BLOOD AND ROSES German Import: Some Frame Grabs

Annette Stroyberg Vadim as Carmilla Karnstein in BLOOD AND ROSES.

Roger Vadim's BLOOD AND ROSES (... Et mourir de plaisir, 1961) was one of the most widely-seen European horror imports of its period, its much ballyhooed lesbian elements (which are very slight) and Vadim's reputation for introducing Brigitte Bardot to the Western world helping it to achieve the unthinkable: major studio distribution (Paramount) as well as mainstream crossover. (Mel Ferrer appeared on THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JOHNNY CARSON to promote it!) However, since then, it has become one of the most difficult Euro horror titles to find, particularly in its original Technirama 2.35:1 screen ratio. To date, the only US release of the film in the entire home video era has been its brief VHS distribution on Paramount's budget label, cropped and available only at the four-hour LP speed.

However, the film was recently issued on DVD for the first time anywhere in Germany under the title ... Und vor Lust zu Sterben by the German label Big Ben Movies. Here is a representative sampling of screen grabs to tide you over till VIDEO WATCHDOG tackles its in-depth review of the title. 

 

 

As you can see, the color is too hot, the color correction is variable (showing some green-yellow bias) and there is some vertical banding noise, and certain shots are much too dark - for instance, this subjective shot of the chateau's kitchen server Lisa, which I offer here first as it appears in the feature presentation and second as it appears in the German trailer also included:

So the presentation is far from ideal - yet it's the closest the film has come to a properly framed official release in more than 50 years. The disc offers a choice of French or German audio - both crackly - with optional English or German subtitles.

We obtained our copy from Diabolik DVD, who sold out their initial shipment of this 1200-copy limited edition the day they received it.

Eric Rohmer's Horror Movie

Though I have not often written about him or his particular importance to me, Eric Rohmer has always been one of my favorite filmmakers. His literary, beatific films about love and communication, infatuation and miscommunication, human nature and Mother Nature have always exercised an almost unique capacity to soothe me, while at the same time sharpening me to higher wavelengths of reception. He clears away the cobwebs for me - put it that way.

It was not until I did some exploring through Potemkine's new mammoth import box set of ERIC ROHMER L'INTEGRALE ("The Complete Eric Rohmer") that I became aware that this most urbane and least haunted of directors had also made a horror film. Quite early in his career, in 1954, he did what Curtis Harrington did almost a decade before him and made a rather ambitious short film based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe; Harrington chose "The Fall of the House of Usher," but Rohmer curiously chose Poe's story of amour fou, "Berenice." It is included among the (un-subtitled) supplements of the second disc in the Blu-ray/DVD combo set, which is devoted to his early short "La Boulangère de Monceau." Like that film, "Bérénice" runs slightly more than 22 minutes. It might be a contemporary telling, but something about it is not quite contemporary, suggesting more of a temporal halfway point between Poe and Rohmer. Let me walk you through it.

The film opens with a pitch black screen, a spoken title, and a scream - years before THE TINGLER pitched a scream in the dark.

Then the story begins with a telling exterior shot of the house where our narrator lives with his cousins. It's a day shot, but strikingly in tone with what Roger Corman later did with his Poe features. "The house is the monster..."  

Rohmer himself stars as Aegeus, and also narrates the film. He lives with his two cousins, Berenice (Teresa Gratia) and a younger female, who are introduced playing outside the house, chasing each other around a table arranged for an outdoor meal with a phonograph positioned nearby.

Aegeus' inner ramblings are interrupted by the girls, rapping at the window for his attention.

After examining them first in their mirrored reflection, he turns to face them - resulting in this striking composition. (The film was photographed by Jacques Rivette, himself destined for great things as a filmmaker.) Now only he and Berenice share the frame, albeit with his own divided image.

Aegeus joins his cousins outside for a snack and, as Berenice's lips part to expose her overbite, his more-than-passing interest is confessed with a jolting close-up.

When we next see Aegeus, the narration has taken him into his study, which Rivette photographs in bold darkness; he is pressed up against a bookshelf as if both transfixed and repelled by the light emanating from a single candle.

The sequence in the study continues, beautifully photographed in light only a step or two above total darkness. We see Aegeus slumped over in a chair, smoking and filling an ashtray with butts. At one point, the camera dips down to study the detail of a Persian carpet below - and Aegeus' hand drops suddenly into the dark composition in a contortion of anguish, then rises with the camera to show him still seated at the table, lost in a dolorous haze.

Hereafter, Aegeus looks almost petrified in his poses of abstracted romantic obsession. At another picnic outside, Berenice falls to the ground in an epileptic fit. Again, her front teeth show through her parted lips as she convulses. The camera studies her body.

The child cousin races over to Aegeus and shakes him out of his deep reverie to come help. He does, but when he reaches the side of Berenice, he does something quite unexpected.

Ignorning the convulsing Berenice completely, he raises the needle of the phonograph and lowers it onto a recording.

In a manic fit, he conducts the music with macabre joy. In time, Berenice recovers from her seizure and sits up.

He recalls another encounter with Berenice, seen here sitting in a solarium, when their relationship suddenly took a bold turn.

While checking herself in the indoor mirror before going for a walk, Berenice checks her teeth in her reflection. Suddenly, her cousin can no longer contain himself and he accosts her.

She laughs, taunting him, goading him on until he lowers his mouth...

 ... to kiss her teeth.

That night in his study, Aegeus is beset with fantasy images of Berenice that come to haunt him. In a remarkable trick shot, Rivette's camera pans left to drink in the full circumference of the room with a different Berenice laughing in every corner.

But then comes the inevitable day of her premature death, and Aegeus was led to her body as it lay in state in his study. Knowing that he will never see her misshapen smile again, he takes steps to preserve it.

Tragically, this entire final sequence is too dark to be properly appreciated. As Aegeus turns away from Berenice, he virtually vanishes from view, though a flash of something silver is briefly seen in the blackness.

A male relative finds Aegeus in the study, seated and looking fixed and catatonic. When he touches him, he finds his upraised hand stained with blood.

He sees various tools, including pliers, on the table. Aegeus reaches for a small silver box on the table, turns it upside down and spills its contents like so many dice. The pulled teeth of his beloved Berenice.

Rohmer's "Bérénice" is perhaps only slightly more than juvenalia, but it confirms that this sunniest of filmmakers had a dark side that he might have explored in his films just as well. What raises it above its humble origins are Rohmer's performance, which is quite adept and stylized in the manner of a silent film performance; the daring cinematography of Rivette with its occasional stark expressionistic flourishes and its courageous attempts to engage with the story's darkness; and the sick extremity of its love story, which had precedents in the work of Evgenii Bauer and Luís Buñuel but still seems at least a decade in advance of what was then acceptable in the horror genre.

RIP Our Friend, Ann Carter (1936-2014)

I was informed this afternoon by her daughter, Carol Newton Brown, that her mother, the former child actress Ann Carter passed away on January 27 after a long battle with cancer, at the age of 77. We all loved Ann particularly for her touching performance as little Amy Reed in the Val Lewton production THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944), co-directed by Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch, but she also appeared in smaller roles in other notable fantasy films, including Rene Clair's I MARRIED A WITCH (1942, recently issued on Blu-ray by Criterion - she plays the broom-riding daughter of Veronica Lake and Fredric March), Joseph Losey's THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR (1948) and Tay Garnett's A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT. She also appeared as an interviewee in the 2007 documentary VAL LEWTON - THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS.

Donna and I got to know Ann shortly after we accepted Tom Weaver's excellent interview with her, which appeared in VIDEO WATCHDOG 137 - which we published in two versions, the second being VIDEO WATCHDOG's second (and last to date) "Signature Edition." She had been diagnosed with cancer even then, in 2008 - she discussed it in the interview and insisted we publish a photo of her as she was, minus her hair, because she had won the upper hand through chemotherapy and it represented a victory for her. She was a spirited and dear lady, very appreciative of the essay I wrote about her performance for that issue, and we so enjoyed the contact we had with her.

When I made the announcement of her death this afternoon on my Facebook page, it prompted an sudden outpouring of respect and affection for Ann, some of whom exclaimed "My friend!" - quoting one of her indelible, heart-tugging lines from the Lewton film. And so she was - not only our friend but, for many of us, our representative as an imaginative child shown coming to grips for the first time with the vagaries of a strange and secretive adult world. It's a performance that, by its very nature and her (and her directors') extraordinary sensitivity, will never lose its relevance nor admirers.   

Indiegogo Campaign Ends Tonight!

Back on November 27 of last year, I announced on this blog that Donna and I were undertaking a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money we needed to finance the digitization of VIDEO WATCHDOG's entire back catalog. We made the mistake of launching this campaign during the holidays, when people are hopelessly distracted and tapped-out financially, yet we managed to obtain commitments for more than half of our original goal figure. As the hours counted down to our Christmas Eve Eve deadline, we obtained a financial commitment from what can only be called a philanthropist, who believed in our project and wanted to see it happen. With that portion of our needs covered, Donna and I determined that we should refuse to lose... and cancelled the original campaign, then immediately relocating it to Indiegogo with a more reasonable, adjusted goal. After 40 days, that campaign is drawing to a close tonight at approximately 3:00 a.m. this morning, US east coast time.

I'm mentioning this here for the sake of closure, but also to report to those of you who only get your news of us here that we have met our goal. The VIDEO WATCHDOG Digital Archive is going to happen! It will be a reality before the end of this year. However, there is still time to contribute to the campaign, which you really should consider for various reasons. Check the Perks. This is your opportunity to obtain the complete, interactive Digital Archive for less than half its eventual price. Or if you're a small business owner or advertising rep looking to target our audience economically, look into the Media Ad or Print + Media Ad perks for ways to multiply your advertising dollars. Or perhaps you're an independent filmmaker who would like to make our knowledgeable and influential readership more aware of your work - if so, take a look at our Now Showing Showcase Perk. These offers end later tonight.

If you haven't been following the campaign's updates, you've probably missed some important information - for example, that we're also going to be making THE VIDEO WATCHDOG BOOK available as a digital eBook. Finally, be aware too that if you contribute only $5 or more, your name will be forever emblazoned on our Digital Wall of Fame AND you might receive an after-campaign bonus! (There's more than 40 available)!

You know you don't care about football - head on over while you still can and check this out!

    

Something Weird's Mike Vraney (1957-2014)

Only two days into the New Year came the startling news that Mike Vraney, the founder of Something Weird Video, had died at the age of 56 after a long and private bout with lung cancer. The announcement was made on Facebook by his wife Lisa Petrucci, who has run the company with him since the mid-1990s and vows─we're glad to hear─that it will continue. Mike had only turned 56 a few days prior to his death, on December 29th─a remarkably short life for someone who made such an enormous difference.

Since founding Something Weird Video (named after Herschell Gordon Lewis' 1967 LSD movie) in 1990, Mike rescued literally hundreds of orphaned features from the brink of extinction and successfully rebranded them to make them attractive, accessible and even fashionable to new generations of fans. It might never have happened if he hadn't broken his foot while skateboarding in 1981. To help him pass the time while recuperating, he asked a friend who knew about such newfangled contraptions if he might set him up with a VHS player and some weird movies from his collection. Mike, who had been a teenage theater projectionist before managing various west coast punk bands  (including The Dead Kennedys), immersed himself in the new video subculture and, as he watched, the gears began to turn.

His first eureka was realizing that tapes could be copied and sold, which he did for awhile before incorporating. When Michael J. Weldon's book THE PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM appeared in 1983, it presented him with a kind of road map, one that he was able to fine-tune with the assistance of Bill Landis' SLEAZOID EXPRESS and old copies of ADAM FILM WORLD. He was hardly alone in his interest and knew it─everyone who bought Weldon's book suddenly had 500 new films they wanted to see─but Mike didn't just want to see them; he wanted to be the guy who found and provided them. It  turned out to be a job for which he was ideally positioned.

Producer David F. Friedman─by his own admission the last of a chain of exploitation movie con men known as "The 40 Thieves"─dubbed Vraney "the 41st thief" because he had found the forgotten warehouses where orphaned 35mm prints had gone to die and, in ways best left for others to tell in detail, came into their possession. Sometimes these warehouses were literally on the eve of closure, their entire unclaimed inventory destined for incineration. True, they weren't exactly Mike's property to claim but, thanks to his efforts, they survived. Mike sometimes came into possession of multiple prints and meticulously assembled the best reels from each, adding back whenever possible the footage some projectionists of generations past had snipped out for their own personal reels. If a rightful owner's whereabouts were known, they were contacted─or they contacted him. Either way, men and women who considered themselves out of the film business for decades suddenly found themselves in league with a laid-back but tireless young business partner who made their presumed-dead product vital again. Sometimes, as a special reward, they would give him the keys to the kingdom─the personal vaults where they kept their original negatives, including the negatives of some desired titles that eluded capture elsewhere─as well as introductions to their surviving colleagues. Between this and a Midas touch at garage sales, a catalogue of more than 2,500 titles resulted. To be considered the 41st Thief was probably the greatest accolade Mike ever desired, but considering how many films he saved from extinction, it would not be overstating things to call him "the Schindler of 42nd Street."

Mike Vraney raised the dead. Because of him, a wealth of exploitation cinema mostly ranging from the 1930s through the 1970s─movies that were made to play for one or two weeks and then be forgotten─could be examined with sustained vision for the first time. He made them available to fans in search of fun, and very likely some perverts in search of kicks, but his rescues also rewrote film history. Lost films were found. Films shown only regionally within the United States suddenly became available to an international following. "Adults Only" features and featurettes made for wartime/postwar audiences now mostly dead became within reach of their children, grandchildren and sociology majors. Other labels had first introduced the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Michael Findlay to home video, but Something Weird (named after one of H.G. Lewis' films) went for their deep cuts, enabling historians to look past their best-known work to research and chronicle their achievements in toto. As a result, the films tell us about more than just themselves; they tell us things about the periods in which they were made that might otherwise have been lost to posterity.

We're not just talking about SCREAM OF THE BUTTERFLY, THE FAT BLACK PUSSYCAT and PSYCHED BY THE 4-D WITCH; we're also talking about Brian De Palma's MURDER A LA MOD, Abel Gance's END OF THE WORLD, George A. Romero's THERE'S ALWAYS VANILLA, Tony Anthony's COMETOGETHER (a movie with an Apple Records soundtrack!), mondo films like ECCO and IT'S A SICK SICK SICK SICK WORLD, the latter-day smut of Edward D. Wood, Jr., the elusive English dubs of Ernst Hofbauer sex-ed movies from Munich, and the unsuspected early acting gigs of people like Rue McLanahan, Grayson Hall and Richard B. Schull.

June Roberts - the ultimate Something Weird girl - as seen in Doris Wishman's MY BROTHER'S WIFE.

Likewise, there are literally hundreds of filmmakers who owe most or all of their contemporary audience to Something Weird Video: Michael & Roberta Findlay, José Mojica Marins, Joseph W. Sarno, Doris Wishman, William Grefé, Armando Bo, Joseph P. Mawra, José Prieto, Lee Frost, Brad F. Grinter, Byron Mabe, Sande N. Johnsen, William Rotsler, Dale Berry and Bethel Buckalew, to name a few─many of whom went on to reclaim their work and see it released on other labels here and abroad. There are also numerous actors and personalities who might have been forgotten without the renewed (or broadened) availability of their work: Audrey Campbell, Uschi Digart, Isabel Sarli, "Julian Marsh" and "Anna Riva", June Roberts, Darlene Bennett, Marsha Jordan, Stacey Walker, Sharon Kelly, Rene Bond, Artimidia Grillet, not to mention the immortal Bettie Page, whose only feature film appearances─TEASERAMA and VARIETEASE, both in color─were considered lost until they emerged through Something Weird Video.

It was Something Weird that recovered such theretofore "lost" horror films as THE HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND (and its alternate cut IT'S HOT IN PARADISE), Andy Milligan's SEEDS OF SIN, TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN (the original Swedish film that was recut into INVASION OF THE ANIMAL PEOPLE here in the States), BLOODY PIT OF HORROR, the Joseph Green recut of Tetusji Takechi's 1964 version of DAYDREAM, THE BEAST THAT KILLED WOMEN, STING OF DEATH, DRACULA THE DIRTY OLD MAN, GUESS WHAT HAPPENED TO COUNT DRACULA, LOVE GODDESSES OF BLOOD ISLAND, THE CURIOUS DR. HUMPP, KISS ME QUICK, the Boris Karloff series THE VEIL, the Lon Chaney Jr. series 13 DEMON STREET, the OLGA films and Michael Findlay's FLESH trilogy. This is by no means a complete list.

Arguably, Something Weird's most important salvage has been nearly all of what is known about that group of films called "roughies," a black-and-white repository for postwar sexual aggression that, once revealed, demonstrated unsuspected ties to 1930's and '40s film serials, 1950s and '60s men's magazines, an occasional parallel to 1960s gore cinema, and a clear predecessor to the bolder horror cinema that followed in the 1970's. Likewise, their collection of "Roadshow Rarities"─vintage exploitation films posing as sex, race and drug education─offers a valuable index of provincial America's ignorance about such matters as recently as just before the arrival of television, and thanks to Vraney's excavations, a fairly complete history of Florida-based filmmaking now stands to be written. As a teens and early twenties, Vraney had worked as a drive-in and porn theater projectionist and never lost his love for the arcana of his profession; Something Weird consequently packaged more volumes of drive-in intermission and trailer arcana than any other label, something for which I remain particularly grateful.

In addition to releasing 2,500+ titles on VHS and DVD-R, Mike produced REEL WILD CINEMA with host Sandra Bernhard for cable television, documentary features (the most recent being 2013's THAT'S SEXPLOITATION, which I covered recently here), and he was also an associate producer on Lewis' one-shot return to active filmmaking, BLOOD FEAST 2: ALL U CAN EAT (2002). Image Entertainment has licensed dozens of SWV titles for release on DVD and Blu-ray and, for several years now, the cable provider Comcast offers a Something Weird On Demand channel.

I didn't know Mike well and, to be perfectly honest, our relationship was not always smooth. In the early years of VIDEO WATCHDOG, he literally overwhelmed me with product and he complained when our coverage didn't reflect this - it didn't matter to him that I had a responsibility to be fair and balanced to all our suppliers. In retrospect, I understand his intentions perfectly; he was fighting for his babies, and what he was sending out was all interesting stuff. It all deserved coverage, and I could have easily devoted an entire magazine to the wonders he was uncovering. I remember asking Mike why he kept releasing stuff in such volume, which made it impossible to keep up with; he told me that a lot of people advised him to hold some things back for a rainy day, but (he said, in that smooth and self-amused voice of his) "I figure, no... just put it all out there now" - his feeling being that he was offering a variety of things and they all had their corners of fandom to satisfy, that every title he was putting out might be somebody's holy grail and he didn't see the sense in making anyone wait for it. Their money was in hand now. Looking back, I can't say for sure that he was wrong.

The only time we met was at the 1994 Chiller Theater convention. Our in-person rapport turned out to be even more comically awkward than our long distance one - we kept bumping into each other at inconvenient moments and had a knack for saying things to each other that got misinterpreted. But whenever Mike unearthed something radically wonderful or unsuspected, I always got on the phone right away to let him know it was appreciated or, in later years - after he decided to hang back and manage his son's punk rock band - fired off an email to him via Lisa. Likewise, when he assembled that singularly wonderful, combination art object-grab bag-Halloween history lesson called MONSTERS CRASH THE PAJAMA PARTY SPOOK SHOW SPECTACULAR, we devoted a feature article and interview (written by Bill Cooke) praising it in VIDEO WATCHDOG #81. That piece seemed to smooth over all the little bumps Mike and I had over the previous years on our shared highway. I remember him telling me what a kick he got out of certain provocative things he'd said that I'd left in (like his reference to "some joker at Disney," which he said some other editors might have cut). And he was particularly pleased that we had opened the interview by showing him surrounded by cans of film. "Because that's what it's all about, those reels of film," he said. "People forget that."

But they shouldn't, and people would also do well to remember Mike Vraney, a true home video pioneer who used his homegrown business to make a real and measurable global difference in the world of cinema. Thanks to him, movie reviewers, critics and historians have much more to explore, process and write about those worlds we almost lost, and the rest of us have an almost inexhaustible wealth of twisted cinema to enjoy.    

Finally, MAN OF STEEL

Henry Cavill as the MAN OF STEEL.

I didn't care for the way it looked from afar, so I'd put off seeing Zack Snyder's MAN OF STEEL till this evening. Then it hit me: this thing's a reality, it is going to add to or detract from a history you care about; like it or not, I needed my knowledge of it.

As sometimes happens when expectations are low, I liked it more than I expected I would. An infinite improvement on the dire SUPERMAN RETURNS, appreciably more involving than the last two Reeve pictures and, in my books anyway, a cocktail-strength antidote to those things I've never liked about the first two. In some ways, MAN OF STEEL is not entirely a Superman movie because it does away with everything that has always rooted this character and his adventures in fantasy: Smallville, Metropolis, the bright costume, his automatic acceptance on planet Earth, the meaning of the S on his costume, the very makeup of his DNA, his traditional wink-wink relationship with Lois Lane - even, for a large part of the film, any utterance of his name. But all of those changes, to me, represent improvements in carpentry that's been shoddy and sentimentally forgiven for much too long. What makes a character classic is its ability to continually reflect some truth about real life, and this is the first evidence I've seen that there is something about the character of Superman that isn't hopelessly stuck in a more naïve sense of ourselves and our world. It builds upon Richard Lester's SUPERMAN II in that it's not an escapist adventure. This is also, to a degree, what's still wrong with it.

Its reach for realism extends to shakycam shots and camera flares. There is far too much "incidental damage" - I'm sickened by the way we've continued to stroke our 9/11 scars with fetishized images of toppling buildings and other urban terrors (it's what CGI is best at doing, along with accelerating actions to preposterous speeds) - but I appreciated the emotional conflicts the well-considered story by David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan heaped upon Clark, Zod, and the people of Earth as well. It may be the most agonizingly heroic of all the Superman films, by which I mean he earns his victory (no spoiler there) at great personal cost. What impressed me is that the film had the courage to say that he could only win earthly victory by committing what could be termed an Original Sin. I wouldn't feel this way unless Henry Cavill had filled his cape with flying colors.

It will be interesting to see what direction might be taken by the sequel, which is perfectly set up to bring Superman face-to-face with an equally pressing global threat: the death of print. 

Riz Ortolani (1926- 2014)

RIP to the great and prolific Italian film composer Riziero "Riz" Ortolani, who has passed away at the age of 87. Best-known for his Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated hit song "More" (written for MONDO CANE), Ortolani was also responsible for scoring such films as Dino Risi's IL SORPASSO (coming soon from Criterion); the Karl May western OLD SHATTERHAND; Antonio Margheriti's HORROR CASTLE aka THE VIRGIN OF NUREMBERG, CASTLE OF BLOOD and its remake WEB OF THE SPIDER, and SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE; Ruggero Deodato's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST; Umberto Lenzi's SO SWEET... SO DEADLY; Cavara and Jacopetti's AFRICA ADDIO and GOODBYE UNCLE TOM; Lucio Fulci's ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER and DON'T TORTURE THE DUCKLING, and many, many more. Among his many admirers is Quentin Tarantino who sampled his music in both KILL BILL volumes as well as in DJANGO UNCHAINED. This link will lead you to one of his lushest orchestrations, worthy of Morricone.