#Bava’s final film

[screamingeyepress]

A Shocker From Bava ⚡😵⚡

Once in a while films make such an impact immediately and are never forgotten. More often than not, films that go unnoticed find an audience slowly and then catapult into glory. This is what I hope happens to the magnificent film, Shock (1977) by Mario Bava. Read On! https://www.screamingeyepress.com/review/shock-1977/

[vintage1981]

The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee Kickstarts Deluxe Blu-ray Edition

The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee mixes traditional documentary with a dash of fantasy. It is narrated by Christopher Lee himself... in the form of an elaborate marionette, voiced by Peter Serafinowicz. The marionette was custom designed and built by Arch Model Studios, who made all of the puppets for Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs and Asteroid City and Tim Burton's Frankenweenie. 

The film combines new, exclusive interviews with filmmakers, including Peter Jackson, John Landis and Joe Dante, friends and family members with animated flights of fantasy from a wide variety of artists including 2000AD's Simon Coleby, award winning stop-motion animator Astrid Goldsmith and the legendary illustrator Dave McKean who directed, scored and animated a whole chapter of the film himself. 

Spanning eight decades and almost three hundred films, Christopher Lee became famous for his iconic performance as Dracula. But he was so much more than just the Hammer Horror roles he is so fondly remembered for. His career took him from uncredited parts in 1950s swashbucklers with Errol Flynn, through famous performances in 007 and Star Wars films, cult hits like The Wicker Man and The Return of Captain Invincible, right up to a lead role in cinema's biggest event - The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Along the way, he worked with everyone from Orson Welles to Mario Bava, Jess Franco, Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. 

Yet his story is so much richer than just his career. Lee was born into Italian aristocracy, with a military career shrouded in secrecy and kept his private life closely guarded. Some of his ventures and adventures seem highly improbable yet, as the film reveals, he often found himself in unexpected situations - he witnessed the last ever death by guillotine, was cousins with 007 creator Ian Fleming, he met Tolkien, performed with the classic Saturday Night Live line-up, was a friend and neighbour of Boris Karloff, he was the oldest person to ever get on the Billboard music charts (with his own Heavy Metal album), was an expert knife thrower, professional opera singer and a Nazi hunter. And somehow, he also managed to appear in almost 300 films of both the highest and lowest quality imaginable. 

The film is finished and producers Jon Spira and Hank Starrs want to share it with you by producing a top quality Blu-Ray with great extra features and a really amazing LIMITED/NUMBERED EDITION COFFIN-SHAPED BOX SET, full of goodies, which will look killer on the shelf of any discerning cineaste. The jewel in the crown of this box-set will be a 3D 'death mask' of Christopher Lee designed and produced by Arch Model Studio exclusively for this set. They also want to host some screenings - both online and in real cinemas - so we can all experience it together and you can get to meet some of the people behind it.

Making this film has been a fascinating journey - producers excavated the British Film Institute archives where they hold Lee's personal collection of scrapbooks detailing his career in his own hand, been given access to personal photos from the family archive, they met and interviewed his closest friends and family from all over the world and we've worked with some incredible artists, puppeteers, animators, musicians and filmmakers to bring his story to the screen in the most cinematic way. Whether you're a fan of Horror, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or just cinema history in general, we think you'll be delighted by this revealing and eclectic documentary.

Risks and challenges

The film is fully edited and ready to go. This Kickstarter is to fund the final bits of post-production and the production of a fantastic Blu-ray and deluxe collectors edition box set as we're all still committed to physical media. Please note that all illustrations of rewards are designs/prototype images. The final items might differ - we hope they'll actually be better.

[kraken17]

🎃Octoberween 2024🎃 #1

Octoberween begins and I finally got to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Monica Bellucci stapling her thighs to the tune of Tragedy by the Bee Gees is one of those things you don't know you needed in your life until you see it.

Thank you so much, Tim.

A chaotic film that touches on issues of post-traumatic stress, unrequited love, the problems of lack of communication, abusive relationships based on lies, the classic generational conflicts, and so on. And all in a package from which some characters could disappear without changing almost anything, with a Big Bad that is barely so and a Willem Dafoe whose presence can only be justified by his sheer charisma. But it's a lot of fun! It has moments that made me laugh way more than I expected, visually it's a joy, the soundtrack is a shot of nostalgic adrenaline and at the end they even dare to touch a little bit of genuine terror with a moment that goes from pure fucked up to grotesquely hilarious.

Also, a Mario Bava reference? Yay!

[bitter69uk]

Born on this day: true Italian cinema royalty, the exquisite Alida Valli (née Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein-Frauenberg – she was a Baroness! -  31 May 1921 - 22 April 2006), who boasted a spectacular seven-decade career. (Her filmography stretches from 1936 until final role in 2002). Benito Mussolini once called Valli "the most beautiful woman in the world", but don’t hold that against her! At the height of her Continental fame, Hollywood imported her hoping she’d be a “new Garbo” or “new Ingrid Bergman”. Billed simply as “Valli” she featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947). More successfully, Valli made an intensely melancholic impression opposite Orson Welles in the British The Third Man (1949). Back in Italy, she collaborated with all the essential art cinema auteurs of the period: Luchino Visconti (Senso (1954)), Michelangelo Antonioni (Il Grido (1957)), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Oedipus Rex (1967)), Bernardo Bertolucci (The Spider's Strategem (1970)). Particularly noteworthy: in the eerie French thriller Les yeux sans visage (1959) (aka Eyes without a Face), she is icily inscrutable as the deranged scientist’s lesbianic assistant with the pearl choker and fetishistic wet-look PVC raincoat. But while Valli clearly excelled in the realm of high culture, she was gutsily unafraid to get down-and-dirty in horror and exploitation flicks in the seventies, like Lisa and the Devil (1973) by Mario Bava, Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and nunsploitation shocker Killer Nun (1979) as the Mother Superior! She even cropped up in 1976 disaster movie The Cassandra Crossing, featuring the all-star cast of Sophia Loren, Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner – and OJ Simpson! If you seek out one Valli film, make it the swooning operatic melodrama Senso (pictured) about the doomed love story between an Italian countess (Valli) and an Austrian officer (Farley Granger). It’s impossibly beautiful - just look at the composition of this shot!

[skojukebox]

Taking a brief diversion from J-Horror (which I will sort of kind of return to in the next thing I watch) and moving over to Italy for one of my favorite horror movies of all time, the beautiful and interminable Inferno (1980). Inferno is horror legend Dario Argento's sequel to Suspiria (1977), which is generally regarded as a classic. Inferno has a much more mixed reception and it's not hard to see why; it's a very strange movie, even by his standards.

Inferno revolves (mostly?) around Mark Elliot, a student abroad in Rome who gets a letter from his sister living in New York that she feels her life is in danger and goes to investigate the strange apartment in which she was living. Around him, a string of vicious murders follow anyone who gets too close to this letter and the "Three Mothers," a coven of witches that Mark's sister was fascinated by.

This is a very, very simplified explanation of the plot but the movie meanders violently between several different focus characters along the way, never really letting you grow comfortable with the person the film is going to get about. These characters mostly go to weird places, do weird things, and get very messily slaughtered for their trouble, often by things that we never even get a glimpse at the identity of. And while, ostensibly the core of the movie is the mystery of the apartment and of Mater Tenebrarum, none of the characters looking into them ever really seem to live long enough to learn much. In a strange way, what it reminds me of is the Call of Cthulhu pen and paper game, in which characters die easily and often to the hands of things they haven't even begun to fathom. Even Mark at the end, who gets told more about what's going on than anyone else in the film, is very much in the dark by the time he reaches the final faceoff.

What makes all of this messy and convoluted stuff I've explained interesting is the atmosphere. "Dream logic" is something I often seen applied to Italian horror, but Inferno goes all out with it. Many of the various scenes feel like someone confusedly describing a bad dream to you. Being lost underwater in a sunken, upside down room for minutes on end and unable to resurface because a corpse keeps grabbing your leg? A woman staring at you while speaking inaudibly and petting a cat as wind explodes through the room around you? Screaming for help as you're murdered to a man across a lake only for him to inexplicably run across it? It's... Weird, dude. To say the least.

This is aided by the gorgeous set design that had input and aid from Mario Bava, more or less the father of italian horror. Everything in this movie is incredibly grimy and artificial-looking, like sets from an old black and white movie dragged into Argento's startling vivid color and shooting techniques. No movie really looks like Inferno, at least not that I've seen, and it aids the feeling of spooky unreality. On top of that is the soundtrack, put together by Keith Emerson, which is a bizarre and intriguing mixture of wild keyboard-heavy prog, classical music and operatic stuff.

Inferno is a beautiful, unapologetic mess that is not for everyone. As mentioned earlier, the plot of this is incredibly difficult to follow. It can have sense made of it, but there's going to be a good deal of filling in the blanks on your part. Much more important is the cruel, surreal atmosphere that is just nightmares coming true one after the other. If you can immerse yourself in that, there's really something wonderful here.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/19/2023: EVIL DEAD TRAP

Having finally seen this movie, I can't believe how long I slept on it! I believed it would be worth while, but I also thought I knew what to expect from it, and I was totally wrong. I had imagined something more like ENTRAILS OF A VIRGIN, which follows the EVIL DEAD model pretty closely despite its distinctly pornographic motivations--and I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, I remember enjoying ENTRAILS OF A VIRGIN, insofar as one can. But EVIL DEAD TRAP really surprised me, and I should probably say that if you're new to this title, don't look it up on Wikipedia, where the first thing you'll see is a block of text that succinctly spoils the genuinely shocking twist! Probably all movies are best seen cold, but that's especially true of this movie.

Miyuki Ono plays a light night TV host who invites viewers so send in their own videos, which makes her the recipient of a horrifying snuff film. She takes a crew to the apparent scene of the crime, a remote industrial complex where they are picked off one by one--which may sound sort of dull, but it really isn't. EVIL DEAD TRAP is wonderfully stylish, thanks in no small part to cinematographer Masaki Tamura who also lensed the two LADY SNOWBLOOD films as well as TAMPOPO (!). Despite its restricted setting and title, the present film is less indebted to Sam Raimi than to folks like Lamberto Bava, with its bold primary color gels and its playfully post-modern engagement with photography, video, and broadcast media; I happened to have seen this in close proximity to rewatching DEMONS 2, and I can definitely recommend this double bill. EVIL DEAD TRAP also boasts a pleasingly Goblin-y soundtrack by Tomohiko Kira that this review is reminding me to buy.

In addition to the movie's formal virtues, I also just really like Miyuki Ono. She's an atypical heroine for a movie that borders on pink film territory, with her kinky hair, strong jaw, and oversized suit. She exudes a kind of machismo that adds something special to this gleefully sleazy production, and let's face it, it's helpful to have a protagonist you can really connect with when you're drowning in unpleasantness for 100 minutes. I hear tell that EVIL DEAD TRAP 2 is also worth while, but I didn't manage to squeeze it in this season. There's always next time.

[elvira-movie-macabre]

Movie Macabre 113 - Baron Blood

Movie Macabre Season 01 - Episode 13 (113) Original Air Date: 27 December 1981 (Final Episode of 1981)

Baron Blood (1972) (Original Title: Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga / The Horrors of Nuremberg Castle) Directed by Mario Bava Screenplay by Vincent G. Fotre, Willibald Eser, and Mario Bava

Starring: Joseph Cotten Elke Sommer Massimo Girotti Antonio Cantafora Alan Collins Humi Raho Rada Rassimov

"A young man, visiting the castle of a murderous ancestor in Austria, accidentally brings his dead relative back to life - searching for new victims." (IMDb)

Episode 13 of Movie Macabre was the first to feature a movie by director Mario Bava, considered one of the masters of Italian horror. Because of this reputation, my expectations were not in line with reality. I found this movie overall pretty dry. While there were a few moments of good atmosphere, very little about this movie really stands out.

Peter is visiting Austria, the place of his family's history. He's particularly interested in a "ghoulish" ancestor, a baron who tortured and murdered people. Peter believes he has the key to resurrect this long-dead evil. In the exact type of stupidity that only seems to exist in horror movies, Peter keeps trying to resurrect the baron until he succeeds. And then he's upset the baron is going around killing people.

Baron Blood casually murders a few people, while Peter and his friends try to solve the mystery of who is killing the people.

The movie's not all bad. There is competent film making hidden in the somewhat bumbling plot. There are some good practical effects.

I try to find the good in every movie I watch. Even if something's not to my tastes, there are usually redeeming qualities. Even movies that are completely incompetent can be enjoyable. But it's difficult to get past a movie that's just boring. Unfortunately, I found this movie boring. The plot wasn't compelling, and often relied on the characters being almost stupid in order for anything to happen. The atmosphere was largely akin to daytime television, except for a couple of standout moments. Much the movie felt added just to get the film to feature length. This particular film was made to be half watched while waiting for Elvira to pop up and comment on it.

I would be interested in seeing more (and better) Mario Bava films. He has a reputation as a master of horror cinema. Surely he didn't earn it for things like Baron Blood?

I bet Elvira would have livened up a viewing of Baron Blood. Someone somewhere has to have all of the episodes of Movie Macabre. Right?

[adamwatchesmovies]

A Bay of Blood (1971)

A Bay of Blood is probably more appealing to horror historians and/or Italian Giallo films than casual viewers. It isn’t quite a proper slasher film but you can see its influence upon the Friday the 13th and later entries in the Halloween franchise - some of the deaths we see here are recreated almost shot-for-shot in the latter. Though its pace is slower than it should be and there are too many characters to keep track of, its mystery is engaging and the body count shocks.

Wheelchair-bound Countess Federica Donati (Isa Miranda) is strangled to death by her husband Filippo Donati (Giovanni Nuvoletti). Moments later, he is himself murdered by an unseen assailant before hiding the body. In the morning, the police discover the dead countess but a note suggests she committed suicide. As the investigation continues, several people begin converging on the property either because they hope to inherit it or want to buy it from the new owners. With a mysterious killer on the loose and everyone’s greed running wild, the bodies begin piling up.

There are A LOT of characters in the film: real estate agent Franco Ventura (Chris Avram) and his lover Laura (Anna Maria Rosati), the creepy groundskeeper Simone (Claudio Volonté), an insect enthusiast named Paolo Fassati (Leopoldo Trieste) and his wife who cares nothing for him, Anna (Laura Betti), the countess’ daughter Renata (Claudine Auger) and her husband Alberto (Luigi Pistilli) as wekk as four teenagers who happen to be visiting the bay - Louise (Brigitte Skay), Sylvie (Paola Montenero), Luca (Guido Boccaccini) and Bobby (Roberto Bonanni). I’m sure someone could remember every face and all of their relationships without taking notes but I wasn’t. This is the kind of movie that needed to cast one Black guy, give someone else an eye patch, a third one some weird verbal tick, etc. Unless you already know how everyone relates, you’ll lose track. Further complicating things are your expectations going in. This is not the story of a lone madman picking off one person at a time for mysterious reasons. Nearly everyone in this story is a potential suspect because they’ve all got murderous urges and several people act upon them. We have all of these conspirators working independently, hoping to take ownership of the bay. In the middle of a scheme, someone will suddenly get decapitated because they're hindering someone else’s plan. Meanwhile, you’re still wondering who murdered Mr. Donati…

A Bay of Blood does an excellent job of keeping you guessing. From their first interaction, you don’t know if Simone and Paolo are potential suspects or just red herrings. Neither appear to have a motive for killing so it could be that if either one of them is a murderer there also happens to be a lunatic messing around with everyone else’s plans. This decision wouldn’t even come out of left field in this film. The teenagers are randomly there so why not?

Director Mario Bava does not give us a protagonist to latch onto. No character is “safe” until the very end. This further obscures the killer/killers’ identity/identities (let’s not assume only one person murdered Filippo) and makes it even more difficult to keep track of everyone. The gore (quite well executed considering the time and low budget) and sudden deaths are more than enough to keep you entertained but this is one of those instances where knowing a little bit about the plot going in would benefit viewers greatly. I can easily see some people getting frustrated by the opaque mystery and dismissing the whole thing. Back in the day, it would’ve been because of the (then) shocking amount of violence. Now, it might be because the ending comes out of nowhere. I have some affection for the final "twist", but it could’ve been foreshadowed better.

If A Bay of Blood interests you, I suggest you set aside an entire evening. Watch the movie, then read an online synopsis, then watch it again with some sort of commentary to "get it". I know that’s asking a lot. Too much for some people but if you are interested in learning the history of horror films, A Bay of Blood is an important stop along your journey and it’s worth doing right. Even if you just watch it once, you’ll still be engaged by the twisty plot, perplexed by the numerous red herrings, and shocked by its violence. (English dub, November 1, 2020)

[sloshed-cinema]

Basic Instinct (1992)

La petite mort writ literal.  Sex and death are intertwined from the opening frames of the film through its final reveal, crafting a space of psychosexual uncertainty which plagues the hotheaded Det Nick Curran in his pursuit of a killer.  Identities fold over one another as we deal with multiple iterations of the usual erotic thriller tropes: women cannot be trusted and people who look similar must have damage.  But the further wrinkle is that this film is directed by Paul Verhoeven, who is a crazy person.  Verhoeven at his best presents an overcranked world gone awry.  RoboCop and Starship Troopers are subversive masterpieces thumbing their nose at the Hollywood establishment welcoming Verhoeven with bafflement, mocking American jingoistic excess with bone-dry satire.  Benedetta thrusts religious fanaticism and Catholic sexual repression into a realm of nigh-hallucinatory excess.  Here, Verhoeven walks a tenuous line.  At points, it’s blatantly insane: the club is choreographed by apparently me, everyone losing coordination of their limbs and flailing about like imbeciles.  Elsewhere, it feels like an attempt at a pastiche of Hitchcock melded with Mario Bava or Dario Argento.  A dangerous, steely blonde courts our haggard protagonist only to don a disguise and stab someone with an ice pick later on.  And yet at times the insanity of this tension is so pervasive that it simply becomes part of the texture of the film.  Nudity is flagrant and extreme in sex scenes to the point where one questions whether Verhoeven even understands the geometry of sex.  Showgirls gets mocked for its pool scene, but holy lord there is some crazy non-Euclidean shit going down in bed here.  And yet in scenes of decorum the same subtext is present.  When Nick attacks his counselor-slash-ex Dr Garner in the halls of the precinct, he strips her shoulder with the same gesture he might give as a rough lover.  Sex is so at the foreground of this world that it permeates every aspect of it.  In this sense, the film is very much in keeping with Verhoeven’s aesthetic of a very specific world cranked several degrees akimbo to what we might accept as realistic.  

Erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s really hate lesbians.  There’s the homophobia of the 90s and earlier, and then there’s this specific vitriol of the subgenre.  Women who fuck women are dangerous because they remove potential candidates from the pool, I suppose, if you’re a man thinking mostly with his cock.  The linkage of criminality and homosexuality in women is a common and regrettable trope, and Nick mocking Roxy by asking to talk with her “man to man” after finding her observing his copulation with Catherine.  There’s subversive fun to be had in revisiting the better examples of these movies, and lord knows Verhoeven knows how to lean into a cheesy double entendre.  But perhaps it’s also a blessing that we’ve collectively moved past this and into other forms of dumb moviemaking.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone says ‘book’ or ‘shooter’.

Double entendre.

Smoking is mentioned.

Traveling a winding coastal road commences.

The Transamerica Pyramid appears in a scene.

BIG DRINK

Someone dies.

Casual 90s homophobia.

Our cops show up in front of a ludicrously fancy house.

[theakandrewscollection]

The Whip and the Body (movies, movie posters, 1963)

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I wanted something special for the final entry of spooky season and I can't think of something more fitting than a gothic ghost story about a masochist in love with a sadist who continues to whip her from beyond the grave....

...Oh, and the movie was released in 1963, starred Christopher Lee and was directed by one of the greatest horror film directors of all time, Mario Bava.

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WHAT! is right! This early, eerie examination of consensual sadomasochism came out over 60 years ago...

...And immediately fell afoul of the censors and authorities of the time.

A heavily censored, and apparently rather incomprehensible, version of the film would make it to America in 1965 under the title "WHAT!"

... Which feels strangely appropriate.

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Trailer (with whipping scene intact)

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Also released under the titles; La frusta el il corpo (the original Italian title), Le corps et le fouet, Der Dämon und die Jungfrau; The Whip and the Flesh and Night is the Phantom.

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More info

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Even more info

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Happy Halloween!!!

[ogradyfilm]

Recently Viewed: Torso

I’ll say this for Torso: it wastes little time; within the first ten seconds of the opening credits, a woman has already removed her shirt, posed seductively for the benefit of the camera, and engaged in an awkward pantomime of sexual intercourse. While such shallow, obligatory titillation doesn’t normally appeal to me, I admire director Sergio Martino’s lack of pretense: he knows exactly what his audience expects and delivers the goods almost immediately.

The film is otherwise rather pedestrian by giallo standards; then again, pretty much everything pales in comparison to the seminal works produced by Mario Bava (Blood and Black Lace, A Bay of Blood) and Dario Argento (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red). I’d characterize the cinematography as competent and serviceable, but relatively unspectacular; the lighting, for example, is borderline naturalistic, with nary a colored gel in sight. Nevertheless, the action is punctuated by just enough bold, moody compositions to keep the viewer invested. This stylistic patience pays off during the movie’s explosive climax, when all of the previously restrained excess and maximalism are finally unleashed in a single magnificent set piece: a deliciously suspenseful game of cat-and-mouse that features minimal dialogue for nearly twenty minutes—a masterclass in silent storytelling.

Ultimately, Torso is the genre equivalent of a palate cleanser: run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road, and aggressively average. And that’s not necessarily a negative criticism; there’s great artistic value in being unexceptional. Not every meal needs to be a five-star gourmet experience; occasionally, a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich will suffice.

[theharpermovieblog]

#HARPERSMOVIECOLLECTION

2024 MOVIE LIST

www.tumblr.com/theharpermovieblog

I watched Cemetery Man (1994)

Scrolling through the cult classic section of Tubi, I realized I'd never seen this one., despite always wanting to.....well, I didn't love it.

A zombie killing cemetery worker wants more out of life.

Director Michele Soavi is an Italian filmmaker, known best to me for his films "The Church", "The Sect", and "Deliria-AKA: Stage Fright". Being an Italian Horror filmmaker, Soavi leans heavily toward spooky visuals, dreamy romantic atmosphere, and gore. Something I love about him and other Italian horror filmmakers like Lucio Fulci, Mario and Lamberto Bava, Joe D'Amato, and to a lesser extent, Dario Argento. (Dario knows what he did)

Cemetery Man tosses humor into the horror and atmosphere, offering something with a lot of quirkiness. I hate using the term 'off-beat', but I'm afraid I have no other choice. The humor here adds an element of lightness, which when combined with the horror and spooky stylization, creates more of a fantasy film vibe.

However, the humor doesn't exactly offer the belly laughs you get with a film like"Shaun Of The Dead". I smirked a few times, but overall the movie was a little leaden. I found myself expecting a fun ride, but got something that felt like it wasn't going anywhere. The action would start and stop and the story felt jumbled. I got bored to the point that I regretted starting the movie in the first place. Sure, I liked some of the cheesy gore and zombie effects. I liked the idea of the film. I liked the overall tone in a lot of spots. But, I felt like I was reading a page in a book, getting distracted and re-reading that same page again and again.

A film like "Brain Dead-AKA: Dead Alive" continuously builds up, ridiculous moment after ridiculous moment. The story has structure, a villain is set up, a hero follows an arc and grows. There is excitement and there are wild moments that all lead up to a final confrontation. While "Cemetery Man" has some of these parts, it doesn't combine them correctly into a whole. Making for a movie that fell really flat for me.

Give it a shot of you want, as it does seem to be popular among a small fan-base, so maybe it will work for you. I just don't think it's many styles end up cohering and the same goes for its story.

[twittercomfrnklin2001-blog]

Baron Blood

The ads for Mario Bava’s BARON BLOOD (1972, Shudder, Tubi, Plex, YouTube) — aka THE HORRORS OF NUREMBERG CASTLE — indemnify theater owners against patrons suffering heart attacks, cerebral hemorrhages or fainting spells. They should have included narcolepsy. Apart from an atmospheric chase scene in the fog, the scenes with a medium (Rada Rassimov) and Joseph Cotten’s bravura performance (when he finally shows up), the film is more padded than frightening and seems one of the least personal of Bava’s career.

American student Antonio Cantafora shows up at his family’s ancestral estate with an ancient parchment containing a spell to return his sadistic ancestor to life. His courtship of pretty architecture student Elke Sommer includes reading the spell in the room where the late unlamented baron died, whereupon the wind blows the parchment bearing the reverse spell into a fire. So, a scarred corpse rises from the grave to kill people until it turns into Cotten, a wealthy old man who buys the castle and sets about getting the leads into his torture chamber so he can kill them before they send him back to hell.

It takes forever to get to that plot, and the torture scenes are decidedly weak tea. Instead, the script pads things out with Cantafora, who’s cute, flirting with the wooden Sommer, whose face is less expressive than the fright mask Cotten’s stand-in wears for the murder scenes. That’s not helped by Bava’s penchant for extremely tight closeups, which underline how little her face moves. Amazingly, nobody questions how the wheelchair-bound man keeps turning up in rooms that can only be reached by climbing stairs. The kills don’t have the zip of Bava’s best gialli, and he uses the zoom so much I wanted to break it over my knee and send him to bed without his supper. The film is also inflicted with an incongruous Euro-pop score that makes it sound like a sex comedy. American prints substituted a horror score by Les Baxter, but Shudder, in a misguided stab at cinematic integrity, uses the original.

[lamilanomagazine]

Siracusa: si conclude stasera la terza edizione del Cine Oktober Fest 2023.

Siracusa: si conclude stasera la terza edizione del Cine Oktober Fest 2023. Si conclude stasera con uno Special dedicato al cinema di John Carpenter, la terza edizione di Cine Oktober Fest, edizione 2023. Un excursus video-musicale realizzato in occasione del quarantacinquesimo anniversario dell’uscita statunitense del film cult “Halloween”(1978), chiuderà all’Urban Center e al Biblios Cafè quella che per molti è stata la manifestazione più ricca di veri e propri documenti storici della cinematografia mondiale. Una terza edizione impegnativa, “titanica” – come la definisce il direttore artistico Giuseppe Briffa, per quanto riguarda i mezzi, i tempi e le risorse impiegate, ma che “ mi ha permesso comunque – ha dichiarato Briffa - di mettere a punto un programma di ampio respiro in tutte le sezioni trattate”. Che sono state definite su quattro linee direttrici: Scandinavian, Anniversary, Silent ImAge e Post-Horror Wave. Diversi e intensi sono stati gli incontri organizzati nel contesto della manifestazione, primo fra tutti quello con Remo Romeo, fondatore nel 1995 del Museo del Cinema di Siracusa e che oggi guarda con occhio vigile alla conservazione dell’inestimabile quantità di reperti storici consegnati al Comune di Siracusa in quello che è il nuovo museo a lui dedicato nell’antica chiesa dei Cavalieri di Malta. A Giuseppe Briffa, Remo Romeo ha più volte mostrato la sua gratitudine per avere speso tutto il suo impegno e dedizione nell’allestimento della mostra permanente, ora affidata alla Pro-Loco di Siracusa. Altro momento di condivisione e grande partecipazione è stato con la scuola media Quasimodo di Floridia; ai ragazzi, attenti e preparati, è stata offerta un’intensa e dettagliata lezione sulla storia del cinema, da Giuseppe Briffa e Ludovico Leone, vice presidente dell’associazione Post-Cinema che rappresenta la struttura portante del Cine Oktober Fest. “La cosa che mi premeva di più e credo la più apprezzata – ha commentato oggi prima della serata finale Giuseppe Briffa – è stata la scelta di lanciare per la prima volta una corrente di per sé contradditoria come il Post-Horror, che resta un diamante grezzo e poco comprensibile tutto da approfondire”. Perché, lo spiega ancora Briffa, “ quando si butta sul tavolo un nuovo format o come in questo caso una nuova corrente cinematografica sostenendo presuntuosamente che sia l’ultima avanguardia che la settima arte stia offrendo da 23 anni a questa parte, qualche rischio sicuramente si corre”. E già si pensa alla quarta edizione 2024. “Vorrei trattare – annuncia Briffa – gli angoli remoti del globo, come la Malesia, l’Iran o l’Islanda e omaggiare il nostro ormai storico Gotico e Macabro italiano che tanto ci manca. Penso ad Avati, Bava, Fulci, Fellini, quest’ultimo poco noto al grande pubblico per le sue indubbie virate nel regno esoterico ed oscuro: perché, come nel mio slogan e sempre più convinto, Il Cinema del Passato è il nostro Futuro”. Oggi 31 ottobre, come accennato in apertura, l’ultimo doppio appuntamento con il Cine Oktober Fest all’Urban Center, alle 21 con The Cinema of John Carpenter: un excursus filmografico su uno dei più grandi outsider della storia del cinema hollywoodiano della seconda metà del Novecento. Un Maestro, un uomo che ha sovvertito le leggi del cinema – come si legge nelle note diffuse da Post-Cinema – cambiando la forma da cui attingeva - fra cui Hitchcock, Ford, Segal – e che nonostante il suo continuo ed incessante andar contro l’establishment è riuscito a diventare mitologico nelle sue semplici ed immersive visioni di un mondo controllato dal capitalismo. La peculiarità dell’opera carpenteriana è anche nella sua duale funzione: di regia e composizione elettronica della synthwave per eccellenza. Stasera si affronteranno nove capolavori del Maestro con introduzioni, contributi editati ad hoc e musicati dal vivo come egli stesso propone nei suoi concerti in tutto il mondo. Alle 23, a seguire, Halloween- La notte delle streghe (1978): in occasione del 45esimo anniversario dell’uscita di un film considerato un’icona per le sue caratteristiche minimali e radicali nella forma stilistica. Girato in modo semi-indipendente, l’opera di Carpenter resta una pietra miliare della settima arte nel cinema di tutti i tempi. Musicazione dal vivo con Noemi Barbera, Chiara Pino e Ludovico Leone. Cine Oktober Fest ha partecipato con un focus sulla Scandinavia al Nordic Festival – I Boreali e la casa editrice Iperborea, che si è svolto all’Urban Center dal 27 al 29 ottobre, proponendo quattro pellicole stra-ordinarie firmate da Roy Anderson, Joachin Trier, Ingmar Bergman, Carl Theodor Dreyer e Ari Asher. Hanno partecipato con letture e brevi performances teatrali gli attori dell’associazione culturale V.A.N. ( Verso Altre Narrazioni), Ornella Matranga e Riccardo Rizzo, che contribuiscono con il loro impegno a rendere più ricca e produttiva d’idee la Post-Cinema che oggi si regge – oltre che in autonomia e in autofinanziamento – sul contributo di giovani colti e volenterosi, tra i quali Claudio Pavia, grafico, Gianandrea Cama per la ricerca di sponsor e finanziamenti, e Davide Carnemolla per la critica. L’evento cinematografico siracusano è ideato e diretto da Giuseppe Briffa, presidente di Post-Cinema e dal vice presidente Ludovico Leone (musicista, graphic designer e regista indipendente); Cine Oktober Fest è patrocinato dal Comune di Siracusa in partnership con Siracusa Città educativa, Urban Center e Biblios Cafè Ortigia con la insostituibile collaborazione di Paola Tusa.... #notizie #news #breakingnews #cronaca #politica #eventi #sport #moda Read the full article

[bitter69uk]

Recently watched: Italian horror maestro Mario Bava’s slasher movie Blood and Black Lace (1964). Tagline: “A fashion house of glamorous models becomes a terror house of blood!” A sadistic masked and gloved serial killer is relentlessly stalking and murdering his way through the fashion models of the chic haute couture salon run by ultra-rich designer Cristina (Eva Bartok) and her lover Max (Cameron Mitchell). (Picture a procession of fiercely elegant women wearing cocktail dresses with impeccable beehive hairdos getting gruesomely murdered one by one). I’m no expert on Bava - the only other film of his I’ve seen is Black Sunday (1960) with cult movie queen Barbara Steele – but wow, what a stylist! From the credits to the white-knuckle finale, Bava envelopes you in a supremely alluring vision with the soundtrack (Latin exotica, heavy on the bongos), costumes, baroque sets and lighting (characters are routinely bathed in fuchsia or green neon, even when that light source makes no sense). Perhaps inevitably, there are vivid splashes of red: an incriminating leather-bound diary, handbags, telephones - and of course - plumes of blood. The victims’ grisly deaths still pack a genuinely nasty jolt. (As Slant magazine put it, “The killings in Blood and Black Lace are still disturbing yet have the vitality of pop art”). An additional bonus: the juicy overripe performances from Hollywood’s Cameron Mitchell and Hungary’s Eva Bartok, both veterans of European co-productions. (The same year, Mitchell starred opposite Jayne Mansfield in the truly wild German exploitation flick Dog Eat Dog – what a career!).

[slpublicity]

SCREAMBOX September Streaming Line-Up Includes GAMERA Collection, ROBODOC, THE HISTORY OF HEAVY METAL & HORROR

SCREAMBOX has revealed the new films that are joining the horror streaming service in September, including the complete Gamera collection, the conclusion of RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop, The History of Metal and Horror, Crabs!, and more.

A horde of cretaceous creatures attack a coastal town on prom night in Crabs! The indie horror-comedy is streaming exclusively on SCREAMBOX today.

The Gamera collection stomps onto SCREAMBOX on September 4. All 12 films in the giant monster movie franchise are included, from the classic Gamera: The Giant Monster to the influential '90s reboot, Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, and the latest installment, Gamera the Brave.

SCREAMBOX delves into The History of Metal and Horror on September 15. Explore how the two genres have intersected with horror icons like John Carpenter, Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Kane Hodder, Doug Bradley, and Tom Savini alongside such metal luminaries as Rob Zombie, Kirk Hammett, Dave Mustaine, Phil Anselmo, and Corey Taylor.

The final three episodes in the SCREAMBOX Original docuseries RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop premiere on September 5, 12, and 19. RoboCop director Paul Verhoeven, stars Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, Ray Wise, and Kurtwood Smith, writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, visual effects legend Phil Tippett, and dozens more cast and crew members break down the 1987 classic.

Other September highlights include: Mario Bava's giallo forebearer Blood and Black Lace; a double-dose of Lucio Fulci madness with The Psychic and Don’t Torture a Duckling; Open Windows, a found footage film starring Elijah Wood; '70s video nasty The Witch Who Came from the Sea; and more.

Start screaming now with SCREAMBOX on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Prime Video, Roku, YouTube TV, Samsung, Comcast, Cox, and Screambox.com.