I had been meaning to purchase the Italian DVD of Illustrious Corpses (Cadaveri Eccellenti) for some time only to recently find that it had gone out print. Typical! After months of searching a copy finally showed up on eBay.it; a great resource for those hard to find Italian DVDs and VHS. As the DVD has no English options I was keen to build a fan DVD of this forgotten film. DjangoLi of the lovelockandload forum managed to locate a subtitle file online and was kind enough to make it available for download. Jim Quigley, who built the English subtitles, certainly deserves a pat on the back as this is a dialogue heavy film and it must have took an age to subtitle.

The DVD did not take long to build and was my first attempt at making a dual layer DVD. I also used my new favourite software, VirtualDubMod, to crop and 16x9 enhance the thirty minute extra feature "An interview with Franceso Rosi". Even though the extra feature does not have any English options I still thought that it would be worthy of inclusion. Again, I created a motion menu and used some of the shots of the "Illustrious Corpses" as the background pictures for the other menus. They look quite effective. Below is a video of the motion menu and some some screenshots taken from my fan DVD:

I have not had time to watch the film yet but even though it is little discussed it is one that is highly regarded by those who have seen it. It is also quite hard to classify: is it a giallo, a poliziesco or an Arthouse film? From what I have seen while building the DVD it bears some similarities to Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion (1970), The Masters (1975) and some of the other Italian political thrillers from this period. Plot wise the film is about a detective who is investigating the murders of several respected judges only to find that the Italian Communist Party are involved. Hopefully I will get round to watching it over the next few weeks.

Next up will be a16x9 version of Death in Haiti (aka Tropic of Cancer, 1972) using the colourful widescreen Eire VHS as the source. I had a tinker around with the video in VirtualDubMod and was quite impressed with the results. I might also have a few surprises up my sleeve over the coming month. Stay tuned!