La Vie Post-DV

As my fellow DV writer Nekoneko put it: “the end of an era”. Delirium Vault is ceasing to be. Us writers were informed a couple of weeks ago, allowing us time to transfer our blog posts to a new address. This is mine. The links to the others can be found in my links section.

I used to maintain this blog for posts about my writing life, but I’ll move those elsewhere. The Avenue has moved here – odd really, moving a street, but there you go. Posts will appear on a regular basis again as of early August. There’s one more planned for July.
The course book I was asked to write has taken up all of my free time these past months, but my first draft had to be finished by 22 July… and I managed to save the final chapter on 22 July at 11.29pm.

Now who doesn’t like a deadline, eh?

Another announcement

And so – after a long period of recovering from illness(es) – we return to Delirium, with a couple of films already viewed and a pile of dvds still waiting for their chance in the limelight. The Avenue returns in a couple of days…

Can’t reach DV’s frontpage?

There’s an occasional problem with the frontpage of Delirium Vault and apparently it has reared its ugly head again. What’s there to say apart from sorry? If you have bookmarked a forum page or one of our pages is still in your cache memory, you can access the site from that link. I hope our tech department will find a way to fix it. In the meantime, I’ve decided to cancel my post planned for this weekend until the site runs smoothly again.

We hope you understand…

Nightmare Castle released in May

Welcome to the news headquarters of DV. That a wonderful dvd release of Nightmare Castle was coming up, may not be news to you: this was already mentioned months ago. But recently a release date has been announced: fans of gothic Italian movies should put May 19 2009 in their diaries.

Gothic horror fans will be delighted to know that Severin Films will be giving the first official DVD release to the 1965 Barbara Steele chiller NIGHTMARE CASTLE / THE FACELESS MONSTER (original title: Amanti d’oltretomba, or “Lovers Beyond The Tomb”).
The original negative has recently been discovered in a Rome storage vault and apparently in good condition. Severin will be doing a new HD transfer in its original aspect ratio, so all those super cheap bootleg DVDs taken from 10th generation TV prints can now be discarded forever.
The film was directed by Mario Caiano, and Severin recently shot a great interview with the 75 year old master at his home just outside of Rome. NIGHTMARE CASTLE also showcases the very first horror score by the legendary Ennio Morricone, and the beautiful black & white cinematography comes courtesy of Enzo Barboni.
This uncut, uncensored and unsung hit of Italian horror history will have a DVD street date to be announced in the near future. (source: dvd drive-in)

In these times of economic crisis with one small company after another closing the books this morsel of good news is more than welcome.

Another recent addition to this upcoming release: Barbara Steele has been interviewed for the dvd extras.

Criterion releases Kurosawa and Vampyr

I guess that there’s no need for me to introduce you to the Criterion Collection. Albeit not especially cheap, these DVDs are so full of extras it would be best to describe them as the definitive edition of the movie, sometimes even for DVDs you wouldn’t expect to get such a gigantic release. Criterion are having a busy month, already they have released Jacques Tati‘s Traffic, Paul Schrader‘s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and the long short (or however you’d describe a movie of 27 minutes) Patriotism by Yukio Mishima. They’ve also released a Canadian movie I’d never heard of, Mon Oncle Antoine by Jutra, but that is dubbed “the best Canadian movie of all times” by certain critics. Looks promising.
But, as I said, the month isn’t over and Criterion is still going to release a couple of movies.

First up is High and Low by Akira Kurosawa. A businessman has to choose what he’s going to do with a sum of money he’s raised. On the one hand he could use it for a vital business deal, or he could spend it as ransom money for his kidnapped son. The movie was based on the detective novel King’s Ransom by Ed McBain (the man also penned the novels for The Blackboard Jungle and The Birds). Apart from a booklet on the movie, you’ll also get several interviews: the interview with the actor who plays the kidnapper was recorded for this release, the interview with the movie’s lead Toshiro Mifune comes from Japanese tv. There’s also a documentary on the making of this movie (37 minutes) and the movie has an alternative  audiotrack for a commentary by a Kurosawa scholar.
This special edition (2 discs) comes out on July 22 and will cost $39.95.

On the same day Criterion will release a movie that sparked off this article: Carl Theodor Dreyer‘s Vampyr. This movie has been released a couple of times already, but I wouldn’t blame you for not buying it: some releases were downright shoddy. Knowing Criterion’s reputation, you can be sure you’ll spend your money on a grand release. Rather than attempting to describe the movie myself, I’ll let Criterion do the job for me:

With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s brilliance at achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery (The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath) was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result—concerning an occult student assailed by various supernatural haunts and local evildoers in a village outside Paris—is nearly unclassifiable, a host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds creating a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of cinema’s great nightmares.

The original German version that was restored in 1998 will now be shown in a high-def digital version. There’s also a “newly credited alternate version with English text”. Apart from an audio commentary by a film scholar, you’ll also be treated to the 1966 documentary on Dreyer’s work by Jørgen Roos, a visual essay on Dreyer’s influences for this film and a 1958 radio broadcast on filmmaking by Dreyer himself. Even that is not all… there’s even a “booklet featuring new essays by Mark Le Fanu and Kim Newman, Koerber on the restoration, and a 1964 interview with producer and star Nicolas de Gunzburg, as well as a book featuring Dreyer and Christen Jul‘s original screenplay and Sheridan Le Fanu 1872 story Carmilla, a source for the film.”
$39.95 may sound like a lot of cash, but I’m pretty sure you’re getting your money’s worth with this release.

P.S. You can buy Criterion movies straight from the source (which means you’ll get a pleasant reduction), but you can also buy them elsewhere and sometimes even cheaper. We of Delirium Vault recommend DVD Pacific.

The Notorious Concubines

The Notorious Concubines is as odd an entry in Koji Wakamatsu‘s oeuvre as The Straight Story was an a-typical David Lynch film. Wakamatsu isn’t the most typical filmmaker and he’s often the discussion of heavy debates. To date, there hasn’t been a Wakamatsu review on Delirium Vault, but there was a forum topic on whether he was an excellent filmmaker or a misogynistic and sadistic bastard. Maybe Wakamatsu proves you can be both.

Some of Wakamatsu’s movies have odd titles: The Embryo Hunts In Secret or Go Go, Second Time Virgin, to name but two. In Embryo the male protagonist does little else than beat the female protagonist up. In fact, male violence is often shown in Wakamatsu’s movies. He did this (allegedly) to give a bleak portrait of Japanese society. Many of his films were extremely low budget: Embryo showed you only needed a man, a woman and a room. Wakamatsu was also quite prolific: he made almost 80 pictures in the 1960s and 70s.

The Notorious Concubines (or Kinpeibei) is different in that it was in colour, involved lots of actors and actresses and had a much bigger budget. It is also an odd one out in that Harry Novak bought the rights to the movie and had it dubbed for the American market. It is that version you can buy on Something Weird Video’s DVD release.

Chin Lien is a beautiful but unsatisfied wife. When her brother-in-law, Wu Song, doesn’t want her as his lover, she turns to an official with an equally large libido. Man Ching poisons her husband and so Chin Lien becomes his fifth wife. Wu Song’s anger outbursts lead him to prison, but when he’s released, he swears revenge on Chin Lien and Man Ching. And he’s not alone: he is now the leader of a small army, all intent on revenge.

If this sounds exciting, I must disappoint you: this is definitely not Wakamatsu’s best movie. Maybe this is because of the atrocious dubbing, which doesn’t seem eager to conceal the dubbed soundtrack was recorded in a studio. Everything sounds flat and the dialogue actors sound like they were forced to read their lines before they could go out for lunch.

The imagery looks much better, but then again, that was always one of Wakamatsu’s stronger points. The most typical Wakamatsu scene is when Man Ching’s sixth wife loses her child and the man takes revenge on all his women by brutally having sex with them. Afterwards the camera pans out and you see the room with the naked women lying on their stomachs. It is at the same time brutal and beautiful, vintage Wakamatsu.
Nevertheless, The Notorious Concubines isn’t that brutal compared to some of Wakamatsu’s movies. Or is that just because of the version we’re watching? Because yes, in the scene where soldiers are ‘playing’ with the women (again shot for far away) everytime the woman in the middle is not on her stomach, a blurry dot pops up onscreen. Yes, my friends, this version is slightly censored. Because after all, we may have seen a man whose ear was cut off and there’s nothing wrong with that, but heaven forbid we would’ve seen the sight of a vagina from twenty metres away. Societies have crumbled for less!

That Something Weird have released this in a dubbed version is awful, but if you’re somewhat familiar with Wakamatsu’s work, you’ll be eager to watch this anyhow: most of his work is either unavailable on DVD or only on Asian releases without English subtitles. It is also not the sort of movie you’ll be able to watch on television (with the exception of Italian viewers, who might have seen Violated Angels pop up somewhere in the middle of the night).

On the plus side, this being a SWV release after all, there are many other things you get for free to take away some of your pain. First and foremost, there’s another movie: Violated Paradise, a fake documentary by Marion Gering. This film tells the story of a young woman, who has jobs as a geisha, a variety entertainer and finally an ama (pearl diver). Oh, and she’ll marry the man of her dreams too. Ain’t life wonderful? Apparently, this was meant to tell us about the exotic life of oriental women, but it’s fairly boring and probably a little bit inaccurate (did you know Japanese women had no trouble with being nude in front of others?). An American narrator (Paulette Girard) translates this woman’s thoughts into English language, but there are a couple of scenes with a male voice-over. I still haven’t figured out why.

But no, that isn’t all: SWV has dug up a couple of featurettes with exotic women, enough to keep you in your chair for another hour. After which you can still watch a handful of trailers which they also managed to include on the disc.
In retrospect, it is easy to see why SWV was one of my first reasons I switched from video to DVD. The amount of extras this company has to offer is just flabbergasting. And even if the film you’ve bought the disc for isn’t as great as you’d expected chances are you’ll still get your money’s worth on the extras.

In the end, was this a good movie? Not really, even if you can still see it would’ve been better if presented in a better version, you’re still left unfulfilled. If it’s your first introduction to Wakamatsu’s work, it’s also a faux pas: better options are Ecstasy of the Angels (1972) or Go Go, Second Time Virgin (released in 1969, just like The Notorious Concubines and 7 other movies – told you he was prolific). Both were released on Region 1 by Image Entertainment and are now no longer available, but maybe eBay can help you out.
If only because a real movie collector should also get a dose of nihilistic degrading cinema. And – one shouldn’t forget – take a shower afterwards.

THE NOTORIOUS CONCUBINES (KINPEIBEI)
R: Koji Wakamatsu (Japan, 1969)
Released on DVD by Something Weird Video (Region 1)
Image: 2.35:1 (enhanced for 16×9 televisions)
Language: English
Extras: bonus feature (Violated Paradise), several trailers, several featurettes