And a Shark vs Zombie garage kit:
Friday, 6 January 2012
Some Fulciana
Two Polish posters for Fulci films; see if you can guess which:
And a Shark vs Zombie garage kit:
And a Shark vs Zombie garage kit:
Fantastikal Diabolikal Supermen
Matt Blake, who runs the excellent Wild Eye website and wrote the essential Eurospy Guide a few years back has recently published this book on Italian fumetti neri style films of the 1960s and 1970s.
Extensively illustrated with posters, lobby cards and stills from the films and featuring quite a lot of interview and review material that hasn't been previously available in English (at least to my knowledge) it's an essential purchase for anyone with an interest in this comparatively under-explored area of Italian cult cinema.
Taking a comprehensive but not all encompassing approach, Blake looks at films that were made by Italian directors – so no Modesty Blaise or Mr Freedom – and which either presented direct adaptations of fumetti characters (Diabolik, Kriminal, Satanik, Isabella, Valentina etc.) or were clearly influenced by the comics (The 3 Supermen series, Vittorio De Sica's contribution to the anthology film The Witches, the Johnny Dorelli vehicle How to Kill 400 Duponts and so on).
The films are discussed in chronological rather than alphabetical order, allowing the reader to better chart the development of the filone as a whole and particular series within it. This is especially helpful when it comes to the likes of the long-running 3 Supermen series, since the personnel involved often changed from one film to the next, for better or worse.
Thankfully there's also a comprehensive index of titles for those wondering whether a specific film is one of the better, worse or average examples of the form.
While the reader will inevitably disagree with some of Blake's evaluations of the films, his reviews are invariably intelligent, informative and insightful, indicating why he rates or does not rate a given film, filmmaker or performer.
So, for example, of the 3 Superman films, Blake identifies those directed by Sabata's Gianfranco Parolini as ranking above those by Black Emanuelle's Bitto Albertini, with both in turn preferable to those directed by their usual producer and writer Italo Martinenghi – precisely the kind of stuff you need when, like me, you've got a whole load of them in your virtual to-watch pile and were not sure of where to begin.
Page for Fantastikal Diabolikal Supermen on The Wild Eye.
Extensively illustrated with posters, lobby cards and stills from the films and featuring quite a lot of interview and review material that hasn't been previously available in English (at least to my knowledge) it's an essential purchase for anyone with an interest in this comparatively under-explored area of Italian cult cinema.
Taking a comprehensive but not all encompassing approach, Blake looks at films that were made by Italian directors – so no Modesty Blaise or Mr Freedom – and which either presented direct adaptations of fumetti characters (Diabolik, Kriminal, Satanik, Isabella, Valentina etc.) or were clearly influenced by the comics (The 3 Supermen series, Vittorio De Sica's contribution to the anthology film The Witches, the Johnny Dorelli vehicle How to Kill 400 Duponts and so on).
The films are discussed in chronological rather than alphabetical order, allowing the reader to better chart the development of the filone as a whole and particular series within it. This is especially helpful when it comes to the likes of the long-running 3 Supermen series, since the personnel involved often changed from one film to the next, for better or worse.
Thankfully there's also a comprehensive index of titles for those wondering whether a specific film is one of the better, worse or average examples of the form.
While the reader will inevitably disagree with some of Blake's evaluations of the films, his reviews are invariably intelligent, informative and insightful, indicating why he rates or does not rate a given film, filmmaker or performer.
So, for example, of the 3 Superman films, Blake identifies those directed by Sabata's Gianfranco Parolini as ranking above those by Black Emanuelle's Bitto Albertini, with both in turn preferable to those directed by their usual producer and writer Italo Martinenghi – precisely the kind of stuff you need when, like me, you've got a whole load of them in your virtual to-watch pile and were not sure of where to begin.
Page for Fantastikal Diabolikal Supermen on The Wild Eye.
Fulci Zombie kits
I got these a while back and my friend painted them up for me:
They're from Gargoyle Creations, who also do Living Dead at Manchester Morgue and Zombie Holocaust ones.
They're from Gargoyle Creations, who also do Living Dead at Manchester Morgue and Zombie Holocaust ones.
Deadly Blvd
A duo from from Montréal who've just released their first EP, Giallo, as a digital download.
As they explain: “We created this music with a mixture of our inspirations, that is horror and sci-fi film music, eighties cartoons music, rock, new wave, etc.... There is no label, no distribution company, we are totally independant and this EP album makes us really proud.”
Check it out at:
http://deadlyblvd.bandcamp.com/
http://www.facebook.com/DeadlyBLVD
As they explain: “We created this music with a mixture of our inspirations, that is horror and sci-fi film music, eighties cartoons music, rock, new wave, etc.... There is no label, no distribution company, we are totally independant and this EP album makes us really proud.”
Check it out at:
http://deadlyblvd.bandcamp.com/
http://www.facebook.com/DeadlyBLVD
Wednesday, 9 November 2011
Heavy stuff
My cat, Bebert, the image that I have as my icon here, has died.
I woke up this morning and found him dead outside the door.
It was completely unexpected. He was about eight years old and was his usual self last night and early in the morning, even up to a couple of hours before.
This was not what I needed at this point, when the new anti-depressants I was taking and whose dose had then been increased seemed to be working; when I was back on track PhD wise, and when things (sleeping, eating, alcohol consumption, self-harming) were generally getting under control.
Hope you will understand if there are no more posts for a bit...
I woke up this morning and found him dead outside the door.
It was completely unexpected. He was about eight years old and was his usual self last night and early in the morning, even up to a couple of hours before.
This was not what I needed at this point, when the new anti-depressants I was taking and whose dose had then been increased seemed to be working; when I was back on track PhD wise, and when things (sleeping, eating, alcohol consumption, self-harming) were generally getting under control.
Hope you will understand if there are no more posts for a bit...
Monday, 7 November 2011
Contrasting posters for The Designated Victim
I think I prefer the top one, because of the bolder colours. Your opinions?
Sunday, 6 November 2011
Aska susayanlar seks ve cinayet / Thirsty for Love, Sex and Murder
One of the criticisms frequently leveled against Italian genre cinema is that it is derivative or imitative. As Luigi Cozzi said, producers and backers didn't want to know what your film was about but rather what films it was like. Yet few went as far down the copyright infringing route as Patrick Lives Again, that unofficial sequel to the original Patrick. The more usual approach was that taken by the various zombie films that appeared in the wake of Dawn of the Dead: It was clear what their inspiration was, but there was enough that was different and sometimes even original.
From what I've seen, Turkish exploitation cinema is another thing entirely. Most notoriously the so-called Turkish Star Wars uses footage from George Lucas's film, intercut with new material, and large chunks of score from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And then there are the Spiderman, Superman and Batman films.
What we have here, meanwhile, is a Turkish version of Sergio Martino's 1970 giallo The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh, with both plot and scenes lifted wholesale.
Even so, the filmmakers do make some changes and additions:
The maniac in the opening scene is more clearly visible, and identified by his victim before she dies as having a scar. This makes the Mrs Wardh character, Mine, suspect that he could be her ex-lover, the Jean one, Tarik, with whom she had an intense sado-masochistic relationship.
The Mr Wardh character, Metin, is sexually incapable, thus providing a further justification/rationale for his wife's falling for the George Corro one, Yilmaz, when she's introduced to him by her friend, the Carol Brandt one, Oya, at a party.
When Mine is blackmailed over this relationship and Oya goes to meet the blackmailer she isn't killed, merely chased and forced to drop the money.
In final third, the identities of the conspirators against Mine are also different, as is the ending.
The film is also differently paced, in that it runs barely an hour rather than 90 minutes. There's less emphasis upon drama and suspense and more upon action, with the general approach being to get straight into, through and out of each scene via the fastest route possible. Hollywood-style visual grammar and decoupage are conspicious by their absence. While it's not intentionally avant-garde, the effect is often just as jarring. This is particularly evident in the approach the filmmakers take to scoring, where a few bars culled from Morricone and Nicolai crime scores or an original chord, riff or beat almost sound like experiments in sampling, looping and layering.
The killer...
attacks...
there's going to be a lot of this...
what the... oh, it's a subjective shot from the victim's POV of a plane coming in to land...
and re-uniting Mine and Metin
You can also see that the filmmakers are trying to emulate their model(s) and inject a touch of visual inspiration, with zooms; odd angles; rapid cutting; or the likes of shots partly through liquid-filled glass or the maniac's dark glasses in the foreground; taken at ground level from behind a car; or of Mine framed through the gap between the handle and body of an old-style telephone.
More importantly in terms of their target audience -- read young Turkish men wanting Meral Zeren more than Edwige Fenech or to be Kadir Inanan rather than George Hilton -- the filmmakers don't skimp on the exploitation goods. Just about every woman quickly get undressed down to her underwear, often naked -- though, it should be noted, with no full-frontal nudity -- and, undoubtedly more disconcertingly for more sensitive types, abused, threatened or slashed up.
The scene that best exemplifies this is when a woman comes home, takes off her coat, revealing that she is naked beneath it, goes into the shower and is then slaughtered. Perhaps she was one of the women at an earlier party who was wearing a paper dress that got torn off. But there was no mention of a paper bra and panties.
For today's audiences, the film also has the attraction of providing cultural and historical insights, in terms of showing modern, swinging post-1960s Turks, along with no mentions whatsoever of Islam and little sense of moral disapproval. A lot of this stuff, whether fashions, decors, hairstyles, vehicles or dialogue is also, of course, highly entertaining from a kitsch/camp/trash perspective, if you're not interested in that sort of thing: “You smell of alcohol and cigarettes.” “A man should smell of alcohol and cigarettes.”
If you've never seen any gialli - unlikely for a reader of this blog, I know - then this probably isn't the Turkish exploitation film for you, but if you have and want to start exploring then its an intriguing and entertaining introduction that may well leave you wanting more...
From what I've seen, Turkish exploitation cinema is another thing entirely. Most notoriously the so-called Turkish Star Wars uses footage from George Lucas's film, intercut with new material, and large chunks of score from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And then there are the Spiderman, Superman and Batman films.
What we have here, meanwhile, is a Turkish version of Sergio Martino's 1970 giallo The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh, with both plot and scenes lifted wholesale.
Even so, the filmmakers do make some changes and additions:
The maniac in the opening scene is more clearly visible, and identified by his victim before she dies as having a scar. This makes the Mrs Wardh character, Mine, suspect that he could be her ex-lover, the Jean one, Tarik, with whom she had an intense sado-masochistic relationship.
The Mr Wardh character, Metin, is sexually incapable, thus providing a further justification/rationale for his wife's falling for the George Corro one, Yilmaz, when she's introduced to him by her friend, the Carol Brandt one, Oya, at a party.
When Mine is blackmailed over this relationship and Oya goes to meet the blackmailer she isn't killed, merely chased and forced to drop the money.
In final third, the identities of the conspirators against Mine are also different, as is the ending.
The film is also differently paced, in that it runs barely an hour rather than 90 minutes. There's less emphasis upon drama and suspense and more upon action, with the general approach being to get straight into, through and out of each scene via the fastest route possible. Hollywood-style visual grammar and decoupage are conspicious by their absence. While it's not intentionally avant-garde, the effect is often just as jarring. This is particularly evident in the approach the filmmakers take to scoring, where a few bars culled from Morricone and Nicolai crime scores or an original chord, riff or beat almost sound like experiments in sampling, looping and layering.
The killer...
attacks...
there's going to be a lot of this...
what the... oh, it's a subjective shot from the victim's POV of a plane coming in to land...
and re-uniting Mine and Metin
You can also see that the filmmakers are trying to emulate their model(s) and inject a touch of visual inspiration, with zooms; odd angles; rapid cutting; or the likes of shots partly through liquid-filled glass or the maniac's dark glasses in the foreground; taken at ground level from behind a car; or of Mine framed through the gap between the handle and body of an old-style telephone.
More importantly in terms of their target audience -- read young Turkish men wanting Meral Zeren more than Edwige Fenech or to be Kadir Inanan rather than George Hilton -- the filmmakers don't skimp on the exploitation goods. Just about every woman quickly get undressed down to her underwear, often naked -- though, it should be noted, with no full-frontal nudity -- and, undoubtedly more disconcertingly for more sensitive types, abused, threatened or slashed up.
The scene that best exemplifies this is when a woman comes home, takes off her coat, revealing that she is naked beneath it, goes into the shower and is then slaughtered. Perhaps she was one of the women at an earlier party who was wearing a paper dress that got torn off. But there was no mention of a paper bra and panties.
For today's audiences, the film also has the attraction of providing cultural and historical insights, in terms of showing modern, swinging post-1960s Turks, along with no mentions whatsoever of Islam and little sense of moral disapproval. A lot of this stuff, whether fashions, decors, hairstyles, vehicles or dialogue is also, of course, highly entertaining from a kitsch/camp/trash perspective, if you're not interested in that sort of thing: “You smell of alcohol and cigarettes.” “A man should smell of alcohol and cigarettes.”
If you've never seen any gialli - unlikely for a reader of this blog, I know - then this probably isn't the Turkish exploitation film for you, but if you have and want to start exploring then its an intriguing and entertaining introduction that may well leave you wanting more...
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