Flavours of the Month: May 2012...

LOOKS:

Shameless Screen Entertainment - "Phantom of Death", "Who Saw Her Die?", and "The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh" - follow the links for full DVD reviews.

Mad Men Seasons 2 through 4 - TV time, and the small hours of the morning as temptation took over, was entirely replaced for a couple of weeks with an obsessive catch-up with Don Draper and the gang. Next up, season five.

Blue Velvet (Blu-Ray) - preposterously, the release in the UK does NOT feature the 52 minutes of newly discovered deleted scenes! Fortunately, the American release is Region FREE on Blu-Ray, so I imported it. For any fan of Lynch's darkly twisted vision of the hell that lies beneath the white picket fences of Americana, it's well worth investing in.

The Real Ghostbusters: Season 1 - I used to adore this show as a child, so having spotted this on the cheap, I decided I'd sprinkle a daily dose of nostalgia into this month.

The Inbetweeners Movie (Blu-Ray)

Click "READ MORE" below for this months sounds, vibes, and flavours...

Pentuple Bill Mini Musings: Guns, Killer Laundry, Grind, Nightmares, and Badlands...

Nude Nuns With Big Guns:
What's it about?
If you can't figure it out from the title, then you've little hope for the future.
Who would I recognise in it?
Nobody, unless you've seen Run! Bitch Run!
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
If flattery is the highest form of compliment, then Robert Rodriguez must be blushing, because Guzman & Co have unrepentently ripped-off his ouvre - particularly Grindhouse (even the music from the opening sequence is highly influenced/half-inched from RR's ode to the sleaze flicks of 42nd Street). The presentation is much improved over Guzman's previous flick, the aforementioned Run! Bitch Run! (which was highly indebted to The Last House on the Left, and I Spit On Your Grave), although it too is utterly indebted to the work of others - but even still, for a low budget faux-grindhouse flick such as this mean-spirited outing, it's put together well enough to not distract from the onslaught of bared flesh and brandished firearms. The script is a bit thin (unsurprisingly, as you might imagine), yet heftier than RBR's, and the pacing is sometimes a bit slow, but it certainly passes the Ronseal test - it does exactly what it says on the tin ... it's just a shame that Joseph Guzman, Robert James Hayes II, and company, are seemingly such unashamed rip-off merchants in the process. Alright.

Click "READ MORE" below for killer laundry machines, movie documentaries, and two crazy kids on the run from the law.

The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (Sergio Martino, 1971) DVD Review

Find more Shameless Screen Entertainment DVD reviews here.

One of Sergio (The Mountain of the Cannibal God, Torso) Martino's earliest films, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh exhibits a confident grasp of tension-building and exploitable elements, which would be seen just as strongly in his later work (such as the equally superb Torso aka Carnal Violence). This prime example of the greatest the giallo genre has to offer, partly inspired by Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955), follows Julie Wardh (screen siren Edwige Fenech, Strip Nude For Your Killer), the wife of an American diplomat who has been left stifled and unfulfilled by her marriage, and resorts to fantasising about her fiery relationship with the sexually aggressive Jean (Ivan Rassimov, Eaten Alive), who she once again comes face-to-face with when she arrives in beautiful Vienna.

Similar to Torso, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh kicks off with a first half that is fuelled by frequent sex and violence, with a second half that focuses on the psychological torture of the female protagonist. Ninety seconds into the film and you've already been confronted by bare flesh and a slashing straight razor – the tool of choice for the so-called 'Sex Fiend' killer who is on the loose. During this first half, there's more bared arses and breasts than you can shake a stick at (Martino deliberately shot much of this content so the conservative Italian film censors would have something to edit out – content which has returned for this DVD release, the first-ever in the UK) – and then by ten minutes in we've had four nude scenes.

 

Click "READ MORE" below for the rest of the review, as well as more screenshots.

Who Saw Her Die? (Aldo Lado, 1972) DVD Review

Find more Shameless Screen Entertainment DVD reviews here.

Opening in the snowy hills of France in 1968, it's not long before Ennio Morricone's eerily memorable score seeps into the film (children singing the title like a nursery rhyme), as we are plunged behind the veil of a killer – a twisted psychopath whose modus operandi relates to red-haired girls – in one of a series of effectively orchestrated scenes of stalking. At these times, and indeed throughout the film, Aldo (Night Train Murders) Lado's tight direction, Franco (Amityville 2) Di Giacomo's gorgeous cinematography, Morricone's score, and Angelo Curi's skilled editing, combine to create a sinister journey through the echoing waterways, canals, stairways, rooftops, and breath-taking architecture of Venice.

Pre-dating the much more widely recognised Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), which tread similar ground a year later, Who Saw Her Die? details the trauma suffered by sculptor Franco (a rail-thin George Lazenby) and his estranged wife Elizabeth, after their red-haired daughter Roberta is taken by the veiled woman in black and found dead in the waters of a fruit market. However, Massimo D'Avack and Francesco Barilli's script (with help from Aldo Lado and Ruediger Von Spihes) opts to pay more attention – in true giallo fashion – to a civilian's (Franco) quest to find the killer when an ineffective police force can't help (you'll find similar narrative approaches in the likes of Dario Argento's The Bird With The Crystal Plumage).

 

Click "READ MORE" below to continue the review and for more screenshots.

"Gaia: Greek Goddess of Earth" wins award!

"Gaia: Greek Goddess of Earth" - an alternate version of one of the films found in the "Gaia & Genesis" Environmental Ethics DVD - has won an Australasian Best Environmental Film Award. From a field of 85 entrants, our film (Joe Jenkins of Ethics Online wrote the script and directed, while I was in charge of the camera work and editing) was chosen as the winner by the Australian Film Critics Association.

It screened last night (May 12th 2012) at the Campfire Film Festival in Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia. The film is also in general competition at the festival, and is one of the finalists.

Many thanks to Campfire for this award!