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.

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Original Title:

Non si deve porfanare il sonno dei morti

Aka: The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue,

Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue,

Do Not Speak Ill of the Dead,

Don't Open the Window and many more.

Directed by: Jorge Grau, 1974

Italy / Spain, 95min

Distributed by: Anchor Bay Entertainment

Story:

An antique dealer plans on spending a quiet weekend in the countryside but finds his plans shattered when a young woman accidentally crashes into his motorbike at a gas station. Edna offers George a ride to his destination, but on the way plans are changed once again and he ends up driving her to her planned visit to her sister who lives in the countryside. The road there unfortunately takes them the wrong way and as they stop to question at a farmyard a stranger wanders up from the river and towards the car. A stranger who has been dead for a month!

Me:

Jorge Grau's excellent “Undead” (I'll be saying undead from here on, as nobody in the movie ever says the word zombie. But we all know that they are zombies don't we!) movie Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, with all of its many a.k.a. titles is a great piece of genre cinema, and one of my personal favourites of the genre. Following in the wake of the groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead, it's possibly one of the best entries into the genre brought to recognition by George A. Romero in 1969. Luckily it's one of those Italian-Spanish coproduction’s that relies more on story than gut munching effects of the later wave of the zombie genre. Not that those movies are bad, quite the opposite, the apocalyptic world of the flesh eater is a tantalising one to say the least.

Producer Edmondo Amati, (producer of such greats like Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin 1971, One on Top of the Other 1969, Alberto De Martino's The Antichrist 1974 and Antonio Margheriti's Cannibal Apocalypse 1980) decided that he must to get in on the zombie niche after Romero's movie became a hit, and in Spain he found his perfect candidate, the young Jorge Grau. Grau had a decent background in movies, not the horror genre per say, but a majority of his works had elements of the fantastic in them and had received an overall fine reception. Amati approached him with the question “Do you like Night of the Living Dead?” A movie that Grau indeed was a fan of, but as he was trying his hardest to get his Ceremonia sangrienta 1973 (aka The Legend of Blood Castle) off the ground since 1964 when he first heard of the Countess Bathory legend during a film festival in Czechoslovakia, the two could not collaborate on the project Amati was trying to pitch. Some years later after the completion of Ceremonia sangrienta, Amati approached Grau once again with the Sandro Continenza penned script, asking if he still liked Night of the Living Dead. Giving Grau a free hand to change the script and take the time he needed to make it more realistic, the two started their relationship, which would end up being Let Sleeping Corpses Lie.

Made in an age before the realistic gore exploded onto screens with movies like George A. Romero’s sequel Dawn of the Dead 1978, Andrea Bianchi’s Nights of Terror 1981, Marino Girolami's eclectic Cannibal/Zombie hybrid Zombie Holocaust 1980 and Lucio Fulci’s epic mother of all Euro Zombie flicks Zombi2 1979, Grau chooses, much like Romero to rely heavily on the realism and everyday drama of the people caught up in this strange new world rather than focusing on the specific gut munching and reigning chaos of a zombie infested landscape.

Let sleeping Corpses Lie is a pretty straight forward story, George [the fantastic Ray Lovelock] sets out for a weekend in the countryside, getting away fro the stress of inner-city life, which is made quite obvious during the start of the movie, the citizens walk aimlessly, stare blankly as they await busses, in the heavy trafficked core of modern civilization. People are seen wearing facemasks to avoid breathing in the fumes (which interestingly enough makes one think of the swine flu pandemic and fear that we are living with right now. It makes the movie contemporary even today) the further George gets out of town on his motorbike, cross cut with images of fuming industrial towers, urban decay, dead birds, the imagery lightens up and instead of the close-ups of decay, we start seeing wide shots of open country, fresh air and swaying fields. George is closing in on his safe haven, but when stopping at a petrol station to fill up his bike Edna accidentally crashes him into. Edna [star of Massimo Dallamano’s What Have You Done to Solange? 1972 and Luigi Cozzi’s top notch Giallo The Killer Must Kill Again 1975, and who also won the best actress award for her part in the movie at the 1974 Sitges film festival] offers to drive him to his destination. But they end up going the wrong way, into the middle of nowhere. George gets out at a nearby farm to ask for directions and two important storylines are introduced. The ecological cause of the forthcoming outbreak is established, which has George make a political statement. Don’t mess around with Mother Nature. No sooner has he said his than Edna has her first encounter with the undead, as Guthrie [the recently deceased Fernando Hilbeck], a local tramp tries to attacks her. Edna manages to evade him and runs up to the farm too, but George and the farmer can’t believe what Edna tells them, and laugh off the shocking experience she just had, as Guthrie couldn’t possibly have attacked her. He died almost a month ago.

A subplot with Edna’s sister Katie [Jeanine Mestre] is set in motion. Katie, a recovering drug addict has been forced out into the countryside by her husband Martin, [José Lifante] and Edna is on the way there to convince her to sign into a rehab programme and get of the drugs once and for all. But she just can’t seem to stay of the smack and as she secretly prepares to shoot up in the barn, she finds herself in the dark stood face to face with Guthrie! This encounter leads up to the death of Martin and it’s at this point of the movie that the real antagonist makes his entry, The Inspector portrayed with bravura by Arthur Kennedy. The Inspector quickly makes up his mind that these city folks, these damned hippies with their longhair and drugs, are the real culprits and that they have killed Martin, not the fantasy figure that Katie claims did. Now this in one cop who always gets his man. We can understand that from the way he moves, talks and acts. He isn’t afraid to go out on a limb to bust a case, and his loyal men are always standing by, ready to act on his every demand. Just watch as he lays pressure on Katie, trying to make her confess, not giving a damn that she just watched her husband be killed.

The movie moves forward as George and Edna try to figure out the whereabouts of Guthrie as both sisters now claim he is the real killer After an infant unexplainably in a fit of rage bites George at the nearby hospital he takes Dr Duffield [Vincente Vega] back to the farm where scientists explain the strange experiments they are conducting in the fields outside the village. Using ultrasonic radiation they are fighting off insects and bugs, who instead of eating crops go insane and kill each other instead when they hear the noises the strange machine makes. Really it’s a modified combine harvester, but it looks believable, and it gives a possible reason for the dead rising from their tombs.

George and Edna’s quest leads them to a crypt under the village church, and low and behold, they find him, the undead Guthrie. This is followed by a wonderfully long sequence where they battle their way out of the underground tomb chased by several more undead that Guthrie awakens by wiping blood on their foreheads. Once again their success in the horror narrative is their damnation in the drama narrative as the Inspector arriving at the cemetery finds his officer sent out to trail the suspects gutted and three burned corpses. Yeah, the undead now dead again.

Finally they all gather for a fantastic ending with several shocking events back at the local hospital and the movie comes to its climax with a bang to say the least. In some ways the ending is kind of silly, but at the same time it’s the ending we always wanted for Ben [Duane Jones] in the movie that inspired this one to start with, Night of the Living Dead. Even though the special effects by Gianetto De Rossi are quite restrained, I’m sure that in 1974 they where quite shocking, even the masterpiece from the other side of the Atlantic, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974 isn’t’ as visually spectacular as this movie is. And the movie is a wonderful time capsule of De Rossi’s realistic effect wizardry only a few years before he really took it to the limit in those splendid Italian genre pieces.

Symbolism and negative counterparts play a part in Grau’s movie. During the very start of the movie we see a fertility stature the symbol of life, a few moments later the camera focuses on a haunting painting which look like a strange blend of the iconic atomic bomb mushroom and a harrowed face of a dead person. Also in a wider perspective it’s somewhat ironic to start a movie that ends on such a down note with a symbol of life. The struggle for human survival is conquered not by the monsters, but by humans themselves. The Cops, who are supposed to be the good guys, turn out to be the bad guys. It’s all wonderfully sinister isn’t it, and one can only imagine the degree of social criticism Grau brought into the movie here, as the idea that the police force represents Franco and his dictatorship over the people of Spain isn’t too far from bay.

Much like The Exorcist 1973, Jaws 1975, and the recent Swedish hit Let the Right One In 2008, it’s the realism of the drama that makes the movie work. The movie is set in a real world and is actually a drama with horror themes and elements. Also i's the very ordinary characters who help drive the movie. George is a simple antique dealer who only wants’ to get to his rural house in the countryside to get away from the hectic tempo of the inner city. Edna is an everyday woman on her way to visit her sister who also lives in the countryside. There are no superpowers at play here, no secret army training, no suitcases full of weapons, just two common people in the middle of a terrifying setting. It’s the simple choices that they make that make them believable characters. Running for their lives, much like you and I would do.

The explanation for the undead coming back to life is also quite reasonable, and in many ways a critical standing point. The human element is to blame, not a freak of nature, but our own need to control our environment. An ecological theme that we are to blame for our own downfall much like in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Jean Rollin’s Grapes of Death 1978. And it works, because we can relate to it, much like we still relate to discussions concerning the environment still today. It’s easier to swallow than radiation from outer space isn’t it?

One of the more sophisticated tools used by Grau in Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, is that George is a sceptic, it’s not until we pass half of the movie that George actually believes that the dead have come back to life, and from then on starts fighting with his life at stake. This is a cunning device as we grow into identification with George as he grows into the believer, his scepticism is the same as ours, there can’t be monsters, but as he changes and develops as a character we go along on the ride with him and he bring us into the story. As he comes to terms of the reality of monsters, so do we.

All of these splendid storytelling tools are used to crate a magnificent movie that still almost forty years later makes it a really disturbing, believable, engaging and highly entertaining movie. A masterpiece of the horror genre to say the least. A definitive must see movie for any fan of early European Zombie Horror.

Finally a word on Giuliano Sorgini’s excellent soundtrack. (Sample above!) It’s honestly one of the most impressive scores conceived for an Italian genre movie because where it starts out as a rock funky jazz thing so typical of the Italian movie scene at the time, it quickly degenerates into a terrifying mixture of primitive growling and guttural sounds which are really disturbing and go perfectly with the images of the undead feasting on the bleeding flesh of mankind. Great stuff, perhaps not as proggish as Goblin or as melodic as the Fabio Frizzi and Alexander Blonkensteiner tunes of the later wave of gut-munchers, but definitely a disturbing soundtrack for a fascinating movie.

Image:

1.85:1 widescreen

Audio:

2.0 Dolby Digital Stereo

Extras:

This version is the limited edition tin boxed set so it has the following extras; A few TV spots, a couple of Radio Spots (which I’d love to have had on CD with the Score! That would have been an extra!) A galley of posters and stills, a novelty Toe Tag replica, a small replica of the German poster! (Surely they could have found a Spanish one, that image is beautiful!) And the best, an interview with Jorge Grau and a 24page booklet, which reproduces text by Nigel J. Burrell from the long out of print Midnight Media book on Let Sleeping Corpses Lie.

And if you really, really want to know… I have no. 1547 of the 5000 limited run.