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Image Entertainment has been creeping around the cult bins, and has come up with a plethora of titles. I’m going to choose one from Italy, one from England, and one from the USA. First – Aenigma, by Lucio Fulci. Speaking of snails, the best scene has a hapless damsel smothered by a batallion of them in graphic fashion. But outside of a few such choice scenes, the movie betrays Fulci’s weaknesses with celluloid rather than his strengths. Narrative logic is absent for the most part, and I can just hear the fans yowling “But it’s like a dream…a nightmare”. Yeah, yeah. That’s the last refuge of a mediocre filmmaker. I know a nightmare when I see one being replicated. The nightmare must have been when he tried to explain the plot to his backers. Then there’s the matter of casting. In these Italian fright-flickers casting faces is vitally important since the acting tends to be stilted and the dubbing atrocious, and Lucio scored poorly on this account. In Dario Argento’s favor, he usually does quite well in the casting department, so that even when his directing brings little out of the actors, they tend to carry their roles on the strength of their personalities and looks. This one’s for fanatics only.

Also from Image is The Flesh and the Fiends from 1960, another rewriting of that page of history featuring Burke and Hair, the graverobbing pair. Done best with Karloff, Lugosi and Henry Daniel in 1944’s The Body Snatcher for Val Lewton, this one is equally literate, featuring Peter Cushing in the Daniel role, and Donald Pleasence and Dermot Walsh in the Burke and Hair roles, and I have to believe either they, or director John Gilling, had studied Disney’s Pinocchio, because the corpse-delivering duo were replicating Honest John and Gideon from the 1940 cartoon to a ‘T’. The DVD cover says ‘More Fearsome than Frankenstein…More Demonic than Dracula.’ Actually it’s neither, but it is a handsome, well-crafted and sturdily directed B&W anamorphic period piece. And what’s more, there are two versions co-existing peacefully on the disc. The “Continental version” is about the same length, but in a few shots, where sleazy nightlife types are sauntering around, in this raunchier version the exact same action is repeated, except that now there’s a totally nude woman wandering in and out of the crowd. It’s really quite funny to see it and realize that she serves no purpose in the scene whatsoever – she relates to no one as she somnambulistically passes through – except to appease the prurient. The print material is terrific. A young, feisty Billie Whitelaw has a meaty secondary role. We interviewed her in FIR back in issue .

Image Entertainment has a number of ‘Collections’ which they periodically contribute to: Their distribution deal with Something Weird Video has yielded a few real gems, not to mention quite a few real duds, but a remarkable find is a double disc set, The Veil, an entire tv series from the 50s hosted by and starring (to lesser and greater degrees) Boris Karloff, which never saw the light of day. The prints are pristine, and the hour stories are engaging enough to make one wonder why the series never aired. Karloff stars in only one episode, Food on the Table, playing a scheming sea captain, and he acquits himself admirably, infusing the characterization with ample shading. An added bonus is two episodes of an ill-fated Swedish tv series hosted by Lon Chaney Jr. called 13 Demon Street. Conceived by Curt Siodmak, who recently passed away, well into his 90s, I recall him telling me what a childish drunk Chaney was, not balancing his appraisal with any positive traits. Yet here he was enlisting the aging horror star’s name to get a bargain basement series off the ground (which didn’t work). I found parts of the half hour episodes appealingly European in their look.

Image Entertainment has a number of ‘Collections’ which they periodically contribute to: Their distribution deal with Something Weird Video has yielded a few real gems, not to mention quite a few real duds, but a remarkable find is a double disc set, The Veil, an entire tv series from the 50s hosted by and starring (to lesser and greater degrees) Boris Karloff, which never saw the light of day. The prints are pristine, and the hour stories are engaging enough to make one wonder why the series never aired. Karloff stars in only one episode, Food on the Table, playing a scheming sea captain, and he acquits himself admirably, infusing the characterization with ample shading. An added bonus is two episodes of an ill-fated Swedish tv series hosted by Lon Chaney Jr. called 13 Demon Street. Conceived by Curt Siodmak, who recently passed away, well into his 90s, I recall him telling me what a childish drunk Chaney was, not balancing his appraisal with any positive traits. Yet here he was enlisting the aging horror star’s name to get a bargain basement series off the ground (which didn’t work). I found parts of the half hour episodes appealingly European in their look.

And from Image’s ‘Euroshock Collection’ comes Doomwatch, a grim little affair starring Ian Bannen, with thesp contributions from Judy Geeson and George Sanders. It belongs in a sub-division of the horror genre that should be called ‘Apocalyptic Cinema’, along with other chilling cautionary tales like The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Anchor Bay), On the Beach (MGM Home Video), Last Night (Universal Home Video), etc. Close off shore near a small island, drums of toxic waste mix with other elements and corrupt the unknowing inhabitants. The 1972 feature was directed by Peter Sasdy, and originated neither with Hammer nor Richard Gordon, so it fell between the cracks. But it’s a serious effort deserving to be seen. If you want to go to extremes with this one, make it part of an ‘Acromegle Triple Bill’. Show it with Rondo Hatton’s The Brute Man, and the laser disc of Jack Arnold’s Tarantula.

Image has issued two documentaries on horror maestros, one on Mario Bava, the other on Dario Argento. I’ve only seen the Bava doc, and while I like some of the late director’s work, and am very tepid about the rest, I sat back and waited hopefully to be convinced by the documentary’s campaign in his behalf. Unfortunately I wasn’t. The testimonials either paint him as a filmmaker whose parts were superior to the whole – which I believe to be the case – or they overpraise him as being on a level with Hitchcock, which undermined my willing suspension of disbelief.

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Anchor Bay is a rich repository of horror genre titles. Their Halloween trick or treat bag is overflowing with Fulcis, Argentos, and other dredged up delicacies of the dark. Two Fulci opuses I viewed were The Black Cat and The Beyond.

The Italians love the slow build, cutting from face to face, eyes to eyes, holding, holding, music building. Bava did it, and sometimes it was inexorable, and not in the good sense. Argento does it better. Fulci did it, too – but the content behind the montages has too little weight, and the result is viewer distraction. Did anyone do it right? Oh, yeah: fellow countryman Sergio Leone. Just right. Brilliant.

The Black Cat actually isn’t gory enough, and that’s not to say that I need gore to satisfy me on a horror film; it’s just that Poe’s tale has been mutated and regurgitated so often, and so memorably, that Fulci really needed to knock my socks off to convince me that the story needed telling yet again. What I got was an impressively budgeted suspence thriller that never stood my hair on end. The cinematography is lush and detailed, the frame well-filled. Some of Donnagio’s music does its job effectively. The cat was impressive, as cats go. Mimsy Farmer, one of two English language ‘names’, is only adequate, and keeps her clothes on. Patrick McNee sounds distractingly like Torin Thatcher from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and grows wearisome. Still, it’s a lovely pressing with minor negative wear, and if you’re a Fulci or Italian horror devotee, well then you’ll probably have to grab it. I simply didn’t come away from the film with more than a respectful nod to the director’s visual skill.

Whereas The Beyond, lovingly packaged in one of those large limited edition tins, is the best Fulci I’ve seen to date, and a good print. This one falls into his zombie mode, with which he seems most comfortable, delivering fine pacing, eerie nuance, and a third act which takes us on an creepy journey we were not expecting. The very ending is particularly powerful, and will long remain in your memory. I also liked parts of the score a great deal. Xtras include a rare interview with Fulci, commentary by stars David Warbeck and Catriona MacColl, six international poster replicas, and a 48 page full-color souvenir booklet. Take my word for it, this is one for the collection.

Anchor has started double billing their titles, such as Argento’s Phenomena and Inferno. If you don’t have them yet, that’s probably the way to go. However, their deluxe Suspiria stands by itself. For better or worse, Argento’s voyeuristic giallo has gained a reputation up there in the stratosphere with the classics of the genre. It is widely considered the best horror film ever to come out of Italy. I’m not saying everyone, or even I, feels that way – Black Sunday afficionados would defend their beloved puncture-faced Barbara Steele vehicle to the death. But Suspiria is on many top ten lists. It comes in an extra fat, 3-disc limited edition, including an all-new 52-minute documentary, and the original Goblin soundtrack on CD. The score is hot, and Argento worked with the group several times. (The CD alone, I’m told, is worth twenty bucks.) His use of Technicolor is marvelous. There are set pieces that undeniably pass over from grand guignol to art. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to shell out the greenbacks for this one.

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A&E has released a four-disc set, ‘The Complete Hammer House of Horror.’ Another TV series, this one did see the light of day in 1980, 13 (an appropriate number) hour slot shows geared toward horror and suspence. And the quality, as of most DVDs emanating from A&E, is magnificent, and more importantly the shows are great fun.

Of course I pulled up ‘The Silent Scream’ first, a title on Volume 3, because it starred Peter Cushing, and was I delighted to discover, co-starring with him, a young, bizarre-looking Brian Cox, who I’d only discovered as the original Hannibal Lektor in Manhunter, and who FIR interviewed (check out the interview page). Cox is real weird (in a good way), Cushing is particularly menacing, and there are twists galore.

Another installment, ‘The Carpathian Eagle’, though less intricate, was no less bleak. Remember Hitchcock’s stand-up epilogues on his tv series, where he had to assure us that the murderers were caught? None of those American TV standards apply here. I haven’t watched them all, but so far there are no happy endings…unless you’re the type of viewer who rooted for Fu Manchu to win, in which case I suspect many more of these will be right up your alley.

The scripts are good, with amusing little raunchy nuances. The episodes could use a bit of pruning, but literally only a bit…maybe a minute or two per show. I like this boxed set a lot. It would make a terrific gift for a lover of either horror or TV.

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