I am pleased to find that another one of my past fan DVD projects will be rendered obsolete as the German label Camera Obscura have announced that they will be releasing the giallo Tropic of Cancer on DVD later this year.  It would be good if the artwork for the DVD is as good as the one Sutekh produced for my fan DVD (pictured below). 

Promo for the forthcoming Optimum DVD release of Lizard in a Woman's Skin (Lucio Fulci, 1971).  From what I have read online it looks to be a winner.

The American DVD label Code Red have announced that they are releasing the underrated giallo The Dead Are Alive, more commonly known as The Etruscan Kills Again, in July.  This is a welcome surprise given that Code Red's releases have been intermittent at best.  Previously only available as a grey market DVD release from Eurovista which had murky picture quality, print damage, missing footage and an authoring error, a German DVD release eventually surfaced as part of the Bryan Edgar Wallace collection.  This DVD had beautiful picture quality but sadly no English language track.  It was this DVD that I used as the video source for a fan DVD project, adding English audio from the Dutch VHS release.  It will be interesting to see how this release matches up with the German DVD (and my fan DVD).  Needless to say, I will be buying this one as soon as it is released.  Let's hope that Code Red decide to get Alex Cord to recount his memories of working on the film in a DVD featurette.  Maybe they can also get round to finally issuing their long planned DVD release of the backwoods horror gem Rituals (Peter Carter, 1977).

Source: Lovelockandload

Summer must be on its way as several of my recent posts have been about Euro-Cult inspired T-Shirts.  Actually, it has more to do with my doctoral research but it is nice to think that Summer is finally on the way.

On Friday I received The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1969) T-Shirt I ordered from Ellen over at www.giallo-tshirts.com.  I love the design and the print quality is very high.  The yellow (giallo!) bag it arrived in was a nice touch too.  Check out the site for the other great designs.  I look forward to Ellen's next design.

One of the chapters of my PhD thesis investigates t-shirt production in the Euro-Cult cinema fan community.  Having being inspired by Jonny's excellent T-Shirt designs over at the lovelockandload and the more unusual designs over at Giallo T-Shirts I have opened my own Spreadshirt shop in order to better understand the production process.   With some help from Jonny, I produced my first design: the logo for Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso (1975).  I have always wanted a T-Shirt inspired by this film and not having ever come across a decent one I decide to design my own.  I ordered the T-Shirt from Spreadshirt on Thursday and it arrived today.  I have ordered from Spreadshirt before and have always been impressed with their quality.  I chose to use the flock print method with gives the lettering a felt effect.  Though the design is somewhat basic it looks better than I had hoped.  If anyone reading this would like one you can order it through my Spreadshirt shop.  If all goes well, I will be uploading some more Euro-Cult inspired designs over the coming weeks.

Zarith, a member over at the Lovelockandload forums, posted that the French cult DVD label Neo Publishing, which specialised in releasing Italian cult film, are no longer.  It appears that the usual combination of greedy rights owners, consumer uncertainty over DVD and Blu-Ray and niche audiences has led to its downfall.  I only own one Neo Publishing release, their superior DVD release of Lucio Fulci's giallo Seven Notes in Black (1977).  I would have purchased their other releases of gialli but none of them were English friendly.  Apparently greedy rights owners prevented Neo Publishing from including English audio and/or subtitles.  Even though their releases were readily available in English friendly formats over in the US, I believe they would have attracted fans with their unique cover art and lavish presentation (as seen in some of the pictures below) had they been English friendly.  So yet another cult label goes.  I hope this trend stops soon but I have a feeling the current state of the DVD industry will lead to more specialist labels dying.  Neo Publishing's releases will most likely end up being collector's items so it is recommended that fans head over to Amazon.fr and pick up the reduced discs while stocks last.  I am trying to fight the urge to not purchase all of their gialli.

 

In April the Italian publisher Glittering Images will be releasing another volume in their lavishly produced Bizzare Sinema book series.  The good news is that this volume will be purely devoted to the giallo.  The book can be ordered direct from the Glittering Images website for €29.00 plus shipping.  The front cover image, taken from Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1964), looks superb.  As with their previous releases, text will be presented in Italian, English and French.

Optimum have recently announced that they will be giving Lucio Fulci's masterful giallo A Lizard in a Woman's Skin a UK DVD premiere on June 7.  The blurb states that this release has been directly mastered from the original negatives and therefore 'should' be the definitive DVD release of the film.  Fingers crossed that this one gets through the BBFC unscathed, I expect that the infamous vivisected dogs sequence won't cause any trouble.  The cover art looks great.

I don't get much time to produce to fan DVDs anymore but I recently completed work on a fan DVD of Ferdinando Baldi's giallo Nine Guests for a Crime (aka Nove ospiti per un delitto, 1977).  The video and audio was taken from the Italian Surf Video DVD.  As you can see in the attached screenshots, the picture quality of the Italian DVD is very good indeed.  One of the problems with the Italian DVD was that the 16x9 flag was not set correctly by the original author of the disc.  This meant that when played the image was squashed.  Using a tool such as Ifoedit it is possible to correct such an oversight with a simple few taps of a keyboard.  Subtitles were created by DjangoLi, the owner and master fan subtitler over at Italian Film Translation.  I also included the original Italian trailer from the Italian DVD.  The Italian Surf Video DVD can be purchased from Kult Video.

It was 1994.  I read John Martin's review of the Redemption Films VHS release of Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red,1975) in The Dark Side horror magazine.  I must have read it about ten times until I was curious enough to purchase the video from Tower Records in Birmingham City Centre.  I recall seeing it amongst a number of other Redemption VHS releases, all of them having the same sleeve template but each with unusual front cover images.  Once I got home I immediately watched the film.  I was drawn into the investigation; just what was it that Marc Daly (David Hemmings) saw, who could be the murderer?  Once the film ended I had to watch it again from the beginning, I had never seen anything quite like it before.  From there on I was hooked on gialli.  I started to seek out other Argento films, which was not an easy task in the pre-DVD era.  I am now researching Euro-Cult fandom, it has become a large part of my life.  And this all stems from reading a review of the Redemption Films VHS release.

Yesterday, it was announced that Redemption Films has gone into administration; a buyer is currently being sought in order to save the company.  Redemption Films were undoubtedly one of the key players in the rise of giallo fandom in the mind 1990s.  Their VHS releases, many in original aspect ratios and in original native language, enabled Euro-Cult fans to experience many rare films which they had only read about in fanzines.  Titles such as What Have They Done to Solange? (aka Cosa avete fatto a Solange?, Massimo Dallamano, 1972), Who Saw Her Die? (aka Chi l'ha vista morire?, Aldo Lado, 1972) and The Fifth Cord (aka Giornata nera per l'ariete, Luigi Bazzoni, 1971) were given releases, many of which fell foul of the strict video censorship regime present during the James Ferman era of the BBFC.  For those that wanted to find uncut versions of Redemption releases you would have to go to Holland or try your luck at some of the UK film fairs and find their 'Benelux' releases.  I was able to purchase an uncut copy of Mario Bava's Bay of Blood (aka Reazione a catena, 1971) at a Memorabilia event at Birmingham's NEC in the mid nineties. 

The unusual cover designs separated opinion.  Some fans liked the somewhat 'gothic' take yet others would have preferred the original cover art.  Some did not care as long as they kept on releasing rare gems.  Releasing niche titles meant low sales and little profit.  The little known giallo Crazy Desires of a Murderer (aka I vizi morbosi di una governante, Filippo Walter Ratti, 1971) reportedly only sold 150 copies.  Many fans hoped for Redemption to re-release their entire Euro-Cult catalogue on DVD but only a very few of their titles found their way on to the disc format.  The quality of many of their releases left a lot to be desired.  The last Redemption release I purchased was Killer's Moon (Alan Birkinshaw, 1978); a little-known British exploitationer set in the Lake District. 

Perhaps the giallo would not be as popular as it is if it were not for Redemption Films.  Marc Morris, who worked on many of Redemption VHS releases, now has his own label Nucleus Films and works closely with Nouveaux Pictures, Arrow Films and this generation's incarnation of Redemption, Shameless Screen Entertainment.  If Redemption fails to find a buyer and disappears into home video history like many other independent labels over the past few years it should never be forgotten forgiving Euro-Cult cinema the attention it deserved.