Alice Sweet Alice

Can anyone out there advise on which is the best version of Alice Sweet Alice AKA Communion on DVD? I am not bothered about extras, such as trailers or a  commentary.

TIA.

America così nuda, così violenta / Naked and Violent

You can be forgiven for confusing this 1970 film with its 1969 predecessor A Thousand sins... no Virtues.

For both are the products of the same team, headed by director Sergio Martino and his producer brother Luciano, and present mondo exposes of the western world at the time.

Indeed, one faux occult ritual sequence was sufficiently similar to make me check whether I had in fact seen the film before, before a check of the archives – revealed that the earlier film had been set in Sweden whereas this one is located, as its Italian title indicates, in the USA.

Besides the occult, other common themes include the sexual and social revolutions of the 1970s, with plenty in the way of sex, drugs, the counter-culture and so on.

There's also a similar mixture of found footage – here of Woodstock and anti-Vietnam demos – reconstructions / inventions – the occult ritual is tastefully suggested to be linked to the Manson Family's alleged practices – and highly dubious vox pop interviews with Easy Rider-styled bikers, redneck racists, black panthers and other representative / stereotypical American figures of the time.

The most interesting topic is the Native American occupation of Alcatraz. Citing a clause in 19th century legislation, activists took control of the island as a territory abandoned by the US. Unfortunately it's also worthy of a documentary in its own right, rather than being a two minute segment here.

One aspect in which the film differs from its predecessor – albeit perhaps down to different edits being extant for different markets – is that other familiar mondo staple of animal cruelty and death. What A Thousand... lacked Naked and Violent provides, via the sacrificing of a chicken in the occult ritual, whose blood is at least seemingly used, and a group of men shooting live rabbit targets strung up on a washing line, apparently not for food but solely as cheap target practice.

The whole is tied together by the usual voice-off commentary along juxtaposition of extremes and opposites – wealth and poverty, black and white, modernity and tradition etc. - alongside the use of scene-setting music, on this occasion courtesy of Bruno Nicolai.

In the end the biggest difference for me between the two films was in how I acquired them: A Thousand Sins... an AVI download from a VHS source, Naked and Violent the recent DVD from Mya Commmunications.

Unfortunately the free download and the paid for DVD are almost identical as far as image quality is concerned; if anything the DVD is worse, with some noticeable jump cuts between one scene or segment and another.




Examples of the print damage

Maybe no better source print was available. But if so there's nothing to indicate this, unlike those releases which at least tell you at the start that this is the case or that some material has been interpolated in from an inferior source or has proven impossible to locate. Nor are there any extras.

All in all, it's the kind of treatment that can only discourage the fan from shelling out their cash. Indeed, we might even venture that in making the film available with English subtitles, the release has a self-defeating aspect: If the increased sales from providing subtitles are greater than the cost of their production, then aren't there just going to be more dissatisfied customers than otherwise? What makes it even odder is that these subtitles have clearly been produced, not being burned in to source print and being removable for those comfortable with the Italian audio. So it is not as if the release was just about taking something that already existed and transferring it across to DVD.

Trauma DVD help

I have the old Tartan DVD of Trauma, which was certainly an improvement on the pan and scan video through which I first saw the film years back, but has never really struck me as being a particularly good transfer - I find the colours in it a bit murky.

Can anyone advise on whether this is a reflection of the cinematography or if there is a better looking DVD out there, preferably with both English and Italian audio options; part of the reason I ask is that I recently upgraded my Sleepless disc from the UK MIA release to the Italian Medusa one and it is so much better looking and sounding.

The Luciano Ercoli Death Box Set

The early 1970s were the boom time for the Italian thriller or giallo, the name coming from the yellow covers in which mystery and suspense novels were published. An important part of the giallo film phenomenon was the presence of a number of attractive female starlets such as Edwige Fenech, Barbara Bouchet and the star of these two Luciano Ercoli directed Italian-Spanish co-productions, his wife Nieves Navarro, appearing here under her Susan Scott pseudonym.

La Morte cammina con i tacchi alti / Death Walks on High Heels opens boldly, with a sequence that alerts the viewer to expect the unexpected: a one-eyed gunman on a train, the kind of figure who you believe to be an assassin, is himself murdered by a balaclava wearing, razor-wielding killer with distinctive blue eyes.

We soon learn that the victim was jewel thief Rochard. His ill-gotten gains remain missing. The police suspect his daughter Nicole, an exotic dancer, may know their whereabouts. But she professes ignorance.

Later, Nicole is threatened by the train murderer, who caresses her with a straight razor and warns her that the next time she had better tell him the location of the diamonds or he'll use the sharp side of his blade.

Finding bright blue contact lenses among her neer-do-well boyfriend/pimp Michel's accoutrements, Nicole believes he may be involves and thereby flees into the arms of Dr Robert Matthews, an Englishman who showed up at one of the strip clubs where she works shortly before and, wooing her with flowers, confessed to being wowed by her strip routine…

The pair leave Paris for London and thence to Matthews's cottage by the sea, empty but for a decidedly creepy looking groundsman with an artificial hand…

From here on in the plot gets complicated, with nothing quite what it seems, including the titular killer…

Coming across as a hybrid of Psycho, Rear Window and Il Diavolo a sette facce / The Devil Has Seven Faces – the two Hitchcock productions providing prolific genre screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi with themes of voyeurism and sexual deviancy and Osvaldo Civriani's giallo the missing diamonds McGuffin and narrative contortions – Death Walks in High Heels is a bit of a curate's egg of a production, with effective direction and a top-notch genre cast – besides Scott we have Frank Wolff (The Great Silence) and Simon Andreu (The Blood Spattered Bride), playing Matthews and Michel respectively, along with Claudie Lange, Luciano Rossi (The Stranger's Gundown) and George Rigaud (Knife of Ice) in supporting roles – outweighed by a marginally overlong and too-confusing narrative that pulls the rug out on the spectator rather too much to fully engage their attentions.

Less, then, an example of the giallo as art than as trash, the film's main selling points are undoubtedly Scott – one soon loses count of the number of different, but invariably revealing costumes (and wigs) she dons as Nicole – and some satisfyingly grisly murder scenes.

La Morte accarezza a mezzanotte / Death Walks at Midnight AKA Death Caresses at Midnight reunites more or less the same cast – Peter Martell/Pietro Martellanza (The Bogeyman and the French Murders) stepping into the Wolff type role, the American born actor having committed suicide barely weeks after the November 1971 Italian release of Death Walks in High Heels – with Ercoli once more working from an Ernesto Gastaldi penned-script.

This time Scott plays Valentina, a hot-tempered fashion model who is persuaded by her journalist boyfriend – again essayed by Andreu – to take an experimental drug for a story he is writing. Under its influence, she has a horrifying vision of a man smashing a woman's face in with a spiked glove, reminiscent of the one prominently featured in Mario Bava's seminal Blood and Black Lace.

It soon proves, however, to be no mere hallucination, with a woman having been murdered in the apartment opposite under near identical circumstances. Valentina's half-remembered memories thus plunge her into a nightmare world of deception and murder. Plus ca change…

Again, what the film may lacks in seriousness it makes up for in trashy fun. Valentina's apartment showcases some especially groovy interior design, while composer Gianni Ferrio contributes nice themes and Mina some gorgeous vocalism.

The main thing to be said about the Death Walks at Midnight disc is that it is in the 2.35:1 ratio, with the earlier release from Mondo Macabro having been incorrectly framed at 1.85:1. While the earlier disc was watchable, nowhere near as bad as a scope film being panned and scanned to 1.33:1, the extra information previously “lost” is clearly welcome in a “see it again for the first time” way.

Much the same can be said of the difference between the audio presentations of the two discs: whereas the Mondo Macabro release was sourced from a French print and so lacked the Italian dub, the NoShame disc features it instead; both also, of course, including the English dub.

The extras on the disc comprise a small poster and stills gallery and – rather more impressive – a 105 minute TV version of the film. While the quality is poor, being panned and scanned and sourced from a VHS copy, it's nice to have even if not the sort of thing you're likely to revisit often beyond the Video Watchdog nerd factor.

Also presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with a choice of English and Italian 2.0 audio tracks, there's not much to say about the Death Walks on High Heels except that it's again a pretty much top-notch transfer, clean, bright and sharp as a maniac's straight razor. (Apologies; I just had to work that one in.)

The extras, meanwhile, comprise another small gallery and the original – somewhat psychedelic – English and Italian trailers for the film, which are otherwise identical bar their languages.

The set also includes miniature reproductions of the films' lobby cards and a booklet containing liner notes; biographies of Navarro, Rossi and Wolff by Chris D – author of Outlaw Masters of Japanese Cinema – illustrations, poster reproductions and a track listing for the Cipriani CD.

One contestable point within the liner notes is the author's assertion that Romolo Guerreri's 1968 film Sweet Body of Deborah “inadvertently opened the floodgates,” for the giallo. While the years 1968 and 1969 saw a rising number of productions in a similarly vein, such as Umberto Lenzi's Orgasmo and Così dolce… così perversa and Lucio Fulci's One on Top of the Other most other commentators would probably have suggested that the key film here was Dario Argento's 1969 debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, as signalled by the rash of like-sounding titles that quickly followed in its wake like Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Sergio Martino's The Case of the Scorpion's Tail.

While dedicated followers of Italian pop cinema will likely have many of the 18 tracks featured on The Sound of Love and Death: The Very Best of Stelvio Cipriani, the CD provides a good demonstration of the composer's versatility. Curiously it does not include anything from Death Walks on High Heels, the closest thing to a giallo among the films featured being two tracks from Massimo Dallamano's police / giallo hybrid La polizia chiede aiuto / What Have They Done to Your Daughters, the title piece and a driving chase score. with the mix otherwise one of pieces from dramas, cop actioners and horror. Fans of the trashier side of Cipriani's work may be disappointed by the lack of anything from his Joe D'Amato porno-horrors, but should find the TV studio disco track from Lenzi's Incubo sulla citta' contaminata / Nightmare City a decent enough substitute.

All told, a must-buy for Euro cultists.

Puzzle / L'uomo senza memoria

The puzzle of the English title begins in London as Peter Smith (Luc Merenda), l'uomo senza memoria of the Italian, goes to see his doctor (Tom Felleghy, in yet another character role) to see if there isn't any way he can speed up the process of remembering the past he lost in a car accident some nine months ago.

The doctor tells him that there isn't and it's all a matter of time, but evidently had not considered the way in which a death sentence might speed the process up.

For when Peter returns home he finds an old acquaintance – alas he cannot remember who – waiting for him. Thing is this man knows him as Ted Walden, 30 years old, married and living in Portofino, Italy. Worse, he's now going to shoot Peter/Ted in revenge for some past deed.

A gunman's bullet from the window opposite puts paid to the man's plan, but also prevents him explaining further “at the point of dying” and leaves Peter/Ted with a body – which tellingly he seems rather too adept at dealing with, potentially offering a foretaste of things to come – and a slew of new questions.

Who is he really?

Why did this man want to kill him?

Who saved him?

Why?

Unsure of what to do next, the timely arrival of a telegram from Sara (Senta Berger) in Portofino seems to offer some answers. On arrival, however, the questions only multiply. Ted does not recognise his wife, instead requiring her to be pointed out by a third party – who of course has his own agenda, soon to be revealed – before learning that she didn't send for him, doesn't trust him and can't really help him ...

Though there's one of those unconvincing falling dummy moments late on, where its head comes off as it lands in the sea, this is otherwise a well made, tightly scripted and effective thriller that keeps you engaged and guessing right up to the end.

While perhaps a little slow for some tastes, taking time to establish character and situation, there really isn't any waste to speak of. Everything that's there – a kid's photography hobby; the chainsaw that Sara puts back in the kitchen cupboard; a prominently displayed clock; a burglary where nothing seems to have been taken; the cross-cutting between Sara and Ted as they separately prepare for bed etc. – has a reason for being.

Similarly, if stalk-and-slash suspense dynamics and set pieces are downplayed, this only serves to strengthen the slow-burn menace of some of the encounters – most notably when a immobile Sara is terrorised by one of the bad guys flicking matches on her decidedly flammable nightdress – and the impact of the climactic settling of accounts when the straight razor comes out in apparent concession to genre requirements...

And if the amnesia McGuffin is clearly lifted from Hitchcock's Spellbound, the filmmakers have also put sufficient spin on it to make it their own. Whereas that film's protagonist was set free by the uncovering of his true past, here is serves instead to only make things worse for Ted.

Okay, there is undoubtedly a classical model for this in Oedipus, if we want to go back that far, but again the psychoanalytic/Freudian focus of the conventional giallo is conspicuous in its absence, in favour of a more existential reading that (as with Hal Hartley's Amateur some twenty years later) asks whether a man can still be held accountable for the actions of a past self that no longer represents his present and future – if, that is, he still has one...

As far as the casting goes, the only potentially weak link would seem to be Luc Merenda. Yet even here his characteristic inexpressiveness and reliance upon good looks paradoxically work in the film's favour, better conveying the sense of a man whose life is pretty much a tabula rasa, as does his facility with action, implying a kind of muscle memory from his past.

All told, if Puzzle suggests that Dario Argento was right to say that Duccio Tessari was not the man to direct his The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to best effect, it also indicates that this was less down to any lack of facility with the thriller form – The Bloodstained Butterfly is similarly impressive, even in the compromised pan and scan version I saw – than a different accent and set of dynamics.

Put another way, if Argento is the master of the modern giallo thriller, Tessari must be ranked as a master of its classical counterpart.

This Region 2 coded PAL format disc from new Danish outfit Another World Entertainment, billed as the first in their giallo series, presents Puzzle in an ultrabit anamorphic transfer in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The transfer is clean and vibrant, perhaps a little soft but undoubtedly far superior to the kind of bootleg sources some might have encountered the film on previously.

While the sound suffers from a bit of snap, crackle and pop, it's never too distracting nor sufficient to detract from overall enjoyment of the film. While both Italian and English tracks are provided, there isn't the option of listening to the former subtitled in the latter, with the choices here – Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish – apparently reflecting the main target market for the disc, while also providing hope that someone elsewhere might yet license the film and provide this.

The extras are a bit thin on the ground, being confined to the film's trailer; a straight off the IMDB style filmography for Tessari, and a small slideshow gallery.

Okay, there's also a trailer gallery of future releases from the company, but these are for films – Cannibal Ferox, Mountain of the Cannibal God, City of the Living Dead, Cannibal Holocaust, Eaten Alive and The Beyond – that are all already well represented on DVD – except perhaps for with Finnish subtitles...