Byleth

More proof if needed that the world’s gone mad: I’ve just noticed an expiry date on a roll of tape. It’s as good as any other reason to lament the seventies are finished: an era style may have forgotten, but food didn’t have an expiry date and mothers weren’t crucified when they allowed their toddlers to sip their wine or inhale some smoke. The latter was shown on a retro show the other day and I believe the viewers have caught up with the woman by now and have banished her from the country. Another grand plus of the seventies: it was the era of the giallo.

Meet Byleth, the Italian bastard child of a giallo and Bilitis. The erotic scenes are clearly shot to titilate the viewer and the lack of vaseline on the lens has a simple explanation: they didn’t have a budget. In Byleth a young man has the best day of his life when his sister returns home: you see, he had a fond relationship with his sister. No, fonder than what you’re thinking of… let’s just say they often slept together. Too bad for him she’s been keeping a little secret: she’s been married for a couple of months and she’s returned to introduce her husband.
And to make it more of a giallo: there’s also a mad killer on the loose, cutting women with a strange knife.

Byleth – or Byleth, il demone dell’incesto to use the film’s full title – was directed in 1972 by one Leopoldo Savona, whose filmography included mostly westerns (maybe you’ve heard of his Apocalypse Joe). The biggest name attached to the film is Mark Damon, whose filmography we don’t need to mention here (because we know you’re into cult movies and there’s no need to insult your intelligence). Damon plays Lionello, the troubled protagonist of the film. His sister (and possible love interest) Barbara is portrayed by Claudia Gravy, who appeared in a handful of exploitation movies. Speaking of exploitation movies, Marzia Damon (the unlucky chambermaid) has a filmography brimful of exploitation: this film is by far the most normal, other films include Decameron n°69, Holocaust 2: the memories, delirium and vendetta (nicknamed “I’ll spit on your swastika”) and Sexy Sinners. Aldo Bufi Landi, as Barbara’s husband, completes the main cast.

Byleth was released by X-Rated Kult DVD and it proudly boasts it has the dvd world premiere of this film. It’s true that this is quite a rare movie. Not in the least because its theme (the incestuous relationship) and giallo references make it sound sleazier than the film ultimately is. It should be avoided at any cost if you can’t stand slow-paced films. In fact, Byleth is so slow it makes Finnish arthouse films look like rollercoaster rides. However, one third of those overlong scenes consist of semi-naked to naked women in extasy, so the pervs amongst you may want to complain the movie is only 79 minutes long.

Which brings us to the language options of the film: you can choose between German audio with optional English subtitles or Italian audio with fixed English subtitles. If you choose the Italian audio, you’re in for a surprise: the first scene is in German. Rather than have you check seven times whether you’ve chosen the correct audio channel, I can tell you that you did choose correctly, but the Italian version is shorter than the German version (that’s a first) and the missing scenes are inserted into the Italian version. Because clearly the Italians thought 79 minutes was way too long for a movie. Collectors will of course choose the Italian version to see what was chopped.

Bad news from our subtitle department: the movie is presented as a 4:3 letterbox and the subtitles are at the bottom of the screen. So if you don’t understand German or Italian, you’ll be forced to switch your widescreen tv to 4:3 format if you want to know what’s going on.
Speaking of subtitles, they sometimes lack a finishing touch. The subtitlers may want to check up on their English grammar again: “Why you wrote me…?” and “he don’t” is not correct English and as far as sloppiness goes, there’s one scene where we’re informed the killer dragged the “boody” to the “parc”.

As per usual, X-Rated have released the film with two covers. You can choose between one using the German subtitle “the demon with the bloody fingers” or one going for the sleazier “horror sex in spooky castle”. The artwork is also different, but the one with the naked woman approached by the gloved hands was often used as the film’s poster. This is something you can check in one of the extras: a slideshow of artwork for the film. Other extras are a couple of trailers (including Africa Erotica and the quite awful Oh, Bangkok!) and a comparison of the film copies. The Italian VHS didn’t use a nightfilter whereas the DVD does. The result is a clear improvement: suddenly Italian nights don’t look like noons anymore.

I must say that the film improves after a while, but it’ll take you more than half an hour to get captivated by it. And, for me, the captivation didn’t last forever: Savona may be able to direct a couple of interesting scenes, but a handful of good scenes don’t make a good movie. Weirdly enough, this helps the film in a way: when the movie’s finished you are allowed to wonder if all you’ve seen really happened or whether you were partly in the sick mind of Lionello.

So maybe not an exceptional movie, but at least it’s decent and rare. Good luck – as with most X-Rated Kult releases – tracking it down.

P.S. At the time of writing Xploited Cinema still offered both versions of the DVD release.

Django Kill

Welcome to my latest DVD review, offered at least a week too late. And if you’re wondering why: be glad you’re reading this and you don’t have to listen to my voice, as I’m still sick.

Equally sick, be it in a different meaning, is the movie that’s on review today: Django Kill: If you live shoot!, which was called Se sei vivo spara when it was released. I’ve already written about the success of Corbucci’s Django and the stream of ‘sequels’ that popped up shortly afterwards.
This is one of them: the producers changed the title (much to the dismay of the director), but for once something good came out of something bad. Even though Django Kill can still not be called famous, the Django suffix gave the movie the extra boost it deserved. Do remember that in the late 60s several euro westerns were released every week and it became hard to distinguish the handful of great movies between the hundreds of releases.

Django Kill: If You Live Shoot is a good euro western and the British release by Ardent (which was released in 2004, but completely slipped by me at the time) is the best version to buy. Here’s why.

Giulio Questi is the director of Se Sei Vivo Spara and he’s mainly known for two movies, the other being the equally weird giallo Death Laid An Egg.

Tomas Milian plays the lead and it definitely helped the producers that his character in the movie was either nameless or just called ‘The Stranger’. This made it so much easier to redub the character Django.
Fair enough, though this movie has nothing to do with Corbucci’s classic movie, of all the fake Django sequels this is the movie that resembles Django the most. It’s an incredibly cruel and violent movie: you’ll see a lot of people being killed, tortured and more of that unpleasantness.
One scene that had many censors worried at the time was the one where people realize someone has been shot with golden bullets and they tear the (still living) man apart to get their hands on the gold.

Ardent DVD offered the British audience the movie in its uncut glory, a very first for the British audience who probably heard about the movie when Alex Cox introduced the movie in BBC2′s Forbidden season in 1997. (Though the scene with the bullets couldn’t be shown in the film, you could see (most of) it in Cox’s introduction.)

The good news is that Alex Cox was willing to do another introduction for this movie, especially for the DVD release. This introduction can only be found on this edtion, which is why the British DVD manages to beat Django Kill‘s American release by Blue Underground.

Also present on the Ardent release are an exclusive interview with the director and co-star Ray Lovelock and a set of trailers for other Argent western releases, as well as Se Sei Vivo Spara‘s trailer.

The cut scenes have been reinserted and you have to know where they were to find them. The movie was restored from the original negative materials and a splendid job was done.
This, of course, means that people who aren’t familiar to Italian cult movies, will be able to complain that the blood is far too red to be believable. We, however, like our blood as red as can be.

Django Kill is a very good movie: if people disagree, shoot!

P.S. As a bonus, here’s Alex Cox introducing the film for a spaghetti western series on ITV4 (with thanks to Cultextras):

Fuori Orario

My previous post concerned that odd television programme, Fuori Orario. It’s broadcast on Italian channel Rai Tre late at night. It’s shown nightly for a couple of minutes. Monday nights the show is longer and a documentary is shown. But the real stuff is broadcast during weekends. Fridays and Saturdays Fuori Orario kicks off between midnight and 2am and lasts until 7am. On Sunday nights it’s shown till 6am. What do they show? Movies. Sometimes extremely rare movies. And yes, that for nearly six hours. Every week.

Fuori Orario always starts with a clip montage of similar movies to that night’s theme. Then after a while the theme tune starts, a clip from L’Atalante set to the music of Patti Smith’s Because The Night, which looks a bit like this:

Maybe some more clips follow, it all depends on how packed the show is. Anyway, after a while the host appears. His name is Enrico Ghezzi and he has a peculiar way of hosting: we only hear him talk about the movies, but the image we get to see is an old video of him (two options: either him in white T-shirt and white background or him talking in an old radio booth). Which means audio and video are completely out of synch. It’s arthouse, baby! (If you’d like to see a sample of that, click here.) Luckily my Italian is rather poor, so I can just fast forward that bit. (To be honest, there’s still a third option: sometimes Ghezzi makes a new introduction. My favourite one is where he tried to stay out of the camera’s reach. And jumped. Or that one where we didn’t get to see him, but the camera moved from his chair to the wall and back again, for five minutes.)

But honestly, I don’t mind all that. And the reason is that the selected films are often brilliant and people who display such movie knowledge are allowed to do whatever they want, especially if their show lasts five to six hours. Name me one other movie programme which often shows movies by Koji Wakamatsu or a retrospective of Russian arthouse cinema from the fifties or a Samuel Fuller weekend.

This weekend Fuori Orario has but one theme: “De(u)tour”. Its opening montage on Friday contained footage of Gun Crazy (hmm!!!), They Live By Night, Bonnie and Clyde and a Takeshi Kitano movie I haven’t been able to identify. The movies themselves were so nice too, they get a special mention here. If you have no plans for next weekend, why don’t you try and rent all these movies and have a weekend of renegade couples on the road. You’ll enjoy yourselves.

FRIDAY

Another Day in Paradise (Larry Clark, 1997)
In the hope of a big score, two junkie couples team up to commit various drug robberies which go disastrously wrong leading to dissent, violence and murder. James Woods and Melanie Griffith star.

Running in madness, dying in love (Koji Wakamatsu, 1969)
A student comes home after a manifestation and has a fight with his brother. He accidently kills him. He tries to make it look like suicide and flees to Hokkaido, accompanied by the wife of his brother.

Stesso Sangue (Cessa & Eronico, 1987)
Two orphans (brother and sister, aged 24 and 14) leave the city and rob banks. Impending doom awaits. A road movie of despair, love and violence played against a background of desolate post-industrial landscapes. Excellent photography. Believable performances.

SATURDAY

98 Octanas (Fernando Lopes, 2006)
He and she don’t know each other but, both at loose ends, they meet at a gas station somewhere on the highway between Lisbon and Oporto. Almost without saying a word, they drive off in his car. What follows are the gas stations, the motels, the conversations and the silences, the revelations and the mysteries. She hopes he will take her to a primordial, almost mythical place: her grandmother’s home. In their solitude, each one of them can, simply, lose themselves or meet each other.

They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)
The script involves a mail carrier (Farley Granger) who, worried about taking proper care of his pregnant wife (Cathy O’Donnell), impulsively swipes an envelope full of money. Hard upon that “one false step,” the family man finds himself caught up in a dark scheme involving blackmail and, several times over, murder.

The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle, 1970)
Based on the true story of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, who met through a lonely-hearts correspondence club, Ray is weedy, feral, and untrustworthy; Martha is enormous, compulsive, and needy. Together, they play out a horrifying scheme in which he lures lonely women out on dates and proposes marriage to them, with she pretending to be his sister. They take the women’s savings and then murder them remorselessly. Dank, claustrophobic, and weirdly engrossing, this movie never quite gives in to the comforts of conventional narrative. Francois Truffaut named it as his favorite American film.
(followed by a conversation with director Kastle on the making of this, his only movie.)

SUNDAY

SCARECROW (Jerry Schatzberg, 1973)
Max is an ex-con who’s been saving money to open a car wash in Pittsburgh. Lionel is a sailor who’s returning home to the midwest to see the child born while he was at sea. They form an unlikely pair as the brawling Max learns a little how Lionel copes with the world: Lionel believes that the scarecrow doesn’t scare birds, but instead amuses them – birds find scare-crows funny.

ZABRISKIE POINT (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)
An epic portrait of late Sixties America, as seen through the portrayal of two of its children: anthropology student Daria (who’s helping a property developer build a village in the Los Angeles desert) and dropout Mark (who’s wanted by the authorities for allegedly killing a policeman during a student riot).

Nuda Per Satana

The Dutch label Filmfreaks has launched a sublabel, Sodemented Cinema, which – according to the blurb on their covers – aims to release “the very best in badbad taste”.
If you don’t take their word for that, feel free to watch one of their first releases, Nuda Per Satana (a.k.a. Naked For Satan) by Luigi Batzella.

Not that it should surprise you from the director of The Beast in Heat, but Nuda Per Satana is one hell of a weird movie: it features two people, a man and a woman, who crash their car on virtually the same spot.
One of them, the man, tries to get help at a nearby castle, only to be lured into a weird world where he encounters several people, including the exact image of the crashed woman (but she is not her). After a while the woman regains consciousness and goes to the castle herself, only to find an 18th century version of the man she saw at the crash and, erm, Satan.

And if scantily clad women weren’t enough, Sodemented offers a proud first: this is the first time the XXX-rated sequences were inserted into the film.

And by XXX-rated we really mean XXX-rated, even if this isn’t as extreme as what you’d find in some exploitation movies of the 70s, this is still very much “in your face”. Speaking of faces, one of the XXX-rated actresses does the most peculiar thing with her tongue: it doesn’t really look like she’s licking the bodies of her partners, more as if she’s imitating a blender.

Never mind that weird sight, because there isn’t anything normal about Nuda Per Satana. Now I’ve seen a fair amount of cult movies, but few are so warped and confusing as this one. Partially it’s intentional, partially it’s because they just didn’t seem what to do with this movie.
While, on any regular basis, that should be a ‘no no’, for this sort of movie it’s a big plus. Just try and wrap your head around this story, just try and feel aroused by the sex scenes and just try and be scared by the giant spider sequence. Yes, if ever there was a movie that dared to fight The Giant Spider Invasion (remember the Volkswagens dressed as spiders?) for “most unbelievable spider in a movie”, it’s Nuda Per Satana. This prop is so awfully made it won’t even scare a two-year-old.

So why would you need to own Nuda Per Satana? Well, first of all, if you’re completely bonkers and like your movies as weird as they can come, this is an absolute must. If there is still some sense floating around in your brain, you might have second (and third) thoughts about buying this, but please bear in mind that Nuda Per SatanaNuda had a regular and a hardcore version). Tacky plots, countless scenes with derobing because they could and special effects for $0.35 because that’s as much as the budget would allow… welcome to the Seventies, the decade when movies seemed to be made by people still suffering from the effects of a bad LSD trip. is a child of its time: no other decade dared to produce movies as genuinely weird as the seventies. This was the “anything goes” era with nonsensical plots and countless versions of movies (like this one had a regular and hardcore version).

Nuda per Satana has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and that’s what makes it so appealing.

As for the DVD release, the images look very nice, in a quality much higher than one could expect from this sort of movie. The XXX scenes (which are quite tame for 2008′s standards) look different from other scenes, but were probably filmed with other cameras, so this was to be expected. It is also handy, because you can feel warned the woman with the weird tongue might be approaching again.

The movie is presented in widescreen format with English or Italian sound (Dolby 2.0). You can choose between Dutch, French and English subtitles. Not many extra features, but you do get a couple of trailers.

We end on a bit of trivia: apparently this movie was a big influence on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. To be honest, we aren’t that surprised.

I Ragazzi del Massacro

A beautiful young woman is teaching evening classes to a bunch of juvenile delinquents when suddenly something happens. Next thing the young boys (allegedly aged 13 to 17) are around her, rape her and murder her. As the boys have left the room, all the evidence that remains is the naked and abused corpse and an empty bottle.
All this we see through a series of short scenes and stills. But what happened? What really happened?

The police discover the bottle was full of absinthe and that the boys must ‘ve drunk the bottle and gone completely berserk.
But which of the boys had brought the bottle to class? Or was there another person who’d staged all this?

Fernando di Leo is the Italian director best known for La Mala Ordina and Il Boss. Di Leo’s I Ragazzi del Massacro is a movie that was internationally known as Naked Violence, a title that suggests more nudity than you’ll actually find in the movie. (Raro Video’s release use the same trick: the back of the DVD cover shows only stills where you see the naked corpse of the young teacher.)
Pier Paolo Capponi has the unwelcome task of finding out why the murder took place. This is not a whodunnit, it’s “why did the boys do that?”. Assisting him is Susan Scott, a social worker who laments that society doesn’t really care about these delinquent boys: as long as the killer is found or someone ends in jail, society will be happy. It doesn’t take the duo long to find out the murder was staged, but that still doesn’t mean the mastermind is identified.

Di Leo does address a couple of issues in this movie: there are the delinquents (who are as much victims as culprits), society’s lack of interest for those boys, homosexuality, older women who use tomboys for their own pleasure and corruption.
While I Ragazzi del Massacro is a thriller, it’s one with severe socio-political undertones. It’s a crime mystery which does without chase scenes that’ll raise your adrenalin levels.

Like the international title and the cover stills, another thing that might mislead you is the presence of Susan Scott. This Spanish actress is nowadays mostly remembered for appearing in a couple of giallo movies (e.g. Death Carries A Cane, Death Walks at Midnight, Forbidden Photos of a Lafy Above Suspicion and So Sweet, So Dead) and exploitation movies (Orgasmo Nero, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Emanuelle and Lolita). Compared to those roles, I Ragazzi del Massacro may appear as a bit tame.
But do not forget that some of the issues raised in this movie were not as commonly discussed as they are now and that – while it’ll be streching it a bit too far to call the movie taboo-breaking – I Ragazzi del Massacro did mention and show a couple of acts that were unspeakable at the time. That is the sad role for movies that question society: if society will break a taboo, the movie won’t look so audacious a couple of decades later.

I Ragazzi del Massacro does entertain the viewer, though I must admit I can easily sum up a couple of dozen Italian films I’ll hold dearer than this one.
It is a nice extra to have the socio-political undertone in the movie, but as a murder mystery it isn’t the most exciting movie out there. And, almost 40 years later, you’ll see this more as a historical slice of life in the late sixties than a controversial movie.

Over to a look at the DVD itself.
First and foremost, Raro Video should be applauding for releasing movies like this. The catalogue of Italian cult movie still seems to be growing and it’s nice to see an earlier work from Di Leo (who was one of the most famous directors in the “Italo crime” subgenre) and an early appearance by Susan Scott.

You have the choice between three settings for the movie: Italian, Italian with English subtitles or English dubbed. Choose wisely before you’ll watch the movie, as you won’t be able to switch audio channels once the movie has started.
As the English dubbed version was cut, the missing scenes were shown as Italian with English subtitles.
That’s great if you want to find out which bits were too controversial at the time. And it’s a great improvement on some of RaroVideo’s earlier releases (like Nightmare City) where you could only choose between Italian or English audio. Some of us like to watch movie in Italian with subs, you know!

There are two extras on the DVD worth mentioning: first is a small documentary on the film. However, this is in Italian only and there are no subtitles.
The second is a French documentary on the director. This is in French only and there are no subtitles. (Also, I found the image to freeze occasionally, but that might just be my copy.)

So hurrah for RaroVideo for releasing this movie on DVD, but please think of international audience and add a couple of subtitles. Sure, this’ll cost more, but there are millions of people interested in Italian genre films who don’t speak Italian that fluently.