the mundane seem interesting. In the case of the killer, Vittorio (that’s not a spoiler - his identity is revealed to us from the outset), we get to see what goes through his head as he observes the public, storing nuggets of information about their appearances and mannerisms that may or may not be useful in the future for one of his disguises. It’s all quite fascinating and well observed.

Something else that I like about Lucarelli’s writing is his ability to use description to give the impression that the reader is watching a film. There is a scene in which Grazia is in her office, listening to a tape recording of the interrogation of a suspect. The dialogue between the suspect and the investigating officer is intercut with descriptions of the office and the various items inside it - post-its on the notice board, photographs and so on - gradually unveiled in such a way as to suggest that a camera is snaking its way around the room, moving from one object to the next. I’d be very interested to see this adapted as a film, although I do wonder to what extent the characters’ inner thoughts, so important to the novel, would have to be jettisoned along the way.

The stand-out scene, meanwhile, is one in which the aforementioned social outcast, Alex, flees injured through a busy street in broad daylight as Vittorio, having killed all of his work colleagues, calmly follows him. It reminded me of the scene in Tenebre in which Bullmer is murdered on a sun-drenched plaza in full view of several people: this idea that that something terrible can be happening in a public place, and no-one notices. As if to hammer home the similarity, Alex later describes the experience as reminding him of when he watched Profondo Rosso on television.

It is, however, largely business as usual. The plot is such a retread of Almost Blue that there’s really nothing new to be gleaned. The book’s strengths lie largely in the telling rather than the story itself, and, while I would certainly read any future instalments in this series (the book’s open-ended nature suggests that there will be a sequel somewhere down the line), I would hope that Lucarelli would be able to come up with something less of a retread.

Hello, it’s me, I’m back from the sea

Well, not literally, because I wasn’t anywhere near the sea. But it is indeed me, and I am indeed back. As I mentioned previously, I was away at my gran’s funeral, which was held down in Warwick, meaning that we had to head down a day early and come back a day late. I’m not sure what I can really say about it (“I’d give this funeral a 6/10” doesn’t sound quite right), except that the cremation was set to a piece of music by Ennio Morricone, chosen by my aunt. Unfortunately, it wasn’t anything daring like the opening title theme to Four Flies on Grey Velvet, which would have been an eye-opener indeed (although I do think Come un Madrigale could have worked), but rather a piece from one of his Hollywood projects, The Mission.

Anyway, over the last three days, I’ve spent about twenty hours sitting in the back of a car, so I’m understandably not feeling entirely loquacious at the moment. Just a quick note to say that the French HD DVD release of Asterix and the Vikings and the US Blu-ray release of Volver were waiting for me when I got back this evening, so I’ll be discussing them in due course. Hopefully tomorrow, but I’ve had very little sleep over the last couple of nights, due to a variety of factors, so I’ll be hitting the hay before too long. I need to be up at 6:30 for work anyway.

PS. Thanks for all the well-wishing, people. For those who asked, no, this was not exactly an unexpected death. My gran had Dementia and had been going south for a long time. She more or less spent the last month of her life unconscious, and I think most of us would have agreed that it was better for her to go now than to hang on in there without any real quality of life.

The Giallo Project #11: Death Walks at Midnight

Alternative titles: La Morte accarezza a mezzanotte; Director: Luciano Ercoli; Starring: Nieves Navarro, Simón Andreu, Peter Martell, Claudie Lange, Carlo Gentili, Luciano Rossi; Music: Gianni Ferrio; Italian theatrical release date: November 17th, 1972

Note: this review contains some spoilers.

Now comes the part where I get to revel in my own hypocrisy. Last time, I looked at Sergio Martino’s The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and picked it apart for its narrative shortcomings and weak-willed heroine. This time, however, I’m going to talk about a film that I enjoy much better on the whole, although it’s not one I can really defend. Luciano Ercoli’s Death Walks at Midnight, the producer-turned-director’s third and final giallo, suffers from some pretty significant problems, not least the leaden pacing in its second act, but, if a giallo is going to be kitschy rather than serious, it’s a lot closer to the sort of kitsch I personally enjoy than that which is to be found in Mrs. Wardh.

The plot centres around Valentina (Nieves Navarro), a glamorous model who agrees to take an experimental new hallucinogenic called HDS for a story her journalist friend Gio (Simón Andreu) is writing. While under the influence, Valentina sees (or thinks she sees) a woman being bludgeoned to death by a man wielding a spiked glove in the apartment facing hers. With virtually everyone, including Gio, her boyfriend Stefano (Peter Martell) and the requisite cigar-chewing inspector (Carlo Gentili) passing her vision off as nothing more than the result of a drug-induced stupor, Valentina sets out to do her own detective work, particularly when the same killer she saw begins menacing her…

This is one of these films that you have to take at face value and accept for what it is. It is not, by any means, great art, and looks decidedly out of place when positioned alongside the better genre offerings by Argento, Fulci, Bava, Dallamano, Lado and the like. Essentially, it’s just a light, gory, kitschy romp in which a beautiful woman is menaced by various unsavoury types, and as such it has a lot more in common with the Sergio Martino films that tend to leave me cold. For some reason, though, I really do enjoy Ercoli’s gialli, and this is by far my favourite. A lot of it, I suspect, has to do with the way in which the heroine is portrayed. Ercoli, it would seem, attempted to establish his wife/leading lady Navarro (credited here, as in many of her films, as Susan Scott) as a rival to Edwige Fenech, without much success (she only played the lead in three gialli: this, the earlier Death Walks on High Heels and Maurizio Pradeaux’s snorefest Death Carries a Cane). Part of this might be due to her arriving on the scene late: she was much older than Fenech when she made her first giallo, and, by the time Death Walks at Midnight, arguably her strongest outing, came along, 1972 was nearing its end and the giallo craze had entered its twilight. However, I suspect that another reason is her on-screen persona.

To put it bluntly, “victim” is really not in Navarro’s repertoire. She literally exudes sexuality, her self-assured “I’m gorgeous and I know it” pout a far cry from the sort of innocent damsels who tended to be the leading ladies in most gialli. Passivity seems to be an alien concept to her, and she controls virtually every scene in which she appears (and I can think of only a handful in which she is absent), continually giving as good as she gets and, unusually for a giallo heroine, absolutely refusing to give up. (It’s also kind of interesting that, although she is a model by profession, unlike Fenech in Mrs. Wardh, she never takes her clothes off and is, on the whole, much more modestly dressed. That’s not a criticism or a compliment, just an observation.) True, she gets slapped around a bit, but those who decide to take her on tend to get far worse from her in return, and, while the various men in her life all seem to treat her as a bit of a joke, you get the impression that she has the last laugh.

Valentina is, ultimately, an example of an extremely rare breed in a giallo territory: a confident, self-sufficient woman who takes shit from no-one: Julie Wardh she is not. A complete and utter narcissist (a giant blow-up photograph of herself hangs over her bed), you get the impression that she is in love with no-one but herself, despite having a boyfriend who has his own key to her apartment, and something of a love-hate relationship with Gio, the specifics of which are never made clear (personally, I suspect they probably had a relationship in the past). There is also a strong dose of comedy both in Navarro’s performance and in her interactions with her co-stars, showing that she is not afraid to take the piss out of herself, flopping about on a bed with her arms flailing and wittering on about purple ice cream, red priests and murderers. While we might speculate that the injection of comedic elements implies that the filmmakers are uncomfortable with the notion of a tough, independent woman, we tend to laugh with Valentina rather than at her. All the men she meets either treat her as an attention-seeking child or like crap (or both), but, ultimately, she’s right and they’re wrong: she did see a murder, and there was a man after her, trying to kill her. Most of the laughs come from her eye-rolling as Gio attempts to worm his way into her favour, or from the number of people she slaps, punches or knees in the balls.

Perhaps the strongest possible indication of the difference between Valentina and Julie Wardh comes in a scene in which Valentina and Gio are sitting in an outdoor restaurant. Only half-listening to what Gio is saying, Valentina allows her mind to wander and suddenly spots the killer standing in a crowd nearby, watching her. Realising he has been spotted, he turns tail and runs, while Valentina immediately gives chase, berating a reluctant Gio into tagging along. Julie would probably either have fainted or collapsed into George Hilton’s arms, begging him to take her back to the safety of his bachelor pad (no doubt for a bout of reassuring sex on the sofa), but giving up is the last thing on Valentina’s mind. Throughout the film, she is the driving force in getting to the bottom of the mystery, and all the amateur sleuthing is carried out by her. I’m not trying to suggest that this is anything approaching a feminist tract, but in comparison with Mrs. Wardh, it seems positively radical.

I think Valentina’s relationship with the world of men is perfectly summed up in the scene where, attempting to exit the asylum she has been visiting, she has to fend off a room full of crazed inmates, who crowd around her, pawing at her or acting up to get her attention. She seems ultimately to be the lone woman and voice of reason in a world dominated by mad or immature men, some of whom with to do harm to her (e.g. Stefano and the assassins who come after her), while others simply don’t realise they’re getting in her way and are too preoccupied by their own concerns to see her point of view (e.g. Gio, Inspector Seripa). Even random individuals seem to want to do her harm: a driver whom she flags down for a lift back into town ends up trying to rape her (and finds her foot connecting with his groin for his troubles). When we finally meet another female character - the pale, frightened Verushka (Claudie Lange), obviously a “kept woman” - the difference between her and Valentina is striking.

As I said at the beginning, I can’t make too many excuses for Death Walks at Midnight or claim it to be a lost masterpiece. It is, in places, a whole lot of fun, and has some very nicely-directed scenes (in particular, the opening hallucination and the rooftop fight which rounds things off), not to mention a great, charismatic heroine, but it really falls off the rails in the middle, giving way to a seemingly pointless subplot involving Stefano and two Japanese children who he is looking after (I’m assuming the point of this is to reveal some sort of latent longing for a conventional domestic life in Valentina, but it is buried before it has a chance to be explored). Still, for all its faults, it’s an agreeable, breezy giallo with a nice sense of self-deprecation and a lead who doesn’t make me want to tear my hair out. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather hang out with Valentina than with Julie Wardh. Provided she didn’t start thumping me.

I’m not sure which film I’ll be looking at next time, but hopefully you won’t have to wait too long for it.

It’s sweepstakes time!

Top 10 films of 2007:

1. Black Book (Netherlands/Germany/Belgium: Paul Verhoeven)
2. Zodiac (USA: David Fincher)
3. The Lives of Others (Germany, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
4. Planet Terror (USA: Robert Rodriguez)
5. Sicko (USA: Michael Moore)
6. Hot Fuzz (UK/France: Edgar Wright)
7. Ratatouille (USA: Brad Bird)
8. Death Proof (USA: Quentin Tarantino)
9. Black Snake Moan (USA: Craig Brewer)
10. Mother of Tears (Italy/USA: Dario Argento)

(Also posted at DVD Times)
 

Top 10 optical disc releases of 2007:

Black Book (Blu-ray, Sony Pictures, USA)
Blade Runner: 5-disc Complete Collector’s Edition (HD DVD, Warner, USA)
Cars (Blu-ray, Disney, USA)
Casino Royale (Blu-ray, Sony Pictures, Finland)
Children of Men (HD DVD, Universal, USA)
Hot Fuzz (HD DVD, Universal, UK)
Mulholland Drive (HD DVD, Studio Canal, France)
Ratatouille (Blu-ray, Disney, USA)
Silent Hill (HD DVD, Concorde, Germany)
Les Triplettes de Belleville (HD DVD, France Télévisions Éditions, France)

(Also posted at DVD Times)

 
Notes: These lists are based solely on what I myself have seen of the films and discs released in 2007. I make no claims as to them being all-inclusive. Some of the films listed were still playing in UK cinemas in 2007 despite being released in 2006. The top optical disc releases were chosen from a combination of the quality of the films themselves, the audio/visual presentation and the extras.

The Year in Review, 2007

Well, another year has been and gone. We’re all a year older, but probably not much wiser. As usual, I’m going to do a brief run-down of various events and issues that I’ve touched on in my news posts over the year. It’s generally not my style to comment on current affairs, so I won’t be saying anything about the murder of Benazir Bhutto, Tony Blair’s departure from office or anything like that. This year, I’ve decided to split things into several sections.

 
Life Itself

Life™ was somewhat different for me this year. The biggest change was, fairly obviously, that, at the end of March, I landed myself a full-time job, working for the NHS on their Smoking Cessation programme. I spent four and a half months working thirty-seven and a half hours a week in an office, entering data and phoning people to ask them whether they had managed to successfully stop smoking, and, while I’m not about to claim that this was the most unpleasant way anyone could ever spend four and a half months, I won’t deny that I was extremely relieved to see the back of the place in August, at which point I went into a part-time Library Assistant position at the Gallery of Modern Art. To say that I find this job vastly preferable to my previous one would be the understatement of the year, and that’s not just because I work fewer hours.

On a not entirely unrelated note, my application for funding for my PhD was unsuccessful, but my four and a half months of back-breaking (I kid) labour with the NHS was enough to pay for my first year of part-time study, and more besides. I started the PhD, on portrayals of gender in the giallo (following on from my MLitt dissertation on the same area), at the end of September and, while illness in November prevented me from making as much headway as I would have liked, the work that I’ve done so far has certainly gone a long way towards getting me back into the swing of things, academically speaking, and I look forward to properly delving into my subject of choice over the next twelve months.

 
Zeros and Ones

The big technological issue of 2007 was the ongoing battle between the two rival high definition home video formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray, and the perpetual game of teeter-totter in which each format continued to vie for supremacy, engaging in a conflict of words as much as sales. A war in which what your opposition doesn’t have is every bit as important as what you do have, the biggest surprise was undoubtedly Paramount’s shock decision, in August, to ditch Blu-ray entirely and concentrate on HD DVD. With no end to the format war in sight any time soon, 2008 looks set to be another interesting year.

For me, my most significant purchase was that of a Japanese Playstation 3, reneging on my single format stance and embracing neutrality. Personally speaking, the balance continues to lie firmly in favour of HD DVD in terms of exclusive titles (a fact only compounded by the aforementioned Paramount decision), but I can’t deny that it’s nice to be able to own and watch high definition copies of Casino Royale, The Descent and Ratatouille.

I also bought three additional pieces of hardware: a new desktop PC in May, an Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive in July (to replace my clunky and oversized stand-alone HD-A1 player), and a Blu-ray enabled laptop in October. In the case of the latter, my original intention was to use it primarily for PhD work, although, in reality, I’ve got just as much, if not more, use out of it as a convenient means of taking screen captures from Blu-ray discs.

 
At the Pictures

Perhaps largely due to my period of full-time employment, I watched somewhat fewer films this year than in the previous two years. By my calculation, I watched a total of 164 films, 77 of which were ones that I hadn’t seen before, down from 216 (99 new) in 2006. Still, I did manage to see several significant films, including the great - 2001: A Space Odyssey, Babel, Black Book, Black Sabbath, the Final Cut of Blade Runner, Blood Diamond, Children of Men, Full Metal Jacket, Grindhouse, Hot Fuzz, Inside Man, Life of Brian, The Lives of Others, Pan’s Labyrinth, Ratatouille, Sicko, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Zodiac - the reasonably good - 1408, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Brokeback Mountain, Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Bourne Ultimatum, Chicago, Crank, The Game, Hard Candy, Idiocracy, Mission Impossible, Mission Impossible III, Mother of Tears, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Red Road, Syriana, Tideland, Transformers - and the guff - Aeon Flux, Fantastic Four, The Fountain, Futurama: Bender’s Big Score!, Hostel, House of the Dead, The Matrix Revolutions, Mission Impossible II, Norbit, Paprika, A Scanner Darkly, The Simpsons Movie and the remakes of Poseidon and The Wicker Man.

Best new film I saw in the year? Either Black Book or Children of Men. Worst? Without a shadow of a doubt, Norbit.

I bought or otherwise received 118 films on disc, 42 of which were HD DVDs, 31 Blu-ray discs and 45 standard definition DVDs. I wrote 44 reviews for DVD Times, down from last year’s 66. Of these, 16 were for HD DVDs, 12 for Blu-ray discs and 16 for standard definition DVDs.

 
Bibliothèque

I read the following books: Legion by William Peter Blatty, The Naked Drinking Club by Rhona Cameron, Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File by Frederick Forsythe, Carrie by Stephen King, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, The Red Dahlia by Lynda La Plante, Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin, Almost Blue by Carlo Lucarelli, The Dead Hour by Denise Mina, The Mephisto Waltz by Fred Mustard Stewart, Odette by Jerrard Tickell, Mercy Alexander by George Tiffin, and The Devil Rides Out, Gateway to Hell, Strange Conflict and To the Devil - a Daughter by Dennis Wheatley. Which, now that I think about it, is a heck of a lot more than I’d expected.

 
Song and Dance

I snagged the following CDs: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Ennio Morricone), Blood Diamond (James Newton Howard), Cars (Randy Newman), The Descent (David Julyan), Grindhouse: Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez/John Debney/Graeme Revell), The Iron Giant (Michael Kamen), Kingdom of Heaven (Harry Gregson-Williams), Mother of Tears (Claudio Simonetti), The Professional (Eric Serra), The Secret of NIMH (Jerry Goldsmith), Serenity (David Newman), This is the Life (Amy MacDonald), V for Vendetta (Dario Marianelli), Veronica Guerin (Harry Gregson-Williams), Why Bother? (Peter Cook and Chris Morris).

 
Well, all in all, I think that’s it for another year. Look back on it, it reads a bit like a shopping list with the occasional personal titbit, but I suppose that’s the way of things in our evil capitalist society. Anyway, here’s to a great 2008 and yet more wanton spending.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of December

• 28 Weeks Later (R2 UK, DVD)
• Blade Runner: 5-disc Complete Collector’s Edition (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• The Bourne Ultimatum (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Four Flies on Grey Velvet (R0 Germany, DVD)
• Halloween: Unrated Director’s Cut (R1 USA, DVD)
• Inside Man (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Jackass Number 2 (R2 UK, DVD)
• Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 5 (R1 USA, DVD)
• Masters of Horror: Season 1, Volume 3 (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Masters of Horror: Season 1, Volume 4 (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Psychic (R1 USA, DVD)
• Running Scared (R0 Germany, HD DVD)
• Sicko (R1 USA, DVD)
• Tekkonkinkreet (R2 UK, DVD)
• Tideland (R0 Germany, HD DVD)
• Veronica Guerin (R2 UK, DVD)
• Wolf Creek (R0 UK, HD DVD)

A pretty shockingly large line-up to send off 2007. I guess I should count myself lucky that several of these were either free or Christmas presents.

It’s an Argento kind of Christmas

Mother of Tears (or La Terza Madre, or The Third Mother) is, as most of you probably know by now, the third entry in Dario Argento’s loose “Three Mothers” trilogy, the first two instalments of which, Suspiria in 1977 and Inferno in 1980, constitute two of the finest horror films ever made. Arriving in 2007, Mother of Tears shows up a good 25 years later than most of us would have liked, but the question is, has the wait been worth it? Argento, after all, has famously stated on numerous occasions that the reason for the extended delay was that he didn’t feel ready to tackle the final part. Therefore, either the end result is something he really believed in, or he simply got tired of putting off the inevitable.

The answer to the question, if what you’re looking for is a natural conclusion to what was begun with the previous two films is “No.” Mother of Tears is a very different beast - unsurprisingly, given the 27-year gap between this and Inferno. If you view it as a standalone film, or at least a different twist on the same material, it starts to look a bit better, but, even so, Argento makes a number of decisions that are questionable at best, downright baffling at worst.

The plot involves student Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento), an intern at the Museum of Antique Art in Rome. She and co-worker Giselle (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) find themselves in the possession of a coffin containing various artefacts: an ancient dagger, various demon statues and a shroud imprinted with strange symbols. A drop of blood and an ill-advised incantation unleashes the demons and a screeching monkey on the unwitting Giselle, who meets a particularly bloody end. Sarah elopes but finds the police incredulous, while, below the streets of Rome, the Mother of Tears (Moran Atias), awakened after hundreds of years of slumber, unleashes a campaign of madness and destruction.

It’s pretty clear from the outset that Mother of Tears doesn’t exist in the same fairytale world as its predecessors. Gone is the lush primary colour scheme, as is the strange, indescribable sense of otherworldliness with which every frame of these films was infused. This third outing takes place very much in our own world, continuing that same realistic look that Argento has continued to explore since the 90s. Frederic Fasano’s cinematography reminds me very much of Benoit Debie’s work on The Card Player crossed with the blander look created by Ronnie Taylor for Sleepless. It’s strange that Argento claimed this film to have the style of his 70s outings, because nothing could be further from the truth. The colours do begin to creep in, in a decidedly subdued form, during the climax, but they are generally restricted to a handful of brief shots.

At least the film has the Italian flair that was sorely missed in Argento’s Masters of Horror episodes, his most recent directorial projects prior to this. Lush architecture and classy ladies abound… although that most definitely does not apply to the gaggle of witches who fly into Rome aboard a jet liner and look more like a group of goth posers on their way to a late night rave than evil incarnate. The scenes in which they menace various fellow passengers really do rank among the most risible that Argento has ever directed, and that includes anything in The Phantom of the Opera, Jenifer and Pelts. What’s worse, though, is the utter banality of Mater Lacrimarum, who is talked up as an ancient evil but turns out to basically be a Page 3 girl with too much make-up. In Inferno, Mark Elliot encountered her in a lecture theatre as an alluring, mysterious presence who whispered silent words to him, causing his perception of time and reality to be altered. Here, she’s a plastic-breasted, cackling joke with bad hair who struts around in the nude with her shaved pubic region on display while her followers enjoy a rampant orgy.

I wonder perhaps if what hurts the film most is the budget. The mystical shroud worn by Mater Lacrimarum (when she’s wearing anything at all) is basically a red T-shirt with glitter writing on it, while the various vignettes showing Rome’s inhabitants going crazy, committing rape, murder, vandalism and the like, are on too small a scale for us to really believe that the whole city is in chaos. That, too, might explain the overly conventional colour palette, although I find it hard to believe that some of the look of Suspiria and Inferno couldn’t have been achieved digitally. Speaking of computer effects, there is some really bad CGI on display, the worst being a demon that suddenly appears in the lens of a photographer’s camera in the opening scene, accompanied by an obvious musical stinger. And the last said about the film’s final shot, the better…

Ignoring all that, though, there’s plenty to appreciate provided you can get over the overwhelming sense of disappointment that this really isn’t a patch on its predecessors. Asia Argento turns in a good performance and makes for an engaging and reasonably resourceful protagonist, while Valeria Cavalli is sympathetic as the white witch who helps Sarah realise her inner potential. I also have no problem admitting that the reappearance of Varelli’s book on the Three Mothers and its familiar opening narration (complete with Emereson-esque music) sent a chill down my spine and evoked a wonderful sense of nostalgia in me. Most of all, there’s a certain sense of infectious glee to the film’s complete lack of restraint. Unfortunately, there’s a feeling of leering sadism to the death scenes (case in point: a lesbian character dies by having a spear rammed into her nether regions and out through her mouth) that I just didn’t get from Suspiria or Inferno, which had a far more artistic bent to their killings, while the lingering on Sergio Stivaletti’s not entirely convincing prosthetic effects is dangerously close to latter day Fulci. Still, if you like over the top gore, there’s much to appreciate, with an opening murder in which a character is strangled by her own intestines particularly standing out. There are fewer great set-pieces than in most of Argento’s films, but an extended sequence in which Sarah has to evade both the police and the aforementioned goth witches, hopping from train to train, is definitely memorable.

Compared to its predecessors, Mother of Tears is crude and in many respects sloppy. I suspect it was always a foregone conclusion that it would fail to live up to the grandeur of Suspiria and Inferno, but even so I think it could have been better than it is. It’s fun while it lasts, but it doesn’t really stick with you. Essentially, it’s more of a thrill ride in the vein of the Final Destination films (now there’s something I never thought I’d say) than the mesmerising experience of the first two films, but I had fun and I can’t say it bored me for a second.

DVD image comparison: Four Flies on Grey Velvet

I’ve put together an in-depth comparison between the various releases of Four Flies on Grey Velvet that I own: two VHS-sourced copies and the recent film-sourced release put out by Retrofilm.

I’ve decided to do things slightly differently for this comparison. Given that there is yet to be an authorised release of the film on DVD, several copies are floating around, with various bootleggers repackaging the same versions and putting them out under their own labels. As such, this is less a comparison between specific releases and more one between the various different “editions” that are floating about.

Until recently, it was generally accepted that there were three major versions doing the rounds:

1. A truncated English language version, presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. This release is very dark and, during the climax, it becomes virtually impossible to see what is happening. I refer to this as the OAR English version.
2. A composite version, taken from a French print with English audio overlaid in most instances. This release is cropped to approximately 1.85:1 and is much brighter, but with the whites blown out. This version carries a Luminous Film & Video Works watermark during the opening credits, so I refer to this as the Luminous version.
3. An English language version cropped to 1.33:1. This verion supposedly features the best quality out of these three releases, but, as I haven’t seen it for myself, I can’t comment.

A fourth version, a Region 0 PAL DVD, surfaced in December 2007 from German label Retrofilm. The first release of the film to be taken from a film source rather than an nth generation video copy, there was initially some speculation that this was a legitimate release, but, although there have been arguments on both sides of the fence, it does at this point seem that Retrofilm’s copy is unauthorised. It is, however, quite clearly the best available version by some considerable margin, as you will be able to see from the screen captures here.

FedEx flies

That’s right, it’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet. This particular order actually came from Xploited Cinema, not D&T. I ordered a second copy for two reasons. First of all, my impatient side got the better of me and I decided that I wanted to order from a supplier that had a courier shipping option, to ensure that it reached me before Christmas. Secondly, there was at one point a rumour doing the rounds that D&T had already sold their entire allocated stock and wouldn’t be getting any more, so I decided to hedge my bets and order from a supplier which had already stated that it would be getting a decent number of copies. As it turns out, my D&T order shipped only slightly after the Xploited one, but all that this means is that I’ll have an extra copy to pass on to a lucky duck… for a price, of course.

You’re probably looking for my opinion on the quality of this release, and I’ll start out by categorically stating what it is not. It is not, by any means, a bells and whistles, zim-zam, whizz-bang, no holds barred restoration of the film. The materials used, an English language print (presumably theatrical), show no small amount of wear and tear, with speckles, scratches and tramlines visible for the duration of its running time. The colours and black level are also inconsistent, with several scenes looking overly pink and the overall saturation level seeming too high most of the time. Additionally, given that the English language print is a few minutes shorter than its Italian counterpart, some material has been spliced in from a VHS source, and at these points the quality is much poorer than the rest of the film (although still, by my estimation, an improvement on the two bootlegs I own). A handful of other minor flaws, including the title card being misplaced (it appears at the very start of the film here, rather than in its proper place after Michael Brandon, Mimsy Farmer and Jean-Pierre Marielle’s names have been displayed), and the occasional instance of the entire frame floating slightly too high or low, resulting in the top or bottom of the next frame being visible, show that this is release is very much rough around the edges.

With all that on board, let’s move on to the positives, and luckily, there are many. Although the detail is far from spectacular, I’ll be absolutely honest and say that it compares favourably to many giallo releases I’ve seen from Blue Underground and NoShame in terms of overall sharpness, and it exhibits none of the obvious edge enhancement that the former go in for. Provided you lower your explanations slightly and don’t expect a flawless, crystal clear image, I can’t imagine you being disappointed by this release, which is by far the best the film has ever looked outside of an actual cinema. The sound is not bad either - noticeably strained, but once again a lot better than my previous copies. You can actually see and hear what is going on throughout, particularly in the second half of the film, which, in many copies, was virtually incomprehensible due to it being so dark and fuzzy.

I’ll be doing an in-depth comparison between this and the two other releases I own before too long, in addition to a fully-fledged review (this, The Five Days of Milan, Jenifer and Mother of Tears are the only Argento films about which I have yet to write in depth), but for the time being, feast your eyes on these screen captures:

O Weinstein, where art thou?

When DVDs of Planet Terror and Death Proof, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s respect entries in the Grindhouse double feature, were released in the US this year, I made a point of not buying them, as I assumed that the Weinstein Company would release both on HD DVD before too long. Unfortunately, with no new Weinstein HD releases since June, one can only assume that, unhappy with the low sales, they got cold feet and decided not to release anything further on the format.

Worry not, however, for German distributor Senator are picking up the slack with separate HD DVD releases of both films in the New Year. Death Proof will be out first on January 7th, with Planet Terror to follow on March 10th. Both films will feature 1080p VC-1 encodes (Death Proof will be in its original theatrical ratio of 2.39:1, while Planet Terror will, like the DVD, be reframed to 1.85:1, as per Rodriguez’s intentions) and English and German audio tracks (DTS-HD 5.1 and Dolby Digital-Plus 5.1 for both), with optional German subtitles. No word yet on the extras for Planet Terror, but Death Proof appears to include everything from the DVD, so I don’t see why its stablemate will be any different. In addition, both will come in a nifty “steelbook” case, presumably similar to Europacorp’s Ultimate Edition DVD of Danny the Dog, Dark Sky’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and that horrible “Definitive Edition” of Suspiria.

Four flies on shiny plastic

Get your kreditkarten at the ready, check your email for your benutzername und kennwort and hurry over to D&T Mailorder Shop, because they’re taking pre-orders for the German DVD release of Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Due to ship on December 21st, this obscure piece of Argento history can be had for a mere €24.99.

In other Argento-related news, DesertRain at Dark Discussion reports that the man himself is already working on his next project. Entitled Giallo, it will be shot in Turin and star Asia Argento, Ray Liotta and Vincent Gallo. Filming will take place between January and March. Some brief early information on the project is available at Shock Till You Drop - unfortunately, it seems that, as with his Masters of Horror entries, he will be working from someone else’s script.