Blue Underground
1980 / 97 mins / Dolby Digital / Not Rated

In the films of Italian director Lucio Fulci, the human body is a fragile thing that is constantly getting ripped, burned, shot, melted, and otherwise rudely penetrated. In Fulci’s best films, like his 1981 horror classic The Beyond, he achieves a violent, hallucinatory, dream-like quality that swiftly sweeps us past any qualms about wooden acting and illogical plotting. Unfortunately, Contraband, Fulci’s 1980 gangster drama is almost completely devoid of Fulci’s merits, forcing us to focus our attention on his weaknesses. Only Fulci’s typically excessive gore, and a surprising amount of nudity, distinguish this film from countless other post-Godfather gangster films.

Our hero, Luca Di Angelo (Fabio Testi), is a handsome and honorable smuggler with a beautiful wife (Ivana Monti) and an annoyingly cherubic young son. Along with his brother, Luca is simply carrying on the family business. Luca and his brethren, in their trademark blue boats, keep the city of Milan supplied with cheap cigarettes. None of them would ever consider dealing drugs. When Luca’s hotheaded brother is machine- gunned to death in a brutal ambush, it seems to signal the start of a gang war between the city’s various criminal factions. However, it soon becomes clear that they are actually facing an outside threat. The Marsigliese (Marcel Bozzufi), a ruthless and sadistic French drug lord has come to town. He is extremely pleased to slaughter anyone who gets in his way, and drag the survivors into the drug trade. The idealistic Luca quickly finds himself on a collision course with the savage Frenchman.

Like The Godfather, from which it lifts numerous plot twists and themes, Contraband is a crime drama with a conservative social vision. Fulci gives us a tale of happily married mobsters who band together to fight a single (possibly homosexual) foreigner who wants them to give up their “honest” criminal activities and sell drugs to kids. Throughout the film, sexuality outside of marriage is explicitly linked with moral degradation and villainy.

Ironically, Contraband actually has better acting than some of Fulci’s superior films. Italian screen legend Fabio Testi (mainly familiar to American audiences from his performance in Vittorio DeSica’s Academy Award winning The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) brings the perfect blend of strength and charisma to his role as our upstanding hero, and Marcel Bozzufi (The French Connection) is delightfully malignant as The Marsigliese. Sadly, both are somewhat undermined by mediocre English language dubbing.

It’s hard to imagine anyone other than hardcore Fulci fans and Italian crime film completists being interested in this run-of-the-mill thriller. However, those interested in seeing Contraband will probably never see a better presentation than Blue Underground’s lovingly produced new disc. Working from the original negative, this release marks the first appearance of the uncut version of the film. The 16×9 enhanced transfer captures Sergio Salvati’s skillful cinematography, carefully reproducing his palette of muted blues and grays punctuated by Fulci’s trademark splashes of red blood. The extras are fairly paltry, just an original theatrical trailer and talent bios of Fulci and Testi, but that will matter little to the dedicated fans who will desire this disc. Only the addition of the original Italian language track could possibly offer a meaningful improvement to this excellent release.

Credits:
Screenplay by Ettore Sanzo and Gianni De Chiara. Cinematography by Sergio Salvati.
Directed by Lucio Fulci.
Starring Fabio Testi, Marcel Bozzuffi, Ivana Monti, Guido Alberti and Ferdinando Murolo.

Image Entertainment
Italy, 1976
106 mins / Color

In the past few years, fans of Italian horror films have received a bonanza of delights as a torrent of excellent DVD releases has poured into American video stores. Along with works by the usual suspects like Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci, have come films by important but lesser-known directors. Over the course of a still-active 35-year career, Pupi Avati has directed over 30 films. His most recent film, IL CUORE ALTROVE (2003), is in competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. Thanks to the vagaries of American film distribution, he is best known here for gentle comedies like THE STORY OF BOYS AND GIRLS (1989) and THE BEST MAN (1998). However, some of his finest works have come in the horror genre.

Avati’s 1976 THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS (LA CASA DALLE FINESTRE CHE RIDONO) is a slow-moving but atmospheric tale of terror. Eschewing the shock tactics favored by many of his contemporaries, Avati carefully builds a mood of menace and ever-tightening doom before hitting viewers with a truly unsettling finale.

Stefano (THE GARDEN OF FINZI CONTINIS’ Lino Capolicchio) is a young art restorer who travels to a tiny, remote, Italian village to restore a fresco of St. Sebastian in the local church. The Mayor hopes that restoring the picture will help promote tourism. As he uncovers the painting, and digs deeper into the story of its tortured creator, Stefano discovers that this picturesque village harbors painful and dangerous secrets. The artist, Legnani, was known locally as “The Painter of Agony,” with strong hints that he liked to work directly from real life subjects. Despite the warnings of local schoolteacher turned girlfriend Francesca (and some mysterious phone calls in which he is literally told to “Go away!), Stefano refuses to turn away from the slowly enveloping mystery until escape may be impossible.

The film is unusual for the period in finding the locus of horror not in urban decadence but rather in the fears of a small village, and a repressive Catholic Church with a distinctly sado-masochistic nature as embodied in the erotic imagery of St. Sebastian. Avati perfectly captures the outwardly pretty, inwardly rotten character of this nasty inbred place.

With its questioning of the symbiotic relationship between violence and artistic creation, Avati’s film could be seen as a subtle critique of the far-more violent works that dominated Italian horror movies at that time. Certainly, an easy parallel can be drawn between the figure of Legnani and a director like Dario Argento whose popularity was peaking at the time of THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS’ production. Like Legnani, Argento rarely missed an opportunity to draw connections between his own personal demons and those of the psychotic killers that famously populate his classic movies. Although Avati may or may not have been thinking of Argento, his film explicitly criticizes artists who dance on the borderline of violent fantasy and artistic violence. This criticism is clear in both his portrayal of Legnani, and in the restrained nature of his own film that couldn’t be more different from the sensual savagery of Argento and the other popular Italian directors of horror and Giallo films in the Seventies.

While 27 years have passed since it was made, this DVD release arrives at a time when the film feels surprisingly current. Avati’s low-key approach has distinct similarities to the recent wave of Japanese “J-Horror” films like RING, PULSE, and UZUMAKI, as well as Hong Kong imitations like THE EYE.

Image’s new DVD, released as part of their “EuroShock Collection,” offers an excellent opportunity to rediscover this neglected gem. The new 16:9 enhanced transfer, which nicely captures Pasquale Rachini’s imaginative cinematography, is marred only by slight color fading that is especially noticeable in the constantly purplish blacks. Unsurprisingly for a film that has never before been released in America, there is no dubbed track. The film is presented in Italian with English subtitles. A very adequate 18 chapter stops have been provided on the disc. The highlight of the extras is a fine retrospective documentary that features new interviews with director Pupi Avati, writer Antonio Avati, star Lino Capolicchio, and others. This documentary (which should be watched after the feature as it effectively gives away the film’s ending) captures the camaraderie and commitment of everyone involved in the production, and explains how such a visually sophisticated film could be produced on a shoestring budget. The other extras are an original theatrical trailer, a lobby card gallery, and filmographies.

Whether you are a devotee of Italian horror, or just someone who enjoys a good, eerie story, THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS will provide a pleasantly unsettling evening.

Credits:
Director: Pupi Avati.
Writers: Pupi Avati, Antonio Avati, Gianni Cavina, Maurizio Costanzo.
Music: Amedeo Tommasi

Cast:
Lino Capolicchio
Francesca Marciano
Gianni Cavina

(Criterion) 1932
82 mins / B&W / 1.33:1 aspect ratio

Watching Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise is like traveling to an alternative universe, a parallel world where Hollywood made films dealing with adult sexuality in a manner that is straightforward and sophisticated but never crude. Lubitsch’s masterpiece was produced in 1932, shortly before the stiffening of the Hays censorship Code forced Hollywood to create a bizarre cinematic world where even a husband and wife couldn’t lie together in the same bed, and criminals never went unpunished. The seed that Lubitsch planted, a cinema of sexual sophistication and emotional realism, would never bear fruit. The films that emerged after the Hays Code was destroyed justly reveled in their expression of sexual explicitness, and produced many brilliant films, but it is hard to think of any that capture Lubitsch’s simple elegance. It’s certainly difficult to imagine Lubitsch’s style flourishing in today’s lowest-common-denominator Hollywood. It’s important to remember that many Pre-Code films were extremely crude (just check-out Clara Bow as a bullwhip wielding nymphomaniac in Call Her Savage), and later Hollywood filmmakers (including Lubitsch) used considerable ingenuity to get around the Code; nonetheless, it is hard not to feel that an amazing opportunity was lost. Fortunately, Trouble in Paradise is still here to delight 21st century audiences with its wit and magic.

When fellow jewel thieves Gaston (Herbert Marshall) and Lily (Miriam Hopkins) meet, it is love at first sight. They instantly know they are perfect for each other and immediately embark on a European spree of passion and theft. Their ambitions grow when the return of a purloined necklace allows Gaston into the good graces of wealthy perfume executive Madame Colet (Kay Francis). However, the plan gets twisted into knots when romantic feelings develop between Gaston and their beautiful intended victim.

Another element that would soon disappear from Hollywood films is Trouble in Paradise’s delightful frankness about one of the most taboo subjects in American society: class. For depression-era audiences, it was an enormous pleasure to watch Gaston and Lily, two characters with lower-class roots, who guiltlessly steal from the rich and give to themselves. Of course, audiences also got to vicariously enjoy the luxury of high society.

The re-emergence of Trouble in Paradise over 70 years after it was made is especially pleasurable because the film’s survival was far from a sure thing. The same censorship that transformed Hollywood sent Trouble in Paradise tumbling into cinematic limbo. Because the film violated so many rules of the Hays Code, it was never re-released to theaters and was banned from television syndication. The latter was extremely ironic considering that numerous movies with far greater violence and fetishistic sexuality were common on TV. As the film disappeared from view, its reputation began to fade. Luckily, some movie lovers with long memories kept Trouble in Paradise from following so many other lost films into the void.

Now, The Criterion Collection has brought Lubitsch’s gem into the digital era with a gorgeous new DVD that is packed with intelligent and very entertaining extra features. An excellent new transfer minimizes the speckles and soundtrack hiss that are unavoidable in a film of this age, while beautifully capturing the glowing black and white of classic Hollywood cinema. Although he occasionally falls prey to the airless quality that mars some scholarly audio commentaries, Lubitsch biographer Scott Eyman (author of Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise) offers many perceptive insights, as when he points out how the necessity of shooting and editing around the limitation of Herbert Marshall’s wooden leg actually added to the film’s lighter-than-air quality. Other extras include a video introduction by director Peter Bogdanovich; written tributes to Lubitsch by numerous cinematic luminaries including Billy Wilder; and a hilarious 1940 Screen Guild Theater radio show featuring Lubitsch, Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert, and Basil Rathbone, all playing themselves.

However, the absolute gem of the extras is another whole feature film: Lubitsch’s 1917 silent comedy Das fidele Gefängnis (The Merry Jail). This delightful tale of sexual shenanigans amongst the German bourgeoisie is both highly entertaining, and a perfect illustration of the European sensibility that Lubitsch and his compatriots brought to Hollywood.

Special Features:
Restored image and sound.
Audio commentary by Scott Eyman (‘Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise’).
Video intro by Peter Bogdonovich.
Lubitsch’s 1917 feature THE MERRY JAIL, with Emil Jannings, featuring a new score recorded exclusively for this release.
1940 Screen Guild Theater radio program featuring Ernst Lubitsch, Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert, and Basil Rathbone. Tributes to Lubitsch written by Billy Wilder, Cameron Crowe, Roger Ebert, etc.

Credits:
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplaya by Samson Raphaelson. From the play by Aladar Laszlo. Music by W. Franke Harling. Photographed by Victor Milner.

Cast:
Miriam Hopikins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall, Charlie Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, C. Aubrey Smith.

The “Queen of Sexploitation” is dead. Long live the Queen.

On Saturday, August 10, Doris Wishman died, possibly bringing an end to one of the most unusual careers in movie history. The word “possibly” is added because Doris often proclaimed that after her death she “would continue making films in Hell.” If anyone had the drive to make this prediction a reality, it would be Doris. In the 1960s, a time when exploitation was a bawdy boys club where a woman’s only role was to be a nudie cutie, Doris Wishman decided to become a filmmaker. She went on to become the most prolific woman filmmaker of the modern era.

Doris Wishman could best be described as an Outsider Filmmaker for she was not unlike the unschooled painters and sculptors known as Outsider Artists. When her husband, an advertising executive, died, Doris looked for work that would consume her time. Although her experience was limited to a few college acting classes and a stint as a film booker in a relative’s movie distribution company, Doris chose independent filmmaking. Completely self-taught, Doris evolved a unique and eccentric style. Almost all of her movies were shot silent with dialogue and effects dubbed in afterwards. Doris attempted to conceal this by oftencutting to a shot of the listener whenever someone spoke. She also indulged a lifelong passion for seemingly illogical cutaway shots. Enormous close-ups of furniture, carpeting, paintings, sky, birds, soap dishes, and especially feet, punctuate nearly every scene. The result is a movie composed almost entirely of reaction shots and cutaways. It is strange but fascinating to watch a film that intentionally leaves out what would be the central focus of most movies. This tendency reached an absurd apogee in Wishman’s 1989 slasher flick A Night to Dismember. After the edited negative disappeared, Doris recreated the film entirely from outtakes and unused scenes.

While using footage from one movie in another is an old exploitation filmmaking trick, Doris took this technique to new heights. She constantly mixed and matched footage from all of her films. A particularly attractive shot of a woman swimming naked underwater appears in three different films. In her penultimate film, Dildo Heaven (2002), Wishman freely combined footage from the 60s, 70s, and present, as well as mixing film and video, without feeling any need to explain.

Doris’ films were further distinguished by her surreal imagination. In the nudist camp classic Nude on the Moon (1962), Wishman’s vision of a lunar landscape, looking suspiciously like Florida, populated by sexy showgirls with pipe-cleaner antennae, has a delightfully fizzy beauty. The film is possibly one of the only watchable nudist camp movies ever made. In Another Night, Another Man (1966), the unlucky heroine has a voodoo-like connection to a Barbie doll. The Amazing Transplant (1970) is an astounding twist on the Peter Lorre classic Mad Love (1935). Instead of having the transplanted hands of a killer drive a man to murder, we get the story of a guy who receives a transplant of his recently deceased best friend’s extremely large penis and finds himself driven to duplicate his friend’s very active sex life with tragic results.

Doris Wishman’s career can be broken down into several definite stages. Her first works were all nudist camp films including Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1960), starring the legendary stripper. These were followed by a series of black and white “roughies” with lots of nudity and violence. In Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), a film from this period that many consider her finest work, Doris conjures up a nightmarish journey into degradation where our innocent heroine discovers that every man (and woman) is a rapist under the skin. In the 70s, Doris added color and her plots became more fanciful. It was during this time that Doris made her most successful films Deadly Weapons (1973) and Double Agent 73 (1974), both starring the prodigiously endowed Chesty Morgan whose lack of emotion is only matched by her enormous all-natural 73-inch chest. The explosion of hardcore pornography devastated the market for Doris’ softcore features. Her 1980s attempt to get in on the slasher movie craze with her film A Night to Dismember ended disastrously. In the late 80s, Doris gave up filmmaking, returned to Florida, and got a job in a lingerie store. Everything changed when her films began to be released on videotape. With her work being rediscovered, Doris burst back into action with several straight-to-video features. Her final movie, Each Time I Kill, is expected to be released later this year.

Doris’ life and work were filled with contradictions, particularly about sex. Ironically, the woman who was known as the “Queen of Sexploitation” was profoundly uncomfortable about the subject, a feeling that reverberates memorably through her films. Rather than erotic, many of Wishman’s films could actually be described as anti-sexual. In Deadly Weapons, Chesty Morgan plays a secret agent who is forced to have a camera surgically implanted in one of her colossal breasts. Every time that Chesty needs to photograph a top secret document, she takes off her blouse and squeezes her breast until it goes “click.” She is also racing against the clock because there is a bomb implanted in her other breast. On the surface, this is a standard exploitation excuse for the heroine to get naked, not unlike the magic glasses in Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas. However, in this case, watching Chesty, a woman who is literally defined by her breasts, have those very body parts turned into tools of self-destruction is an unsettling and disturbing experience. Of course, it also doesn’t help that Chesty is filmed in a very unattractive manner; although this is probably explained by Doris’ well-known hatred for her pulchritudinous star.

The most extreme example of Doris’ anti-erotic filmmaking is her amazing semi-documentary about transsexualism Let Me Die a Woman (1978). This almost indescribable combination of heartfelt interviews, ridiculous scientific experts, and bizarre dramatizations, mixed with mind-blowingly explicit surgical and gynecological footage goes far beyond shock value. After watching it, you won’t want to have sex for a month. It’s a reaction that might have pleased Doris. A possibly apocryphal story tells that during the 1970s heyday of porn, Doris directed several hardcore films (something she denied to her dying day) but insisted on leaving the room when the sex scenes were filmed.

The films of Doris Wishman have always offered an easy target for the Golden Turkey crowd to ridicule. Even Doris often treated her own work with disdain. Indeed, they fail almost every traditional criteria for good filmmaking. However, if viewers drop their ironic distance, stop “looking down” at these films and instead enter Wishman’s universe, they will be transported to a strange and captivating world.

It is a place that offers an intriguing and entertaining look at our society\rquote s
sexual anxieties as seen through the eyes of one woman. Doris Wishman wrote, directed, produced, cast, and edited about 30 movies (the exact number is difficult to pin down because she often used pseudonyms) and they were all done her way. With budgets that almost never exceeded $70,000, Doris kept complete control over her films. Nothing would budge Doris from her vision, not even money. Late in her career, Wishman became friendly with Fred Schneider of the rock band, The B-52s. A devoted fan of Doris’ films (the recent B-52s greatest hits collection was entitled Nude on the Moon), Schneider offered to ask his some of his famous musician friends to record songs for her new film. This would have instantly raised the profile of Doris’ film and possibly even guaranteed it a commercial release. She rejected his generous offer. Why? Doris didn’t like rock and roll.

Many of the enigmas that were Doris Wishman will be revealed with the publication of Michael Bowen’s eagerly-awaited biography, “It’s Better Than Sex.” The title comes from one of Doris’ favorite comments about filmmaking. Doris Wishman’s exact age is unknown but is believed to have been in her mid-eighties at the time of her death.

Despite her detractors, the cult of Doris Wishman continues to grow. 35mm prints of her most famous films have appeared on the revival circuit, and many of her movies have recently been released on DVD. Ironically, at a time when the exploitation genre has pretty much died, Doris’ films are more popular than ever. So, next time you’re looking for something different, try a Doris Wishman movie. I can’t guarantee you’ll like it (or be held responsible for any effects these films have on your sex life) but I am certain that it will be unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

–Dylan Skolnick

Each Time I Kill (2002)
Dildo Heaven (2001)
Satan Was a Lady (2001)
Night to Dismember, A (1983)
Let Me Die a Woman (1978)
Come with Me, My Love (1976) (as Luigi Manicottale)
… aka Come with Me, My Ghost (1976) (USA)
… aka Haunted Pussy, The (1976) (USA)
Satan Was a Lady (1975) (as Kenyon Wintel)
Double Agent 73 (1974)
Deadly Weapons (1973)
Immoral Three, The (1972)
… aka Hotter Than Hell (1972)
Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972)
Amazing Transplant, The (1970) (as Louis Silverman)
Love Toy (1968) (as Louis Silverman)
Too Much Too Often! (1968) (as Louis Silverman)
… aka Too Much, Too Soon (1968)
Indecent Desires (1967) (as Louis Silverman)
Taste of Her Flesh, A (1967) (as Louis Silverman)
… aka Taste of Flesh, A (1967)
Another Day, Another Man (1966)
My Brother’s Wife (1966)
Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965)
Sex Perils of Paulette, The (1965)
… aka Paulette (1965)
Behind the Nudist Curtain (1964)
Playgirls International (1963)
Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls (1962)
Nude on the Moon (1962) (as Anthony Brooks)
… aka Girls on the Moon (1962)
… aka Moondolls, The (1962)
… aka Nature Girls on the Moon (1962)
… aka Nudes on the Moon (1962)
Prince and the Nature Girl, The (1962)
Diary of a Nudist (1961)
… aka Nature Camp Confidential (1961)
… aka Nature Camp Diary (1961)
… aka Nudist Camp (1961)
… aka Nudist Confidential (1961)
Blaze Starr Goes Wild (1960)
… aka Back to Nature (1960)
… aka Blaze Starr Goes Back to Nature (1960)
… aka Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1960)
… aka Blaze Starr the Original (1960)
… aka Busting Out (1960)
… aka Nature Girl (1960)
Hideout in the Sun (1960) (as Lazarus Volkl)

Many of these titles are available on DVD from Image Entertainment as part of the ‘SomethingWeird’ collection.

The disastrous Altamont free concert has always been considered Woodstock’s evil twin. The day Woodstock’s utopian communal vision disintegrated in violence, chaos and death. It sounded like a great idea: as the climax of their 1969 American tour, The Rolling Stones would perform at a free concert in San Francisco, unofficial headquarters of the counterculture. Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead quickly agreed to play. When the glorious plans went wrong, legendary documentarians David and Albert Maysles, and their numerous camerapeople (including a young George Lucas), were present to capture the moment. Their film, Gimme Shelter, is more than just a great rock movie, although it does feature electrifying footage of The Rolling Stones at their peak; it is a disturbing record of a turning point in American culture.

In celebration of the film’s 30th anniversary, Home Vision Cinema, The Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and Kit Parker Films have joined forces to reissue this amazing documentary in brand-new restored 35mm prints with a stunning Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack that has been painstakingly mixed from the original audio tracks.

After a deceptively regular concert film opening, the Maysles and co-director Charlotte Zwerin begin to move freely through time and space, intercutting The Stones’ American tour with the torturous preparations for Altamont, and eye-opening postmortem scenes of the band watching the Altamont footage in the Gimme Shelter editing room. Mick Jagger envisioned Altamont as “thousands of people getting along and enjoying the music.” Things might have turned out that way if the event had been better planned. The concert nearly didn’t happen. After losing their original venue, Golden Gate Park, the concert organizers scrambled to find a replacement, finally settling on the Altamont Motor Speedway. The result was a massive event involving hundreds of thousands of people that was essentially improvised with organizers depending on good karma to make everything work. When their parking plans go awry, one of the organizers explains that they are “going to let everyone do what they want as an experiment.” The cherry on the sundae was the decision to hire the Hell’s Angels as security. It is never explained who thought it was a good idea to have a security force that was as drunk and stoned as the crowd they were trying to control. As the day progressed, fights broke out constantly. When Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin waded into the crowd to protect a concertgoer being assaulted by one of the Hell’s Angels, he was also beaten. Mick Jagger gets punched almost as soon as he gets out of his helicopter. Audiences who only know today’s hypercontrolled stage shows (Like The Rolling Stones’ recent tours) will be stunned at how close concertgoers got to their idols.

When darkness arrived, The Stones took the stage, and events reached critical mass. Despite Jagger’s futile exhortations, every song was greeted by an explosion of chaotic violence. Jagger launched into ‘Under My Thumb’ but the night had clearly slipped out of his control. Someone pulled a gun on a Hell’s Angel and got stabbed to death. Although the film documents the very avoidable steps that led to catastrophe, the events at Altamont were perceived as playing a crucial role in destroying the countercultural dream of unlimited peace and harmony.

Ironically, The Stones have expended countless dollars and lawyers to suppress Robert Frank’s ‘Cocksucker Blues’ which simply reveals the not-so shocking news that rock bands drink, do drugs, and have sex with groupies, but have freely promoted Gimme Shelter which is arguably more revealing of the band’s shortcomings. The Stones had always cultivated a dangerous bad boy image which gradually began to include numerous references to Satanism. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was the first song on their Altamont play list. However, when The Stones actually had to face real violence conjured up by the power of their music, they recoiled in horror. Jagger is especially helpless. The self-proclaimed Streetfighting Man was clearly more comfortable sipping a martini by the hotel pool. On the plus side, and it is considerable, the filmmakers captured The Rolling Stones at their peak performing ‘Satisfaction’, ‘Brown Sugar’, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, and other of their greatest hits. No Stones fan will want to miss seeing this on the big screen.

Although The Rolling Stones are Gimme Shelter’s main subject, the film’s most haunting images are those of the audience, a vast gathering of people committed to the idea of building a better world through love, music, and drugs. It is a powerful evocation of that moment described by Hunter S. Thompson in ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’: “that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil… Our energy would simply prevail… we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” The film ends not with The Rolling Stones, but rather with the departing crowds walking through the hills surrounding Altamont, heading into an unimaginably complicated future.

blood-simple (Amer. slang, first used by Dashiell Hammett) 1. State of fear and confusion that follows the confusion of murder; “He’s gone blood simple.”

Usually, when final release prints of a movie are made it is the cinematic equivalent of being set in stone. All the mistakes, shortcuts, and bad decisions made by the filmmakers are forever immortalized. When Joel and Ethan Coen were asked to re-release their debut feature Blood Simple, they used their subsequent success to gain the opportunity to “fix” the film in a new Director’s Cut. They have scrubbed it clean, restored music cues that were lost to rights problems, and in their own words “cut out the boring parts.” Most of the pre-release publicity has focused on the edits that make the Director’s Cut shorter than the original version. However, this is mostly an example of the Coens’ ironic perversity. The edits are minimal to the point of being imperceptible, and are far less important to the new version than the music changes and brand new 35mm prints. Indeed, despite the Coen’s tinkering, both the merits and faults of Blood Simple remain essentially unchanged.

The movie is a darkly humorous tale of passion, infidelity and murder in the tradition of James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Trapped in an unhappy marriage to Marty (Dan Hedaya), a miserable Texas bar owner, Abby (Frances McDormand) embarks on an affair with friendly bartender Ray. Unfortunately for them, Marty is the jealous type and has hired a private detective to keep an eye on his pretty wife. When Marty asks the detective to kill the lovers, it is the spark that sets off an emotional and violent conflagration that consumes them all.

Joel and Ethan Coen jazz up this somewhat cliched tale with their now-familiar trademarks: hyperbolic camerawork, deliciously twisty plotting, and some very funny writing. Like several of their early works, Blood Simple sometimes suffers from an excessively mannered quality; a defect that would vanish as they brought out the humanity of their characters.

Even if it is far from the Coen brothers’ best work, Blood Simple is still an amazing debut. The perspective of hindsight has only confirmed Joel and Ethan’s savvy in choosing collaborators. Veteran character actors Dan Hedaya and M. Emmet Walsh were obvious choices but it is amazing how many of the people involved were working on their first feature, including star Frances McDormand, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld (director of Men in Black, Wild Wild West, and Get Shorty) and composer Carter Burwell (Being John Malkovich, Gods and Monsters, High Fidelity, Hamlet, and The Three Kings). Even the voice on one character’s answer turns out to be the then unknown but now unmistakable voice of Holly Hunter.

Seize the opportunity to see this beautifully restored film, especially if you live in one of the cities where it is playing in theaters. As an extra added attraction, the Coens have tacked on a hilarious introduction with a pompous film preservationist named Mortimer Young babbling on about “the early days of independent film.”

In the mood for a wild flick loaded with relentless action, bizarre humor, and gorgeous babes? Did I mention the comic castration and accidental cannibalism? Well, have I got a movie for you: Clarence Fok’s Naked Killer. This film takes the fast-paced don’t worry about logic Hong Kong action movie style and pushes it to surreal heights.

Kitty (Chingmy Yau) is a feisty gal who doesn’t hesitate to stab a guy when his behavior gets out of line. Wanted by the police after taking vengeance for her father’s murder, Kitty is rescued by Sister Cindy, the leader of a gang of lesbian hit women who are responsible for a series of killings that each culminated with the victim’s penis being severed by a well-placed bullet. After surviving Sister Cindy’s unorthodox training, Kitty is soon a professional hitwoman. They seem unstoppable until Cindy’s former sidekick, Princess, turns on them. With the assistance of her pupil, Baby, Princess declares all-out war on our heroines, resulting in a crazed battle between these deadly femme fatales. Along the way, Kitty also has to juggle her romance with Tinam; a cop who accidentally shot his brother, which has had the unfortunate side effect of making him throw-up whenever he holds a gun.

The worldwide success of Naked Killer’s frequently undressed but lethal babes is powerful evidence that the wet dreams of teenage boys cross all national boundaries and are never fully shed even in adulthood. Naked Killer is indisputably sexist, but like Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill, the film’s portrayal of a universe in which women are all-powerful has made it a favorite of numerous feminists. A situation that demonstrates, once again, pop culture’s deliriously contradictory ability to run roughshod over all social boundaries while aiming directly for the pleasure center of our brains.

The new Tai Seng DVD release presents the film in a very favorable light. In addition to an excellent new 1:85 transfer, this disc features a longer version than the previous Mei Ah release. Extras include the original Hong Kong trailer (plus trailers for several other HK flicks), biography/filmographies for cast and crew, and optional subtitles in English (filled with the usual grammatical errors), Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese and Spanish.

This will be a guilty pleasure for some, while others will know that it is foolish to feel guilty about a movie that is so much fun.

Controversial Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini once wrote an influential essay entitled Cinema of Poetry. Boiled down to its essence, Pasolini’s argument was that someone sitting down to read a poem does not get upset because the poet refused to provide the realistic characters, believable dialogue, and straight-forward plot that are expected in a novel. Most readers know that poems are frequently abstract, symbolic, and tight-fisted with their overt meanings. Why then do people expect clearly poetic films to behave like conventional Hollywood blockbusters? Pasolini hoped that film viewers who approached a work of cinematic poetry with the same mindset they reserve for literary poems would find similar pleasures.

The work of legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky could function as a perfect illustration of Pasolini’s essay. Like his idol Robert Bresson, Tarkovsky’s films are a constant search for truth. However, it is not the surface reality of documentary that interests Tarkovsky; he was seeking the deeper truth that lies within the human soul. His quest led him to constantly push the boundaries of cinema, creating luminous, hypnotic cinematic poems.

In the first scene of The Mirror (1974), a documentary television show depicts a young man being cured of his stuttering through hypnosis. For Tarkovsky, this film functioned in a similar manner, with his clear-eyed look into a very revealing mirror signaling a new flowering of his cinematic voice. The Mirror is Tarkovsky’s most personal work, and one of his finest. Skillfully intertwining shimmering black and white, earthy color, and historical footage, he transports us into a captivating universe where dreams and memories are as important as dramatic events. The film abounds in Tarkovsky’s trademark elemental imagery of fire, water and earth, revealing their biographical roots. In a tightly packed 106 minutes, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey through his life interwoven with crucial events in 20th century Russian history. Moving effortlessly back and forth through time, Tarkovsky plunges us into his parents’ troubled marriage, his mother’s fear during the Stalinist terror, the deprivations of wartime, as well as his own broken marriage. Although the film has no straightforward plot, Tarkovsky’s intense and poetic evocation of each crucial moment’s emotional truth keeps the film absolutely gripping. After watching The Mirror, viewers will be unable to recite many “facts” about Tarkovsky’s past; instead they have experienced the essence of his life. Outwardly, The Mirror is Tarkovsky’s most private vision, but ultimately, it is his most universal work.

The poems heard at various times during the movie were written by Tarkovsky’s father, the noted poet Arsenii Tarkovsky, and are read by the author.

The DVD transfer is very good with no visible artifacts. The film is presented full-screen which feels right for a work that makes extensive use of newsreels and other archival footage.

Like a number of Kino releases, this disc features a stylish and attractive cover designed by Bret Wood (co-author of the recent book ÔForbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation FilmÕ), and comes in a keepcase. Kino on Video DVD’s are often skimpy on extras, but The Mirror literally has none. The English-language subtitles are non-removable. A pleasing menu offers easy access to the chapter stops.

After his defection to the West in the early-eighties, Tarkovsky worked first in Italy, then finally, in Sweden. Ill with cancer during production, Tarkovsky knew that The Sacrifice (1986) would probably be his final work, and he expressed himself in an uncharacteristically blunt and impatient manner. Tarkovsky felt that our modern technological society was racing towards an apocalypse and could only be saved by a return to spirituality. The Sacrifice was his impassioned expression of that idea.

The film revolves around a gathering of family and friends at a remote house on the Swedish seashore. They are there to celebrate the birthday of Alexander, the family patriarch, and a noted intellectual. The celebration is shattered by news reports that World War III is about to begin. Faced with impending doom, Alexander pleads with god to save them. He becomes convinced that only a selfless personal sacrifice can bring salvation in this time of crisis.

The Sacrifice is not among Tarkovsky’s finest works. The film’s directness makes it far easier to understand than The Mirror, for example, but it also sets off fewer sparks in the viewer’s mind. Nonetheless, this is gripping filmmaking. The sense of doom after the war announcements is overpowering, and the final epiphany is very moving.

Overall, Kino has done an excellent job on the DVD, which comes in a pleasant keepcase. Pleasingly letterboxed at a ratio of approximately 1:66, the disc beautifully reproduces the film’s subtle color palette. The disc has a simple and attractive menu with a satisfactory, but unimpressive, number of chapter stops. English language subtitles are non-removable. The disc is only marred by two glitches. The first is a very noticeable layer-change approximately twenty minute before the film’s ending. The second, more serious error, is the virtual non-appearance of the movie’s final subtitle. This reviewer had to run the disc frame-by-frame to read the subtitle, and even then it was difficult. This subtitle’s disappearing act would not even be worth mentioning if it did not involve the film’s final moment, distracting the viewer at a crucial time. Hopefully, Kino will remedy this problem soon.

Kino’s usual lack of extras problem is solved in one stroke by the inclusion of Michal Leszczylowski’s feature-length behind-the-scenes documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Leszczylowski, who edited The Sacrifice, offers an eye-opening look at the director at work. The documentary presents us with an artist who is passionate, stubborn, and intensely detail-oriented as he conjures up his vision in images and sounds. A number of interviews allow viewers to hear Tarkovsky’s ideas in his own words. British actor Brian Cox reads excerpts from Tarkovsky’s published writings.

These movies will not appeal to everyone but they are essential viewing for any film-lovers looking for work that shatters the conventions of traditional filmmaking and takes us somewhere we have never been before.

Nothing in Eugenio Martin’s Horror Express makes much sense but it keeps the audience on their toes with so many surprising and imaginative plot twists that few viewers will complain. Arnaud D’Usseau and Julian Halevy’s witty script throws what seems like every horror and science fiction idea into their stew including prehistoric monsters, aliens, zombies, and possession; all in a tight eighty-eight minutes. Add the classic horror duo of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and you have a very charming tale of terror.

In 1906 China, the brilliant, secretive anthropologist Alexander Saxton (Lee) digs up a strange frozen ape-like man who he believes to be a crucial piece of the evolutionary puzzle. With the creature seemingly secure in a crate, Saxton begins the journey back to Europe by train. The violent death of a thief at the train station, his eyes boiled until they are white as snow, is just the first sign that Saxton has made a deadly error. Much to his displeasure, this draws the interest of Dr. Wells (Cushing), a rival anthropologist. However, he is soon glad to have his colleague’s assistance when the revived monster gets loose and starts rampaging through the train frying people’s brains and stealing their intelligence.

Made in 1972, Horror Express comes near the tail end of Cushing and Lee’s amazing run of classic horror films. Although the material is not up to the level of their vintage Hammer work, they both tear into their parts with great gusto. Cushing’s cool intensity is perfect as the ever-curious Dr. Wells, while Lee’s arrogant charm beautifully embodies Saxton, a man who knows he should be more upset than he is over causing several deaths. “A thief and a baggage man,” Saxton muses, clearly unimpressed by society’s loss. Both actors have a field day with the film’s delightful mix of humor and horror, culminating in the unforgettable moment when it is suggested that one of them might be possessed by the monster leading Cushing to protest indignantly “Monster? We’re British you know!”

Except for Telly Savalas, who deliciously chews up the scenery as a crazy Cossack named Captain Kazan, the rest of the cast is little-known and nothing they did here is likely to change that fact. Eugenio Martin’s direction is skillful, especially considering the film’s miniscule budget, but lacks the dazzling style that directors like Dario Argento or Mario Bava have conjured up with similarly paltry resources. Nonetheless, the film is gripping throughout and builds to a chilling finale. Composer John Cacavas contributes a pleasingly thorny music score that is reminiscent of Ennio Morricone or Peter Thomas while retaining its own distinctive flavor.

After years in the limbo of cheap public domain tapes, Horror Express is well-served by Image Entertainment’s DVD release as part of their “Euroshock Collection.” Although there are some scratches near the beginning and end, this transfer has been taken from a good-quality 35mm print source. The image is nicely letterboxed in the movie’s original 1:66 theatrical aspect ratio. Filmographies of Lee and Cushing are the disk’s only extra but the snapper case has an excellent foldout essay by Marc Walkow that includes a touching anecdote about the movie’s legendary stars. As production began in Madrid, Cushing was still distraught over the death of his wife, Helen, and planned to quit the project. With tact and good humor, Lee roused Cushing’s spirits and got him back on his feet; an incident that helped cement their long friendship.

Reasonably priced and artfully presented, this is a DVD that fans of classic horror will want for their collections, and it is an absolute must-have for devotees of the artistry of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

So, you think you’re an expert on film history? Well, I have a two-word challenge for you: The Baby. Don’t be embarrassed if you failed the test. This bizarre little shocker did not make much of a splash when it crawled out into the world in 1973. Now, The Baby has been dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the shadows of b-movie limbo and into the 21st century’s bright shiny DVD universe. Those who caught this twisted flick on its first go-around can rest assured that the movie’s distinctive weirdness remains completely intact, even if the film is not.

The Wadsworth family is your average suburban clan. Blowsy, domineering Mom (Ruth Roman), two crazed and oversexed daughters, and her teenage son, Baby. Abandoned by each of the separate fathers of her children, Mom’s all-consuming hatred of men has made her keep Baby in a totally infantile state. He cannot walk or talk. He sleeps in a crib, drinks from a bottle, wears a diaper, and communicates solely by crying and gurgling incoherently. When social worker Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) is assigned to be Baby’s caseworker, she becomes fascinated by him. Her plans to liberate Baby from his debilitating situation bring her into open conflict with the Wadsworths, a clash that eventually leads to bloodshed as the film slides effortlessly into full-blown gothic horror mode. A shocking final twist throws a surprising new light on this strange tale.

In addition to being an enjoyably twisted little movie, The Baby is also an amazing Seventies time capsule. The hideous fashions, casual drug use, talk of astrology, and ideas are all deeply rooted in the moment of the film’s birth. Released during the early days of radical feminism, The Baby can be read as an hysterical male reaction to that movement. Like a demented remake of Johnny Guitar, the movie envisions a woman-dominated world in which all the men are spineless bureaucrats, sex-addicted drooling creeps, or babies. Meanwhile, the women are the insane mothers and castrating bitches of men’s nightmares. All of the movie’s vaguely incestuous male-female relationships have sado-masochistic overtones with S & M’s distinctive ambiguity about who is in charge, master or slave?

Remarkably, considering that this appears to have been a low-budget affair, the producers managed to assemble a fairly impressive ensemble of talent. Hitchcock fans will remember Ruth Roman as the Senator’s chilly daughter in Strangers on a Train. Here, she gives a delightfully unrestrained performance reminiscent of Joan Crawford in the above-mentioned Johnny Guitar. Director Ted Post’s other credits include the Dirty Harry flick Magnum Force, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and the underrated Vietnam movie Go Tell the Spartans. Although the movie does drag in the middle, Post skillfully maintains the film’s effecting moodiness, and delivers a truly slam-bang finale. An evocative music score by film and television veteran Gerald Fried (Paths of Glory, The Killing, Roots, Star Trek) adds immeasurably to the film’s unsettling and entertaining tone.

Image Entertainment’s new DVD presents the film in a full-screen transfer, but it never feels cropped. The transfer has been taken from a good condition positive print with some wear and scratches at each reel change. The disc’s only extras are a full compliment of chapter stops, a Spanish-language track, and the rather pointless option of watching the film with music and effects only. The disc comes in a snapper case with an appropriately lurid cover.

Sadly, Image is presenting The Baby in its edited, PG rated, eighty-five minute form. Much of the missing material evidently focused on the two daughters, featuring nudity and greater detail about their unusual sexual proclivities. Since this footage currently seems to be irretrievably lost, I guess we should just be happy to have this unique film back in circulation and available for strong-minded viewers. Even in this cut version, The Baby is fun, surprisingly gripping, and simply quite odd.