It's no exaggeration to call Ruggero Deodato's notorious 1980 Italian exploitation legend Cannibal Holocaust (Grindhouse) one of the most controversial portraits of extreme gore put onscreen. Not merely for its grotesque brutality and explicit scenes of bloody violence, torture and death of humans (fakery so convincing that it led to a rumor that this was actual snuff footage) and animals (sickening scenes of genuine violence against animals), but for its specious commentary on the manipulation of violence in news and documentary footage and the exploitation of sordid spectacle for entertainment. At least it aspires to that in its admittedly ambitious story, about a New York anthropologist (Robert Kerman) who travels to the Amazon jungle ("the Green Inferno") to look for a quartet of American documentarians who went in search of legendary South American cannibal tribes "armed with cameras, courage, and curiosity" and never returned. What he finds is their corpses and raw footage, which reveals the quartet as ruthless ugly Americans who brutalize the natives for the benefit of their cameras (and their own cruel desires) and manipulate the tribes to stage their own stories of native cruelty.
It's a weird movie with an awkward narrative, which Deodato makes all the more effective with his grimy sheen of documentary realism, while Riz Ortolani's unsettlingly lovely, elegiac score provides a weird undercurrent. On the one hand, Deodato is attempting to make a statement about the civilized world's rape, exploitation, and demonization of the third world, creating monsters out of innocents who rise up against their oppressors. On the other, it's an excuse for Deodatto to make a fetish of primitivism and exploit sex, violence, and cruelty to his gangrenous heart's content. It's both a satire and an extreme example of Mondo moviemaking, embracing and criticizing its fakery all the while playing the spectacle as pure exploitation. "I wonder who the real cannibals are," muses the anthropologist after enduring the ordeal of watching it all, a comment supposed to point the finger at the media, but Deodato can't escape the charge. That ambiguity and hypocrisy, oddly enough, is what makes it so interesting.
Grindhouse delivers the DVD debut of the legendary grunge classic in its complete, uncensored form, but the producers have obligingly offered different versions as well, including an "animal cruelty free" version. Also features commentary by director Ruggero Deodato and star Robert Kerman (in Italian with simultaneous English translation), select on-camera commentary by Deodato and Kerman, the hour-long Italian documentary The Making of Cannibal Holocaust, video interviews with Deodato, Kerman, and co-star Gabriel York, the original shooting script, galleries of stills and art, a music video, trailers, and a mini-poster insert with liner notes by horror journalist Chas. Balun. The limited edition of 11,111 copies comes in a tricky clamshell case, which can crack if not closed carefully.
Mario Bava gave birth to the "giallo," a distinctly Italian twist on horror that combines a poetic, haunting beauty with grand guignol gore and a bent of sexual perversity, with his elegant 1964 Blood and Black Lace: Unslashed Director's Edition (VCI). If Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch turns violence into a ballet, then Blood and Black Lace is murder as ballroom dance. Forget the plot, which has something to do with a masked stalker hunting the gorgeous models of a Rome fashion house, and just take in the color and style. The man, dressed in black, leads his partners, invariably beautiful women impeccably dressed in bright, bold colors, through an often elaborate, usually sadistic, tightly choreographed dance of death. The plot becomes secondary to spectacle of the dreamy dance of death, choreographed with sadistic precision, delivered in lurid color, spied upon with a restlessly gliding camera. There's an undeniable edge of misogyny to the whole thing, but the psycho-thriller aspects seem beside the point as the narrative melts into abstract moments of dreamy, disconnected beauty. Cameron Mitchell, Dante DiPaolo, Lea Lander, Ariana Gorini, and Harriet Medin star. VCI's new 2-disc set features commentary by Bava expert Tim Lucas, an archical interview with actor Cameron Mitchell conducted by David Del Valle, and bonus music tracks by the film's composer Carlo Rustichelli among its supplements.
Dario Argento took the reigns from Bava as if born to the genre and the promise is right there in his 1970 directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Blue Underground), a handsome thriller (shot by the great Vittorio Storaro), about an American in Rome (Tony Musante) who witnesses an attempted murder in a locked art gallery (helplessly trapped behind the panes of glass as he watches the assault). Argento wrote the script with the popular mystery novelist Bryan Edgar Wallace (whose works are part of a similarly sadistically violent genre of German thrillers known as "krimi"), but it's really an edited version of Fredric Brown's thriller "Screaming Mimi" (previously made into a 1958 film). The mystery ultimately collapses into bizarre and silly twists, but the story is only a structure for Argento to spin his painstakingly choreographed visions of violence and terror with a fluid camera and carefully controlled colors. It's all about the spectacle, and while it's only a rough draft for the delirious "giallo" to come, Argento fills it with inventive character bits (a stuttering pimp, an artist who lives in a house with no doors). Suzy Kendall, Eva Renzi, and Enrico Maria Salerno co-star and the moody score is by Ennio Morricone. The newly remastered 2-disc set from Blue Underground (fast proving itself to be a rival of Criterion for its excellent work on both arthouse and grindhouse Italian cinema) features commentary by journalists Alan Jones and Kim Newman and interview featurettes with director/co-writer Dario Argento, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, composer Ennio Morricone, and actress Eva Renzi among its supplements.
Guerdon Trueblood's grim 1973 kidnapping thriller The Candy Snatchers (Subversive) is a forgotten classic of cynical drive-in noir, a perfectly nasty seventies exploitation film with a vicious sense of doom. Candy (Susan Sennet) is a Catholic school girl snatched off the street by a sleazy trio of would-be masterminds -- femme fatale (Tiffany Bolling, who all but smarls her lines), her dumb lug of a boyfriend (Vince Martorano), and her psycho brother who twitches in ecstasy at the mere thought of cutting off Candy's ear for leverage. Their only mistake is ransoming her off to a greedy stepfather who would prefer her dead anyway. It's a brutal ordeal -- Candy spends much of film buried alive in a makeshift grave that is all the more terrifying for its haphazard construction and unreliable makeshift airways -- but for all the reprehensible characters doing perfectly reprehensible things, the film has an uncompromising sensibility that you just don't find in modern films. The dialogue is often campy and clunky and some of the performances are awful, but the twisty little plot digs itself deeper under the skin than you could predict, right down to the horrific final frame. It's a sleazy crime film that Tarantino would love. Christopher "Christophe" Trueblood plays the little mute little kid who watches it all unfold with a perpetual look of dazed astonishment. Features commentary by stars Susan Sennett and Tiffany Bolling, moderated by actor Marc Edward Heuck (Beat the Geeks) and Norman Hill, the documentary featurette The Women of The Candy Snatchers, and an accompanying mini-poster and set of 3 mini-lobby card reproductions among its supplements.
Godzilla: Final Wars (Sony), produced to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the lizard king of all nuclear age giant monsters, turns out to be a blithely campy, altogether good-natured love letter to the classic Godzilla films of the 1960s and 1970s directed by new kid on the block Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus), Japan's adolescent action stylist. The first Godzilla film in decades to embrace that early "history," it brings back all the old monsters (even Minilla!), tosses in an alien invasion force ("Hello, people of Earth. We come in peace!") to send the monsters rampaging across the globe, and creates a team of Power Ranger-like mutants (led by a Jesse Ventura-like American soldier) to dig Godzilla out of the ice of the North Pole and lure him back to the hot spots on Earth so he can duke it out with them all over again. It's all classic suitmation effects (except for one suspiciously familiar CGI lizard, who is hilariously tromped by the real lizard king) and stomped-on miniatures, with CGI flourishes, martial arts whirligigs from the humans, and classic clips from the original movies. Directed by a true fan of the old school, it's lusciously, knowingly, lovingly cheesy. Toho says this is their last Godzilla movie, but they've said that before. Features both original Japanese and English dub soundtracks, the featurette Godzilla: B-Roll to Film and bonus trailers.
Japanese gonzo maverick Miike Takashi solidified his international reputation with one of his most uncharacteristic films, Audition: Uncut Special Edition (Lions Gate). His disturbed and disturbing psycho-horror nightmare begins as a gentle romance based on a lie and then shoots into the Twilight Zone of obsession, sadism, and mutilation. Ryo Ishibashi is a quiet widowed father who decides to marry again and uses the audition process of a phony film as a dating service and Eihi Shiina is his ideal: elegant, submissive, demure. The restrained romance has the calm feel of a Yasujiro Ozu film, until she disappears halfway through and his investigation reveals a dark past with demented dimensions. Takashi plays with narrative sleight of hand in dreams and flashbacks that wind through the story and undermine any feeling of grounding, and the transgressive turns in the story plays on guilt, paranoia, and a fear of women that seems to permeate Japanese horror in an age when social expectations have turned inside out. Be warned: this is not for viewers with weak nerves. The new DVD editions features select scene commentary by director Takashi Miike, an introduction by and interview with Takashi, an interview with writer Ryu Murakama, a segment from the TV program Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments, and a still gallery.
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