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Alcove, The

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

a.k.a. L’alcova
company: Filmirage
and Golden Hawk
year: 1984
runtime: 93′
country: Italy
director: Joe D’Amato
cast: Lilli Carati, Annie Belle,
Al Cliver, Laura Gemser,
Roberto Caruso, Nello Pazzafini
writer: Ugo Moretti
cinematography: Joe D’Amato
music: Manuel De Sica
disc company: Severin Films
release date: February 23, 2010
retail price: $29.98
disc details: Region 1 / NTSC / dual layer
video: 1.85:1 / anamorphic / progressive
audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic English
subtitles: none
reviewed from a screener provided
by Severin Films LLC
order this film from Amazon.com

Plot: A military officer brings an African princess home with him to act as a domestic servant, only to have her take control of the seedy goings ons at his Italian villa.

1984 was a slow year for low budget exploitation guru Joe D’Amato, with this and the infamous The Blade Master – the sequel to Ator the Fighting Eagle, best remembered for being MSTied under the title of Cave Dwellers – being his only releases for the year. While The Blade Master sets the benchmark for zero-budget spaghetti in-adventure, D’Amato appears to have focused more than his usual share of attention to the direction of The Alcove. It ranks as one of the better of his nearly 200 films, not that those of you of more discerning taste will find much consolation in that.

The period story takes place entirely, with the exception of two or three brief scenes, at the isolated villa of Ello (Al Cliver, Zombie, Devil Huner), an officer just returned from duty in Africa. Along with a hefty assortment of souvenir trinkets, Ello brings an African princess named Zerbal (Laura Gemser, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead), gifted to him by a chieftain, into his household. Wife and mistress of the household Alessandra (Lilli Carati, Escape from Women’s Prison) is none too happy to have a savage in her midst, a view echoed by Wilma (Annie Belle, Black Velvet, Horrible), a secretary with whom Alessandra has been having a lesbian tryst in her husband’s absence.

Zerbal is equally unhappy with her new position in a “cultured” society, and wastes no time in making trouble. She wiggles her way into her own relationship with Alessandra, using her new status as the mistress’ preferred pet to take more control around the household. Wilma is spurned while Zerbal and Alessandra ride the high life on cocaine and champaign bubbles, ignoring the fact that Ello’s finances are teetering on the brink of complete collapse.

The story by Ugo Moretti (Orgazmo) slogs along at a snail’s pace, wading through poorly written melodrama to get to the all important naughty bits. Things take a turn for the interesting only in the final half hour, when Ello comes up with a scheme to make money fast by producing his own pornographic films starring the women of the house. D’Amato takes the opportunity to dress Alessandra up for some nunsploitation-by-proxy, spicing things up with a brief but hardcore vintage short. Even the villa gardener (Nello Pazzafini, The Pumaman, Star Odyssey) gets in on the action, exposing his member while Alessandra’s nun squats over a restrained Wilma and Zerbal looks on with a whip! It may not be sexy, but it’s more than enough to validate The Alcove’s sleazy reputation.

I’ve never been a terribly big fan of D’Amato muse Laura Gemser, who has appeared in just about every sub-genre the director dabbled in but is most remembered for her turns in the Black Emanuelle series. Her performance here is as bland and uncharismatic as I’ve come to expect, though I doubt anyone is coming to The Alcove to admire her acting chops anyway. All fans need to know is that she bares her physical assets early and often, as does the rest of the female cast. Al Cliver’s pants remain firmly in place for the duration, thankfully.

The Alcove makes its first appearance on domestic DVD in fine form, and is one of the better of Severin Films’ recent SD releases. The 1.78:1 (listed as 1.85:1 on the case, which also says the running time is 97 as opposed to the actual 93 minutes) transfer may be cropped a bit too tightly for this European production, but D’Amato’s compositions don’t seem to suffer any ill effects. Progressive and anamorphic, the transfer faithfully represents the diffused style of the film and presents with good detail when the situation calls for it. Colors are strong, though contrast is a little flat, and grain (and some video noise, particularly in darker scenes) is present throughout. I have no doubt that it’s a competent representation of how the film would have looked theatrically, and I’m pleased overall. Audio is a decent Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic English dub, though the mixing of the original master seems to have been less than stellar. I found myself cranking up the volume to hear dialogue, only to have to turn it down again whenever Manuel De Sica’s score kicked in. There are no subtitles.

Supplements are sparse, but Severin looks to have dug deep to find even this much. The primary extra is a supplement listed as Talking Dirty with Joe D’Amato on the case, actually an unnamed 11 minute snippet of an interview with the director from the mid 1990s. Quality is a little iffy on the tape-sourced interview, here pillarboxed into a 16:9 enhanced frame, but that’s not really a problem – fans of the director will want to see it either way. The only other supplement is a tape-sourced trailer in pretty bad shape, blown up to no good effect to fit a 16:9 frame.

And that’s it, I think. The Alcove is another in a long line of generally drab and occassionally raunchy Joe D’Amato softcore efforts, but it’s better than most of the same. There are certainly moments to recommend – the absurd homemade pornography scene and the exploding film can finale in particular (remember kids, porn kills!) – and it’s worth checking out for those keen on the genre. There’s nothing wrong with the Severin Films release, due out the 23rd of February, and Gemser fanatics will want to indulge.

Tags: Annie Belle, Drama, Drugs, Italy, Joe D'Amato, Laura Gemser, Lilli Carati, Porn, Sex
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California

Friday, January 8th, 2010

companis: Uranos Cinematografica
and Belma Cinematografica
year: 1977
runtime: 97′
country: Italy
director: Michele Lupo
cast: Giuliano Gemma, Raimund Harmstorf,
Paola Bosé, Miguel Bosé, William Berger
writers: Roberto Leoni, Franco Bucceri,
Nico Ducci, and Mino Roli
cinematographer: Alejandro Ulloa
not on home video in the USA

The US Civil War is over. The former Confederate Army is being dissolved, which leads to an army of men without money or food trying to get home passing through areas where they aren’t exactly welcome anymore.

A man (Giuliano Gemma) who has given himself the pseudonym of Michael Random – after a brand of tobacco, the film informs us, not the plotting proclivities of Italian scriptwriters – is one of those men. While he is not a bad guy at heart (as proven by his heroic efforts in protecting a helpless kitten from being eaten), Michael is rather cynical about the war and his shadowy past in which (as we will learn much later) he was a gunman known as “California”, so he would really rather keep to himself and cultivate his aloof pose. That’s easier said than done when a very young, very much not cynical former soldier named Willy Preston (Miguel Bose) starts to follow Michael around like a loveable little puppy.

At first, the older man is annoyed by his new companion, but Willy’s excessively kind nature and the vagaries of travelling together let the men grow close.

At the same time, a group of fur-coated bounty hunters lead by a certain Whittaker (Raimund Harmstorf) is prowling the ex-Confederate refugees as the easiest prey imaginable. Whittaker is in league with some Union generals who are just too eager to produce new victims for him.

Somehow Michael and Willy are always able to just barely avoid direct run-ins with Whittaker’s group, but those guys are not the only danger awaiting them.

After some strokes of bad luck, Willy ends up dead with a bullet in his back for a horse he had to steal to keep alive. Michael decides to do the decent thing for once, and travels to the Preston farm, telling Willy’s family that their son died as a hero in the war.

Willy’s parents (William Berger and Dana Ghia) are just too willing to take Michael in as a kind of adoptive son, while Willy’s cute sister Helen (Paola Bose) takes quite a shine to the man. It seems as if Michael could make a peaceful life for himself on the farm, but one day, when visiting the nearby town, more bad luck leads to Helen’s abduction by Whittaker and his gang, who have just fallen out with their former friends in the military.

Michael swears to bring Helen back, whatever the cost might be.

Before director Michele Lupo ended his career with a string of shitty Bud Spencer vehicles, he made this excellent late-period Spaghetti Western.

It’s a slow film mostly built on two of the most important fundaments of Spaghetti Western filmmaking – mood and mud. A large part of the film trades in a silent mood of melancholia. To produce that effect, Lupo drenches his film in muted autumn colours, fog and the aforementioned mud. It is quite a beautiful film to look at if you are a friend of the colder seasons, and definitely a visually well-composed one.

The film keeps the Spaghetti-typical nasty violence a bit more low-key than usual. This doesn’t mean that there is no violence on display, rather Lupo uses violence and the undercurrents of violence as silently waiting below much of human interaction instead of throwing it into our faces all the time. Unlike many American western directors, he doesn’t shy away from random death and the suffering of innocents, he just doesn’t wallow in it more than is strictly necessary to get his points across.

The film’s subtext isn’t much friendlier than those of other Spaghetti Westerns, though. Lupo’s film isn’t as hopeless as some other films of the sub genre, but calling California’s ending a happy one would be quite a stretch, unless every ending that leaves people still standing is to be called a happy one.

I was pleasantly surprised by the acting here. Gemma has never been one of my genre favourites (which mostly says that he isn’t a Franco Nero or Lee Van Cleef) does an excellent job of keeping his character sympathetic despite his flaws and past and still makes you believe in both, while Harmstorf actually manages something you don’t get to see too often, namely making it plausible why people would want to follow the main bad guy. He’s quite a charismatic man in his own, selling-women-into-prostitution way

You could now add the usual paragraph criticizing the treatment of Bose’s female main character as an object used to keep the plot running, but I’m afraid this just comes with the Spaghetti Western territory. At least, Lupo is showing restraint when it comes to showing the indignities heaped upon her on screen. Although I am not sure that this really is the better way to go about it. Not showing the worst often just seems a bit cowardly to me, as if a film wouldn’t trust its audience enough not to enjoy a rape sequence.

The film’s screenplay isn’t without its flaws anyway. While I approve of its preference for randomness in place of classic plot logic when building the film (and here it really feels like a writerly decision to keep closer to reality than the orderliness of tight plotting and not like incompetence), there are moments when the film just drags its heels a little too much for my tastes.

Of course, nobody in her right mind watches Italian films for the quality of plotting. Thankfully, the rest of the script isn’t half bad.

California is one of the better late period Spaghettis I have seen, well worth watching for anyone interested in seeing a film of the genre that shows restraint without being defanged.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

Tags: Civil War, Guiliano Gemma, Italy, Michele Lupo, Raimund Harmstorf, spaghetti western
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Coffin for the Sheriff, A

Friday, December 4th, 2009

a.k.a. Una bara per lo sceriffo / Lone and Angry Man
year: 1965
runtime: 95′
country: Italy / Spain
director: Mario Caiano
cast: Anthony Steffen, Armando Calvo,
Luciana Gilli, Fulvia Franco, Arturo Dominici
writers: Guido Malatesta, David Moreno
not on home video in the USA

A scruffy and unwashed man called not Ringo, not Django, not Sartana, but Shenandoah (Anthony Steffen) rides into a small frontier town. The place has some troubles since the gang of bandit Lupe Rojo (Armando Calvo) has put their base of operations into the area around town.

Shenandoah seems to have something in mind with the gang, though. At first, he does the usual “let’s compare our penis sizes” bit by playing the always lovely “poker leading to fisticuffs” game with some of the gang members.

A little later, he subtly interferes with a bank robbery in town, carefully constructing an opportunity to grab a wounded gang member and rescue him from the law. It seems like he wants to join up with the gang.

Unfortunately, Rojo isn’t just letting anyone join his merry band of slobbering psychopaths. There is a rather ill-advised membership test in form of a deadly game of hide and seek with guns against one of the original gang members for the potential newbie to survive.

Shenandoah is rather good at the game, though, and uses the possibility of a slowly dying bandit right at his feet to ask some questions about a stagecoach robbery and a murdered woman in Omaha two years ago. Alas, he doesn’t get the answers he seeks.

At least, his life’s dream of being one of a group of psychopathic bandits who are bound to die rather sooner than later is fulfilled. Nevertheless, he continues to ask pointed questions about the Omaha business. One could get the idea that it is somehow a lot more important to him than raping and pillaging. It might just be possible that our unshaved hero is out for revenge for a certain murder in Omaha.

All goes swimmingly, until Rojo decides to plunder the ranch of a local rancher named Wilson (George Rigaud). Wilson is an old friend of Shenandoah, and the gunman can’t help himself but warn him and his pretty daughter (Luciana Gilli) of the ensuing attack.

The following debacle for the gang and Shenandoah’s not exactly inconspicuous behaviour weakens his position as a big bad bandit decisively, though, starting off his obligatory torture and the typical finale of bloody vengeance.

If the plot synopsis of A Coffin For The Sheriff (and no, I have no idea what the title has to do with the film) makes it sound as if the typical fan of Spaghetti Western had seen this all before, that impression is perfectly true. There truly is no original bone in Mario Caiano’s film’s body, but while watching it, I didn’t find myself holding that against it.

It is a very thin line which divides the realms of the cliched and of the iconic. Caiano’s film mostly dances directly on the line, doing too much of the expected in the expected manner to come down on the iconic side, yet doing it with too much panache to result in the let-down of the too cliched.

A Coffin For The Sheriff succeeds as a very pleasant example of its genre (and this isn’t exactly typical of the usually rather scattershot Spaghetti Western) mostly through the tightness of its script and Caiano’s drive in executing it. While the usual assortment of side characters (with three women fawning over our hero) with their little side plots is there, the film integrates them into the mainplot in a sensible way instead of going for a smoke and letting the side plots take over from time to time. This gives the film a sense of wholeness one seldom finds in the genre outside of the work of the Sergios.

But it would be unfair not to give Caiano his fair share of props. Having gone through a very typical career for an Italian director of the time by working in every genre that was popular at the moment, Caiano obviously picked up quite a bit about keeping his plots moving and cutting down on filler while letting his film look much more costly than it probably was through judicious use of rather impressive outside locations. As an old pro (his first writing and assistant directing credits come from the 50s), Caiano doesn’t miss out on adding stylistic elements typical of the Spaghetti Western, elements which might still have looked vaguely original to an audience just one year after A Fistful Of Dollars. It is an excellent example of how fast some of the things Leone and Corbucci did visually became part of the visual language of Italian filmmakers trying to make a quick buck off of their successes.

So, friends of frightening close-ups of ugly, sweaty, unshaved men won’t miss out here.

Also not atypical for an early Spaghetti are the acting performances. Steffen is (as was often the case with him) a little bland, yet as solid as someone with seemingly total facial paralysis can be, while the bunch of half-remembered character actors playing the bad guys are chewing the scenery nicely.

A Coffin For The Sheriff is probably not the sort of film I’d recommend to a Spaghetti Western beginner. There are just too many excellent films to see first before starting to waste time on one which is “just” very good, but when one has reached the point where one has worked through the classics and semi-classics of the genre, films like this are the little gold nuggets hidden in the dust and mud of the genre.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

Tags: Anthony Steffen, Italy, Mario Caiano, spaghetti western, Spain
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Beyond, The

Monday, November 30th, 2009

a.k.a. E tu Vivrai nel Terrore – L’aldila / Seven Doors of Death
company: Fulvia Film
year: 1981
runtime: 87′
country: Italy
director: Lucio Fulci
cast: Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck,
Cinzio Monreale, Antoine Saint-John,
Veronica Lazar, Anthony Flees,
Giovanni De Nava, Al Cliver
writers: Dardano Sachetti,
Giorgio Mariuzzo, and Lucio Fulci
cinematographer: Sergio Salvati
order this film from Amazon.com

Plot: Young New Yorker Liza (MacColl) inherits a rundown hotel in New Orleans and decides to re-open it. Strange events surround the renovations, and Liza, with the help of doctor friend John (Warbeck) and a strange blind woman named Emily (Monreale), soon discovers that her inheritance is built atop one of the seven dreaded doorways to hell.

This long-time favorite has somehow escaped coverage on this site in any of its disparate forms over the years, but with a review of the astoundingly dreadful demi-Fulci opus Zombi 3 now up for mass consumption I figured it was high time to rectify that gross oversight. The Beyond is part two of the thematically similar but narratively distant non-trilogy of supernatural horrors Fulci directed between 1980 and 1981, bookended by the Lovecraftian gore fest City of the Living Dead and the Freudian The House by the Cemetery.

Previously known for sex comedies (The Eroticist), spaghetti westerns (Four of the Apocalypse), and a spate of violent gialli (Seven Notes in Black), Fulci’s freshman horror effort was the competent if intellectually barren Zombie – a project that earned him considerable name recognition within the genre and gave new direction to his waning career. For the next several years Fulci would be at the top of the Euro-horror food chain, allowed to persue whatever intellectual interests he wanted with his pictures provided they came packaged with the ludicrous gore setpieces he was known for.

Artist / actor / writer / philosopher Antonin Artaud and his “Theater of Cruelty” had long been an inspiration for the director, and The Beyond owes its perceived incoherence to the concept. Believing that the imagined was as much a part of reality as the tangible, Artaud’s concept was to reveal truth, and shatter what he saw as the false reality audiences were expecting, through production and performance. For Fulci this meant focusing on image and atmosphere to evoke strong reactions in audiences, narrative coherence be damned. The Beyond may begin as a simple haunted house yarn, but it veers into the bizarre early and powers down the rabbit hole from there.

The plot, very loosely detailed above, is calculated for confusion. The basic narrative, in which Liza tries to uncover the history of the haunted house she’s inherited, is never completely derailed, only invaded from all sides by the unknown. Like Fulci’s earlier City of the Living Dead, The Beyond presents audiences with a reality in the process of being torn apart. Much like Lovecraft’s own, Fulci’s unknown is an intangible yet malevolent force just waiting for a chance to come crawling out of the woodwork (or a hole in the basement) to wreak unimaginable horror on the world at large. The Lovecraftian inspiration backing Fulci’s work here is obvious, and he throws a mysterious text titled The Book of Eibon into the proceedings as homage to the author.

The script, by Dardano Sachetti (Zombie), Giorgio Mariuzzo (The House by the Cemetery), and Fulci, is populated with strange side characters – two housekeepers that came with the hotel, a doctor investigating post-death brain activity, a potentially possessed little girl, and others – with occasionally questionable and frequently unknown motivations. Housekeeper Arthur seems perpetually sweaty and nervous, and rummages around Liza’s bedroom in his spare time. Housekeeper Martha just behaves creepily, wandering around a flooded basement with an oil lamp and giving knowing glances to the plumber who comes to fix the mess. The potentially-possessed girl seems relatively harmless until after a funeral, when she suddenly presents with the same blind and shattered eyes as Emily.

The blind Emily is obviously a denizen of Fulci’s hell, though her purpose on Earth is unclear. After hinting at awful things to come and confusing poor Liza into a state of panic she is confronted by the undead painter / warlock Schweik (Antoine Saint-John, Duck You Sucker) and his swiftly growing mob of the recently deceased. She is quick to let him know that she’s done what she was supposed to do, though the audience is left in the dark as to just what that may be. None of the side characters serve much in the way of narrative importance, they’re just intriguing stepping stones between the outrageously violent gags that serve as the meat to The Beyond’s potatoes.

Fulci must have had a field day conceptualizing the multitude of horrendous ways in which the supporting cast is dispensed with. Liza’s property manager is gruesomely devoured by talkative tarantulas while the aforementioned potentially-possessed girl is chased by the malevolent red goo that’s left of her mother, whom she saw dissolved by a conveniently placed (and ludicrously full) canister of acid just moments before. The blind Emily survives the onslaught of Schweik and his zombie minions only to be ripped to pieces by her once faithful German shepherd. In perhaps the best gag of them all, a zombie is seen rising from a bathtub to attack Martha as she cleans a bathroom. He grabs the poor woman by the face, taking careful aim before planting the back of her head on a nail and sending one of her eyes popping out of its socket.

Make-up effects man Gianetto de Rossi (The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) is in top form here and his fine craftsmanship merges perfectly with Fulci’s eye for detail, elevating the Techniscope terrors of The Beyond to a strange sort of art. Rarely has explicit violence been rendered with such aesthetic prowess, and there’s beauty to be had among the liters of expended stage blood. Perhaps more interesting to me after the dozens of times I’ve seen the film is the uniquely cruel Fulcian humor that constantly bubbes just below the surface. That the gateway to hell under Lisa’s hotel is opened by a nosy plumber (named Joe, of course) is on the verge of being parodic, and the sight of Emily fumbling about in a circle of unseen assailants feels like a particularly malicious prank.

The Beyond has seen a huge resurgence in popularity in the USA since the 1990’s, thanks to a theatrical reissue from Grindhouse Releasing and Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder and subsequent releases on home video through Anchor Bay. Those home video releases are now long out of print, but Grindhouse Releasing filled the void by re-releasing The Beyond to DVD, with a newly remastered transfer to boot, in October of 2008. I’ve not seen that disc (am waiting on the eventual jump to Blu-ray since I already own the OOP Anchor Bay disc), but online reviews attest that it is up to the high standards Grindhouse has set for itself since the 2005 special edition of Cannibal Holocaust.

Heralded by many as Fulci’s masterpiece, The Beyond is one strange customer. It asks many questions in its 87 minutes and answers almost none of them, and the ambiguous ending will surely leave many scratching their heads. But no one has ever captured the vision of all literal hell loosed upon the modern world like Fulci did, and The Beyond is a showcase for an underrated director at the height of the second wave of his career. Highly recommended.

Tags: Gore, Hell, Horror, Italy, Lucio Fulci, New Orleans, Zombies
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In the Folds of the Flesh

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

a.k.a. Nelle Pieghe della Carne
companies: Talia Films
and MGB Cinematografica
year: 1970
runtime: 92′
country: Italy / Spain
director: Sergio Bergonzelli
cast: Eleonora Rossi Drago, Pier Angeli,
Fernando Sancho, Alfredo Mayo,
Emilio Gutierrez Caba, Mario Rosa Sclauzero
writers: Sergio Bergonzelli,
Mario Caiano, and Fabio De Agostini
dvd company: Severin Films
release date: October 28, 2008
retail price: $19.96
disc details: region 0 / NTSC / single layer
order this title from Amazon.com
reviewed from a screener provided
by Severin Films LLC

Plot: A twisted family kills off visitors to their castle thirteen years after the mysterious and traumatic disappearance of the head of the house, a mafia boss named Andre (Alfredo Mayo).

I’ve seen few films that seek to entertain through shear confusion and preponderance of style, but Sergio Bergonzelli’s [BLOOD DELIRIUM] twisted and violent giallo does just that. The screenplay by Bergonzelli with Mario Caiano and Fabio De Agostini tears through enough plot to fill a slew of feature films, racing through such saucy subjects as incest and patricide before finally resolving itself . . . Sort of.

Confounding as contending with its twists and turns (sometimes four in a single scene) may be, never let it be said that IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH is boring. Things start off with a bang, with a recently disembodied head lying on the floor of a bedroom on a dark and stormy night. Lucille (Eleonora Rossi Drago) takes to burying the remains of the murdered in the backyard of her employer’s seaside castle and, for reasons unknown at the time, sends a motorboat puttering out to sea unmanned. Escaped convict Pascal (Fernando Sancho) sees everything but opts to say nothing when captured by the police, paving the way for his future extortion of the family.

Thirteen years pass. Lucille has raised Andre’s daughter Falesse (Pier Angeli) and her own son Colin (Emilio Guitierrez Caba) by herself in the castle, telling them that it was Andre who was beheaded that night and that Falesse herself wielded the sword. They are content creating strange art and taking care of family pets Kiki and Kioka (a pair of vultures caged out back!) until people start snooping about the place, and things go quickly downhill from there. Falesse kills two men, stabbing one in the back and decapitating the other, leaving Lucille and son little to do but dispose of their remains in an acid bath they keep in the shed (!). Soon the recently released Pascal returns with blackmail on his mind, only to find himself gassed to death with cyanide and dissolved in the aforementioned acid bath for his troubles.

Each murder reveals a little more about the mysterious disappearance of Andre, information that only confuses the audience more as to what actually happened. That confusion reaches a dizzying peak when an elderly man, claiming to be the deceased Andre, returns to the castle with a young institutionalized woman, supposedly the real Falesse, in tow. I’m not sure even I can rightly explain what happens from there, and for the sake of preserving some of IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH’s multitude of surprises I won’t even try.

I suspect that Freud himself, quoted in hilarious fashion just before the opening credits roll (“remains . . . REMAINS! . . .”), would have been baffled by the time this one was through. I was that for certain, but I had a good time of it all the same. While its subject matter tends towards the perverse, Bergonzelli’s thriller plays as more serious than sleazy. The frequent violence is never overtly graphic (though there is quite a collection of disembodied heads on display) and nudity is kept surprisingly limited. The most one can expect is in a flashback involving a group of female prisoners shuffling into a Nazi gas chamber (!), and that’s hardly of a titillating variety. It may be a far cry from good clean fun, but a Bruno Mattei Nazi-sploitation sex fest this certainly isn’t.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me in viewing IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH is the amount of style it packs in. Bergonzelli will never be confused with Bava, Fulci, or Argento, but one can’t fault him for trying. Psychedelic lighting, filter effects, and flashes of still photo montages are frequent among the more traditional flourishes. Expect lots of crash-zooms. The score by Jesus Villa Rojo is suitably bizarre, alternating between a beautiful main theme, dramatic musical stings, and incidental tracks that can only be described as carnival-esque. The cast is a well chosen lot. Eleanora Rossi Drago (beautiful here in her final film role) and Pier Angeli [SODOM AND GOMORRAH] are always nice to have around, and Fernando Sancho [RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD] and Emilio Guitierrez Caba both put in memorable turns.

Severin Films has more or less rescued IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH, greatly overshadowed by the genre works of Argento, Fulci, and Bava from the same time period, from obscurity, offering it legitimately on home video in the United States for the first time. The enhanced and progressive transfer presents the film in its originally intended 1.85:1 aspect ratio and looks very strong. Colors are striking and contrast is spot on, and the image seems blessedly unmanipulated. The vault elements from which this disc was mastered appear to be in more or less fine shape, with the exception of a few dropped frames and scratchy cuts. Audio is represented by a suitable Dolby Digital stereo English track – there are no subtitles. Extras are limited to a theatrical trailer, but the reasonable retail price will make it an enticing release for Euro-cult fans all the same.

Bergonzelli’s film is a bucket full of crazy and I had a blast with it. The Severin Films disc is bare bones, but the transfer is one of their strongest yet in SD and the price (a sticking point on many a disc I’ve reviewed from them) seems about right in this case. Wtf-film recommends.

Tags: Awesome Titles, Giallo, Italy, Mystery, Nazis, Sergio Bergonzelli, Severin Films, Thriller
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Beast in Space, The

Monday, November 9th, 2009

This locandina for THE BEAST IN SPACE is, in accordance with the film itself, rather derivative. Not only does the artwork rip-off that commissioned for the release of John Boorman's ZARDOZ, but the still images included are from the earlier Brescia space film STAR ODYSSEY.

a.k.a. La Bestia nello Spazio
companies: LU. MA. FIN and S.I.G.M.A. E. CO.
year: 1980
runtime: 92′
country: Italy
director: Alfonso Brescia
cast: Sirpa Lane, Vassili Karis,
Venantino Venantini, Lucio Rosato,
Robert Hundar, Marina Hedman
dvd company: Severin Films
release date: April 29, 2008
retail price: $29.95
disc details: Region 1 / Single Layer
order this film from Amazon.com:
unrated version | xxx version
reviewed from a screener provided
by Severin Films, LLC

Plot: A group of astronauts are sent deep into space to a planet rich in the rare metal Antalium. Once there they discover a world ruled by a megalomaniacal robot sex fiend, his groovy beast-man servant and an army of blond android warriors.

The first STAR WARS revolutionized the sci-fi fantasy genre in any number of ways, namely by placing a renewed emphasis on action and expensive special effects. It’s runaway success ensured that imitators would be riffing on its formula for decades to come, and none of these imitators seem to have been so prolific as the low-end Italian exploitation director Alfonso Brescia. In the span of three years between 1977 and 1980, Brescia managed to co-write and direct a tersely connected pentalogy of such knock-offs (along with a host of unrelated efforts).

His production ethic was simple and cost effective – create a single laundry list of props, sets, and special effects takes, and then write scripts for which they could be utilized time and time again. After three serious efforts (BATTAGLIE NEGLI SPAZI STELLARI, ANNO ZERO: GUERRA NELLO SPAZIO / COSMOS: WAR OF THE PLANETS and LA GUERRA DEI ROBOT / THE WAR OF THE ROBOTS) and one outright spoof (1979’s SETTE UOMINI D’ORO NELLO SPAZIO / STAR ODYSSEY), the well was running quite dry. What were money-hungry Italian producers to do?

Why, rip off another popular film from the time period, steal its star, and dust off those props, sets, and effects for one more go. One has to give the film makers credit for shear absurdity in this department as they found that inspiration in, of all places, Walerian Borowczyk’s bizarre erotic opus LA BETE from five years earlier. Simply adding graphic sexual content to their space picture was obviously deemed too mundane, and THE BEAST IN SPACE opts to focus instead on the Borowczyk film’s most infamous moment – the rape of a young and prudish aristocrat by a randy and hugely endowed anthropomorphic beast. A family friendly space adventure this was certainly not to be.

70’s sex icon Sirpa Lane (THE SECRET NIGHTS OF LUCREZIA BORGIA) was attached to be BEAST’s star attraction and doomed to a far less glamourous fate than in the Borowczyk production – falling victim to the lustful intentions of a lascivious man-beast and a world-dominating super-robot and a cocky starship captain named Larry who likes to compare the wonders of space to animal asses. Needless to say, Lane’s professional career had seen better days, and its a pity to see her used here as nothing but an admissions booster. Director Brescia approaches her (as well as the other) erotic moments with the same aesthetic barbary that renders the drama that surrounds them so lifeless and ineffectual. There is certainly sex to be had here, though it’ll prove of little interest to even the most devoted of skin aficianados.

Aside from its adults-only classification and a handful of sleazy and salacious moments, THE BEAST IN SPACE is par for the course as far as Brescia’s science fiction efforts are concerned. Characters sit around spouting all manner of ludicrous dialogue (“Sector two damaged. The bastard hit the module!”) while the editor unspools reems of stock effects in a ramshackle fashion about them. Many of these effects shots are rather well accomplished, with considerable attention paid in making them as believable as the budget would allow, though their presence in three previous films has exponentially lessened their novelty value.

Those trademarks of the previous Nais Film produced Brescia space pictures are all present and accounted for, including hordes of blond-wigged silver-suited android fighting men with clunky glowing swords, though that company’s name is nowhere to be found in the credits scroll. Scripting (by Brescia and Aldo Crudo) is at least as convoluted and incoherent as in the rest of those films, and the effort is rendered even harder to follow by one of the most incongruous Itailian overdubs I’ve yet encountered. That’s not to say that this low-tech patchwork of disparate genres is without its bizarre charms (the sight of women in space suits becoming hot and bothered by anamorphic stock footage of horses copulating is perversely hilarious), but you’ll need an unflinching adoration for cinematic awfulness to appreciate them.

The shaky distribution rights to Brescia’s previous space operas have fallen by the wayside, leaving us with nothing but shoddy bargain-bin releases of them to choose from. Not so with the previously unreleased THE BEAST IN SPACE, which only recently received its stateside debut thanks to the due diligence and possible insanity of cult DVD distributor Severin Films. The company has shown a remarkable dedication to the title, presenting audiences with not one but two separate releases of it – including one of the obscure hardcore cut of the picture.

The feature presentations for both discs, triple-x inserts and gigantic rubber man-beast penis aside, are pretty much identical. BEAST is presented in 16:9 enhanced and progressive scan widescreen transfer that, in spite of frequent speckling and other damage, puts the digital representations of Brescia’s other space films to shame. Colors and contrast are both well represented and the grainy image presents with good detail when the cinematography (frequently intentionally blurry and diffused) allows for it. Audio is represented by a suitable Dolby Digital monophonic Italian track, augmented with English subtitles that, barring a few typos, are well translated. An interview with actor and artist Venantino Venantini is included on the unrated disc, while the xxx edition gets just over two minutes of hardcore outtakes. Both discs come with a trailer, the sexual explicitness of which varies in accordance with which cut of the film is represented.

Severin Films is to be commended for finally giving this, undoubtedly the strangest of Italy’s science fiction offerings, a proper release on digital, though the high retail price will probably deter most casual buyers. In this case that’s probably not so bad a thing, as THE BEAST IN SPACE is definitely not for everyone. Its off-kilter blend of outer space antics and sleazy sex was enough to keep the Wtf-filmer in me casually entertained, but your mileage will definitely vary.

Tags: Alfonso Brescia, Italy, Rip-off, Robots, Science Fiction, Sex, Sirpa Lane
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