Gialli

Halloween: the countdown begins

I've now finalised the list of reviews that will be going live this Halloween at DVD Times. Unfortunately, I've had to cut back a little on my original projected list of titles due to a lack of time and, in some instances, motivation, but you should still be seeing six horror-themed reviews from me (plus a few from other contributors), so you shouldn't want for lack of reading. The schedule looks like this:

• October 30th, 6 AM: Plot of Fear (R0 Italy, SD DVD)
• October 30th, 12 PM: Constantine (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• October 30th, 6 PM: Seven Notes in Black: Collector's Edition (R2 France, SD DVD)
• October 31st, 12 AM: Corpse Bride (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• October 31st, 12 PM: The Machinist (R0 Japan, HD DVD)
• October 31st, 6 PM: Death Laid an Egg (R2 Japan, SD DVD)

Of these, all but Corpse Bride are written and ready to go.

I also intend to watch several horror-themed films over the next few days, including some old favourites, like Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, Suspiria and Inferno. Time will tell, of course, whether I actually manage to keep to that, but I live in hope. At any rate, the TV schedules look as piss-poor as usual for October 31st, so it looks as if I'm going to have to provide my own playlist, as usual.

My latest little project

I knocked this one together this evening, once again proving what Anchor Bay could easily have done if they'd invested a little effort, instead of cobbling the missing material together as a bunch of VHS-sourced "deleted scenes". The Italian print has much nicer colours too, which I'm led to believe are an accurate representation of how the film should look, so that's a nice bonus.

The results are fine overall, with the film playing in as seamless a manner as possible when taking into account the language switching (I wish I had the work print available so I could get the original English dialogue for the affected material), although I've had a lot of trouble fitting this one on a single layer disc without major artefacting. The Italian transfer wasn't the best compression job in the first place (it too was crammed on to a single layer disc), and if there's one thing I've learned from these projects, it's that, since the material is effectively going to be encoded twice, you'll need to give your version a higher bit rate than that of the source file, otherwise you essentially get double the artefacts. One of these days, I'd love to get a dual layer burner - maybe I'll wait till HD DVD-compatible drives become available and/or affordable.

New Lizard in a Woman's Skin DVD from Media Blasters

Source: 10K Bullets Forum

Media Blasters, it would seem, are working on a new release of Lucio Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin. As many of you probably know, they hopelessly bungled their previous release of the film a couple of years ago, failing to secure an uncut print and as a result offering only a choice between a widescreen cut version and a VHS-sourced, pan and scan version, which contained considerably more material than the cut version, but was still missing a couple of segments due to Italian censorship. At the time, Media Blasters claimed that an uncut print of the film didn't exist.

Egg was on their faces, however, when Federal Video in Italy released a DVD earlier this year which contained an almost-uncut version of the film. This version, it would seem, will be used as the source for the new Media Blasters release, which, according to 10K Bullets editor Mike Den Boer,

will include the region 2 cut of the film and the extras from the region 2. All with English subtitles.

Apparently, they will be syncing the superior English dub up with the transfer wherever possible, but there are still a number of issues to consider. First, will this be a proper native NTSC transfer, or will they simply do a half-assed PAL to NTSC standards conversion of the Italian DVD? Secondly, will they make any attempt to reinsert the material that is missing from the Italian DVD? There are three specific instances: (1) around 15-20 seconds of sapphic canoodling near the start of the film; (2) a few seconds of Anita Strindberg's ass as she approaches a man lying prostrate on the floor during one of her sexy parties; (3) a dream sequence which misses a few more seconds of fondling, and is partially overlaid with a "ripple" effect. For the composite version of the film that I made for my own personal use back during summer this year, I was able to fix the first two but couldn't do anything about the third. The discrepancy on the Italian release came about because they used two different sources for their version - the cut American print and a slightly poorer quality but less cut Italian print. The American print includes the "ripple" effect and is partially censored, but for some reason whoever was in charge of combining the two didn't notice this, and as a result the Italian DVD features a botched version of the dream sequence. The uncut version presumably exists on the Italian print, so if Media Blasters are able to access it, they could, with a little effort, create the definitive version of this film. Unfortunately, knowing their track record, I somehow doubt that they are going to go the extra mile.

Oh, and I'm still waiting for Media Blasters boss John Sirabella to make good on the promise he made back when the previous version was released, that, should an uncut print emerge, he would ship replacement copies of it free of charge to everyone who got gypped in the first place.

The Do-It-Yourself Giallo Generator

A Yellow Parrot in a Darkened Room

Directed by Carlo Plagiarino

A frantic young woman is found dead with her head and hands cut off on stage, in front of an audience which doesn't understand what's going on. Her brother is unsatisfied with the official explanation of the killing. After discovering an old painting, he discovers that he himself is actually responsible; his own lover is forced to kill him before he can kill again.

I posted this link before a couple of years back, but it's so damn neat it bears repeating. The Do-It-Yourself Giallo Generator perfectly captures everything that makes the wackiest gialli so wacky, from the ridiculous animal-themed titles with no relation to anything in the film, to the convoluted and/or nonsensical plots. Anyone who is a fan of the genre should get a kick out of this well-observed send-up.

Two gialli from Neo Publishing in October

Source: DeVil Dead

Neo Publishing, a French DVD distributor who put out special editions of Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper and Seven Notes in Black last year, are releasing another two gialli on October 9th: Massimo Dallamano's What Have You Done to Solange? and Umberto Lenzi's Seven Bloodstained Orchids. I already own both these films, and, in the case of the former, am extremely happy with 01 Distribution's Italian release (beyond any doubt the best transfer I've ever seen for a giallo), but the menu screen captures have caught my eye. Seven Bloodstained Orchids doesn't have anything much on offer, but Solange promises a new documentary, "Whatever Happened to Solange?", interviewing producer Fulvio Lucisano and star Fabio Testi, as well as a stand-alone interview with Testi.

Now, the thing is that Neo Publishing's releases have been variable at best. Both of their Fulci releases were loaded with exhaustive extras, but The New York Ripper's transfer was a poor-quality standards conversion of the NTSC release from Anchor Bay, while Seven Notes in Black lacked an English audio track. In the case of Solange, provided Neo license 01's stellar transfer and remember to include an English track, then I'll probably pick it up for the extras. Otherwise, forget it. Either way, I won't be bothering with Seven Bloodstained Orchids: it's not a very good film, and I don't really feel like buying another copy of it, even if it improves on Media Blasters' botch job.

Cleaning house

I will shortly be starting the task of converting the rest of my site over to the new (version 9) format. The heavy work - i.e. the Movies and DVDs sections - is now done, so the rest should be a much more peaceful affair. Still, I'm looking to streamline things a bit, and will be getting rid of the following sections:

• Gialli and Schitty Movies. I added placeholders for these to the Writings section in 2004 and 2005 respectively, with the assumption that I would have something to show for them before too long. To be honest, it's simply not going to be possible. I already write reviews for DVD Times on a regular basis, in addition to other external commitments, which means that I simply can't start to think about maintaining another two review databases.
• Opinion. This section contains two articles - one on the quality of that fine British television channel ITV2, and another listing things I hate. It hasn't been updated in over a year, so I see no reason to keep it around.
• CD Collection. I don't write music reviews, and I don't buy CDs on a regular enough basis for this to be worthwhile.
• Jokes and Funny Quotes. It hasn't been updated in ages, and most of them aren't that funny anyway (although I do like the Emma Caulfield one referring to Sarah Michelle Gellar).

Sorry, folks. I know you'll struggle to cope without them, but we'll get through it.

Eugenie

Spain/West Germany: Jess Franco, 1970

Back in 2003, I happened to see a film by a Spanish director by the name of Jesus "Jess" Franco. The film in question was Justine, and I'm sorry to say I thought it was so bad that I didn't make it beyond the opening half-hour. This was when my Euro-cult craze was still in its infancy (the only such films I'd seen were around a third of Dario Argento's catalogue), and I realise that Franco has a rather formidable following among such circles. Therefore, recently, when I was doing a little borrowing and trading with other Euro-cult fanatics, I decided to give Franco another go, with his 1970 film Eugenie.

It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that Eugenie and Justine are pretty similar films. In addition to sharing a director, a writer/producer (Harry Alan Towers) and a composer (Bruno Nicolai, he of so many gialli), they are both based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade and have a similar narrative theme of an innocent young woman embarking on a series of sexual adventures, many of them sadomasochistic. As such, Eugenie is somewhere between a character drama and an exploitation/porn hybrid, although the fact that it takes itself seriously and places no small amount of emphasis on the narrative means that, as one reviewer put it, it's as far from a Skinemax flick as you can possibly get.

Be of no doubt, though, that this is far from a classic. Not much of note really happens, and the whole thing seems to come to an abrupt end long before it should. Franco's attempts to blend fantasy with reality are also not particularly successful, and, to be honest, there's only so much canoodling and breast-fondling I can take before I start looking for something more substantial. And yet, Eugenie's technical qualities set it apart from most films of this sort. Franco had a decent (at least by his standards) budget with this film, and you can tell that every penny ended up on the screen. Shot in anamorphic Technovision, it consistently looks sumptuous, making excellent use of the picturesque island location and, in the more hallucinatory sequences, various dye filters. And the final moments, which show the naked, degraded Eugenie stumbling through sand dunes and along deserted country roads, are haunting in their sheer beauty. Unfortunately, a number of scenes are sullied by being so out of focus that I'm amazed Franco never re-shot them.

The film also has an interesting cast, headed by Marie Liljedahl as the young Eugenie who, while not exactly a first-class thespian, is game for anything and handles the character's innocence well. Her transition from innocent wallflower to sullied damsel never really convinced me, though, as she does little to show any sort of change in her character. The sultry Maria Rohm is also on fine form, and the sheer shock of seeing Christopher Lee in such a dirty picture is well worth the price of admission. (Apparently, he had no idea what sort of film he was appearing in until he saw the final cut, but, looking at the scenes in which he appears, I'm not entirely convinced by this claim.)

In the final analysis, therefore, Franco is a better filmmaker than I previously assumed him to be. The subject matter isn't really to my liking, but here he clearly demonstrates a decent ability behind the camera if given an appropriate budget. For all its faults, I'm not sorry to have watched it, and I'll be less hasty to avoid this director's output in the future.

6/10