Reviews

DVD review: Spooks: Season 5

Season 5 comes across as Spooks' weakest so far, sacrificing credibility and its ensemble cast in favour of increasingly unbelievable situations and an annoyingly narrow focus. The DVD release, likewise, is the most disappointing of the bunch, making the high £39.99 RRP seem particularly extortionate given the lack of bonus materials.

In preparation for the launch of its sixth season on BBC1, I've reviewed Contender Home Entertainment's DVD release of Spooks Season 5, presenting all ten episodes on five discs.

The Giallo Project #7: The Sweet Body of Deborah

Alternative titles: Il Dolce corpo di Deborah; Director: Romolo Guerrieri; Starring: Carroll Baker, Jean Sorel, Evelyn Stewart, Luigi Pistilli, George Hilton; Music: Nora Orlandi; Italian theatrical release date: March 20th, 1968

The newly married Marcel (Jean Sorel) takes his American bride, Deborah (Carroll Baker), to his home town of Geneva to celebrate their honeymoon. However, he hasn't been home long before he begins receiving all sorts of reminders of the untimely demise of his ex-girlfriend, Suzanne (Evelyn Stewart). The papers all say that she committed suicide, but an old friend, Philippe (Luigi Pistilli), menacingly accuses Marcel of murdering her. Soon, it becomes clear that someone is playing a very sick game with both Marcel and Deborah, who both begin to wonder how they can trust each other.

I like to class gialli such as this one as "Mills & Boon Gone Wrong". All the familiar traits are here: handsome European stud romances glamorous American woman and they run away together to various exotic locales (here Geneva and, as this was a French co-production, Nice, both lushly photographed in the manner of a tourist video). Then, throw in a bit of blackmail, double- and triple-crosses and some murders, and you've got yourself a giallo in the same vein that was later exploited to great success by the likes of Sergio Martino. In fact, a glance at the list of players both in front of and behind the camera shows this to be very much an early forerunner to Martino's ventures: Luigi Pistilli, Evelyn Stewart and a bearded George Hilton (as a charmingly unapologetic peeping tom) make up the roster of suspects, while Ernesto Gastaldi penned the screenplay, Nora Orlandi provided the score, Luciano Martino (brother of Sergio) served as producer, and Sergio Martino himself receives a credit as production manager. The jet set aesthetic that Martino would so often visit is also clearly established: this film is populated by wealthy decadents with too much time on their hands and a predilection for watching topless dancers gyrate to swanky lounge music with an air of bland indifference.

What's missing is the urban slasher element popularised by Dario Argento: as a pre-Bird with the Crystal Plumage giallo, the emphasis is more on the melodrama and internalised anxiety than on black-gloved killers stalking and killing a roster of victims. There are no on-screen deaths at all until the final act, and the pace tends to become a bit stodgy at times, with Baker looking harangued and spending a lot of time in bed and in various stages of undress. Yet, it's still considerably more engaging than the last giallo I watched, Naked You Die, and that has a lot to do with the plot, which Gastaldi skilfully drives from one twist to the next, even if the final major twist, which Gastaldi would go on to use again and again, is difficult to swallow, given that it directly contradicts what we have already seen. It also helps that there is distrust on both sides: the film alternates between Marcel and Deborah's point of view, with both suspecting each other of foul play, and as a result we're never quite sure how the land lies.

There are also some genuinely nice moments of style on display, with the occasional use of flashbacks to convey Marcel's past with Suzanne, with a scene in which they canoodle against a backdrop of autumn leaves falling in slow motion seems to anticipate, albeit in a romantic rather than sinister context, the "rape in the rain" scene in Martino's The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh. Likewise, a shot in which Marcel watches a striptease act through a brandy glass, the liquid distorting and colourising his (and our) viewpoint, is an interesting touch, the scene in question anticipating something similar that would show up in Giuliano Carnimeo's The Case of the Bloody Iris (also written by Gastaldi and produced by Luciano Martino), albeit with considerably more visual panache and less relevance to the plot. There's some deliciously outdated fashion and decor on display, all manner of crazy dancing, and even a bizarre musical game of Twister. Oh, and I'm not sure if it's a major point, but this strikes me as being the only giallo I've seen to feature a scene with a woman coming during sex.

Next time, I'll be returning to familiar territory with Lucios Fulci's One on Top of the Other, a film with many of the same hallmarks as this one.

The Giallo Project #6: Naked You Die

Alternative titles: Nude... si muore; Sette vergini per il diavolo; Schoolgirl Killer; The Miniskirt Murders; The Young, the Evil and the Savage; Director: Antonio Margheriti (as Anthony Dawson); Starring: Mark Damon, Eleonora Brown, Michael Rennie, Sally Smith; Music: Carlo Savina; Italian theatrical release date: February 20th, 1968

So far, all of the gialli that I've watched for this project have demonstrated a wide variety of influences. Naked You Die is where this all changes, as its sole frame of reference seems to be Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, with an all-girl boarding school standing in for the earlier film's fashion house and its various pupils replacing the models. Margheriti, however, doesn't have half the visual flare of Bava, and the cinematography is overall flat and unattractive, particularly when it comes to the lighting which, day or night, has the same harsh brightness. Nor does he possess Bava's imagination: almost everyone dies as a result of a straightforward strangling, which seems to take little more than a couple of seconds.

Margheriti does, however, make occasional use of the subjective camera to represent the killer's point of view, beating Dario Argento to this technique by nearly two years. (One of the interesting things about tackling these films chronologically is that you begin to get a sense of at what points various trends began to become popular.) There is also a rather effective moment in which a girl strangled in a basement drops to the floor, her head angled directly at the camera - staring, as it were, at the audience. That's about it for creative kills, though, and the film's title turns out to be incredibly misleading as most of the victims are fully clothed when they are murdered.

Elsewhere, a bland cast and unbelievable, perfunctory dialogue kill pretty much any potential interest in the plot itself. Mark Damon is hopelessly ill-equipped as riding instructor Richard Barrett, while the fact that virtually every girl on campus seems to be on the verge of swooning at his feet just boggles the mind - "I think I'm in love; he's the man I've always dreamed of!" is an actual line, spoken within minutes of his arrival. Naturally, he has his own ideas about the students, and ends up romancing one hapless girl who - coincidentally - is deathly afraid of horses.

Naked You Die can pretty much be summed up by the first couple of minutes, as a woman sheds her clothes, takes a bath and is promptly murdered: Margheriti teases but shows very little with regard to violence and nudity. This is effectively an exploitation film without any exploitation, and there certainly isn't anything more intellectually stimulating to compensate. It just amazes me that a giallo about a killer stalking the pupils of an all-girl school can be so damn chaste! One for completists only.

Next time, it's another new discovery for me, Romolo Guerrieri's The Sweet Body of Deborah.

Almost Blue

Almost Blue is an Italian giallo novel and, as far as I'm aware, one of the few to have been translated into English (although the blurb on the back refers to its as "noir"). The author is Carlo Lucarelli, who is probably known to most readers of this site as one of the co-writers of Dario Argento's giallo Non Ho Sonno. Almost Blue was itself turned into a film, in 2000, by Alex Infascelli, and it was in that form that I was first introduced to it. Reading the book, therefore, has been an interesting experience.

The premise is a pretty intriguing one. A serial killer is doing the rounds in Bologna, killing students and assuming their identities. His modus operandi leads to him being given the nickname of "the Iguana", and, fairly quickly, he is identified as Alessio Crotti, an orphan who grew up in a convent and has developed severe psychological problems. The only problem is that, as he continually changes his identity, any description of him is rendered useless as soon as he kills again (which he does with alarming frequency). By chance, a telephone conversation between him and an intended victim is picked up by Simone, a blind teenager who spends his life in his bedroom, listening in on phone conversations on his computer. Grazia Negro, a young detective brought in from Rome to crack the case, believes that Simone is the key... but can he lead her to the Iguana before he kills again?

Had this been written back in the 70s, it would probably have been given a deliciously convoluted animal title: then again, we already have a giallo film whose title involves (somewhat bafflingly) an iguana.

At less than 170 pages, it's a very short book, and one that I could imagine many people blazing through in one sitting. I tend to read at a somewhat slower pace, however, as I rarely sit down with a book for an extended period (reading, for me, tends to be restricted to the three Bs: bed, the bus and the bog), but I finished it in a couple of days, which is fast by my standards. I prefer to read for a bit and then soak up the atmosphere of what I've read - and it is a very atmospheric book, contrasting the emphasis on sound when told from the blind Simone's perspective with the killer's emphasis on sight. It also transpires that the film is very faithful to its literary origins: with few exceptions, if a scene occurs in the book, it is also in the film, and hits all of the same main plot points.

Where the two differ, however, is in the foregrounding of the sounds heard by Simone. This isn't entirely surprising, given that, as a visual medium, it's hard to convey blindness in a film, so one can't really complain too much about this, but what is regrettable is that, as a result, the film focuses a lot more attention on Grazia, turning the plot into a more typical detective thriller. This isn't done by altering the narrative as such, but rather by drawing out her scenes for longer. It's not that she isn't an interesting character (she is, and sympathetic too) but even she loses something in the adaptation - her struggle to be taken seriously as a woman in a male-dominated environment. In the novel, this is a major point, because the fact that Simone can't see is what attracts her to him so much, as this means he doesn't make judgements about her based on her appearance. In the film, it appears that she makes a habit of banging her witnesses.

Overall, I'd recommend Almost Blue. It's a fast, engaging read, and the English translation is very evocative (I'm assuming the Italian original is similar, if not better). The subtitle on the cover, "An Inspector Negro Novel", suggests that this is part of a series, and I certainly intend to seek out further instalments.

The Giallo Project #5: Death Laid an Egg

Alternative titles: La Morte ha fatto l'uovo; Plucked; A Curious Way to Love; Director: Giulio Questi; Starring: Gina Lollobrigida, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Ewa Aulin, Jean Sobieski; Music: Bruno Maderna; Italian theatrical release date: January 9th, 1968

Marco (Jean-Louis Trintignant) has married for money, which comes in the form of the chicken farm owned by his wife Anna (Gina Lollobrigida). It's a state of the art affair, employing all manner of high-tech machinery and avant garde music to get the chickens in the correct psychological frame of mind. Marco, however, has a few sordid secrets up his sleeve. Not only is he carrying on an affair with Anna's cousin Gabriella (Ewa Aulin), he also takes regular trips to a hotel, where he indulges in the murder of prostitutes. Nothing is quite as it seems, however, with multiple conspiracies brewing beneath the surface, and everything eventually explodes in a cocktail of mind games, backstabbing and, yes, headless chickens. (From my review at DVD Times)

I defy anyone to claim that the giallo was a movement aimed exclusively at grindhouse audiences, as Mikel Koven's book La Dolce Morte suggests, after watching this film. The clearest frame of reference seems to be Jean-Luc Godard, as evinced by the wildly experimental editing, while the sweltering heat that can be palpably felt throughout the entire film recalls the Western Django, Kill... If You Live, Shoot! for which Questi is best remembered. You won't find much Bava here... then again, you won't find much Antonioni either. Death Laid an Egg sports one of the most bizarre titles in the entire giallo catalogue, and is a baffling mindfuck of a movie. As an experiment, it's an interesting one, but as a commercial film, the end result is somewhat less than the sum of its parts, for, while the various avant garde techniques of narrative and editing that co-writer and director Giulio Questi exploits are definitely interesting and give the film a tone unlike any other giallo, they ultimately serve to make the film more frustrating than engaging.

This is a film that seems to be off-kilter right from the start, as the opening titles play out over stock footage of microscopic close-ups of living organisms, set to the crashing and banging of Bruno Maderna's weird, jaunty, atonal score, which manages to be both incredibly annoying and incredibly catchy at the same time. This segues into a truly baffling scene showing various hotel guests doing a mixture of mundane and bizarre things in their rooms - polishing knives, combing hair, preparing to commit suicide, and so on. Like much of the rest of the film, this first scene promises much but ultimately delivers little: a series of non-sequiturs with little pay-off. In a sense, it doesn't work because, despite using experimental editing techniques and throwing in a whole bunch of inexplicable cutaways and seemingly irrelevant plot strands, Questi still insists on tying it all to a relatively straightforward narrative structure. The thriller element, which doesn't really surface until well into the second half, and has more in common with a domestic melodrama than the urban slashers popularised by Dario Argento, doesn't really fit, while what seem to be various criticisms of commercialism don't really go anywhere meaningful.

What does work very well, however, is the claustrophobic atmosphere. The film seems to take place in the middle of the Italian summer, with the light so bright and the heat clearly so intense that at times it feels as if the characters are actually being suffocated. Even during the night scenes, the characters (or is that the actors?) look as if they are on the verge of collapse, while the fact that everyone looks (and sounds, at least in the English version) incredibly bored and tired seems somewhat appropriate given the film's rather biting portrayal of this section of society. In true giallo fashion, everyone is deceiving everyone else (the constant allusions to masks are perhaps just a little too bludgeoning), and the glee with which certain characters approach the prospect of pretending to be someone else just serves to underscore how thoroughly tedious their everyday lives are.

Death Laid an Egg has built up quite a following in certain circles, most likely on account of its obscurity and weirdness - how could a film which features genetically mutated chickens that are basically falls of meat with pulsating veins and feet not be embraced by the cult circuit? A film doesn't, after all, have to be brilliant in order to develop a cult following: often, simply being weird is enough. While Death Laid an Egg is not a bad film per se, it is an unsuccessful one - one that add two and two together and doesn't quite make four.

Next time, I'll be tackling a film I've never seen before, Antonio Margheriti's 1968 offering Naked You Die.

The Giallo Project #4: Blowup

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni; Starring: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles; Music: Herbie Hancock; US theatrical release date: December 18th, 1966

"Slowly, slowly... against the beat." - The unnamed photographer of Blowup

"What's the meaning of this?" you ask. "I thought this was the Giallo Project?" It's a valid enough question, and I thought long and hard about whether or not to include Blowup in this rogue's gallery, but eventually I came to the conclusion that I couldn't afford to ignore it. You see, while I don't believe it possible to describe this as a giallo in the truest sense (although both Blood and Black Lace and The Giallo Scrapbook 2 do so), I suspect that it had a profound impact on virtually every giallo beyond a certain point in history. It undoubtedly had a huge influence on Dario Argento, who adapted several of its themes into The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and indeed all of his 1970s gialli, and, in turn, the various directors who set out to imitate Argento's work ended up adopting these same themes and stylistic traits second-hand - imitations of an imitation, as it were. Besides, I thought it only right that I do something to acknowledge Antonioni's recent death.

Beyond the plot, which, if you break it down, is basically the same as virtually every Argento giallo - an artist living as an outsider in a contemporary urban space, flitting around unable to settle, witnesses (or believes he has witnessed) a crime taking place, the solution to which lies in a single image or memory that he can't quite understand - it's the very atmosphere that so closely mirrors everything from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh: a sort of decadence, a society of bourgeois excess, where people are obsessed with useless commodities and avant-garde art, and seem to have to real purpose in life. I wasn't around to experience the 60s first-hand (far from it!), but I can easily see this as a defining statement of the atmosphere and mood of the period. In some respects, it makes the same point as Blood and Black Lace, and yet the bleak urban landscapes are a world away from the gothic opulence of Bava's film.

David Hemmings' unnamed photographer is clearly the forerunner to Sam Dalmas and Marc Daly - and indeed, Argento even cast Hemmings as Marc in the seminal Deep Red, itself a clever inversion of Blowup which actually manages to outclass its predecessor. In many respects, though, he's a far nastier piece of work than the two of them put together. Daly had some rather antiquated ideas about the place of women in society, while Dalmas seemed to treat his girlfriend as a commodity, but they pale in significance to the character in Blowup (referred to as "Thomas" in many sources but never actually named in the film itself - actually, names are almost completely absent, a reference, perhaps, to the characters' lack of identity and failure to find a place for themselves in the world), who manhandles several models, forcibly "posing" them and berating them for being useless, not to mention toying with blackmailing a woman (Vanessa Redgrave) who objects to having her picture taken on the sly. That's effectively Antonioni's (and Argento's) point, though: he is a vain, self-absorbed prick, continually searching for a perfect image that doesn't exist, and searching for meaning where there is none. Of course, it's therefore entirely appropriate that the central mystery is a single image whose very meaning continues to elude him (and the more he focuses on the image, the more he loses perspective).

In many regards, Blowup is about as anti-giallo as you can get - there are no on-screen murders, and the film is famous for its deliberate refusal to provide a solution to its central mystery - and yet in orders, you can see the roots of so many 70s gialli in it that it's impossible to ignore it completely. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the giallo of the golden age is effectively a marriage between Bava's early efforts and Blowup, filtered through Argento's sensibility and adopted by a slew of imitators - a reinterpretation of the form in the context of the post-1968 cultural revolution. It's a brilliant, baffling, mesmerising film in its own right, but when you consider the knock-on effect that it had on the giallo movement, its importance becomes all the more clear.

Next time, I'll be dipping into the bizarre world of Giulio Questi's baffling Death Laid an Egg.

The Giallo Project #3: Blood and Black Lace

Alternative titles: Sei donne per l'assassino; Director: Mario Bava; Starring: Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner; Music: Carlo Rustichelli; Italian theatrical release date: March 14th, 1964

Whenever the topic of Blood and Black Lace comes up, I always seem to find myself apologising for not liking it more. I've seen it four or five times now, and on each occasion I find myself feeling strangely distanced from it and unable to see it in quite the same light as its many, many admirers. Maybe it's the fact that it lacks a single clear-cut protagonist to whom I can relate, or perhaps it's because, to date, there has not been a satisfactory presentation of the film on DVD (it's fickle, I know, but there have been occasions when a better transfer has improved my appreciation of a film, particularly those that are visually-oriented). In any event, for whatever reason, Blood and Black Lace is an entry that I see as important on account of its influence, but considerably less interesting when taken on its own merits.

Dubbed "the first authentic body count movie" by VCI on the cover of their (frankly pretty poor) DVD release, Blood and Black Lace builds on the thematics that Bava developed in his previous two gialli, The Girl Who Knew Too Much and The Telephone segment of Black Sabbath, and injects a vital new component that would come to characterise so many other films in the genre: the protracted, deliriously violent murder sequence. While Girl's death scenes, such as there were, were pretty perfunctory, they are Blood and Black Lace's raison d'être, and are quite shocking in their intensity. The very first, occurring in a windswept park at night within the first five minutes, is brutal and frenzied, unveiling the fedora-clad, black-gloved killer (his face concealed with a mask), who, thanks to his sheer viciousness and lack of identifying features, feels more like a force of nature than an actual person.

Actually, it's difficult to fault the murders at all - they are all incredibly well-executed and almost always incredibly sadistic. One unfortunate victim is slapped about before having her hand and then face scalded, while another receives a blow to the face with a spiked glove, prefiguring the killer's modus operandi in Death Walks at Midnight by several years. A further death, occurring late in the film, also sets the template for many a giallo bathtub drowning. However, the scenes designed to connect them together (and I believe that this is all they really are) are considerably more mundane, with the plot never sustaining my interest in that way that Girl's does. Thomas Reiner's wooden Inspector Silvester plods from scene to scene without doing anything particularly interesting, and the various women of the fashion house around which the events revolved are given only enough characterisation for us to know what dirty deeds they have been getting up to in between shows.

Admittedly, some of this really is quite clever. In typical giallo form, everyone is hiding something, whether it's drug addiction, thievery or blackmail, and to an extent you can almost imagine the killer representing a force of brutal retribution. Bava also indulges in one of his favourite pass-times in opening up an outwardly respectable society and revealing it to be corrupt to the core. Furthermore, I don't need to tell you that it's impeccably shot, with Bava's trademark gel lighting giving the various locations an otherworldliness while still anchoring them firmly in reality. However, Blood and Black Lace remains, for me, a stepping stone in the giallo's journey rather than the landmark that many consider it to be. I like it, but I would never afford it masterpiece status.

Sorry again...

Next time, I'll be looking at Michelangelo Antonioni's seminal Blowup (don't worry - all will be explained).

The Giallo Project #2: The Telephone (segment of Black Sabbath)

Alternative titles: Il Telefono; Director: Mario Bava; Starring: Michèle Mercier, Lidia Alfonsi, Milo Quesada (uncredited); Music: Roberto Nicolosi; Italian theatrical release date: August 17th, 1963

I hadn't originally considered including The Telephone in this project, as I was originally planning on only covering feature-length gialli, but Marcus over at Dark Discussion suggested I give it a look. In the end, I'm still not completely sure that it should be included here, since I would only consider it to be a giallo in the broadest possible sense, but it has an important place in history nonetheless, since not only was it the first film of this sort to be shot in colour, not to mention having a profound influence on everything from Black Christmas to Scream in its use of the telephone as a device of dread, it also potentially marks the first instance of the iconic black gloves later to be donned by many a giallo killer!

The plot takes place entirely within a single location, focusing on the protracted terrorising of Rosy (Michèle Mercier) by phone by a voice claiming to be that of Frank Rainer (Milo Quesada), a man who, having been put away as a result of Rosy's testimony, has now escaped from prison... only there's more to this than meets the eye, as it turns out that the calls in fact originate from Mary (Lidia Alfonsi), Rosy's former friend and (as is strongly implied) lover, as part of a bid to rekindle their friendship (and relationship). There is, however, a twist in the affair. Can you guess what it is?

Black Sabbath is introduced by host Boris Karloff as "three brief tales of the supernatural", but, at least in the Italian version (the US edition, like The Girl Who Knew Too Much, features a radically different edit), there is nothing supernatural whatsoever about The Telephone. Rather, it's a very straightforward thriller mixing that perennial giallo cocktail of sex and violence: the voice on the phone discusses killing Rosy in decidedly erotic terms, while a strangling by stocking only serves to underscore the manner in which the two are conflated. As the protagonist, Michèle Mercier is certainly easy on the eyes, and Bava seems to delight in tantalising the audience with the briefest flashes of bare shoulders and legs (of which the voice on the phone approves so much). However, despite looking the part, she lacks the pluckiness and spontaneity that made Letícia Román so appealing in The Girl Who Knew Too Much; she seems more like a forerunner for what would eventually end up becoming the Edwige Fenech role in later gialli of the harangued, attractive victim. Lidia Alfonsi, meanwhile, is rather more effective as the ice-cold femme fatale.

More psychological than most gialli, the horror of the situation comes not from sadistic violence (there isn't any till the final few minutes) but from the fact that the speaker on the phone knows Rosy so intimately, while the room in which the entire segment takes place, despite being quite spacious, takes on an incredibly claustrophobic quality. The transition from black and white to colour, meanwhile, has not harmed Bava's ability to make the most of light and shadow to create tension, while the richly saturated hues, especially on the excellent transfer provided on Anchor Bay's recent DVD, at the same time provides a drastically different aesthetic (one can only dream of Blood and Black Lace looking this good on DVD). Roberto Nicolosi's score, meanwhile, starts out with some of the jazzy lounge aesthetic of Bruno Nicolai's contributions to later gialli, but quickly gives way to a more menacing, sinister tone.

In many ways, this is a minor entry in both Bava's filmography and the history of the giallo - a sub-heading rather than a full chapter, if you like - but it shows many of the tropes that would be established in Blood and Black Lace in a smaller-scale, more rudimentary, form, and works rather well as a short, sharp exploration of mounting dread.

Next time, I'll be looking at Mario Bava's second feature-length giallo, Blood and Black Lace.

The Giallo Project #1: The Girl Who Knew Too Much

Alternative titles: La ragazza che sapeva troppo; The Evil Eye (alternate US edit); Director: Mario Bava; Starring: Letícia Román, John Saxon, Valentina Cortese, Dante DiPaolo; Music: Roberto Nicolosi; Italian theatrical release date: February 10th, 1963

We all have to start somewhere, and I can think of no better film with which to begin this lengthy and probably foolhardy project than this 1963 offering from Mario Bava. While I doubt that you'd ever be able to find two people who completely agree on the definition of the word "giallo" and every single title that it encompasses, it's more or less unanimously agreed that The Girl Who Knew Too Much was the film that launched its cinematic form (unless you count Luchino Visconti's 1943 Obsession - Gary Needham, I'm looking at you!). It's ironic, then, that the first true giallo film is one of the most tongue-in-cheek of the cycle. Almost a parody of thriller conventions, it sends up heroine Nora Davis' (Letícia Román) obsession with paperback gialli and her less than accomplished attempts at amateur sleuthing.

Bava and his five co-writers use the "foreign tourist in Rome" framework that would become so popular with other filmmakers as the giallo gained popularity, placing the wide-eyed Nora against the backdrop of a series of killings known as the Alphabet Murders (actually the title of a Poirot novel and a very self-conscious reference to the giallo's roots in Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and Mickey Spillane novels - all of whom are referred to by name in this film) and forcing her to team up with the charming Dr. Marcello Bassi (John Saxon) to solve the mystery herself when she is met with the same disdain and disbelief that The Establishment would dole out to so many other giallo leading ladies. A rather likeable heroine, Nora is a bit silly and possesses an over-active imagination, not to mention a tendency to faint when things get a bit too much, but a lot more independently-minded than many an Edwige Fenech or Suzy Kendall. It also helps that Román has a decent sense of comic timing, playing the slapstick romance scenes between her and Saxon well and not afraid to make a fool of herself when the script calls for it. Indeed, the banter of the pair in many ways prefigures that of David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi in Deep Red, while the running gag of one or the other continually causing injuries to Marcello is a good one and helps lighten the tension.

Indeed, this is a decidedly light-hearted giallo, with its tongue firmly in its cheek at all times. The Italian version (the American version, released under the title of The Evil Eye, is substantially different, featuring a number of alternative scenes and a different music score) features a male narrator continually commenting on Nora's plight which, in addition to providing a lot of humorous moments also serves to highlight the genre's literary origins. On the other hand, the manner in which it is shot is anything but frivolous: one of the few gialli to be shot in black and white, Bava, who was also the cinematographer, makes superb use of his monochromatic palette to create a world of great foreboding, foregrounding extremes in light and shadow and turning many of the familiar Roman tourist traps, including, most famously, the Spanish Steps (which provides the film with its key set-piece), into places of mystery and dread. Bava takes the Rome of picture postcards and rips open its seedy underbelly, and Marcello's insistence that the Rome of bright sunshine and milling tourists is the "real" one never quite ring true.

This is clearly a very prototypical giallo, and while some elements are already in place, others are either not yet fully formed or else absent entirely. There is no hidden, black-gloved villain - all the potential suspects are unmasked - and the outlandish murder set-pieces that would later become the format's hallmark are nowhere to be found. "One moment and it's all over," the killer promises Nora when finally unmasked, a far cry from the protracted stalk-and-slash scenes that would later delight audiences. There are only a handful of murders, and they are largely committed off-screen, with the body count aesthetic that would emerge in Bava's next giallo, Blood and Black Lace, not yet established.

Of all the Bava films I've seen so far, this is actually the one that I enjoy the most, and in fact I would put it ahead of Blood and Black Lace, for reasons that I'll explain when I get round to discussing that film. It lacks both the depth of a Deep Red and the camp sleaze of a Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, but it got the giallo movement off to an impressive start, and it holds up today as a thoroughly enjoyable stand-alone film.

Next time, I'll be looking at Mario Bava's second giallo, Blood and Black Lace.

Update, August 17th, 2007 03:35 PM: At the recommendation of Marcus, the next title to be covered will now be The Telephone segment of Black Sabbath rather than Blood and Black Lace.

Blu-ray review: The Rock

A solid catalogue release from Disney, The Rock holds up well in high definition, and indeed compares favourably to many HD releases of more recent films. While the missing audio commentary is a shame, at the end of the day the impressive (albeit not flawless) audio-visual presentation means that those who already own the film on DVD are highly advised to pick up a copy of the Blu-ray release.

It's got explosions, it's got car chases, and it's got Nicolas Cage doing his "I'm a loveable dope" shtick. Yep, sounds like the perfect HD release. I've reviewed Disney's recent French Blu-ray release of The Rock.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 5: The Chain

Written by Joss Whedon; Illustrated by Paul Lee

This season of Buffy is full of surprises. Who would have thought that the best "episode" so far would turn out to be a one-shot stand-alone affair rather than one with something to do with the main arc? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that it will prove to be relevant to the bigger picture in a thematic sense, but for the most part this is a self-contained story, and, to date, the only episode not to feature Buffy. Actually, the only regulars we see are Giles (briefly) and Andrew (even more briefly, thankfully, although he manages to be as infuriating as ever in his one-page appearance). The narrative, this time, focuses on one of two Slayers posing as Buffy in order to confuse her enemies, and it actually manages to be quite touching in the space of its 22-page duration. The theme seems to be the loss of identity: as the heroine puts it, "You don't have to remember me. You don't even know who I am." This is a continuation of the "everything is connected" mantra of Season 7 that eventually led to Buffy sharing her power with all the potential Slayers, although it's a lot less happy-sappy and touchy-feely than what we saw at the end of Chosen. The point is that, in a war, the grunts are expendable, and most of the time, no-one will even know the names of the ones who make a real difference. It's not a pleasant message, but it's a truthful one.

By the way, this episode was drawn by a different artist, Paul Lee. He tends to stage his action more coherently than Georges Jeanty, but his characters seem less "alive", and his rendition of Giles is way off (his Andrew his considerably better, although, given how I feel about the character, I'm using "better" in the loosest possible sense of the word). Jeanty returns for the next episode, which will kick off the Faith arc written by Brian K. Vaughan. My hopes for this arc are actually somewhat higher than they would have been had Whedon been writing it - I'm looking forward to seeing whether new blood can put a fresh spin on things. And hey, it's Faith. What's not to like?

8/10.

Lost in translation

This morning, I forced myself to sit down and watch Paprika... with an emphasis on forced, because I really did find it a chore to sit through. I have nothing against nonsensical films that operate in the world of dream logic - Mulholland Drive and Inferno being two of my absolute all-time favourites - but, if the director doesn't know what he or she is doing, or loses his or her sense of perspective, it's easy to lose track of what counts. With Paprika, I can only assume that, as with Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (another dream logic film I saw recently and hated), everything made sense to writer/director Satoshi Kon in his head, but he was unable to translate this on to the screen in a way that resonated... with me at any rate. I never felt as if I was actually experiencing a dream, just viewing one nonsensical scene after another.

"I'm not bland, I'm just not good at expressing my emotions."

It doesn't help that, unlike the other Satoshi Kon film I've seen, the excellent Tokyo Godfathers, the visual style is that bland, stilted, lifeless look that I (rightly or wrongly) associate with anime. Rather than moving their whole faces when they speak, characters' mouths just open and close, and the voices (in the original Japanese - the English dub is unsurprisingly cringe-worthy) certainly don't add any more life to these wooden personalities. There is some nice colour work, and a couple of interesting visual images, but most of the latter are to be found in the opening credits - really not a good sign. The designs are mostly bland and generic, and I find myself wondering how the same director could produce such inventive visuals in Tokyo Godfathers, working with a much more reality-based storyline, and yet give this high fantasy such an uninspired look.

I do intend to seek out Satoshi Kon's other work - Perfect Blue and Millenium Actress - but I sincerely hope my enjoyment of Tokyo Godfathers wasn't just a fluke.

4/10.

DVD review: The Secret of NIMH: Family Fun Edition

This new release of The Secret of NIMH comfortably renders its predecessors obsolete, sporting a decent transfer and audio track. The extras are disappointingly sparse, and the whole package has clearly been aimed at a younger age group than the film's original intended audience, but even so, fans should not hesitate to pick up a copy of this version.

Courtesy of DVD Pacific, I've reviewed the new 2-disc "Family Fun Edition" of Don Bluth's The Secret of NIMH, released to coincide with the film's 25th anniversary.

The Odessa File

Frederick Forsythe is probably best known, as a novelist, for The Day of the Jackal, which somehow manages to combine a painstaking level of attention to detail with an extremely gripping plot, resulting in the book being compulsive page-turner despite is extremely clinical style. The Odessa File, written a year later, retains The Day of the Jackal's attention to detail, but for the most part of a more conventionally structured suspense thriller, focusing on an intrepid hero rather than a ruthless killer, and unfortunately suffering from a series of plot contrivances that The Day of the Jackal was able to avoid. Both books were, within the space of a few years, turned into films produced by John Woolf and written by Kenneth Ross, although this is where the crew similarities end.

In 1963, Hamburg journalist Peter Miller (Jon Voight) inherits the diary of a suicide victim who was formerly a prisoner at Riga concentration camp during the Second World War. The diary implicates the camp's ruthless Commandant, Eduard Roschmann (Maximilian Schell), in a series of barbaric war crimes, and Miller decides to set about tracking the man down himself and bringing him to justice. Unfortunately, he finds himself up against something of a brick wall, given the German public's apathy towards digging up this shameful past, as well as the high level of infiltration into the civil services by former Nazis, who naturally have a vested interest in preventing their old identities from being uncovered.

The film is largely a faithful adaptation of its source material, but it deviates in a few respects, some of which actually end up weakening it. The part of Miller's stripper girlfriend Sigi (Mary Tamm), for example, is beefed up, but this only really amounts to more screen time for her rather than her actually affecting the narrative in any way. Likewise, a few plot elements are compressed to save time, while the subplot of a planned Egyptian offensive against Israel, involving the unleashing chemicals over its major cities, is relegated to a brief mention at the beginning and end. In effect, they might as well not have bothered including it at all - surprising, given that it was what gave the novel so much of its urgency. More damagingly, though, the film makes it clear almost from the get-go why Miller is so driven to track down Roschmann. In the novel, his motive is concealed among Forsythe's trademark screeds of painstakingly detailed descriptions, and as such doesn't draw attention to itself, but, in the film, this issue is lingered on to the extent that the audience will surely put two and two together immediately. The film's depiction of the atrocities committed by the Nazis is also greatly toned down from the material in the novel, which probably explains the rather tame PG certificate.

Highlight below to reveal spoiler text:

As with The Day of the Jackal, the film adaptation constitutes a step down from its source. Unfortunately, the film, while engaging enough, is also not of the same standard as Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal, which succeeded in adapting the novel's clinical, detached narrative style to the screen. Ronald Neame's The Odessa File is, like the book on which it is based, a more conventional affair and thus fails to distinguish itself from the crowd of war and post-war movie thrillers made at around the same time.

Overall, a 7/10 for the film. I don't tend to give numerical ratings to books, but if I did, The Odessa File would probably be an 8/10.

HD DVD review: The Skeleton Key

Universal's HD DVD for The Skeleton Key constitutes a definite improvement on the standard definition release in terms of audio-visual quality, although it's still far from the upper echelons of the format's capability. Unless you enjoyed the film a great deal, or habitually rebuy all your standard definition titles in standard definition, there's not a great deal here to justify shelling out for the same film twice, but if you don't already own the DVD, this HD DVD is a fine place to start.

The Bayou goes high definition in The Skeleton Key, released on HD DVD by Universal with all of the content from the standard definition release intact. Descend into the swamps at DVD Times...

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 4: The Long Way Home, Part Four

Written by Joss Whedon; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

So the first "arc" of Buffy's eighth season reaches its conclusion. Given the dramatically different nature of comics as a medium versus television, it's difficult to say precisely how these issues would relate to an episode of the TV show, but, allowing for how much longer it takes for action to unfold in dramatic form versus on the page, I'd say that this four-part opening arc feels somewhat akin to a 90-minute two-parter like Bargaining (Season 6). By that I mean that a similar amount of ground has been covered: too much for these four issues to constitute a single episode, but not enough for each issue to operate as an episode in its own right.

In some respects, things have moved a lot faster than they ever did in the TV show. Already we've been introduced to three potential villains and a vast number of Slayerettes, seen Buffy sent into a deep sleep and then awakened by the kiss of true love Sleeping Beauty style, had Willow engage in a whiz-bang mid-air duel with Amy, be kidnapped and subjected to an array of horrific tortures (which for some reason leave her completely unscarred - thanks to her new post-Chosen powers, perhaps?), and a whole lot more besides. And yet, at the same time, I'm not all that convinced that a great deal has happened. We've had snatches of characterisation (I hesitate to call it character development at this stage), true, but it's mostly been smoke and mirrors. With the change in medium, I get the impression that Whedon is intent in converting Buffy into more of an action superhero, devoting more time than ever before to the fight scenes. It doesn't help that these fight scenes don't always read very well on the page, with the staging at times making the action rather incomprehensible. Then again, I had exactly the same problems trying to follow the action in V for Vendetta, so perhaps it's a problem with me rather than the artwork itself. Either way, I'm impressed by the way that Jeanty manages to capture the essence of Willow/Hannigan, Xander/Brendon and, some of the time, Buffy/Gellar in his artwork. Dawn, Amy and Andrew (who, mercifully, doesn't appear in this issue) are a lot shakier, but it's no mean feat to be able to take the likenesses of real people and translate them into fairly flat drawings while ensuring that they remain recognisable. That said, Jo Chen's cover art is really on another level. (I wonder if the actors get royalties for the use of their images?)

Unfortunately, letting it all down for me is the fact that Whedon has, for some inexplicable reason, decided to bring back Warren, one of the worst villains in the history of the show - if not the worst. He's not as annoying as Andrew, true, but his presence leaves a foul taste in the back of my throat, bringing back unpleasant memories of Seasons 6 and 7. At least, as a leering, skinless cadaver, he has become slightly more interesting, at least on a visual level.

Right now, I find myself at something of a crossroads. I can't deny that I want to find out where this is all headed, but at the same time I have a sneaking suspicion that Whedon is making this up as he goes along (since the comics began production, the series has ballooned from a 22-episode season into a 50-plus issue epic), and, if this is true, I suspect that the end result will be as dramatically unsatisfying as the final two seasons of the TV show. I hope I'm proved wrong, but, at this stage in the game, I think that the fan-written continuation The Chosen has done a better job of capturing the tone of classic Buffy while taking the characters and their storylines in new and satisfying directions. Some will probably hold this opinion to be absolute heresy - after all, it's Whedon's baby and the comics are canon while The Chosen is not - but so sue me, Seasons 6 and 7 have severely diminished my opinion of the creator's storytelling abilities, and Season 8, for far, has not done a great deal to allay this.

Oh yeah, and Ethan Rayne is dead. This being the Buffyverse, though, who wants to bet how long it will be before he gets resurrected as some sort of ghoulish otherworldly being?

5/10.

HD DVD review: Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive arrives on HD DVD in a predictably no-frills package from Studio Canal, who seem to view high definition content and bonus features as an either-or situation. While the transfer is in many respects very strong, it is let down by overzealous noise reduction, and the audio pitch problem is yet another silly error that could easily have been avoided. A US release has been rumoured at some point in the next year, so it may be worth waiting to see if Universal is able to provide a better package.

The UK release may have been delayed indefinitely, but those on the mainland are already enjoying Mulholland Drive in high definition! I've reviewed the French HD DVD release of David Lynch's quintessential fever dream.

DVD review: Pan's Labyrinth: Platinum Series

New Line have served Pan's Labyrinth extremely well in terms of audio and bonus content, but as is usually the case the lacklustre image quality lets the side down.

I've reviewed the R1 Platinum Series edition of Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo Del Toro's critically acclaimed and award-winning dark fairytale. New Line's 2-disc set, features excellent audio and an impressive array of extras.

Review copy courtesy of CD-WOW.

HD DVD review: The Fountain

The Fountain gets a decidedly mediocre HD release that doesn't do its lush visuals justice by any stretch of the imagine. Still, even if it had been graced with the most impressive transfer ever, I would still find it rather difficult to recommend this infuriatingly nonsensical ramble even as demo material. If you like the film, you may find some of the additional bonus materials interesting, but if, like me, you thought it was a pompous load of odd cobblers, there's really nothing here worth bothering about.

I unsuccessfully try to work out what on earth is going on in my review of Warner's HD DVD/DVD combo release of The Fountain.

Carrie

Confession time: this is the first time I've read a Stephen King novel. No, really. That's quite an accomplishment, given my interest in horror and the sheer number of horror novels King has written, but I suppose we've all got to start somewhere.

Generally speaking, when I read a book that has been made into a film, in instances where I've seen the film first, I tend to come away with the impression that the book is the better version, with too much having been lost in the adaptation process. Not so with Carrie: I genuinely think that Brian De Palma improved the story in his iconic 1976 film. Carrie is a scant 200 pages (plus, in my copy, a new introduction by King in which he talks, at some length, about its origins), and I read it in dribs and drabs over the course of a week (that's pretty fast by my standards). It definitely gripped me considerably more than the last book I read, The Historian, but I wouldn't call it a masterpiece by any means. King uses an interesting technique (abandoned by De Palma in his film version) in which he intercuts the narrative with extracts from various publications - academic journals, courtroom transcripts, the written testimony of survivors of the fateful prom night - giving the read insight into the minds of people other than just poor Carrie White. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's just a distraction that gets in the way of the plot.

Unfortunately, I suspect that my having seen the film beforehand coloured my reading of the book. King refers to Carrie on numerous occasions as large and "bovine", which Sissy Spacek most assuredly is not. He describes Margaret White in a similar way, which again clashes with the appearance of Piper Laurie in the film. It's odd that the image of Carrie as a frail, slight girl seems to have been adopted so unanimously, as just about every piece of cover artwork that I've seen for the book, whether explicitly based on Spacek's appearance in the film or not, bears more resemblance to the character from the film than to the one described on the page. That's not, of course, a problem with the book itself but rather the way its image has been altered by the film's influence.

As with The Exorcist (and I'll get back to reading Legion very soon, Lee, I promise!), what struck me most about Carrie was the film's faithfulness to its source material. Entire scenes and conversations have been lifted from page to celluloid, although, like I mentioned before, the film dispensed with the fictitious "secondary sources" used in the book. Some key changes were also made to the final act, probably due to budgetary constraints, and a plot involving a telepathic link between Carrie and Sue Snell (through whose eyes we see many of the events in the book) was also dropped.

So yeah, my first Stephen King, and probably not my last. I enjoyed it for sure, but it didn't offer any startling revelations that I would have missed by just watching the film.