Reviews

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.

A $75 million turkey

My first two optical discs of 2008 arrived this morning, and I’m sorry to say that neither one turned out to be particularly impressive, albeit for different reasons. The first, The Simpsons Movie on Blu-ray, I’ll discuss in a minute, but for the moment, I want to take a moment to discuss Cat People on HD DVD (the Paul Schrader remake, not the Val Lewton original), which features, hands down, the worst high definition transfer I’ve ever paid money to see. Okay, so Traffic and Spartacus (both also from Universal, as it happens) both look worse, but I didn’t pay to see these.

From start to finish Cat People has been attacked, and I mean attacked, with the edge enhancement and noise reduction filters, to the extent that every high contrast edge is surrounded by a large white outline, and every time the camera moves the screen turns to mush, while every texture, from skin to fabric to hair, looks like wax. Even more infuriatingly, the clips that play behind the main menu look nothing like this. They are alive with unmolested film grain and, beyond the still-visible edge enhancement, generally look pretty tolerable. Now don’t get me wrong: I suspect that the master used was less than stellar to start with, as is true of many catalogue titles from Universal and other studios. However, I also suspect that, had the image simply been left alone, it would have looked no worse than the likes of Enternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Lost in Translation, which fall way below my standards of acceptability but are at least watchable. Cat People is just… ugh.

Now, on to the main point of this post (no, I’m not done ranting): The Simpsons Movie. I’ll probably be doing a full review for this at some point, so I’ll withhold my comments about the transfer until then, save to say that the ringing that some people have pointed out is indeed present from beginning to end, and you’ll no doubt be able to see the evidence on my brother’s site when he does his own post on the subject very soon. (Incidentally, it really sticks in my craw when people don’t themselves see problems that have been identified with transfers, and illustrated through solid evidence, and have the audacity to claim that those who do see them either have faulty equipment or have somehow got “a bad copy” of the disc in question. If you have even the slightest comprehension of how digital replication works, then you’ll know how ridiculous the latter is.)

No, my blithering will primarily be restricted to the film itself and what a tragic waste of time it is.

I like The Simpsons, I really do. The first five seasons are almost consistently hilarious, and, for all their bland animation and shoddy timing, they are pretty hard to fault. However, I think it’s fair to say that the show has not been at its prime for some time now, and the only thing worse than a has-been show is one that is unceremoniously hauled on to the big screen, where the flaws become even more readily apparent.

I saw The Simpsons Movie late last summer and was thoroughly underwhelmed by it. Foolishly, I thought that a second viewing might improve my appreciation of it, so I decided to pick up a copy of the Blu-ray release. Besides, we’re somewhat starved for high definition traditional animation, so, as the saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers. Unfortunately, I now find myself wishing I hadn’t bothered. The simple reason for this is that, second time round, I already knew the story, so there was nothing, and I mean nothing, left to engage me. Had this, the result of the toiling of fifteen writers, god knows how many animators and a gaggle of overpaid actors who sound like they’ve never taken voice direction in their lives (that’s $75 million to you and me), been broadcast as part of the regular series, it would have been the worst episode of The Simpsons I’ve ever seen (bearing in mind that I stopped watching regularly at around Season 11). As it stands, it’s three times longer than the worst episode of The Simpsons I’ve ever seen, which means that it’s actually three times worse than the worst episode of The Simpsons I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen the one where Homer gets raped by a panda.

I don’t often say “Can I have an hour and a half of my life back?” after watching a film, no matter how bad, but I’m going to say it this time. I honestly can’t understand how anyone could have a positive word to say about it. The sad part is that it isn’t even awful. It’s just empty, bland, insincere and ultimately pointless. It’s not even funny - I laughed at it perhaps three times: once at Bart’s “doodle”, once at the gag where Bart defaces the Wanted picture of his family (itself a retread of a gag used at least twice before in the show), and then at the one genuinely funny line in the entire film: “You just bought another load of crap from the world’s fattest fertiliser salesman!” Which, oddly enough, is exactly how I felt when I remembered I’d given 20th Century Fox my money for this film.

So can I have an hour and a half of my life back, please?

Update, January 3rd, 2008 09:52 PM: Lyris’ post, with pictures, can now be found here.

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.

Ave Satani indeed…

Omen IV: The Awakening is my first film of the new year. Unfortunately, I can’t say we’re off to a great start…

The Omen is one of my all-time favourite films. Its script may not be a masterpiece, but its tight execution by Richard Donner, stellar cast, including Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, Billie Whitelaw and David Warner, not to mention masterful score by Jerry Goldsmith, conspire to make it a first-rate exercise in horror. Its two sequels, Damien: Omen II and The Final Conflict, demonstrate the law of diminishing returns and, barring a handful of set-piece sequences, are generally not worth bothering with. Still, their flaws pale in comparison to this third sequel, one of the worst and unintentionally funniest films I have ever had the (dis)honour of seeing.

Omen IV: The Awakening eventually made its debut on television in 1991. However, I suspect that it was originally intended for a big screen release, a theory compounded by the fact that the DVD comes with a theatrical trailer, not to mention that the film itself is in a ratio of 1.85:1, which would have been unheard of for American TV in the early 90s. Presumably, the powers that be at 20th Century Fox actually realised that they had, in all likelihood, commissioned a train wreck and opted to let it rot on the small screen rather than risk the end of Western civilisation by subjecting it to moviegoers around the world. And these are the people that deemed Glitter to be releasable.

Can you guess the plot? A married couple (Faye Grant and Michael Woods) adopt an orphaned child from a convent, only for it to emerge fairly quickly that the hapless couple have in fact been lumbered with the spawn of Satan (literally). The child, this time round, is not Damien but Delia (Asia Vieira), but, barring this change of gender, it’s business as usual.

Things begin to go horribly wrong right from the start. “Wait till you see her,” declares a beaming nun, talking on the phone to Delia’s parents-to-be. “She’s a tiny miracle.” Jump cut to a shot of storm clouds accompanied by a thunderclap, then back to the ladies of the cloth, while Mother Superior intones dramatically that “Clouds sweep away the colour. Leaves everything like a black and white photograph.” I don’t know about you, but I’m getting the heebie-jeebies already.

Scene after ridiculous scene unfolds before us. During Delia’s baptism, the child begins to scream and bawl, prompting looks of horror from all and sundry. (I’m not sure why they find this so strange: every baptism I’ve attended has resulted in the victim howling his or her head off. And naturally, for the crime of attempting to indoctrinate the child, Satan strikes the guilty priest down with the sudden onset of a heart attack.) Later, a nanny is pursued by a Rottweiler and then falls backwards through an upper storey window in slow motion. A crowd of carol singers in bad goth make-up lip sync to the “Jesus Christus, Ave Satani” lyrics of the soundtrack. We even have a fervent get-together for born again Christians, in which one of the aforementioned nuns, now welcomed into the bosom of this cult and inexplicably, out of nowhere saddled with a strident Southern accent, hands out snakes to members of the congregation (no, I’m not kidding) and tells them they’ve “got the joy”. Eventually, she predictably ends up being bitten when the snakes turn on her, although the prosthetics work is so bad that it looks as if they are attacking a doll’s legs.

Aaargh! Not the choirboys!

These are actually the high points of the film. The rest of it is so risible that I actually found myself missing The Final Conflict’s hapless assassin priests and their Keystone Kops antics. The absolute worst moment comes about a third of the way in, when Delia gets her revenge on a school bully. In the original film, Damien drove his nanny to suicide with a mere glance. Here, Delia’s ultimate punishment is to cause her tormenter to piss his pants, complete with a tasteful close-up of the urine seeping through his trousers. For a very strange moment, I thought that Delia had somehow wandered on to the set of Problem Child. And I’m not even going to give away the twist ending, which, even though I knew it was coming, had me howling with laughter. Special attention must be given to the phenomenally hammy acting, with Faye Grant taking the prize in the role of the harangued mother. Asia Vieira, meanwhile, has only one tone of delivery - bratty - leaving us convinced that, if she really is the child of the Devil, then Satan really needs to work on his parenting skills and exercise a little discipline.

Of course, given that this is a 90s film, the writer has to throw in nods to non-mainstream “spirituality” in case anyone was feeling a little left out (there’s nothing for the atheists among us, though, I hasten to note). And here’s my problem with this approach: if you’re going to tell a story that presents religion and the supernatural as real, then please do so consistently instead of throwing in this wishy-washy “everyone is spiritual” nonsense. The Omen films ostensibly present Christian doctrine as reality, so why, pray tell, would Delia react with such horror to a “healing crystal” worn around her nanny’s neck, and why would a gaggle of New Age mystics and assorted crackpots, upon seeing her, collectively go wide-eyed and begin opening and closing their mouths like fish out of water? (Incidentally, the healing crystal leads to one of the most hilariously awful moments in the entire film: the nanny reacts in horror as she discovers that the crystal around her neck has turned black, and, hurrying to the bedroom drawer in which she keeps various other trinkets, all of which have turned the same colour. Just in case we don’t understand what has happened, the filmmakers treat us to her exclaiming in voiceover: “They’re all black!” You couldn’t make this stuff up. Still, this is nothing compared to a mystic declaring that Delia’s aura is like “mud and molasses and swirls of red paint”.)

What’s worse, this is effectively little more than a remake of the original film. Barring a handful of minor deviations, the plot is virtually identical, right down to the details. In The Omen, various zoo animals went wild when confronted with Damien; here, Delia drives a crowd of horses to madness. In both films, the mother character ends up pregnant and becomes convinced that Damien/Delia will do everything in his/her power to prevent the child’s birth. We even get photographs of doom, a kooky nanny and a phenomenally badly staged repeat of the iconic decapitation accident. Even the film’s one good element is pilfered: Jonathan Sheffer’s insipid music is augmented by the liberal borrowing of Jerry Goldsmith’s scores for The Omen and The Final Conflict. And, of course, at the end, we’re effectively back where we started, with another Antichrist in the world and the potential for any number of sequels. Thankfully, the decision-makers opted to nip this in the bud rather than let things continue.

I suspect there’s a reason this film was omitted from the initial UK Omen box set, and that’s that, even in comparison with the first two sequels, it’s tragically awful. It is, however, very funny (unintentionally, of course), considerably more entertaining than that dire 2006 remake of the original film, so, oddly enough, I find myself in the position of giving a stronger recommendation to what is, technically, the worse of the two.

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.

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:

Bourne again

My review copy of the HD DVD release of The Bourne Ultimatum arrived yesterday. My brother had actually bought the UK version about a week earlier, so we’d already watched the film, but will be doing so before I write my final review, for two reasons. First of all, I haven’t seen this film on the projector yet, and the experience is always better when the image fills your entire field of vision. Secondly, it features a different encode: the transfer for the UK version comes without any burned-in location type or subtitles (for non-English dialogue) to facilitate international distribution. These are then generated by the player in your language of choice. As a result, the two discs feature different encodes, so it could be that the US release has flaws not apparent in the UK one (the UK transfer scored a perfect 10/10, as it happens). Either way, I vastly prefer the “burned-in” location type and subtitles: it’s more authentic, and the UK version ends up looking rather stupid due to a few minor timing errors and the fact that the “typing in” sound effect accompanying the location type is still present, despite the text itself merely flashing on to the middle of the screen, subtitle-style. It’s a shoddy practice that happens all too often with European DVD (and now, it would seem HD) releases, and it just cheapens the whole package. There will be a review soon, hopefully before Christmas.

We watched the first film in the trilogy, The Bourne Identity, tonight, and I was once again reminded of the fact that it is, in my opinion, by far the best instalment in the series. Much of this comes from Franka Potente’s character, who gives the audience a point of identification that it just doesn’t have in the stone-faced Matt Damon, but a lot of it also has to do with the photography and editing. I’m not a fan of Paul Greengrass’ trademark “shakycam” and rapid cutting, which is all over The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, and, watching Identity, I found myself wishing that Doug Liman’s comparatively restrained touch had been extended to the entire trilogy.

Shame on you, Rob Zombie

Of all the pointless, gratuitous remakes that have come pouring out of Hollywood in the last few years, the only one I had any real hope for was Rob Zombie’s re-envisioning of Halloween. While his first film, House of 1000 Corpses, was a bit of a mess, it had a sort of quirky charm to it, and its follow-up, The Devil’s Rejects, boasted a more consistent tone and showed that Zombie was growing as a filmmaker. The original Halloween is also not a sacred cow for me (I like it, but I don’t consider it the best slasher movie ever made by any stretch), and, in any event, I don’t see the notion of remaking a classic film as being a complete act of blasphemy. If a director with his own vision steps up to the task, then “Go nuts!” is my response. Zombie, an offbeat and unpredictable filmmaker, is nothing if not unique, so I genuinely did think he might do something interesting with this remake.

How wrong I was. I got a copy of the Region 1 Unrated Director’s Cut release to review, and my only consolation is the fact that I didn’t pay for it. This is essentially a film of two halves, neither or which works on its own and which fail to gel together into anything meaningful. The first half is Zombie’s usual “grungy 70s hillbilly hicks saying ‘fuck’ a lot and acting despicable to each other” shtick, and it actually manages to be quite engaging. I certainly won’t pretend that I didn’t laugh out loud on several occasions, although you get the sense that Zombie is going for easy laughs. It’s also irritatingly smug in its use of stars from Zombie’s previous films. Oh look, there’s Sheri Moon. Hark, it’s Bill Moseley. Is that Sid Haig? Wah-hey, William Forsythe. Howdy, Danny Trejo. Most directors take at least a couple of decades before becoming this self-referential. Zombie has managed it after less than five years.

Initially, the film tries to give something of a psychological backdrop to Michael Myers, but then promptly throws this away in the second half when it becomes a straight remake of the original, making him the same soulless, faceless shape as in the original film - which leads me to wonder what the point was of the first half, other than to fill time. As a remake of Halloween, this second half is particularly embarrassing, cribbing entire set-pieces without any of Carpenters skill. This film is really, and I mean really, badly photographed, with more or less every second shot looking as if it has been misframed, almost as if it was filmed for the 1.85:1 ratio and then matted to 2.39:1 at the last minute. The best I can say about it is that Scout Taylor-Compton does her absolute best as Laurie Strode, but even with her screaming her guts out, the whole thing just falls flat. Malcolm McDowell, on the other hand, ransacks all of his credibility in the Dr. Loomis role.

Expect a full review in the not too distant future. Mr. Zombie has an awful lot of making up to do.

Oh, and my rental of Omen IV: The Awakening has arrived. Crumbs.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 9: No Future For You, Part Four

Written by Brian K. Vaughan; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

Brian K. Vaughan’s Faith storyline draws to a close, and I have to say that, on the whole, I enjoyed it much more than the first four-parter that Joss Whedon wrote. Part of that may be because I like Faith more than I like Buffy (this has got to be the only series I enjoy despite not having much time for its protagonist), but I suspect it’s also because it feels more self-assured and manages to maintain a more consistent tone and focus. Faith’s character is fertile ground, and Vaughan does an excellent job of exploring her conflicted feelings, which make a lot more sense in this instalment than they did in the previous one. I particularly enjoyed her flashback involving the Mayor, given that (a) the Mayor was a great villain and (b) it’s really the first time Faith has actually verbalised how she feels about her relationship with him. Surprise surprise, she’s conflicted.

I also like the ruthless side of Giles that is shown in this episode, and I hope that this will lead to more of an exploration of the inner turmoil he experiences over the issue of taking a human life, particularly given how quickly his killing of Ben in the final episode of Season 5 was brushed under the carpet. The final pages of this issue seem to be foreshadowing Giles’ affections being transferred from Buffy to Faith, which is intriguing, and actually oddly satisfying, given that Buffy and Giles both treated each other like crap throughout Season 7. Faith, I suspect, in her own way, has more respect for Giles than Buffy does, and the thought of them going rogue together does please me considerably.

Oh, and the final page introduces what I assume is going to be the Season’s Big Bad (it doesn’t appear to be either Amy or Warren, thank god). He appears as a big floating guy in a mask not unlike the one Jason Voorhees wears… oh, and his voice is emphasised by the use of a different font for his dialogue. We don’t learn anything much about him at this stage, but it does appear that the end of the world is - dun, dun, dun! - nigh. Again.

The next two episodes appear to both be stand-alone storylines written by Joss Whedon. I’m particularly looking forward to Episode 10, which, judging by the cover, sees Willow, my absolute favourite character, take centre stage. After that, Drew Goddard, who wrote on Season 7, is doing a four-issue arc, seemingly set in Tokyo. Well, it should be different, at any rate.

8/10.

HD DVD review: Wolf Creek

Over a year later and Optimum have delivered a version of Wolf Creek that fails to improve on the older US release from the Weinstein Company and, in many ways, constitutes a step back. For what it is, it’s not a bad disc, but, unless you absolutely feel the need to own the original shorter cut, my advice would be to avoid this one and pick up the US version.

Optimum continues to serve fans whose interests lie slightly off the beaten track with an HD DVD release of Wolf Creek, Greg McLean’s nasty and effective shocker. Review at DVD Times.

The wonder of Victoria Alexander

Earlier tonight I soliloquised about Mark Kermode and his deliciously brutal reviews. Now I present the work of another reviewer for your pleasure. Unlike Kermode, she doesn’t have podcasts or vodcasts, but she more than makes up for this technological deficiency for being madness personified.

Ever wanted to read a review in which women are decried as irresponsible for resisting rape? Check out her thoughts on 28 Days Later.

Not sure whether you liked the remake of The Omen? Well, neither is she, judging by her write-up, but hey, at least it’s apparently “better than the original since a 30 year-old [huh?] Mia Farrow runs off with the deaf-mute [huh?] Antichrist”. Huh?????

Who ever saw the original version of The Wicker Man? Not Ms. Alexander, and apparently not many other people according to her. But apparently there’s a lot to like in the remake, including a “stringent lesbian cult”. She was also surprised by the ending.

Think Jarhead was disappointing for being “a war movie with not one shot fired, no visible enemy, and soldiers standing around in the desert” that’s “[m]ore gay than Capote”? You’ll love her appraisal of it.

Oh, and want to find more obscure and derogatory references to homosexuality? She’s written over 600 reviews, so take your pick.

Having examined the evidence, I can only conclude that either we are the victims of an elaborate practical joke, or Ms. Alexander is certifiably insane. Credit where credit’s due to Parma Violets for pointing the ramblings of this demented crone out to me.

Oh, and she’s the one who praised Norbit for its positive portrayal of fat black women.

The glory of Dr. Mark Kermode

Over the past few hours, I have been discovering a hitherto unfound appreciation for Mark Kermode. Kermode, for those who don’t know, is an English film critic who, in addition to penning two books on The Exorcist and being hauled out for virtually every horror retrospective piece under the sun, have a regular spot on BBC Radio 5 where, every Friday at 3 PM, he reviews the latest cinema releases in his own inimitable style.

To say that Kermode is somewhat opinionated is like saying the Pope is slightly Catholic. If Kermode sees something he doesn’t like, he will let you know in no uncertain terms, and believe me, there’s a lot he doesn’t like. He has no qualms about insulting the actors and directors who don’t float his boat, and I always have a huge amount of respect for people who speak their mind and don’t feel the need to sugar-coat things. “Absolutely rubbish” is an oft-repeated phrase, although he generally finds more creative ways to express these sentiments. When he gets on to a favourite hatred - such as the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and Michael Bay movies - he really lets rip and pulls no punches. I’ve listened to at least 30 of his reviews this evening, and, even when I completely disagree with what he has to say (which is with some degree of frequency), I find myself nodding my head and appreciating his no nonsense tone.

You can find an archive of his podcast reviews at the BBC Radio 5 Live site, and a few choice favourites are also available, with video, on YouTube:

Death Proof - I like it, Dr. Kermode most certainly doesn’t. He has a few choice things to say about Quentin Tarantino and his style of “homage”.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End - a ten-minute out of control rant that has since passed into legend. I haven’t seen this instalment in the franchise, but his diatribe is more entertaining than the first two films put together.

Transformers - in which Dr. Kermode loses it completely and explains why Michael Bay’s entire directorial philosophy is analogous to masturbation.

The case for euthanising Eddie Murphy

I thought it would be a long time before I came across a film worse than Dr. Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead. Now, however, thanks to the magic of Amazon’s rental service, I’ve found one.

As you may have noticed, my HD Image Quality Rankings list includes several films that I myself don’t own. The reason for this is that I like to keep abreast of developments in HD-land by renting and checking out as many titles as possible. I don’t always manage to watch them all the way through, but usually I can get a reasonably good impression of how a particular disc measures up within a few minutes. And, if the film happens to be particularly good - or bad - I’ll be more inclined to stick with it for the duration. Late last year, I became aware that a particular film had been released on HD DVD (and Blu-ray). Its name was Norbit, it starred Eddie Murphy, and it brought with it a reputation so abhorrent that I just knew it and myself would cross paths one day.

No escape clause, unfortunately.

As you will know if you have been reading my brother’s site, he is shortly to be the proud owner of a projector. You’ll probably also be aware that projector bulbs aren’t cheap, which means that, every time you use it, you can almost hear the pennies dropping out of your wallet and hitting the ground. The notion of using some of the bulb’s valuable power on a film like Norbit wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, but we eventually reached a deal: Norbit could be viewed on the projector, but only on the condition that I wrote a full-length review of it.

However, the best-laid plans of mice and men and all that… One of the problems with online DVD rental programmes is that you often don’t know which title you’ll be receiving next. I had banked on Norbit not reaching me until the projector had safely arrived and been installed, so imagine my surprise (and faint feelings of nausea) when it turned up yesterday. (For some reason, this title does not appear to have been in high demand.) Realising, however, that, if I returned the disc or held on to it until the projector arrived, I would have wasted one of my precious monthly rental slots, I decided to bite the bullet and watch Norbit anyway, projector or no projector.

Fifteen minutes in, my brother turned to me and said “You know, it’s okay if you want to just tear up the contract.”

I persevered, however. What sort of watcher of bad movies would I be if I let a little thing like Norbit scare me away? Besides, I knew that my loyal readers would be waiting on tenterhooks for my verdict…

Norbit is yet another low-brow comedy in which Eddie Murphy dons a fat suit and plays several different characters. One of these is the titular Norbit, a weedy, pathetic little man who is married to Rasputia (also Murphy), a virtual elephant of a woman with a personality as foul as her odour. Norbit is an orphan, who was brought up by a Chinese man named Mr. Wong (Murphy, again, this time in yellowface). Mr. Wong’s orphanage is up for sale, and the prospective owners include Rasputia’s three vicious brothers, who plan to turn it into a titty bar and make Norbit’s life hell at the same time. The other is Kate (Thandie Newton), a fellow orphan and the love of poor, browbeaten Norbit’s miserable life. (Can you say “ahhhh”?) Oh, but she’s engaged to Deion (Cuba Gooding Jr., who can currently be seen stepping into dear old Eddie Murphy’s shoes in Daddy Day Camp, the follow-up to that masterpiece, Daddy Day Care), who is in league with the evil brothers! Will this delightful fairytale romance have a happy ending, or will Norbit have his face smashed in with a rusty hook? (I know which I’d prefer.)

Norbit’s humour is best summed up as a never-ending series of fat jokes that aren’t funny, with copious amounts of toilet humour and a healthy dose of racism thrown in for good measure. As an example of what passes for a gag in this supposed comedy, let’s take the scene in which, having failed to carry his overweight bride over the threshold (because she’s fat), Norbit stands quaking in his boots in the bedroom as the delightful Rasputia thunders towards him. She lands on top of him, the force throwing him backwards on to the bed (because she’s fat), at which point the bed collapses (because she’s fat). Safe in the knowledge that the audience will find this absolutely hysterical, the filmmakers then proceed to repeat the exact same gag three times, the only differences being the various costumes that the two Eddies are wearing. Oh, and, on the final occasion, the bed doesn’t collapse, because it has been reinforced with concrete. You laughing yet?

Take, for another example, the film’s witty wordplay. At the wedding reception, the delightful Mr. Wong, delivering the best man’s speech, tells the guests that he is sad for Norbit because he is married to a gorilla. The aforementioned gorilla’s family take exception to this, at which point Wong hastily reassures them that he is only kidding.

That’s the joke.

No really, that’s it. The entire film is one long series of build-ups without any punchlines. Each time the writers provide us with a situation, we continually assume that it’s going somewhere, but it never does. At the same wedding, it is discovered that a slice is missing from the wedding cake. Cut to a shot of Rasputia with icing and sponge all over her face. You assume that the laughs will come from either her or the other characters’ reactions. Instead, the film carries on to the next scene. “Norbit!” screams the cover art. “Funny!” is hollers underneath. I assure you, it is anything but.

Oh, and before I forget, I must take the time to mention that Mr. Wong is easily the single most racist creation I can remember seeing in a film in god knows how long. Why Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips continues to be suppressed while Eddie Murphy is allowed to paint himself yellow and utter all manner of inanities in a guttural voice (hilariously substituting “r” for “l”, by the way - gotta love the attention to detail) is a mystery to me. You get the impression that perhaps the filmmakers were aware that this portrayal of a Chinese man might be a tad offensive, so they attempt to offset this late in the game by revealing that Wong is in fact a screaming racist himself (“Yes, Wong very racist. Don’t like black. Don’t like Jew either. But black and Jew love Chinese food. Go figure.”), which, judging by the inverse logic to which the writers clearly ascribe (the same logic which allows them to mistake “devoid of humour” for “full of humour”), presumably means that everything’s okay. I should probably point out that, if a white actor dressed up as a Chinese man and made these sort of “jokes” in this day and age, he would probably be lynched. However, Eddie Murphy, as a member of a minority group, seems to have a licence to offend every other minority group under the sun.

The rest of the film is made up of the same sort of inane gibberish and schoolyard bullshit that a kindergartener could have come up with. I could be charitable and say that Rick Baker’s make-up effects are impressive (Murphy’s transformation into Mr. Wong is nothing short of completely convincing), but that’s like dishing out accolades for coming up with a completely authentic recreation of faecal matter which even smells like the real thing. It wasn’t funny when Murphy did it in his remake of The Nutty Professor and it sure as hell isn’t funny now. This is a tedious, mean-spirited, nasty, unfunny, noxious, loathsome, fucking tragic waste of celluloid. Baron Scarpia, I lay down the gauntlet.

Victoria Alexander in her review for FilmsInReview.com (one of the only positive appraisals I could find) crowed about how the film “celebrat[es] a big black woman who has not been victimized by a non-achievable, absurd standard of beauty fostered upon black and white women”. Assuming she wasn’t being ironic, then I can only lament for a culture that actually considers Rasputia to be a positive portrayal of a fat black woman.

1/10.

Oh, and to add insult to injury, the HD DVD transfer is flawless.

Ask and ye shall receive

Well, I’ve taken today as annual leave (my parents are away for the weekend, and, if I was going out to work, I would have had to get up at 6 AM to walk the dogs beforehand, so this means less hassle beforehand), so I decided to take the opportunity to answer a reader request and put together a permanent HD Image Quality rankings list.

You may be aware of my semi-infrequent postings in which I provide a breakdown of the various HD releases I’ve seen and how their image quality compares. When I first jumped aboard the high definition bandwagon back in the summer of 2006, I immediately began to notice major discrepancies between the ratings being awarded to the image quality of HD DVD and Blu-ray releases on major review sites, and what I was seeing with my own eyes. As with standard definition DVD, I quickly lost track of the number of times a reviewer would praise a transfer to the heavens, only for me to discover that it was in fact blurry, filtered and/or edge enhanced, or for them to utterly trash (or at the very least remain indifferent to) discs that turn out to feature smooth, natural, film-like image quality. Broadly speaking, there seems to be a lack of understanding among reviewers, even so-called professional ones, of what constitutes a filmic “look” and how to accurately describe the various strengths and weaknesses on display in a transfer. I thought, and still think, that reviews such as these can potentially cause damage to the format (a distributor, for example, might see that a filtered and/or edge enhanced title is receiving rave reviews and therefore mandate that all transfers have the same work done on them) and bring the profession into disrepute (by appearing ignorant).

Therefore, I made up my mind to add my own voice, wherever possible, and “call it as I see it”. Initially, reviewing every disc that landed on my doormat wasn’t too much of a tall order, but, as I ended up buying or otherwise receiving more and more discs, this became increasingly difficult until, fairly quickly, I realised that it would be impossible to write in detail about every single HD DVD and Blu-ray disc I’d seen. This is why I decided to create the rankings chart.

I was recently asked if I would consider creating a specific section on the site in which to store all this information, the contents of which would be continually updated and therefore meaning that there would be a permanent URL to which to refer, rather than having to wait for each new unscheduled update. I agreed, and the results, which I knocked together over the course of a couple of hours this morning, can be seen here.

High definition hootenanny

A handful of discs have landed on my doormat over the last couple of days. First up, on Tuesday, was a check disc for Optimum’s UK HD DVD release of Wolf Creek, replacing the Blu-ray release which wouldn’t play in my Japanese Playstation 3 thanks to a strange bug called region coding. I’ve taken a quick look at it in advance of putting together a full review for DVD Times, and I can report quite categorically that those who already own the Weinstein Company’s US release should stick with it. Optimum have inexplicably decided to encode their version using MPEG2, and the result is a heck of a lot of artefacting. You still get a nicely detailed picture, and some shots do look flawless, but the number of shots that show excessive macro-blocking make this a less than immersive experience.

Oh, and the menus appear to be bugged, at least for Xbox 360 users: the scene selection screen won’t load. The on-screen overlay disappears, leaving the background footage to play in an infinite loop, requiring the disc to be ejected and reinserted.

Then, on Wednesday, while I was out at work, the Blu-ray release of Masters of Horror: Season 1, Volume 3, containing Don Coscarelli’s Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, Tobe Hooper’s Dance of the Dead and Larry Cohen’s Pick Me Up, arrived. Then, today, this was supplemented by the fourth and final volume of Masters of Horror’s first season, containing Takeshi Miike’s Imprint (the episode which so horrified the executives that they refused to air it in the US), Joe Dante’s Homecoming and Mick Garris’ Chocolate. Given that the only episode I’ve watched so far is Sick Girl in Volume 2 (having previously seen Jenifer one and a half times, which was more than enough), it looks like I’ve got quite a bit of viewing ahead of me.

Blu-ray review: Ratatouille

All things considered, this is a superlative release. The audio-visual quality is so impressive that, if it had been bare-bones, this disc would have been getting my unreserved recommendation. As it is, you may have to sift through the material on offer to get to the juicy bits, but there is a wealth of information on offer provided you are able to put up with the less than ideal menu system. Ratatouille on Blu-ray is just what this diner ordered.

I’ve reviewed Disney’s Region A Blu-ray release of Pixar’s latest film, Ratatouille, after having promised not to abuse this opportunity to use as many metaphors about cooking as possible.

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.

HD DVD review: Les Triplettes de Belleville

It’s great to see more traditional animation becoming available in high definition, particularly when it’s a film as good as Les Triplettes de Belleville. With its solid audio-visual presentation, this release is a must-have for HD DVD-ready animation aficionados.

“Swinging Belleville rendez-vous…” I’ve reviewed the recent French HD DVD release of Sylvain Chomet’s excellent Les Triplettes de Belleville.

HD DVD review: Pan’s Labyrinth

Optimum’s HD DVD release of Pan’s Labyrinth is a good one, and one which improves substantially on all current DVD releases in terms of image quality. It does have its shortcomings, however, particularly with regard to the problem of audio synchronisation, and looks set to be superseded by New Line’s substantially meatier US release, due out towards the end of the year. If you want your HD fairytale fix now, however, you could do a lot worse than picking up this release.

I’ve reviewed the recent HD DVD of Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, released in the UK by Optimum on a feature-packed disc.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 8: No Future For You, Part Three

Written by Brian K. Vaughan; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

I suspect this is a failing on the part of Season 7 rather than Season 8, but I really don’t get why Buffy and Faith are at loggerheads once again, after getting on pretty well during the final episodes of the television series. Don’t get me wrong, I was as baffled as anyone by the fact that Buffy and her friends so readily forgave Faith for trying to, y’know, murder them, but even so, given that the writers decided to go down that route, brushing all of Faith’s past indiscretions down the carpet, they should really have carried this through into the comic book realm instead of doing what strikes me as a massive retcon. Now, Buffy, who happily fought alongside Faith in Chosen, comes across her once again and immediately assumes that Faith plans on killing her.

To be fair, Faith is, at that present moment, in the company of one Lady Genevieve Savidge, who most certainly does plan on killing her, but even so, it seems like a bit of a leap in logic. Genevieve, by the way, has some absolutely delicious dialogue (most of it relating to her bored observation that most of her tutors have been “filthy paedos” - Vaughan has done a pretty effective job of capturing the lingo and obsessions of the inhabitants of the British Isles), but it wasn’t enough to distract me from the problematic nature of the Faith/Buffy relationship. I’m also growing increasingly weary of the use of generic fantasy archetypes in these comics: in The Chain we had fairies, whereas, in this episode, we have a little hobgoblin man assisting Giles.

Some nice artwork in this issue, though - quite a bit more dynamic than the previous couple of episodes. Oh, and the final frame immediately reminded me of Gargh Marenghi’s Darkplace. If you read the comic and have seen that particular show, you’ll probably know what I mean.

7/10.