Horrors of Malformed Men

Horrors of Malformed Men

Original Title: Kyôfu ikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshû

Directed by: Teruo Ishii

Euo guro (Erotic/Grotesque), 99 min

Japan, 1969

Distributed by: Synapse Films

There’s a popular misconception that Japanese horror movies are a recent novelty that starts with the success of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu 1998. Yes, it’s true, several people recently looked completely puzzled when I noted that J-Horror is in no way a new entry into the horror genre, although the name may be new as we have an anal need to categorize themes and topics into one definable slot, the Japanese horror scene has always been an item. J-Horror and Ringu as we know it, based on Koji Suzuki’s splendid book Ringu, was already shot in two different versions before the international success had genre fans looking to Japan and Asia for the next big thing. In 1995, director Chisu Takigawa directed a TV movie based on Suzuki’s book. The TV movie opted to focus on the sexual relations of the kids instead of the profound terror found in the source material and it comes off more like an episode of O.C., The Hills or even Beverly Hills with a supernatural element thrown in. Following this there was even a sequel produced Rasen, directed by Jôji Iida in 1998, the same year that Nakata revisited the original text only to end up with an international hit on his hands which opened the floodgates for Japanese and Asian horror in the same way directors like Ringo Lam and John Woo shot their way to fame with their ballistic ballets during the late eighties.

J-Horror isn’t new in any way and the tales told within the J-Horror sphere are really folktales modernized for a new audience. The origins of the J-horror iconography, themes and style have their foundation in the Kabuki and Noh theatre of feudal Japan. During the sixties, directors like Nobuo Nakagawa, Kaneto Shindô and Masaki Kobayashi where shooting movies that relied heavily on their ancestors folktales, and just like the J–Horror wave, the antagonist was more than often a bloated woman with long hair hanging over her face out to claim revenge from her frequent male wrongdoers.

It would be a far stretch to say Teuro Ishii’s once banned for decades, Horror of Malformed Men is a horror movie, as it in all honesty won’t scare anyone these days. It is more of a thriller, whodunit movie with elements of horror aesthetics interwoven in the narrative. But that can’t really be discussed without first talking about Edogawa Rampo first. Rampo was the pseudonym of Japanese writer Tarô Hira, who mainly wrote "pulpy" detective stories in the fashion of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Maurice Leblanc. Many of these detective stories incorporated themes and elements of the fantastic, the erotic and on many occasion saw lead character super detective Kogorô Akechi go up against a varied assortment of mastermind criminals set out to succeed with the perfect crime, such as the antagonist in Kenji Fukasaku’s campy pop-art masterpiece Black Lizard 1968. But Rampo also frequented the fantastic and horror scenes, where the influences of the gothic and Edgar Allen Poe are obvious, his pen name; Edogawa Rampo is a Japanese rendering of Poe’s name. (Painfully obvious when you see it isn’t it) These stories often saw disfigured or seriously wounded characters in key roles; the monsters taking command. It is from his original text Panorama-tô kitan (The Strange Tale of Paranormal Island) that the main source to Ishii’s Horror’s of Malformed Men can be found, but Ishii knew his Rampo and used several other stories of Rampo’s to bump the script up several notches. Among them The Twins that later was shot as Gemini 1999 by Shinya Tsukamoto.

Teuro Ishii was no stranger to the genre either, and just like Takashi Miike in later years, Ishii could direct up to ten movies a year! After a few years of working for the Shintoho studio, Ishii moved to Toei Studios, and with declining cinema vsitors due to the novelty of TV, he quickly became the right man in the right spot as the Pinky Violence movies hit the silver screens. With a couple of successful Pinku flicks to his name (The Joy of Torture 1968 and Orgies of Edo 1969 to name two) he finally got to make the movie that all those Edogawa Rampo stories had influenced, Horrors of Malformed Men. But instead of becoming the success that he expected, it soon vanished from the screens banned from being shown and plummeted into oblivion.

Still there's the question why was Teuro Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men banned in Japan? It isn’t more sexually explicit than other movies of the time, neither is it more visually violent than contemporary movies… But still it was banned never the less, hence becoming one of Japanese cinemas’ most notorious oddities.

Sure by today’s standards it is quite a gentle movie, but the ban was not due to a public outcry, there where no fainting and vomiting in the aisles, there was no audience fleeing from the theatres disgusted with what they saw on screen… They left the cinemas confused and dazed. Where the title, Horrors of Malformed Men may have led the paying blue-collar audience to believe that they where going to be in for a damned good freak show with loads of smut, gore and violence, they got a suggestive, mystic movie with performer Tatsumi Hijakata’s Butoh dance spastically strutting around on screen. Instead the ban came from the studio itself as Toei, worked up about the movie and the lacking results at the box-office, in their panic that the movie would offend someone put it on the shelf and banned it.

Being a land of stern rules, ethics and strictness, the cultural elite turned their backs on Tatsumi Hijakata’s Butoh during the fifties considering it ridiculous, embarrassing, scandalous an definitely not Japanese dancing. Luckily the western world embraced Butoh and today it is definitely a dance that is strongly associated with Japan. There’s a sweet irony in the fact that western worlds took to too Hijakata’s Butoh, as he initially invented the dance as a protest to the way western dance had evolved.

Tapping into the collective fear of nuclear holocaust that traumatized Japan after the war, showing disfigured characters would in one way or another be provocative then, but with today’s standards it probably wouldn’t create the same reaction… but there are other topics in this grand movie that still today will provoke an audience. Try grave robbing, two gender Siamese twins, incest and necrophillic relations for a starter!

Starting off with a superb collage of some awesome spiders to get your flesh creeping during the opening sequence, Ishii next slings us into pitch black as we hear Hirosuke Hitomi [Teruo Yoshida, the leading man from Hajime Sato’s excellent GOKE – The Bodysnatcher from Hell 1968] tell us that this tale starts in a gray room, an unusual room… The camera pans down from the eyes of a woman, eyes that will get those Asian horror references going trough your mind, it continues down revealing the woman’s naked breasts before finally landing on the protruding blade of a knife aimed at us the audience. A great mix of emotional signals evoked, curiosity, lust and fear.

The knife is a fake and this somewhat summarizes the movie, as the theatrics of the prop knife metaphorically refer to things not being as real as they may seem, something that will be revealed in great magnitude at the end of the movie. Hitomi is in prison for reasons untold, and in his cell he keeps having visions of a strange island, an island he also has drawn perfectly from his confusing memories of the place.

This is where Rampo’s Detective plot comes into action with the horror/grotesque. Hitomi goes about his task to solve the questions concerning the strange island, and at the same time is drawn into a murder mystery after fleeing the prison and meeting Hatsuyo [Teruko Yumi in her only acting part]. Hatsuyo is a trapeze artist at the travelling circus, and she also knows of the strange island Hitomi is trying to find for she has memories of the location too

A knife that is thrown from out of nowhere strikes down Hatsuyo and Hitomi takes to the run. During this escape he reads in the paper about the death of Genzaburô Komoda, a wealthy businessman who looks to be Hitomi’s doppelganger. This is later confirmed twice as the blind masseuse identifies the swastika scar Hitomi has on his sole as identical to one Komoda had, and shortly thereafter as Hitomi plunders Komoda’s grave to check the scar and switch identities with the deceased mirror image.

The switch of identities gives place for some really out of place slapstick tomfoolery that comes across as ridiculous in the context. If I wanted screwball monks reacting to ”ghosts” I’d have chosen a Ricky Lau or Samo Hung Kam-Bo Kung Fu horror comedy instead. But it’s only there for a few moments and then the story straightens out again, as Chiyoko [Michiko Kobata, also in her only movie role], the wife of Komodo tends to her seriously misdiagnosed, now inexplicably resurrected husband. But pulling off his plan isn’t easy as Hitomi thought, as he is constantly near to being exposed as he tries to get away with the masquerade. The traits of Komodo’s everyday life, Chiyodo the wife, Shizuko the lover, [Yukie Kagawa from Nobuo Nakagawa’s Ghost Story of the Snake Woman 1968, and Shunya Ito’s Female Convict Scorpion Jailhouse 41, the sequel to his Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion both 1972 with the magnificent Kaji Meiko] all become obstacles on his way.

Settling into his new persona he continues his investigations, but very now and then weird things happen, snakes attack the maids, disfigured beings sneak around the house, and Chiyodo dies under strange circumstances once again leaving Hitomi with a mysterious murder on his trail.

He has to make a move fast and at midpoint, Hitomi makes the decision that they have to make a trip to the island… On the beach he realizes that his visions have not been dreams, he has been there before. And this is where the movie if possible gets even more cryptic and bizarre, as the enigmatic Jôgorô [here's the splendid Tatsumi Hijikata] greets him on the shore. Hitomi is treated to a grand tour that shows him the strange beings living there, beings that Jôgorô has created. During this first night on the island Hitomi comes upon a strange house where he finds Hideko, a woman that looks just like the dead Hatsuyo! As his lust for her draws him closer he realises that she is intact a Siamese twin, joined at the hip with a hideously disfigured monster.

Eventually the terrifying secret of Hitomi’s background is exposed creating a spiral of emotions, as his world is shook to the foundations. Let me just say that the twist is family oriented! Hitomi’s bond to the horrific island and it’s inhabitants force him to take actions he never thought possible, and to put a terrific spin on the final act, guess who has come along for the ride in a sudden subplot about the investigations into where all the missing girls of Tokyo have gone? Yes, you may have guessed it, Rampo’s infamous detective Kogorô Akechi! The Komodo family manservant Shinhichi [Minoru Ohki who also starred as Akechi in Fukasaku’s Black Lizard] and through as series of flashbacks he renders the mystery, reveals the plot, exposes the culprits and brings light to the story. It’s cunning, unexpected and wonderful twist, as Rampo and Ishii don’t even give the lead protagonist Hiromi the satisfaction of explaining or solving his quest. But he does go out with a bang; I’ll give him that. (There’s even a nod at Akechi’s nemesis Back Lizard in the flashbacks) Now how’s that for a surprising use of sub plot in the last fifteen minutes!

So there you go, a bizarre, disturbing, trippy, stunningly visual, and very enigmatic movie that comes highly recommended. Obviously you should take the banned labelling with a pinch of salt now that you know the origins of that story, but at the same time you will for sure find that the movie is a magnificent piece of film to be finally enjoyed once again in the leisure of your own home. Every now and again you will find yourself thinking of the imagery of Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain 1973 or Hyeon-il Kang’s Mago 2002 to name a few, tantalising and haunting images that you will struggle to make sense of, but that’s part of the reason we watch these trippy movies isn’t it! For those crazy plots, shocking revelations and mind-expanding imagery.

Image:

2.35: Anamorphic Widescreen

Audio:

Dolby Digital Mono2.0, Japanese Dialogue with optional English Subtitles, or a commentary track by film critic Mark Schilling

Extras:

A fascinating half-hour documentary on Teuro Ishii featuring Shinya Tsukamoto (who starred in Ishii’s Blind Beast vs. Dwarf 2001 as Kogorô Akechi, based on a story by Rampo) and Minoru Kawasaki, the director of The Calamari Wrestler 2004. Ishii at the 2003 Far East Film Festival, the Original Theatrical Trailer, a poster gallery of Ishii movies and biographies on Ishii and Rampo.

For more on the iconography of J-Horror check out my article on the ConstructingHorror.com website.

Rabid Dogs

Rabid Dogs.
Original Title: Cani Arrabbiati

Directed by: Mario Bava

Thriller/Drama, 96 min

Italy, 1974

Distributed by: Lucertola Media

(OOP – Now available on Anchor Bay)

Of all the movies Mario Bava directed, this shelved, “lost” movie is ironically enough one of my top five Bava flicks. Sure his early Gialli are great, his Euro Goth flicks, filled with those masterful compositions and vivid colour schemes too, and who can forget the pulp-cool classics Planet of the Vampires 1965 and Danger Diabolik 1968. (Which make up two more on that top five list!) It’s all great stuff! If you still don't know of Mario Bava, then you really need to get away from your computer screen and in front of your DVD to check him out NOW! Bava's movies definitely are among some of the best looking movies ever to come out of Italy, all due to his passionate love of cinematography, lighting and composition. Looking back at his cinematic legacy I definitely feel that this "lost" movie is of his most engaging films ever directed, and it packs an ending so unexpected that it will startle you.

It’s said that Rabid Dogs became the long lost masterpiece since the movie was shelved and hidden away in the vaults after that producer Roberto Loyola died. Well that’s not quite true, it was shelved and somewhat forgotten for decades, but Loyola didn’t die, he went bankrupt, hence his movies being seized and locked in the vaults, along with a decent number of other movies too.

Several years later, in 1996, Lea Lander (Maria in the movie) somehow obtained rights to several movies thought long to be lost, and with the assistance of a young genre lover Peter Blumenstock, who you may remember released those great Beat at Cinecitta albums back in the late nineties on his Lucertola label, did all they could to get this wonderful piece of film back in the public eye. Blumenstock managed to secure the DVD rights - a very bold thing to do for a young cineaste as this still was the early days of Digital Versatile Disc, and there was no real market for Italian genre pieces like this one at the time. Well there obviously was, even if very limited. But who dare’s wins right! Back in the seventies Lander was the girlfriend of an elderly German gentleman whom invested in the movie on the terms that she was given the lead role in the movie. As Bava had worked with Lander previously on Blood and Black Lace 1964, he accepted the offer, luckily for us today!

Through his Luccertola lable, Blumenstock released the movie and in a splendid way DVD history was made as this movie definitely opened the floodgates for further genre title releases.

A few years on, Mario Bava’s son, Lamberto Bava - a director in his own, and long time Bava producer Alfredo Leone, purchased the rights, re-cut and shot new scenes for Rabid Dogs according to notes left by the late Bava putting together what is referred to as the definitive version of the movie now released under the name Kidnapped. Obviously this disc is a must for Bava fan’s that need to have all his movies, but in my opinion, the Rabid Dogs version is the one to hold, as this stays the closest to the material available when it was shelved, apart from the tinted title-sequence featuring Blumenstock’s girlfriend at the time weeping behind a curtain.(But given the chance to hear Tim Lucas discuss this movie on a commentary track, makes the Anchor Bay edtion very attractive too.) There’s something uncanny and disturbing when you try to tail footage shot some THIRTY years later on to a movie like this. Just remember how god-awful the Special Edition of Night of the Living Dead 1968 was when they inserted a load of new bullshit into that movie. That’s one limited edition disc which only got played once before it was instantly sold further at the second hand film store. You don’t mess around with a classic!

The action kicks in straight away as we are literally thrown inside a mans car as drives it rapidly down the road, honking his horn, and looking at something in the back seat, and checking his watch. We will later learn that this man is Riccardo [Riccardo Cucciolla] A delicate edit from Riccardo’s watch to Doc’s [Maurice Poli] watch where he is faking engine trouble as he waits for a designated car to pass by. The car passes and Doc jumps into his car where three other gang members are waiting. They follow the car in front of them and as it pulls up in front of a building, they rush out with their weapons drawn and as Thirtytwo [George Eastman as Luigi Montefiori] lets out a burst of shots, Doc flinches, which perhaps could be interpreted that he is not the most prone to violence of the four, making it clear that he’s the brains, “they” are the muscle. A third gang member Blade [Don Backy as Aldo Caponi] rushes up to the car, grabbing the briefcase from the man in the cars grasp. But not before stabbing him to death with a huge stiletto knife. The cops are closing in, the gang return to their getaway car, and set off only to have their perfect escape shattered as security guards at the building shoot their driver, and also puncture the gas tank (no, this isn’t an American movie, so the car doesn’t explode in an inferno of flames.) Obviously the car chokes to a halt a short while later and the now group of three bail out seeking refuge in a parking lot as the cops start sealing off the exits. Again we see shots of Riccardo driving through the traffic, glancing over his shoulder at the object in the back seat. Meanwhile back in the parking lot standoff, Blade once again gets active with his stiletto and kills one of the two women they now have taken hostage. Repelled in shock the Cops back off as the villains shove themselves into a new car taking the surviving female, Maria [Lea Lander] with them.

By coincidence they come upon a traffic light and in a cunning move to ditch their getaway car and shake off the cops the mobsters all stumble into the car at the red light… It’s no real shock that we find Ricardo behind the wheel, and he is now yet another of their hostages. And the bundle in the back seat? It’s a kid, a sick kid that Riccardo says he’s taking to the hospital. All of this in the first twelve minutes, gives you a concept of how fast this movie rolls.

The band of characters take off for the countryside, Doc says to Riccardo that they will let him take the kid, Tino o the hospital when they are safe. At the same time Blade and Thirtytwo make moves and provocative suggestions towards Maria. This adds to the tension along with the police helicopters swishing over head, police motorcycles driving past, the traffic jams and the toll booths that they have to get though without being bust or exposed by their kidnap victims. Several opportunities for escape are given for both Maria and Riccardo, and when Maria manages to make a run for it she ends up being chased by the manic Blade and Thirtytwo. Eastman by the way, is completely radiant here as the psychopathic and sadistic Thirtytwo, possibly his best villain ever in my opinion. Needless to say the two thugs catch up with her and Maria learns the hard way what it’s like to be a woman on the wrong side of a gritty, Italian exploitation flick. Back in the car their journey across the country via torment and paranoia continues. Riccardo tends and pleads for the child, and constantly battles Doc for the role of dominating male in the confined space.

Finally the tension cracks, the floodgates burst open, the anxiety within the group brings it all crashing down, and in the final reel you will find out why Riccardo is the coldest sonofabitch of them all. Once you think the movie has ended it turns out that it really has just begun.

Claustrophobia plays a large part in Rabid Dogs, as the majority of the action takes place inside the moving car. In many ways you could imagine Last house on the Left trapped in a moving car! There’s nowhere to go but forward, and your every move is scrutinized by doped up maniacs who don’t flinch to whip out their stilettos and slice a serious gash in your body. Then add the finer details, like the abundance of master shots, it’s all half’s, close up’s or extreme close-ups leaving no space to breath within the frame. As the majority of the film takes place inside the moving car where the heat almost can be felt, the sour stench of the constant sweating people in the car smelled, it is a very enticing movie indeed. Set Stelvio Cipriani’s haunting score to that, and you have nerve wrecking tension at it’s finest.

Rabid Dogs is ferocious to say the least. It is dark, it's gritty, it's pessimistic and highly nihilistic. It lacks most of the arty tenderness and gentle flow associated with Bava’s previous works but instead holds a more in your face harsh gritty documentary tone. If his previous movies where delicate bandages, this one is the oozing scab you can't stop picking at no matter how much it stings and burns. And that’s a good thing, as Bava took a step away from his previous lush looking movies to create this real gem of grindhouse cinema. Never the less it did stay on the shelf for almost twenty years making it mature with time like a good wine.

Image:

Being mastered primarily from various sources, the print looks thereafter too, but keep in mind, when this edition was released it was the only way to see the movie. In later years several other releases have been digitally re-mastered and therefore hold better image quality. Although the Anchor Bay version of Rabid Dogs released in 2007, does have an audio commentary track by Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog, (the magazine which any self respecting cineast will read with a passion) and if there is one person in the word who is the official go to guy when it comes to Mario Bava, you go to Tim Lucas. Period. If you are not familiar with his gigantic study and documentation of Bava [Mario Bava – All the Colors of the Dark] they I pity you, and advise you to seek it out before you do anything else.

Audio:

Italian Dialogue, 2.0 Stereo, English or German subtitles optional

Extras:

A trailer for the Luccertola DVD releases, Filmographies, and essays on Mario Bava by the masterful Tim Lucas, a study of the restoration by Peter Blumenstock.

The Frightened Woman

Frightened Woman.

Original Title: Femina Ridens

Aka: The Laughing Woman

Directed by: Piero Schivazappa

Thriller/Drama, 86.03min

Italy, 1969

Distributed by: Shameless Films Entertainment.

Story:

A young woman spends the weekend with a Doctor in an attempt to unveil his evil ways, although get’s more than she bargained for when the erotic game takes a serious turn. Slowly but surely roles are changed and a fiendish plan is set in motion.

Me:

Femina Ridens could easily be viewed as being degrading towards women, as it does deal with a topic that will at first estrange women and could be perceived as objectifying them. This would be an easy statement to make about this movie and many like it in the ”exploitation” genre. But if you where to claim that this movie is an insult towards women, then it’s a fair guess that you have missed the point of the movie (or fell asleep before the final reel) as I would claim that the major plot twist makes this movie a highly feminist movie. After all who is using whom for their own needs here? Who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist?

Maria [Dagmar Lassander] is an eager journalist who get’s an opportunity to spend the weekend with Dr. Sayer [Philippe Leroy, who you possibly saw in Dario Argento’s pale finale to the Mother’s Trilogy, The Mother of Tears, Umberto Lenzi’s splendid Gang War in Milan or Lilliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, yeah the one that jumpstarted the Nazisploitation genre], whom she plans to spend a few nights and days with so that she can get the scoop on him. She suspects that he is a murderer who kills his victims as he climaxes during sex, and she's going to bring him in. Or at least that is her initial plan...

Getting into action, Maria goes home with Sawyer but soon finds that he’s once again setting his sinister plans and sexual fantasies into action as she's lured into a fiendish world of sadomasochistic eroticism. At first she resists, but with time she starts to come around, only to learn that Sayer instead rejects her once she has submitted to him. Maria becomes desperate, and continues to play along with Sayers sadomasochistic games, and in one weak moment he confides in her and shows her photographs of his previous victims…

Now terrified of becoming Sayer's next victim, Maria tries to commit suicide by downing a fistful of pills instead. This is where things start to get really interesting. When Sayers realises that Maria dying would deprave him of his latest sex slave, he saves her. But this rescue isn’t salvation but instead becomes his damnation. He starts to feel emotional towards Maria, after all he shared his secret of the murders with her, and she listened to him tell the tale of his childhood memories, she knows him on a deeper level. (Which could be of use for her invest gory newspaper article!)

Dr Sayer, also grows as a character, in his fear of loosing his sexual play thing, he tends to her and nurses her back to health, and the two find themselves growing closer and closer. But subtly Maria is taking the dominating role instead of Sayer. It is now she who resists his approaches, as he moves in for intimacy, she backs off, taunting him in the same way he taunted her earlier.

Finally the climax to their erotic sadomasochistic game, in a sudden twist that you possibly may have seen coming, but at the same time a highly satisfactory climax, and the same one I claim makes this movie a feminist movie. Ages ago academics like Cynthia Freedland and Laura Mulvey argued that classic filmmaking is dominated by the “Male Gaze”, i.e. Women are only objects on screen for a male audience to google at, hence the starting accusation of this piece that it could easily be seen as a classical movie where females are only there to bring a voyeuristic and erotic element to the movie. But as I also pointed out the roles change and with the final scenes the tables have been turned on “us” the male audience, and if we follow Carol J. Clover’s writings on the female role in “horror cinema” she points out that we actually accept the fact that we identify with the “final girl/women in peril”, hence rendering her an active, valuable character and in no means passive and unimportant. That is exactly what happens here, as the final scene is played out. The rush of insight makes us realise that Maria is not a victim in yet another cheesy chauvinistic exploitation flick, but a strong, determined predator with a very obvious agenda that she is following in a splendid genre piece that plays with traditional gender roles and prejudice inherited from previous entries in the genre.

Trashy, 60’s pop arty, bold and an excellent movie to say the least. The cinematography by Carlo and Sante Achilli is fabulous, often reminiscent of Gialli photography, and relying heavily on symmetrical compositions to create stern images that go hand in hand with the strict and spartan modernism of Dr. Sayer's house of sin.

Producer Guiseppe Zaccariello only produced a handful of movies, among them Mario Bava’s milestone Giallo A Bay of Blood [1971], Rino Di Silvestro’s Nazisploitation Deported Women of the SS Special Section [1976], and Joe D’Amato’s Jungle war/Spaghetti Western hybrid Tough to Kill [1978]. Zaccariello not only produced, but also wrote scripts, and got a screenwriter credit on all three movies which all, by coincidence, just like Schivazappa’s Femina Ridens feature great scores by maestro Stelvio Cipriani.

If you are into that Freudian analysis thing, then you’ll have field day with this movie. It’s riddled with male/female emancipation as it uses archetypical gender roles and the prejudice that lies within those roles, subtle symbolism, especially the fabulous scene where Dr. Sayer walks into the crotch of a giant statue of a woman lying on her back only to have razor sharp sliding doors slam shut behind him in a monstrous Vagina Dentate. Once the doors open, only Sayers skeleton remains… Make what you want of it, but it’s a marvellous scene.

The Sculpture - Installation ”Hon-en Katedral” (literally she-a cathedral) by the artist collective Niki de Saint Phalle / Jean Tinguely / Per Olof Ultvedt was re-produced for the movie, as the original once stood at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1966. After entering the giant sculpture through the vagina visitors could enjoy a cinema, a rollercoaster ride, gaze upon a goldfish pond or buy soda from a vending machine. Now that should give you an impression of size!

As you may recall from my bit on Luciano Ercoli’s The Forbidden Photographs of a Lady Above Suspicion, Dagmar Lassander never really made an imprint on me in any of her movies, (even though she was in two Fulci movies and that first tickling Ercoli Giallo) but this is possibly one of the exceptions, as she really makes this movie work and her acting is top notch as she slowly shifts from victim to perpetrator. She really sells the part perfectly, and instead of the regular “Oh I’m in Shock!” face, she actually manages to act with her facial expressions here too. She is fully believable as she curiously sets foot into Dr. Sayers world, terrified as he starts to enslave and break her down, flirtatious and sexy as she gives in to his plan, only to set her own in motion and stand victorious and content after her triumph. Once again this transition and performance is what sells the shift into a feminist theory discussion held above.

This edition claims to be a restored version, and for a change it’s not a marketing trick (which the UNCUT – UNRATED stamps usually signal to me when I’m choosing editions to buy), as the team at Shameless with the use of a varied bin of source materials, and constant dialogue with director Piero Schivazappa. This all led up to their screening for him, where he held with script in hand, later responded; “It is as faithful as it can be to the original script”, “This IS the version of my film to watch.” Once again Shameless bring a fascinating movie back to the intended vision of the filmmakers and make it available for fans of the genre after a painstaking labour of love is presented.

Image:

1.85 : 1, Remastered for 16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen

Audio:

English Dialouge, Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo

Extras:

The customary assortment of Trailers for other titles available from Shameless: Tonino Valerii’s My Dear Killer, Corrado Farina’s Baba Yaga (which Shamless also restored to HIS vision of the movie, not the butchered version available previously), Lucio Fulci’s Black Cat, Guiliano Carnimeno’s RatMan, and both of Massimo Dallamano’s Venus in Furs, and What Have They Done to Your Daughters. There’s also the Shameless Redux trailer for The Frightened Woman, but below I give you the original grindhouse trailer for your entertainment.