Reviews

Halloween Blu-ray review: The Descent

The Descent is one of the most impressive high definition releases I have seen so far, not only for featuring a stellar transfer and solid audio support, but also for featuring one of the best modern films released on either format thus far, and for being one of the few Blu-ray releases to not only port over all of the extras from its standard definition counterpart, but also for including an array of HD exclusive bonuses. Yes, the lack of true picture-in-picture means that the effect is not as seamless as it could have been, but this is overall a magnificent release and the best Blu-ray disc I've seen.

As part of DVD Times' Halloween 2007 coverage, I've reviewed last year's Blu-ray release of The Descent, and excellent presentation of Neil Marshall's superb horror film put together by Lions Gate.

Attention spookmeisters!

Well, in just a few hours it will be All Hallows Eve, and, as promised, I have some spooktacular reviews for you. Unfortunately, the list is somewhat shorter than I would have hoped, due to my coming down with a nasty case of writer's block, which didn't clear up in time for me to get through my entire list of titles. Still, here's what you can expect to see tomorrow:

• Midnight: The Descent (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• 6 AM: Suspiria: Definitive Edition (R2 Italy, DVD)
• 12 PM: Inferno (R2 Italy, DVD)
• 6 PM: Underworld: Extended Cut (R0 Germany, HD DVD)

Unfortunately, I'll be out at work all day tomorrow, so I won't be on hand to post links to the reviews themselves until I get home. If you just have to be at the front of the queue, I suggest you loiter around DVD Times and watch out for them as they materialise. Unless you have anything better to do, that is.

In sickness and in health...

Sometimes, it seems as if every horror fan apart from myself has seen Showtime's Masters of Horror series in its entirety. Now with two seasons of thirteen episodes each to its name, it seems like everyone has an opinion on each and every one of them. Until recently, I'd only seen Dario Argento's two offerings, Jenifer in Season 1 and Pelts in Season 2. My phenomenal disappointment at their lacklustre quality played no small part in my lack of interest in seeking out the rest of the series: after all, if my favourite director couldn't manage to bring anything to the table, what hope was there for the rest of 'em?

Recently, however, I picked up the first two volumes of Anchor Bay's Blu-ray release of Season 1, containing episodes by John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, William Malone, Argento, Lucky McKee and John Landis. Impressed by McKee's theatrical debut, May, one of my favourite horror films of the last decade, I jumped straight to his tale, Sick Girl, not sure at all of what to expect.

What's strange is that, although McKee only has two feature films under his belt (one of which hadn't been released when Sick Girl aired, and which I've yet to see), it's still clear from the outset that his "style" is all over the production in a way that it just wasn't for Dario Argento with Jenifer. If you've seen May, you'll immediately recognise this as the work of the same director. All of his obsessions are present: we've got quirky outcasts, we've got lesbians, we've got Angela Bettis (playing a quirky outcast lesbian - how's that for value for money?), we've got gloomy old buildings, we've got a slow, building sense of dread, we've got Jaye Barnes Luckett's off-kilter score, we've got a scene in which two lovers watch a movie that can only be described as the creation of a deranged mind... Essentially, Sick Girl is treading much of the same ground as May, but McKee has got this formula down pat, and I for one didn't object to a second outing.

The plot focuses on Ida Teeter (Bettis), a throaty-voiced scientist whose speciality is bugs. So fond of her beloved insects is she that her apartment is filled with them, much to the disgust of her frosty landlady, Mrs. Beasley (Marcia Bennett), and, when an unusually large and vicious, and seemingly unknown, specimen is mysteriously delivered to her door, she can't keep the excitement out of her voice. Things get going when Ida, egged on by her lab partner, Max (Jesse Hlubik), plucks up the courage to approach Misty Falls (Erin Brown), a shy, reclusive girl who spends each day drawing pixies in the foyer of Ida's workplace, and ask her out. Quicker than Max can say "ladies in lust", Ida and Misty are having hot, rambunctious sex on the sofa, and Misty is moving into the apartment. It's all sweetness and fairycakes... until, that is, Ida's new bug takes a liking to Misty and... well, you can probably guess what happens next.

Okay, not the most thrilling of plots, as I'm sure you'll agree, but McKee handles it with applomb. Like May, it goes nowhere in a hurry, taking care to establish its characters and allow the audience to come to like them before the "horror" segment of this Masters of Horror episode gets going. And Ida and Misty are likeable. They're both quirky and oddly charming, and McKee portrays them with affection rather than as grotesque parodies of social outcasts. Yes, they're weird, but in an endearing and frequently amusing way.

Much of this is down to the performances of the two leads, with Angela Bettis, while not delivering to quite the same level as she did in May, handling the awkward and stone-faced Ida with considerable skill. Erin Brown, meanwhile, seems to be channeling Amber Benson, initially at least. Beyond the more obvious issue of her orientation, Misty is so similar to Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer in terms of shyness, clothes, hairstyle and mannerisms that it's a wonder 20th Century Fox haven't sued for plagiarism. She's also very good in the role, though, and handles her character's slow transformation effectively. I was surprised, to put it mildly, to discover that she is actually a porn actress, better known to her fans as Misty Mundae.

Once the horror elements begin to fly, they do so with abundance. The climax is a deliciously twisted piece of filmmaking, with one of the most over the top but strangely convincing transformation I've seen in a while, all created with practical effects (no CGI muck here). I read a review which described this as the David Cronenberg film that David Cronenberg never made, and I can definitely see the similarities between this and the likes of Naked Lunch (and, presumably, The Fly, which I should be seeing for the first time soon), in its merging of humans and prosthetic insects. And hey, just in case this sounds like a bit of a downer, McKee even throws a happy ending at us out of left field, albeit one laced with a hefty dose of black humour.

One of my main criticisms of Jenifer and Pelts was that their scenarios were too thin and inconsequential to fill an hour's running time. With Sick Girl, conversely, I felt exactly the opposite: I wanted the episode to last longer, and I suspect that, if it had, it would have avoided the third act seeming so rushed. It might also have allowed more depth to be given to the secondary characters, Max and Mrs. Beasley, who are merely one-note stereotypes (the sex-obsessed man and the "degenerate"-hating old woman). Still, for what it was, I enjoyed Sick Girl considerably more than I was expecting to. I'm not quite sure how McKee got to be labelled as a Master of Horror on the back of two films, but this episode confirmed my belief that he is a filmmaker worth watching out for.

Halloween: what can you expect?

In just a few days' time, it will be Halloween, and, naturally, I'm planning a splurge of horror-themed reviews for DVD Times. Last year, I concentrated mainly on covering HD DVD releases, but this year, things are going to be a little more balanced across the three formats I cover. So, provided I can actually churn them out within the next 8-9 days, here's what you can expect to see:

• The Descent (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Halloween (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• House of 1000 Corpses (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Inferno (R2 Italy, DVD)
• Suspiria: Definitive Edition (R2 Italy, DVD)
• Underworld: Extended Cut (R0 Germany, HD DVD)

Now, I'm aware that that's a bit of a tall order, particularly given that I also have work commitments and my PhD to think about, not to mention a review of the Blu-ray release of Oldboy, plus one of Blue Underground's new release of The Stendhal Syndrome when it arrives, so I don't want to promise anything. I'll do my best to finish as many of them as possible, though.

Blu-ray bonanza

On Friday, I received a couple of packages from DVD Pacific, containing the first two instalments of Masters of Horror: Season 1 on Blu-ray. Volume 1 contains John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, Stuart Gordon's Dreams in the Witch-House and William Malone's The Fair-Haired Child, while Volume 2 contains Dario Argento's Jenifer, Lucky McKee's Sick Girl and John Landis' Deer Woman. Hmm, something slightly wrong about the first Argento title I own in HD is comfortably the worst thing to which his name has ever been attached (then again, I haven't seen all of the pre-Bird with the Crystal Plumage westerns that he wrote, so there could be some clunkers among them as well). Still, we all have to start somewhere, and I wanted to pick these discs up, given that Argento's shameful contributions are the only episodes I have seen of either season of Masters of Horror. I just hope some of the other filmmakers were able to bring a little more of themselves to the table.

As for the treatment of the episodes on Blu-ray, you may already be aware that, barring the audio commentaries for each episode, all of the extras from the standard definition releases have been dumped. Classy, Anchor Bay, real classy. Anyone would think you didn't care about what you were putting out. Oh, wait a minute - judging by Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Evil Dead II, that much is pretty clear.

Anyway, unlike most Blu-ray and HD DVD releases, these discs are encoded at 1080i rather than 1080p. The reason for this seems to be that the closing credits for each episode scroll at 60 Hz, necessitating the episodes themselves to be stored as such. Personally, I'm glad Anchor Bay didn't try to deinterlace them themselves, as such results are rarely pretty. As for the image quality, it's reasonably good. All the episodes have a similar soft, rather diffuse look, but I suspect it may turn out that they look as good as the source materials allow.

I've also received a check disc for Tartan's upcoming UK Blu-ray release of Oldboy. The image quality is... eh, passable. I've seen worse, but I've seen a lot better. Looks rather murky and edge enhanced. I've been tasked with reviewing the technical components of the disc for DVD Times - we already have plenty reviews of the film itself, so there's no need to repeat what others have already said.

See you at the movies!

I am fury!

While my month's free subscription to Amazon UK's DVD rental service is still active, I'm doing my best to work my way through as many awful films as possible. I may not be as experienced a connoisseur of Z-grade movie garbage as Baron Scarpia, but I'm doing my best to make up for lost time, and last night I had the dubious honour of sitting through Dr. Uwe Boll's big screen adaptation of the arcade game House of the Dead.

You have to admire Dr. Boll. He consistently churns out garbage so bad that rats would turn their noses up at it, and yet still somehow manages to get funding for multiple projects and attract A-listers like Ben Kingsley and, er, Tara Reid. He seems to have made it his mission to wreck virtually every successful video game franchise of the past decade (although Halo and Silent Hill, it would seem, are safe, for now at any rate) - a laudable aim given that Hollywood Pictures had already set the bar phenomenally low with Super Mario Bros. The man is so adept at tooting his own horn and acting like a complete blow hole that it's hard to find any sympathy for him when the critics trash his latest train wreck (although I must admit that I did feel just the teeniest bit sorry for him when 90% of his audience got up and walked out during his presentation at the Penny Arcade Expo of the opening scenes from his new film, Postal).

Anyway, enough of that. I'd previously seen Boll's take on Alone in the Dark (review here, and had come to the conclusion that it would be difficult to conceive of a worse film. So horrifying was the experience that it very nearly drove me away from Boll's filmography completely. However, last night, undeterred, I popped in House of the Dead, and quickly realised that Alone in the Dark was merely foreplay to my glorious encounter with the true face of Dr. Uwe Boll.

House of the Dead is a film so staggeringly inept and mind-bogglingly idiotic that I deem Boll to be either completely mad or a ground-breaking genius whose talents will only come to be appreciated after several generations. This is a film in which, with every line of dialogue spoken, you feel that the actors are doing their damnedest not to crack up. A film in which a group of snot-faced teenagers (at least, I'm assuming they're meant to be teenagers - the actors playing them are all at least in their mid-20s) arrive at a rave to find it deserted and a blood-stained shirt on the ground, only to promptly separate to go exploring or have a shag (one participant goes so far as to boast about how quick he can make it). A film in which said teenagers (one of whom wears a one-piece jumpsuit with the stars and stripes on it, while another has a halter top cut so low that her jiggling breasts threaten to pop out at any second), when confronted by seemingly endless hordes of the undead, spend a whole lot of time running around, flapping their arms about and getting bitten, before inexplicably turning into expert gun-slingers/martial artists/sword-wielders (delete as applicable) and going at it to the backdrop of heavy metal that would give 80s Dario Argento a headache and slow motion that would cause John Woo to blush. Oh, and, to spice things up a bit, Boll randomly inserts clips from the original video game, presumably because, without them, you'd never know that this is supposed to be an adaptation of House of the Dead.

But wait! Surely it can't be all that bad? After all, as Dr. Boll himself points out,

HOUSE Of THE DEAD was in a lot of territories a very big success. In Middle East, Russia, Spain, Thailand and South America was the movie similar to the USA and KANADA two weeks in the TOP TEN and a long time in the Video/DVD-Charts.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. After all, I only saw it on DVD on a 40" LCD. Perhaps, had I seen it at the cinema, I would

recognize that the CINEMASCOPE look of the movie and the sound are absolutly A LIST and not one percent less quality as RESIDENT EVIL or UNDERWORLD.

Preach it, Herr Doktor!

In HOD we have a lot of GORE and a lot of action. Much more as in Resident Evil. The big battle in front of the house with the MATRIX and TURN TABLE effects, over 100 blood effects and 11000 cuts in 13 minutes will be film history in a few years because in NO OTHER FILM EVER was a similar scene. Also Rodrigez or Tarantino ever made a scene like this escalating action scene in HOD.

There you have it! A lot of gore and a lot of action! Turn table effects! Over 100 blood effects and 11,000 cuts in 13 minutes! Truly this film deserves to go down in history! I was completely wrong! This is a masterpiece and a prime example of why Dr. Uwe Boll is the saviour of modern cinema. Why, he could be this generation's Ed Wood - that's how good he is.

Jesus fucking Christ. Now I absolutely must see Bloodrayne.

PS. If you still need convincing of Dr. Boll's awesome talent, you can watch the entire fight scene, with its turn table effects, 100 blood effects and 11,000 cuts, on YouTube.

A pretty developed sense of perversion

Throughout the 1970s, hundreds (if not thousands) of gialli were made, and, although many of them are now readily available on DVD, the vast majority are either lost entirely or only available in severely compromised grey market editions, usually copied countless times from already iffy materials. One giallo that I'd been wanting to see for some time was a 1978 offering called Enigma Rosso, also known as Rings of Fear, Red Rings of Fear, Virgin Killer (a pretty misleading title), Trauma (not to be confused with the 1993 Dario Argento slasher of the same name), and various other diverse titles. It bears the distinction of being the final part in the group of films unofficially referred to as the "Schoolgirls in Peril" trilogy, the first two instalments of which, What Have You Done to Solange? and What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, were helmed by the gifted and underrated Massimo Dallamano. Dallamano's life was cut short when he was involved in a car crash in 1976, but he collaborated on the script for Enigma Rosso and, as far as I can gather, fully intended to direct it. The reigns ended up being passed to Alberto Negrin, and the buzz on the Internet has always been that the end result was nothing like as good as the first two films in the trilogy.

Until recently, the only version of the film that was circulated on a wide basis seemed to be a murky-looking, VHS-sourced pan and scan presentation of the English language print, which, with PAL speed-up, ran for approximately 81 minutes. Recently, however, the same version of the film (albeit with Spanish credits) showed up on DVD in Spain, non-anamorphic and with Spanish audio only but in its proper 2.35:1 aspect ratio. I bought this DVD back in August, and, a few days ago, put the finishing touches to my own personal composite version, which marries the English audio from the VHS dupe with the transfer from the Spanish DVD. The results, while far from ideal, are certainly preferable to either version on its own. I understand that several different cuts of the film were prepared for different markets, so presumably other versions exist which feature additional and/or alternate footage, but, for the time being, this is probably the best we're going to get.

The plot sees Inspector Gianni Di Salvo (Fabio Testi, who also played the lead in What Have You Done to Solange?) investigating the death of a teenage girl, Angela Russo, whose body is discovered washed up on a riverbank. In predictable giallo fashion, it quickly emerges that something incredibly seedy has been going on, involving Angela and her three friends, quaintly known as "the Inseparables". They, and the various employees of the St. Theresa's boarding school, quickly begin dropping like flies, and Di Salvo, finding himself faced with a killer with, in his own words, "a pretty developed sense of perversion", teams up with an unlikely accomplice, Angela's younger sister, Emily (Fausta Avelli).

It immediately becomes apparent that this third instalment in the trilogy is very much a companion piece to its predecessors, as familiar elements crop up throughout. Peeping tom scenes of girls in showers? Check. Late night motorbike chase through the streets of Rome (at least I think it's Rome - the locations used are fairly anonymous)? Check. Sordid sexual antics and corruption at the very core of society? Check. Back street abortion? Check. Negrin seems intent on combining the amateur sleuthing elements of Solange with the police thriller exploits of Daughters, and the result is rather confused and not altogether satisfying. There isn't enough detective material to make an interesting poliziottesco, while at the same time the amateur detection scenes are too limited for a solid giallo. Negrin seems to want to both have his cake and eat it by catering to both markets, when in reality the end result ends up pleasing neither.

A lot of the confusion, I suspect, stems from the sheer number of writers involved. The English print credits Marcello Coccia, Dallamano, Franco Ferrini, Stefano Ubezio, Negrin and Peter Berling for the final screenplay (while the Spanish print, predictably, gives a completely different, and smaller, list of writers). A lot of gialli seem to have been written by committee, but I can't recall ever seeing another with this many names attributed to its script. Another reason may have been the multiple cuts supposedly prepared for different territories. This would certainly explain the setting up and abandonment of multiple subplots, including Di Salvo's rather unconventional, seemingly non-exclusive relationship with a shoplifter who may of may not be his wife, as well as the established-then-abandoned-then-reintroduced partnership between himself and young Emily.

Or it could be that Negrin was simply being sloppy. This is the only film I've seen by this director, but it suggests that he wasn't half as effective a filmmaker as Dallamano. The peeping tom shower scene has a clumsy, leering quality that lacks the thematic justification of the similar scenes in Solange (confounded even further once we learn the identity of the voyeur), while the cross-cutting between scenes of an abortion being performed on one girl and flashbacks to a raucous orgy involving herself and her friends falls flat on its face. This is the sort of parallel that Dallamano would have been able to draw in a more subtle way, but Negrin, lacking his skill behind the camera, has to resort to crasser, more obvious techniques. Riz Ortolani's score, too, doesn't really work, frequently throwing menacing stings into completely innocuous situations.

As for Testi and his character Di Salvo, he's pretty much your typical 70s macho cop protagonist. His preferred method of investigation is to barge into people's bedrooms in the middle of the night, haul them out of bed half-naked and scream "Who killed Angela Russo?" at them. He also knows just how to set people at their ease: confronted with a room full of stone-faced, prudish schoolteachers, he bellows "Someone with a cock this big raped Angela Russo!", spreading his arms wide to demonstrate. He also performs a rather intriguing interrogation on a suspect prone to motion sickness by taking him to a theme park and hauling him on to a roller coaster ride, and he's as likely to enjoy a nice meal and bed down for a kip on the premises of a suspect as he is to actually do a decent day's work in the office. Actually, come to think of it, I don't think we ever see him setting foot inside a police station, while the oversized cardigan that he wears for the film's duration robs him of much of his credibility - odd, given that, in The Big Racket and The Heroin Busters, I had no trouble believing in him as a cop.

In the final analysis, Enigma Rosso is comfortably the weakest of the trilogy. The final solution is disappointing and seems to be based more around hammering home the familiar message of corruption taking place in the very foundations of society than actually providing a satisfying explanation to the murders. There are definite moments of inspiration here and there, and it's rarely boring, but it lacks the depth of Solange and the high octane rush of Daughters. Oh, to know what Dallamano had in mind for this one.

PS. I haven't forgotten about The Giallo Project. In fact, I hope to get it started up again very soon. Think of this as a sneak peak at where I hope to end up in the somewhat distant future.

DVD review: The Jungle Book: Platinum Edition

While it would have been nice to have had the alternate Academy ratio version of the film included in the package, it goes without saying that this new Platinum Edition of The Jungle Book belongs on every Disney aficionado's shelf. Controversial aspect ratio choice aside, this is a stellar package with an array of bonus materials that ranks among the best the studio has ever put out.

Arriving on DVD with considerably more than just the Bare Necessities, The Jungle Book remains many people's favourite Disney film forty years after its original release. I've reviewed the Region 1 2-disc Platinum Edition.

Upcoming review copies

This have been a little quiet on the review front of late, but I'm hoping that will pick up soon with the arrival of a couple of new titles.

First up is the recent 2-disc special edition of Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome from Blue Underground. Casting my eye around the net, it seems that virtually every major horror review site got their copy ages ago, but one of the problems that faces UK-based reviewers is that, generally speaking, we don't have much direct contact with the US distributors. Still, hopefully the wait will be worth it. Given that I already own the Italian release from Medusa, and Blue Underground's transfer doesn't appear to improve much on it, if at all, my interest in this release comes primarily from the point of view of its bonus materials, which sound rather impressive.

I will also soon be receiving a copy of the 40th Anniversary Platinum Edition of Disney's The Jungle Book. This is not my favourite Disney by any stretch of the imagination - in fact, I'd go so far as to say that it heralded the beginning of a particularly dark age in the studio's history - but it has some great moments, and I never got round to picking up the old Limited Issue DVD release, so I'm looking forward to refreshing my memory of this title. Oh, and it appears to be another of Disney's semi-controversial matted widescreen releases (see here for the debate surrounding Robin Hood and its intended ratio).

Aaaaaargh! Not the bees!

In case you aren't aware, Amazon UK runs a DVD rental service similar to that offered by the likes of Blockbuster and LoveFilm, albeit without such a wide range of available titles. Anyway, if you have an Amazon account, it seems that you can get a month of free rentals. I'm not convinced that the various packages offered are cost-effective enough to be worth it in the long run, but a free trial certainly doesn't hurt, and I decided a few days ago to start renting some titles.

Top of the list was the remake of The Wicker Man, a film with such an awesome pedigree of awfulness that I couldn't just rely on the word of mouth - I really had to see it for myself. I had already seen a hilarious reel collecting many of its more intentionally funny scenes, but I felt the need to understand them in context, especially after reading my good friend the Baron's excellent review of both this atrocity and the very good 1973 original.

In retrospect, perhaps "context" is a misleading word to use, because there really is no such thing. This film is so moronic and damn near incompetent that I actually think clips of Nicolas Cage karate-kicking Leelee Sobieski in the abdomen, donning a bear costume, stealing children's animal face masks and finally having a hive of bees poured over his head work better in isolation than they do when integrated into this meandering, preposterous tale about a policeman with a crippling allergy to bees invading an island-based matriarchal commune in search of his missing daughter.

Just to put this into perspective, in the original, the protagonist, Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), was a devoted Christian lured to an island by a group of pagans who needed a virgin for their yearly harvest sacrifice. Obviously, the writer/director of the remake, Neil LaBute, came to the conclusion that Nicolas Cage was such a dishy catch that no-one would believe he was a virgin, so this particular aspect of his character has been replaced by a tendency to flap his arms and faint when in the vicinity of bees. Guess what the women of this island are famed for producing? That's right: honey. ("Well, Christianity and bee allergy, they're kind of the same thing," a friend said to me today when I told him about the film.)

None of this really makes any sense. Why does Cage have a bee allergy? Why is the island dominated by women, with the few male inhabitants subservient mutes? Why does he spend the final act of the film violently assaulting many of said women? Why did LaBute decide to make the missing girl Cage's daughter? Why would anyone in their right mind commission this heap of drivel? Presumably, someone in a position of power genuinely believed in this project. Cage, who also gets a producer credit, certainly did, although his hammy, outrageous performance as the marauding Edward Malus (yes, that is his name - the man who ends up being murdered by a group of crazy women just happens to be called... oh, never mind) might make you wondering if the whole thing is just an extended piss-take. Rest assured that it isn't, more's the pity: it's deadly serious, and it's a strong contender for the worst film of 2006.

DVD review: Zodiac

This release of Zodiac has "stopgap" written all over it. If you enjoyed the film and can't wait a few more months for the director's cut, then this release may be for you, but those with more patience are advised to pass on this disappointingly empty and visually compromised edition, particularly with the director's cut being slated for release on HD DVD.

Released tomorrow in the UK, I've reviewed Warner's Region 2 release of Zodiac, David Fincher's serial killer thriller based on the real-life late 60s murders.

Zodiac's great but the DVD ain't

Yesterday, I received a review copy of the R2 UK release of Zodiac, David Fincher's latest film. The short story is that it's a great film, a worthy spiritual successor (of sorts) to Se7en, and you should definitely see it if you haven't already. For the long story, you'll have to wait for my full review for DVD Times, which will hopefully be going up on Sunday, ahead of the DVD's Monday release.

On a side note, it's been a while since I watched a standard definition DVD of a recent film, and I was horrified by just how shoddy this release of Zodiac looks. Maybe I've just been spoiled by high definition, but I was genuinely shocked by the amount of artefacting (mostly in the form of mosquito noise and horrible noise reduction smears) on display, not to mention the total lack of fine detail. I think Lyris (who saw it at the cinema) put it best when he said to me that, with high definition and theatrical screenings, you can tell what's supposed to be in focus because you can see a clear difference in clarity between, say, the actor who is the centre of attention and the background which is of less importance, but, in standard definition, or at least poor quality standard definiton, everything just sort of merges together as a flat, indistinct sea of mush.

Paramount is bringing the director's cut out on HD DVD in the US on January 8th, and you can bet your bottom dollar that I'll be snatching it up and junking the DVD as soon as possible.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 6: No Future For You, Part One

Written by Brian K. Vaughan; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

This episode begins the Faith storyline, and I'm pleased to report that it looks as if it's going to be a good one. Any fears that bringing in a new writer would disrupt the tone of the series can be put aside, because Brian K. Vaughan definitely captures the correct feel: in fact, I'd argue that this feels more like vintage Buffy than any other issue thus far, given that, for the most part, it eschews the large-scale, superhero-like fights scenes and improbable demons (c.f. the fairies in The Chain) in favour of more understated character scenes.

The main interaction in this episode takes place between Faith and Giles, holed up in Cleveland, guarding its "second-rate Hellmouth". They were always two of the strongest characters, and the dialogue is the sort of witty-yet-meaningful material that went on when the show was at its best. It's nice to see them not shying away from Faith's dark past, especially given that one of the biggest problems with her return in Season 7 was that this aspect of her character was given short shrift. The hints that are being dropped about her childhood and home life make me hopeful that we'll get a deeper exploration of her character as this arc progresses, while the mission on which Giles intends to send her - to pass herself off as an aristocrat and attends a fancy dress party ("They seriously call their fancy dress parties 'fancy dress parties'?") in order to assassinate a rogue Slayer/heiress - is just ridiculous enough to offset the darker elements with some much-needed comic relief. So, Faith heads off to England (you know she's in England because David Tennant and Billie Piper are wandering past a red telephone box in the establishing shot) to learn etiquette and be fitted with a ball-gown - most amusing.

The episode also picks up on an issue raised, briefly, in Angel's fifth season, and it's a pertinent one: if you give two thousand girls throughout the world instant Slayer powers, how can you be sure they'll use these powers for good? The answer is that you can't, and Lady Genevieve Savidge (great name) is a particularly nasty piece of work, kidnapping various people (including other Slayers) and hunting them down on horseback on her estate. This continues the theme that began in The Long Way Home of the world becoming less defined in black and white terms and more in shades of grey. It's no longer a case of "good Slayer fights bad demons" - the later seasons of the TV show suggested that demons had it in them to be good, and now we're seeing that a Slayer can just as easily be bad, and that, by sharing her power with these two thousand girls, Buffy has in fact populated the world with two thousand dangerous killing machines, with the choice of going either way.

Overall, an impressive episode. After a slightly shaky start, this new season actually seems to be finding its footing.

8/10.

The Giallo Project #8: One on Top of the Other

Alternative titles: Una sull'altra; Perversion Story; Director: Lucio Fulci; Starring: Marisa Mell, Jean Sorel, Elsa Martinelli; Music: Riz Ortolani; Italian theatrical release date: August 15th, 1969

Note: this review contains a number of major spoilers. Much of the body of this text is taken from my review of Severin's DVD.

When Dr. George Dumurrier's (Jean Sorel) wife Susan (Marisa Mell) dies suddenly during a vicious asthma attack, the young clinician stands to inherit $2 million. The convenience of this situation does not escape the attention of the authorities, and their suspicions are raised further by the news that George has started associating with a stripper named Monica Weston (Mell again), who bears an uncanny resemblance to his supposedly dead wife. As the net closes in, and George finds himself accused first of conspiring with his wife to commit fraud and then of murdering her, his lover Jane (Elsa Martinelli) is forced to take matters into her own hands to unravel the mystery and prove his innocence.

Lucio Fulci was the second of the "Big Three" (Bava, Fulci, Argento) to hop aboard the giallo train, and this, his first entry, clearly bears the influence of Romolo Guerrieri's The Sweet Body of Deborah, a fact never denied by Fulci himself. For this review, I watched the French cut of the film, entitled Perversion Story, released on DVD by Severin Films, but in actual fact I prefer both the English cut and its more ambiguous title, One on Top of the Other. The French cut loses a lot of character development in exchange for added sex scenes, and as a result feels considerably more disjointed than the English variant. There is some discrepancy as to the running time of the Italian cut, although I have seen a version, in Italian, which includes all the scenes from both the English and French edits.

I see this as Fulci's Vertigo, a thriller focusing on a man's obsession with the image of a dead woman (who is in fact not dead), set in and around the dizzy heights of modern (late 60s) San Francisco. Taking many of its cues from the domestic melodramas popularised by the likes of Umberto Lenzi in the mid to late 1960s, the focus is less on outlandish set-pieces (the events of the film hinge around a single death, which takes place off-screen) and more on conspiracy and psychological torture. This is a very cold film, and one tinged with sadness too, despite the colourful settings and Swinging Sixties vibe: all relationships seem to be distant, comprised of ritual and pretence. George's marriage to Susan, it would seem, is merely for show, while even his relationship with his lover, Jane, is mechanical and devoid of any real passion. This is most apparent in an early sequence in which, having told him that their relationship can't go on, Jane boards a train to return home to her family. George then sets off in his car, pursuing and overtaking the train, and meets her at the other end. Later, as they travel together in his car (in a scene removed from the French print), it is made clear that this ritual is carried out on a regular basis: "One day, I’ll take that train, and you won’t be there waiting for me," she tells him, to which he responds "No, we'll work it out. Even his relationship with the seductive Monica, a woman who finally seems to be accessible to him, turns out to be a sham, as she is revealed to be nothing more than a mocking construct created by Susan.

Sex is a game in the world in which this film is set, characterised by strip clubs that manage to be both shamelessly salacious and hopelessly naff at the same time, while George, in what is perhaps a manifestation of Fulci's inherent misogyny, finds himself surrounded by a cavalcade of manipulative and hostile women. Indeed, even 'plain' Jane is not all that she seems, transforming into a calculating seductress in a scene in which she turns a photo-shoot with Monica/Susan into an impromptu interrogation. Looked at from a male perspective, it's essentially a fantasy of submission - perhaps best exemplified by the character of Benjamin Wormser (Riccardo Cucciolla): a love-struck client of Monica, he dotes on a woman who doesn't even really exist. Perhaps, in this world, people can only truly be in love with themselves: as Monica rebukes the jealous Benjamin, who believes that she has found someone else, "Yes, you're right. I've got a lover who loves me more than you do. It's a woman, too. It's me!"

Perhaps the most misanthropic element of the film, however, is not the sex but the general impersonality of life itself. Fulci shows us a world in which everything is done by proxy: we, the audience, aren't sure how Susan "died" until it is actually spelled out for us by Henry (Alberto de Mendoza), because we never actually see the event. Even the conspiracy to have George bumped off does not require that its participants lift so much as a finger against him since, as Henry so eloquently puts it, "the State" will kill him for them. This extends to the film's conclusion, which actually turns out to be its weakest moment, despite being thematically appropriate: George's last-minute rescue from the gas chamber takes place off-screen, with the events instead described to us by a news reporter. Given George's complete lack of agency throughout the whole affair, his slinking into the shadows is rather fitting, but it is unsatisfying nonetheless, as it means that both he and the audience are denied a proper sense of closure.

It is, therefore, appropriate, that the biggest impression is made by Marisa Mell. Given top billing in English language prints but listed after Jean Sorel elsewhere, she pulls off a remarkable feat by playing two completely different characters who are, in fact, one in the same. So complete is her transformation from the cold, strait-laced brunette Susan Dumurrier to the blonde, energetic and highly sexual Monica Weston that it comes as a shock to learn that both are played by the same person. A Jungian reading reveals a world full of doppelgangers, none more so than Susan/Monica, who is introduced as a reflection in a window, fleetingly spotted gliding around the house. Effectively, the film is telling us, she's a ghost even before she's dead, and her spirit continues to haunt George long after her apparent demise. Even the title is a double entendre: "one on top of the other" may superficially be seen as a reference to sexual activity (of which there is plenty in this film), but it could just as well refer to the notion of layering one persona over another, as Susan does when she creates the character of Monica.

One on Top of the Other stands as the beginning of a high point in Fulci's career, and a niche which, had he continued to explore rather than being drawn to the more visceral but less satisfying thrills of gory zombie horror flicks, would probably resulted in a better legacy than being known simply as the "godfather of gore".

Next time, I'll be looking at Piero Schivazappa's 1969 thriller The Frightened Woman.

Blu-ray review: Black Book

Call it a guilty pleasure if you like, but Black Book is one of the most engaging films I've seen in recent years, and definitely Paul Verhoeven's best offering in a long time. Tartan's Blu-ray release offers up an impressive transfer and audio options, alongside extras that are insightful but rather limited in quantity.

Tartan kicks off their Blu-ray support with Paul Verhoeven's World War 2 thriller Black Book, released on the UK on September 24th. I've reviewed this Region 0 disc, which features an excellent transfer and boasts solid audio support.

Inspector Negro rides again

Yesterday was pay day, so, during my lunch break, I took a wander over to Borders and picked up a copy of Day After Day by Carlo Lucarelli, the sequel to his giallo Almost Blue (see here for my review of that title). I wonder if there have ever been any plans to turn this one into a film, as Alex Infascelli did with Almost Blue? Either way, I'm looking forward to getting stuck into this one without knowing the plot and its outcome beforehand.

I'll get cracking on it just as soon as I've finished the books I currently have out of the library - Mercy Alexander by George Tiffin and Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin.

HD DVD review: Silent Hill

Constituting a distinct improvement over the earlier Sony Pictures release in terms of image quality, Concorde Home Entertainment's release of Silent Hill features an amazing transfer and impressive audio. Despite being bare-bones, I highly recommend that fans of the film, or those who are just dying to add another magnificent-looking disc to their HD collections, get their order in immediately.

Just over a year after launching on Blu-ray and receiving much criticism for its image quality, Silent Hill shows up on HD DVD courtesy of German distributor Concorde Home Entertainment. I investigate how this new VC-1 encode compares to Sony's older MPEG-2 release.

The biggest comeback since JR rose from the dead

If you've been reading this site for any length of time, you've probably had the opportunity to observe me waxing lyrical about the medical drama Casualty and its fall from grace. In spite of featuring an excellent two-parter penned by former writer Barbara Machin, which were as good as anything the show had to offer in its prime, the most recent series was the worst ever by a long shot, and, not for the first time, I was just about ready to give up on it entirely. Last night, however, such thoughts were banished from my mind. The 22nd series began this weekend, with a two-parter spread over Saturday and Sunday, and, if their quality is in any way indicative of what we can expect from the rest of the season, this might just be the most miraculous return to form I've ever seen on television.

Casualty, in recent years, has been characterised by many problems, not least a gradual ramping up of the number of episodes per series (going from 24 to 48 in the space of a scant eight years) and a slow but steady decline in the quality of the writing, acting and characterisation, while the "medical drama" aspect of this medical drama became increasingly sidelined in favour of second rate soap opera storylines revolving around who fancied who and managed to knock who up. The influx of soap content was gradual enough that it took a few years for the problems to become readily apparent, but by the sixteenth series everything more or less fell apart.

Last night, however, it felt as if someone had turned back the clock. While I don't know if the five-week gap between Series 21 and 22 can truly be considered an end-of-series break, these five weeks would appear to have been put to excellent use, as the new production team, which came in towards the end of the previous series, have performed a blitzkrieg on the show. Rather than gradually phasing out the soap, they have done what was in my opinion the only thing they could have done: obliterated it entirely in the blink of an eye. The opening two-parter focused around a bomb blast in the centre of town which left the hospital swamped with casualties and barely able to cope, and in the process reaffirmed everything that the show used to be about.

Like last Christmas' two-parter, the same storyline was told from two different perspectives, the first episode being shown entirely from the point of view of wide-eyed, bumbling new recruit Toby (Matthew Needham, a shockingly good screen debut), and the second through the eyes of world-weary Charlie (Derek Thompson, the only actor to have been there since the first episode), who, having lost all sense of purpose in the job he does, receives a generic letter commending him on 35 years of nursing. Showing the same events from two different points of view might seem like a cheap gimmick (and, when I first heard about it, I was worried that this would simply be an attempt to replicate the more superficial elements of the Christmas episodes), but the effect is extremely powerful, the first episode throwing the audience into the thick of an extremely confusing situation and the second adopting a perspective of jaded detachment.

In the first episode, the decision to feature a new character in every single scene certainly helped make a character who, on the surface, was quite annoying, more sympathetic. I felt that some of the narrative contrivances were a bit silly (Toby just happens to be in the vicinity of the bomb blast, then just happens to run into not one but two people in need of urgent medical attention on his way home), but by and large I found it incredibly effective. This was a properly character-driven episode, the like of which we haven't seen for a long time. Oh, and the banter between the regulars was some of the best and most natural I've heard in a long time.

As good as the first episode was, the second just blew it out of the water, surpassing it in every way imaginable. If Episode 1 was trying to be the Casualty of old, Episode 2 actually was the Casualty of old. This was a true nursing-oriented episode, with not a shred of soap in sight: just 60 minutes about a normal guy trying to get through a job he no longer believed in, only to have has passion for it re-ignited before the end. Just as with Toby in the first episode, the way in which it was structured really helped get inside Charlie's head, and the benefit of him being such a familiar face made it all feel that bit more real. You could really feel his total sense of displacement and uselessness, being treated like a spare part (oh, sweet justice, the writers finally seem to have noticed how they've been treating him for the last couple of years) and pushed around by people who didn't value his experience and expertise. Seemingly innocuous moments like him lighting up a cigarette outside the hospital entrance, something he last did way back in Series 2 in 1987, hammered home just how close to breaking point he had come.

As for the terrorism storyline, it was handled quite well. Originally, the idea was for the perpetrators to be Islamic fundamentalists, but this concept was nixed by BBC standards and practice goons, who decided that it would be too "controversial". The result? The bombers are now animal rights activists, who accidentally detonate their explosive device in a crowded street rather than at its intended destination. (I'm not sure why this is any less controversial - more likely, the BBC bosses are less scared of reprisals from animal rights activists than suicide bombers.) However, it ended up working a lot better than I was expecting, and the fact that one of the bombers was by far the most sympathetic of the guest characters (a superlative performance by Nigel Terry) gave the episodes a much-needed angle of balance, avoiding any sanctimonious hand-wringing.

On the technical side of things, the show has now finally abandoned the cheap-looking, interlaced video format used for the previous 21 years and switched to a progressive, film-like appearance. The film effect (actually the result of shooting in 25p DigiBeta) is a big improvement on the tacky "remove every second line so everything looks like a jaggy mess" technique used on most TV shows shot on video but made to look like film, including sister show Holby City, which recently adopted this look. It actually looked like film on some occasions, and I thought the design of the bomb site, with all its smoke, debris and monochromatic colour palette, was hugely effective. For some reason, no director was credited for these episodes, but, whoever he/she was, they did a sterling job. They decided to shoot the scenes in the aftermath of the explosion in the manner of a horror film - a very effective choice. Yes, the overuse of clumsy, hand-held shots and haphazard editing remains, but the filmic look, coupled the more dramatic lighting, helped make it less objectionable than it has been for some time.

Seriously, I could rave and rave about these episodes all day, but I won't bore you with the details. Suffice to say that, if the rest of the series is even a smidgen as good as this, I will be more than satisfied. I never thought they'd pull it off, but they really have brought Casualty back from the dead, and my faith in the programme has been restored, just when I thought there was no hope left. While I doubt that anyone could maintain a further 46 episodes of this quality, I would like to think that the ideology they represent will remain in place. Writers: please, please keep things going in this vein and don't be tempted to go back to the soap and silliness.

Tarantan films presents...

Today I received my first ever high definition check disc - a review copy of the upcoming UK Blu-ray release of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book from Tartan Films... or "Tarantan Films", as the label misspells it. I already have the US version from Sony Pictures, due out on September 25th, on pre-order at DVD Pacific, and I intend to keep the order open in order to get the US-exclusive Verhoeven commentary plus other assorted extras, but the UK version, due out a day earlier, on September 24th, is a rather impressive package in terms of image quality, and one that Sony will have to work hard to better (if indeed they don't just use the same encode).

For a start, Tartan have clearly decided to go the whole hog, delivering the film on a dual-layer BD50 disc with a 1080p AVC encode (no repeats of their early days with the DVD format here). The transfer, which hovers consistently around the 30 Mbit/sec rate, is very impressive, slightly pre-filtered and as a result exhibiting some mild ringing and not quite hitting the heights of, say, Open Season or King Kong in terms of fine detail, but otherwise absolutely magnificent.

For audio, as seems to be Tartan's custom, the default track is a stereo affair (at 224 Kbps), with Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 Kbps) and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks also included. Unfortunately, neither the Playstation 3 nor any other currently available player can decode the high definition audio content of such tracks, so it falls back on a legacy DTS 1.5 Mbit/sec stream, but to my ears it sounds very good in its own right and constitutes an improvement on its 768 Kbps predecessor from the DVD. I'll have to do a more in-depth comparison between the two before offering my final verdict, however. Annoyingly, despite the bulk of the film being in Dutch and German, English subtitles are not enabled by default, making a pit-stop at the Setup menu (or a few button presses on the remote control) necessary before beginning the movie.

Tartan have also chosen to approach the presentation of their bonus content in a rather unusual manner, and this is likely to attract some consternation from certain parties. Whereas every other distributor I know either upscales their legacy 480i content or has the player itself switch to standard definition to play it, Tartan have embedded the material in a small window on the Extras menu. While this has the effect of making the quality look better (because it's smaller, natch), it's also going to be a bit of a pain in the neck for people with smaller displays. On a 40" screen viewed at fairly close range, it's not that big a deal, but I wouldn't like to watch it on my 20" monitor, or even on our older 32" TV.

Expect a full review at DVD Times in the near future. After a fairly lengthy period of what I can only term writer's block, I'm finally getting back into the sway of penning regular reviews.

HD DVD review: Dawn of the Dead (remake)

The HD DVD release of Dawn of the Dead is a definite improvement over the standard definition release, maintaining all of the original bonus features and boasting a solid transfer and audio mixes. Of course, the upcoming release of Romero's superior original version on Blu-ray is likely to put this release in the shade, at least in terms of the quality of the film itself, but those who enjoyed Snyder's reimagining are highly recommended to trade their DVD copies for this new release.

Halloween comes early this year as I review Universal's recent HD DVD release of the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.