Gialli

Eye of the ripper

A few quick words on the Another World Entertainment release of The New York Ripper, which arrived today:

First and foremost, the source for the transfer appears to be the same one that was used for the Australian release from Stomp Visual. Based on the screenshots posted with HorrorDVDs.com's review, I had assumed that the source was different, primarily due to how much more saturated they appear, but I suspect that the person who captured them had his/her DVD playback software's saturation set too high.

Having compared the Stomp Visual and Another World Entertainment transfers fairly thoroughly, I'd go so far as to say that there's really nothing to call either way - both look identical, and I did 600% magnifications of several screen captures. AWE's release does, however, gain several points in its favour for including the scene in which Dr. Davis plays a trick on his secretary, which was omitted from the Stomp release. On the AWE DVD, this scene is sourced from the Anchor Bay DVD and is NTSC-to-PAL standards converted, but it's better than nothing (it could still have been handled better, though - a proper adjustment of the frame rate should have been carried out rather than a video standards conversion).

Another major boon for the AWE release is the fact that it ports over several of the bonus features from the 2-disc French Collector's Edition, along with optional English subtitles. Not everything has made it over, but there is a decent amount of material here - enough to keep you occupied for a while.

Ultimately, the AWE release gets my thumbs-up. As far as I can tell, it's the best release of the film to date. Perfect? No, certainly not. There's certainly room for improvement as far as image quality is concerned (although detail-wise is very nice), and it's a shame the extras package is incomplete. But AWE's efforts to port over some of the material, and to assemble a complete cut of the film (even if the added footage could have been handled better) is appreciated.

Eye slicing never looked more lovely

I was browsing through some of the reviews at HorrorDVDs.com the other night, and I suddenly noticed something: Another World Entertainment's release of Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper has a really nice transfer. Personally, I always appreciate it when a review includes full size screen captures, because it means that, whatever the words might say, I can trust my own eyes and have a fairly good idea of what the transfer will actually look at without having to put a whole lot of faith in reviewers whose credentials are unknown to me.

Today, while doing a bit of shopping at Xploited Cinema, in the form of the Italian genre cinema book Esotika Erotika Psicotika, primarily for my PhD work, I decided to bite the bullet and order this, my third copy of Fulci's notorious Video Nasty. It's not my favourite of Fulci's films by a long shot (I still maintain that A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is his best work), but it's unjustly maligned and is, if not in the "very good" category of gialli, at least in the upper echelons of "good".

Thank you for the screenshots, HorrorDVDs. You've just earned Another World Entertainment another sale!

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.

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...

The Giallo Project #12: The Fifth Cord

Alternative titles: Giorna nera per l'ariete; Evil Fingers; Director: Luigi Bazzoni; Starring: Franco Nero, Silvia Monti, Wolfang Preiss, Ira von Fürstenberg, Edmund Purdom, Rossella Falk, Renato Romano, Pamela Tiffin; Music: Ennio Morricone; Italian theatrical release date: August 28th, 1971

Note: this review contains significant spoilers.

In his excellent essay Playing with Genre, Gary Needham descibes Luigi Bazzoni's giallo The Fifth Cord as an example of the more progressive side of the movement. The first time I watched the film, I really wasn't sure what he meant, but, after mulling the issue over in my mind for a while, I'm beginning to see where he was coming from. I'm going to do something a little different with this instalment of the Giallo Project, in that, instead of doing a general overview of the film, I will focus in depth on a handful of scenes which specifically refer to the subject on which I am currently interested: namely, the character of Andrea Bild (Franco Nero) and his relationship with the two women in his life, his ex-girlfriend Helene (Silvia Monti) and his current catch, Lou (Pamela Tiffin). This is part of the work I am currently doing for my PhD, a piece which I am hoping to use to explore the wide variety of ways in which women are portrayed in gialli, and as such, a lot of the material below was written with an eye to being incorporated into an academic essay.

Above: Andrea Bild: the image of the stereotypical hard-drinking macho man turned on its head

Andrea embodies the hard-drinking, virile, macho male stripped of all the qualities normally found in giallo portrayals of such characters. Rather than the suave George Hilton type, he is an unkempt, pathetic drunk, engaged in an affair with Lou, a student several years younger than him, but clearly still dependent on his ex-girlfriend, Helene, a firm, sensible, working single mother fighting a divorce (at one point, she says that, until the proceedings go through, she will not be able to "live [her] own life"). In this film, it's not so much the plot or the basic character archetypes that are unique (on the contrary, they are actually somewhat generic), but the manner in which what we are supposed to infer from them is reversed. In the average giallo, the J&B Whisky bottle is an ubiquitous simple of sophistication and finesse (Koven, 2006, pp. 49-50); here, the first time we see a J&B bottle is when Andrea, drunk and unshaven, swigs from it while driving home from a party after being snubbed by Helene, who has already commented with disdain on his drunkenness. What's particularly interesting about this is that it is a clear reimagining of the persona Franco Nero portrayed in the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and would go on to play in the action and crime thrillers of the mid to late 1970s. In these, the gristled, tough-talking antihero who takes the law into his own hands was romanticised; here, he's practically a joke. Just watch his first speaking role, where he drunkenly tries to woo Helene, gazing pleadingly at her, only for it to be made clear that she finds his state of intoxication pathetic. As someone who finds macho culture intensely irritating, this pleases me no end.

Above: J&B: the classy gentleman's drink

In the scene above, Helene returns to her car to find him sitting in the passenger seat, dishevelled and slurring his speech. It is made clear from the start that he is encroaching on her territory (in this case, her car) and that she holds the power. Throughout their conversation, he gazes at her pleadingly, which she refuses to even dignify him with eye contact. When he begins to caress her hair, she firmly and calming removes her hand, responding to his statement that drinking "makes life much easier" with the statement that she, on the other hand, has not been drinking, the implication being that she would have to be drunk herself in order to entertain any prospect of anything happening between them. She controls the scene from its beginning to its end, when she orders him out of the car with the simple statement "Goodnight. Goodbye, Andrea", and turning on the car's ignition, all the while refusing to look at him. Bazzoni, meanwhile, underscores the lack of connection between the two of them by filming the entire scene as a single medium shot in which each character occupies either side of the frame, the camera adopting a detached distance rather than priveleging either character's point of view with subjective shots.

The first scene to feature Andrea's young girlfriend, Lou, taking place the morning after his encounter with Helene, shows him to be even more dishevelled and pathetic than the night before. He wakes up in bed, groggy and half-dressed, to the sound of the telephone ringing, and it is revealed, through dialogue, that he has slept through two previous calls after returning home in such a state that Lou had to undress him and put him to bed.

Andrea: You always liked undressing me.
Lou: Not when you're drunk.

Above: The modern man: emblematic of suavity and dignity

Here, drinking is once again held in contempt, the impression being given that, far from making him the virile 'ladies' man' that most male giallo protagonists seem to embody, drink is a turn-off (rather than a turn-on) for women and makes him unable to function sexually. Alcohol, therefore, is here used to diminish masculinity rather than embody it.

Lou, however, is a considerably different character from Helene. Content to allow Andrea to be unfaithful to her (a courtesy which he does not extend to her in return - see the scene in which he slaps her about after suspecting that she has been seeing another man) and to dote on him (Helene refused to give him the time of day; Lou, on the other hand, took care of him when he came home too drunk to even undress himself), she is instantly portrayed as a more submissive character. What is unusual, though, is that, while the Italian gothic horror films of the 1960s generally portrayed assertive women as dangerous and a threat to (patriarchal) society and weak, submissive women as embodying the 'proper' characteristics of femininity (see Günsberg, 2005, Chapter 4), this film does not appear to make any judgement calls about either of the two women in Andrea's life. Indeed, if anything, she is the most positively portrayed character in the film. (Other examples of positive portrayals of independent professional women in gialli include Vittoria Stori in What Have They Done to Your Daughters? and Gianna Brezzi in Deep Red. These are, I must confess, about the only ones I can think of.) On the contrary, we see the level of respect Andrea has for Helene when he is sober, heading round to her house to apologise for his inappropriate behaviour the previous night when he discovers that Lou has gone away for the weekend. (In a note she has left for him, Lou tells him that, if he wants to "get laid", he is free to go ahead, but this clearly is not his intention when he pays his visit to Helene.)

Above: Helene, a woman in control of her own life

Is with their previous encounter, Bazzoni once again emphasises Andrea's futile attempts to make eye contact with Helene and her refusal to look at him. It is only when he makes a disparaging remark about her lack of a sex life, telling her that "it's bad for [her] not to make love", that she finally grants him more than a brief glance, and only then to once again refer to his drunkenness and to tell him to get to the point of his visit. His purpose, incidentally, is to ask her for information about a case he is investigating, in effect priveleging her with information which he does not possess and even going so far as to imply that he needs her to succeed at his job (whereas she is self-sufficient). Throughout the scene in which she provides him with the information that she needs, her authority is accentuated by low angle shots in which the camera looks up at her, while the scene's first shot shows her standing on the balcony at the top of a flight of stairs, looking down at Andrea. Throughout the scene, she moves freely around the house, pouring herself a drink and monologuing without directly looking at Andrea, until towards the end, when she sits down and faces him, maintaining a clear distance from him.

Andrea: I didn't notice anything.
Helene: I'm not surprised. You were drunk.

Above: Are you getting all this down, Laura Mulvey?

The difference between the portrayal of Helene and Lou is once again accentuated when Andrea, after believing Lou to be having an affair with another man, returns home to confront her. Whereas Helene, in the scene previously discussed, was dressed modestly in a black pullover and trousers, Lou is completely naked, lying on Andrea's bed as she waits for him to return. Even more significantly, she is introduced via a subjective shot, the camera adopting Andrea's point of view as he enters the bedroom. This time, it is Andrea who moves freely around, putting his groceries away while talking at Lou rather than to her. It is tempting to view Lou, who tells Andrea that she was "dying to see [him]", as his attempt to make up for his failure with Helene. One gets the impression that Helene's independence frustrates him, and that he entertains Lou simply for the convenience of someone who can alternately dote on and be dependent on him.

Andrea: What kind of dump do you come from? Your mother doesn't take care of you, your father's gathering mould in a state home for the aged, and you play tramp in one sports car after the other."
Lou: Was it a red sports car?
Andrea: That's right.
Lou: Well, that car just happens to belong to my brother Walter, you idiot! You know, ever since you've been playing detective, you just can't get anything right. You really had me a laugh!
[Brief pause]
Andrea: You're pathetic.

In a sense, Lou is pathetic. Immediately afterwards, she eagerly tries to please Andrea by providing him with further information for his investigation, before pleadingly asking where he is going when he head out without a word. (Later, she seems to forgive him completely, indulging in a giggling play-fight with him before having sex.) Andrea, however, the drunk who seems to take his frustration regarding his ex out on his current girlfriend, is nothing if not a hypocrite. This is not, of course, the only giallo in which a male protagonist treats his girlfriend badly, whether by treating her with contempt or physically assaulting her, but it is one of the few in which the filmmakers seem to condemn this behaviour. Often, George Hilton (or one of his counterparts) will slap a female character whom they believe to be in a state of 'hysteria' (the impression given that the filmmakers believe such violence to be justified in order to calm down an unhelpfully 'hysterical' woman); here, however, Andrea's assault of Lou is that of a scruffy alcoholic hitting a woman in complete control of her senses on the basis of a false assumption. Andrea is not 'punished' as such for this; rather, it is simply yet another in a long line of cases of bad behaviour. (When she reappears once more, towards the end of the film, to tell him that she is leaving him and getting married, it's tempting to view this as Andrea getting a taste of his own medicine.)

Above: And it looks really nice, too

Of course, the characterisations are far from inclusive. For all her strengths, Helene does, rather regrettably, submit to a brief passionate snog with Andrea after her turns up at her house, wanting her to comfort him after a particularly unpleasant encounter with his boss. (To her credit, however, she does call a halt to it, opting to head back indoors to take care of her son rather than allowing herself to be used by Andrea as a cheap lay to make himself feel better.) And let's not forget that the killer's motivation, seemingly plucked out of nowhere at the last minute, is that old reactionary staple, that of the homosexual turned down by a straight man going mad and deciding to kill a bunch of people. Still, I can see exactly what Gary Needham means when he calls this a progressive giallo which "play[s] with the conventions of detection and investigation procedures in order to explore issues of masculinity and identity".

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.

What is it with academics and penises?

I'm currently reading Maggie Günsberg's Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre as part of my PhD work. At the moment, I'm making my way through her chapter on horror cinema (which concentrates on the "pure" horror films of the mid-50s to mid-60s, barely even mentioning the giallo thrillers of the early 70s in which I'm interested), and I'm wondering if I'm the only person who finds it disconcerting that so many academics specialising in Film Studies seem to see penises everywhere. Particularly when discussing horror films, any object that is long, cylindrical and/or pointy is interpreted as a phallic symbol. (Likewise, the narrow corridors of the old houses that so often appear are invariably described as "vaginal" and their decaying state, plus their frequent use by evil spirits, proof of these films' misogyny.) Sometimes it's understandable - there are only so many ways one can interpret a lesbian character having a spear thrust into her nether regions and out of her mouth in Mother of Tears, for example - but most of the time, it's bordering on the ridiculous.

Maybe it's just me, but would it not be fair to suggest that, if you see willies everywhere, then perhaps you're just a wee bit immature?

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.

The Giallo Project #10: The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh

Alternative titles: Lo Strano vizio della Signora Wardh; Next!; Blade of the Ripper; Director: Sergio Martino; Starring: George Hilton, Edwige Fenech, Conchita Airoldi, Ivan Rassimov, Alberto de Mendoza; Music: Nora Orlandi; Italian theatrical release date: January 15th, 1971

Note: this review contains a number of major spoilers.

No, you haven't gone crazy. I have indeed just skipped over several films, leaping from 1969's The Frightened Woman all the way to 1971's The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, leaving out a whole lot of interesting title along the way (not least The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, arguably the single most crucial film in the giallo movement after Blood and Black Lace). I fully intend to go back and cover these films at a later date, but since, at the moment, I'm writing (or trying to write) a piece comparing the portrayal and treatment of the heroines in The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and Luciano Ercoli's Death Walks at Midnight, I thought it made sense to treat you to my thought process as I went through these two films. (Ergo, the next Giallo Project will cover Death Walks at Midnight.)

Mrs. Wardh is a film that I think people tend to overrate... although, of course, that's just my opinion, and I suspect many people will feel that I underrate it. In historical terms, it's noteworthy for being the first giallo to be directed by the prolific Sergio Martino (although he only actually directed four further gialli) and to star Edwige Fenech, considered by many to be to the giallo what Jamie Lee Curtis is to the American slasher. It's very much a giallo in the "harangued woman" format that we might say got its kick-start with The Sweet Body of Deborah (covered here), on which many of Mrs. Wardh's key players on both sides of the camera worked. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your taste in gialli), this means that the voluptuous Ms. Fenech spends the duration of the film running from one man to another, often fainting into their arms or begging them to protect her. For some viewers, this is part and parcel of what makes gialli so enjoyable; personally, I prefer my heroines to have a bit more pluck - think Nora in The Girl Who Knew Too Much or Valentina in Death Walks at Midnight. Barring the pansexual seductress she played in Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, Fenech's giallo roles tend to be comprised exclusively of complete drips who wouldn't seem entirely out of place in a Victorian romance novel.

The amusing part is that this appears at least partly to be intentional. The rest of the women in the film are considerably less highly strung, and, while most of them meet a bloody end screaming their lungs out, they seem to have noticed that the year is 1971, not 1871, and that women are no longer the property of men. While Julie Wardh (Fenech) is married to her dry-faced dolt of a husband, Neil (Alberto de Mendoza), her best friend Carol (Conchita Airoldi) enjoys living it up, espousing a motto of "When it's good, I enjoy it. When it's bad, I don't think about it." A bit of an airhead, yes, but she's considerably better company than the humourless Julie, even if her notion of being liberated doesn't extend much beyond having lots of sex with lots of men, and seems to be in the fortunate position of having ample money at her disposal despite not appearing to have a job or anyone else to provide for her. La dolce vita indeed!

Julie, too, has far too much free time on her hands, but she spends it fretting and running into the arms of one man after another, hoping they'll protect her. I said before that there's a common theme in the "harangued woman" gialli, of the heroine (a term I'm using very loosely here) hoping the Good Man will protect her from the Bad Men, with the former invariably turning out to be the latter. Here, all three men in Julie's life - Neil, the thuggish Jean (Ivan Rassimov), the roguish George (George Hilton) - are involved in a plot to do poor Julie in and collect the proceeds of her life insurance, so in a sense you can't really blame her for running around like a headless chicken practicing her wide-eyed look of horror at every opportunity. The three conspirators' scheme has to rank as one of the most nonsensical in any giallo (and that's saying something), but I'll get on to that later. In the meantime, it's quite fascinating to see the three archetypes so clearly established: the boring, safe (who is of course anything but) older man who seems to be something of a surrogate father; the dangerous, sinister rascal who enjoys leering at the heroine and subjecting her to various forms of sexualised torture; the rakish playboy whose happy-go-lucky nature really can't be anything but an act. That all three are planning to do Julie in is further evidence of how misanthropic these films tend to be: Julie may be a complete and utter nervous wreck, but if the entire world appears to be populated by bastards, can you really blame her? Actually, I think you probably can: in Death Walks at Midnight, Valentina's response to an attempted sex attack is to knee the perpretrator in the balls; Julie tends to to swoon and let them get on with it. Okay, so I'm not expecting every giallo heroine to be a gung-ho action woman, but it's kind of disheartening to watch one who is such a pushover.

As for the aforementioned plot devised by the three men, it's one of those traditional giallo schemes that superficially seems to make sense - having three killers, after all, means that you avoid any unfortunate problems of having someone be in two places at once - but, once you start to pick it apart, promptly falls to pieces. Now, you might say, if I'm paying too much attention to the plot, I'm not really getting into the spirit of things, but I like my pizza to have some dough in it rather than just a mountain of toppings, and the same goes for my gialli: the photography, sex and violence is all very well, but if there isn't a plot holding it together, I find it harder to care. Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Massimo Dallamano and Aldo Lado (probably my favourite four) all seemed to understand this, and were able to ground their stylistic set-pieces within interesting plots; here, the killers' motives and their actions seem almost to have been an afterthought.

Essentially, the plan is that, if Julie dies, Neil will inherit a substantial amount of money. Now, he could bump her off himself, but he needs an alibi, so he enlists his associate, George, who would like Neil to do him a favour and do away with his cousin Carol, so he can come into some money of his own. All well and good, and the fact that a maniac is currently terrorising Neil and Julie's native Vienna, slicing and dicing young women with a razor, gives the pair the perfect opportunity to make it look like the demises of Julie and Carol are the work of this individual. Killing Carol is straightforward enough - they lure her to a deserted park on the pretext of meeting someone who is blackmailing Julie (though how they could be sure Carol would go in Julie's place is anyone's guess). With Julie, however, they complicate things by, for seemingly no reason, involving her old flame Jean, and then going on a gratuitous trip to Spain, where they chloroform her, turn on the gas and attempt to pass her death off as suicide. All well and good, but why bother going to Spain to do it? Why not just do this in Vienna, or better let keep things simple and stick a knife in her in a dark alley? The most obvious answer is that this was a Spanish co-production, and the script needed to include an excuse to do some filming in that country. Another theory, of course, is that writer Ernesto Gastaldi was making it up as he went along, which is one of the reasons why I've always found his assertion that Dario Argento's scripts are nonsensical quite bizarre.

Is this enough to make or break the film? Not really, but, for me, it does introduce one distraction too many in a film that was already struggling to hold my attention. While a couple of the set-pieces are quite effective (the best being the death of Carol, which anticipates a similar park murder in Argento's later Four Flies on Grey Velvet), Emilio Foriscot's photography is flatly lit and overly contrasty, while, as already mentioned, Julie is a completely insipid protagonist. As far as Martino's work goes, I find myself drawn more to All the Colours of the Dark, which features nearly all the same flaws but makes up for them by being completely crazy and off the wall. Mrs. Wardh is... well, it's not a dead loss by any means, and I do quite like the atmosphere of casual decadence that Martino creates, but it's one of those films that I always have to force myself to go back to, and never enjoy as much as everyone else seems to.

Next time, I'll be looking at Luciano Ercoli's Death Walks at Midnight, one of my guilty pleasures.

The Giallo Project #9: The Frightened Woman

Alternative titles: Femina ridens; The Laughing Woman; Director: Piero Schivazappa; Starring: Philippe Leroy, Dagmar Lassander; Music: Stelvio Cipriani; Italian theatrical release date: August 24th, 1969

Note: this review contains a number of major spoilers.

"From an aesthetic point of view, your position is perfect. You form a long, supple, curving line against a series of upright lines. You're feminine like that!" - Dr. Sayer

Well, nearly five months after my last entry, I finally decided to stop prolonging the inevitable and get this project started again. A can only apologise for the extended delay, and hopefully future updates will be a lot more frequent than they have been so far.

Initially, I wasn't sure whether or not to include this film in the Giallo Project, given that its affiliation with the form can only really be described as loose. However, I think that it does share many elements with the "woman in peril" domestic thrillers that Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino and Umberto Lenzi were known for during the early days of the movement, so in a sense it would be wrong to ignore it just because it doesn't fit the template of the typical giallo. The plot essentially concerns Maria (Dagmar Lassander), a reporter, who accepts an invitation from the enigmatic Dr. Sayer (Philippe Leroy) to visit his apartment on the pretext of giving her some files for a paper she is writing. Maria discovers too late that Sayer is in fact a lunatic who believes that women will take over the world and render men redundant unless something is done to curb their emancipation.

One of the elements that continues to fascinate me with films such as these, and indeed was one of the driving forces in my decision to undertake a PhD on the subject, its their strange air of ambivalence towards violence, modernity and sexuality, to name but a few. After 87 minutes of Dr. Sayer berating women for their desire to be "socially and sexually self-sufficient" and lamenting the possibility of a future in which such a state should come to pass, I'm still not sure where writer/director Piero Schivazappa stands on the issue. The film came along at the height of the women's liberation movement, and as such it's tempting to see this as the knee-jerk reaction of a filmmaker who, like many men in the 60s and 70s, was growing increasingly paranoid as a result of women's burgeoning independence. Obviously, Dr. Sayer is completely insane and unstable, but it wouldn't be the first time a director used a lunatic to convey his message. The matter is also muddied considerably by a plot twist in the final act which turns the tables, presenting Sayer as the victim of an entrapment scheme cooked up by Maria and another woman. Still, it does conclude with what seems to be a completely sincere call to arms for women not to take any crap from men, so frankly I have no idea!

Whatever Schivazappa intended, the film is clearly an exploration of control. The majority of gialli that feature a female protagonist can be broken down into simple stories of a helpless woman falling into the arms of her handsome rescuer: it's the ultimate male fantasy of the Good Man saving the damsel in distress from the Bad Man. The difference, here, is that there is no Good Man, only one man and one woman, with the roles of victim and aggressor becoming increasingly blurred as the film progresses. At one point, Maria asks Sayer why he is holding her against her will when he could have all the women he wants. The answer is that he isn't interested in a woman who is with him by her own choosing: he has to break her will, to give her no choice. This is why Sayer reacts with such horror to Maria's suicide attempt: his desire for control over her is so strong that he can't bear the thought of her dying on her terms rather than his. In the shifting power dynamic between the two characters, meanwhile, there seems to be an implication that man wants to enslave woman but is ultimately utterly dependent on her. Sayer is obsessed with his own virility, continually exercising, checking for grey hairs, and so on. Of course, the ageing process is something that can't be stopped, so perhaps Schivazappa is saying that any attempt to resist the tide of change is ultimately futile. I don't know, and that's part of why I find this film so interesting.

Above: Woman's path curves while man's is straight and regimented?

Whether all this theorising and analysis interests you is beside the point, because there is plenty of visual aural and eye candy to satisfy even the most ardent theoryphobe (did I just coin a new term there?). It's beautifully shot - that much is clear even on the horribly faded and blurred copy I watched, where every shade of colour seemed to be a muddy brown - and incredibly late 60s in its styling. The characters seem to live inside a surrealist painting, one populated with art deco architecture and furniture, and even a fascinating vagina dentata contraption, one large enough for a man to step inside and be swallowed by. There is a fascinating contrast between the classical paintings that adorn Sayer's workplace and the anarchic, tripped-out world of his bachelor pad. Likewise, I'm intrigued by the manner in which Sayer is continually associated with rigid, straight lines while Maria is shown in the context of smooth, flowing curves. Intriguingly, this aesthetic is also used to highlight the shifting balance of power. At the start, while Maria is Sayer's prisoner, she is frequently framed within or partially blocked by horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, whereas later, as the nature of the captor/captive relationship is altered, the framing and architecture become more freeform.

I'm ultimately not entirely sure how I feel about The Frightened Woman. It's a visually arresting and often thematically interesting piece of work, but it does strike a few bum notes, among them Maria's readiness to forgive Sayer for locking her up and abusing her mentally and physically when she discovers that this is the first time he has ever done this to a woman (although even this is muddied by the late revelation that she was actually the one who set out to ensnare him). Likewise, after the reconciliation between the two characters, there is a lengthy stretch in which the film more or less collapses until the final climactic twist is unveiled. Still, it's an interesting, unique piece of work, and Lassander and Leroy do well to carry it across the finishing line between them. This is probably one for repeat viewings, and is definitely worth a look if you haven't seen it before.

Next time, I'll be looking at another fringe case, Elio Petri's Oscar-winning Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

Setting the record straight: The Psychic

A week ago, I wrote a post on Severin Films' release of Lucio Fulci's DVD of The Psychic, criticising its image quality based on flaws which I believed indicated a PAL to NTSC video standards conversion. The truth is actually more complicated than that, and I would like to apologise for misleading anyone in any way.

However, rather than asking you to take my word for it, I thought it would be better if I let someone else explain it - someone who knows more about this subject matter than me and has had first hand experience with video encoding.

David Mackenzie says:

Michael has given me this disc for my input. It's a very strange one and sadly, I have to say that it is definitely a poor disc. The opening shot of the car driving clearly shows a lot of motion judder and also some interpolated frames (strange for a Progressive disc). The frame rate is 29.970fps, and not the correct (for telecine'd film) 23.976fps.

For those that would like to get into technicalities, this is not a video standards conversion in the typical sense. I can understand why it would be mistaken for one because of the aforementioned doubled frames in the opening shot, but it's different. It is actually worse than a traditional standards conversion. With typical PAL 50i->NTSC 60i conversions, better Deinterlacing hardware (in high-end TVs, projectors, DVD players, video processors etc) can attempt to recover much of the original resolution, albeit with the caveats that standards conversions bring to the table (slight motion blur).

However, this disc is a badly done Progressive one. That means that no matter how good your video processing hardware is, it's never going to look much better than this. The video for this film has not been handled correctly. The entire film has a lot of aliasing (which is probably why it was mistaken for a 50i->60i standards conversion in the first place) which appears to be the result of it being run through a crude Deinterlacing process. This creates jaggies and causes a loss of resolution. On the up-side, there's no motion blur for most of the film.

Mike also showed me the French R2 PAL release. It's MUCH better (despite having some more film damage). It doesn't have the jagged lines, and there's no motion blur on any scene.

I realise that companies releasing "cult" foreign material on DVD have enough problems to worry about - rights issues, tracking down good masters, etc., and I realise that not everyone is a video enthusiast, so smaller labels won't necessarily know what to do in every case. That said, proper conversion between the formats is not at all difficult 99% of the time, so it's a problem everyone could do without.

With that in mind, if anyone at Severin would like to contact me, I'd be more than willing to explain how to convert a PAL master tape into NTSC Film (23.976fps progressive) using the correct method.

- David Mackenzie
Hardware Reviewer and DVD author

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.

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:

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.

It's real

http://www.dvdmaniacs.net/forums/showthread.php?p=534200#post534200

Specs here.

How low can you go?

Just when you thought the whole Kane & Lynch: Dead Men fiasco couldn't get any worse, publisher Eidos Interactive has been caught with its pants down yet again. As reported by Kotaku, someone at the company marketing department seems to have decided that, if they can't get a positive review from Gamespot, then they'll damn well make up their own and falsely attribute them to other review sites. Care to guess what's wrong with the image below?

If you answered "Eidos pulled these quotes and scores out of its collective anus," you'd be half way there. As Kotaku explains:

GameSpy did not say "It's the best emulation of being in the midst of a Michael Mann movie we've ever seen" in their review of the game. They said that in their E3 2007 coverage. In other words, a preview. They also did not give the game five stars. They gave it three.

As for Game Informer, same deal. The highlighted quote does not appear in the review of the game. Nor do they give it five stars. Game Informer don't even score in stars. They gave it a 7/10.

Head over to Kotaku for the rest of the story.

Um... say what?

Now, I'm no stranger to publishers using reviews in - shall we say? - creative ways. I have seen certain publishers post extracts of my reviews on their web sites with certain parts edited out to make my overall appraisals sound more glowing than they actually were. I've also seen quotes attributed to myself (or, more often, DVD Times) appearing on the backs of DVD covers that could only have been compiled by pasting together a word here and a word there. (I mean, come on, does "A little seen gem... with nudity, gore and three Bond girls!" really sound like something I would write? It is, according to Blue Underground's packaging for The Black Belly of the Tarantula. Well, at least they chose a film that I was genuinely impressed by rather than attempting to make out that I was lavishing praise on something I hated.) This is on an entirely different level, though. I suppose, if the DVD distributors had as little integrity and self-respect as Eidos, I could expect to see quotes like "It's... very [good]! [Bianchi's] camerawork is... as accomplished as... Argento's [most] impressive endeavours!" and "You have to admire Dr. Boll. He consistently churns out [masterpieces]! Alone in the Dark was merely foreplay!" attributed to myself appearing on new releases of Strip Nude for Your Killer and House of the Dead respectively.

It's nice to know that Eidos is seemingly intent on digging an even deeper hole for itself. Add to that the fact that Gamespot members, protesting against the firing of Jeff Gerstmann, have taken it upon themselves to award Kane & Lynch 1/10 ratings en masse, and you now have a game that, in all likelihood, was nothing more than hopelessly mediocre, but, thanks to Eidos and Gamespot's dodgy dealings, has now acquired a far worse reputation than it would ever have had if they had simply elected to keep their noses out and let the reviewers get on with reviewing.

Nice one, guys.

Thanks to Lyris for the tip-off.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of November

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• A Clockwork Orange (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Eyes Wide Shut (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• The Fly (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Full Metal Jacket [remastered edition] (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• The Mario Bava Collection Volume 2 (R1 USA, DVD)
• Pan's Labyrinth (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• Peep Show: Series 4 (R2 UK, DVD)
• Ratatouille (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Shining (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Soldier of Orange (R0 UK, DVD)
• The Stendhal Syndrome: Special Edition (R0 USA, DVD)
• Tokyo Godfathers (R2 UK, DVD)
• Les Triplettes de Belleville (R0 France, HD DVD)

A good month for high definition, this, and another expensive one too.