Quickie movie night review: BLOOD & BLACK LACE and DEEP RED
This week's movie night took its inspiration from Amer, a modern giallo art film we caught at SIFF a few weeks ago.
(As an aside, I would like to state for the record that Amer is highly recommended for fans of film in general, most particularly fans of giallo, and doubly so for those named Phil. Imagine, if you will, a movie made entirely out of the awesome shots from a Mario Bava or Dario Argento film, with truly minimal dialogue attempting to carry the plot but rather letting the audience do the heavy lifting themselves. The sort of movie Mario Bava or Dario Argento probably wanted to make in their prime but couldn't convince anyone to let them, as shot on classic Super 16mm Kodak film.)
Anyways, I loved it so much that I decided to share some of its progenitors with the movie night gang, Mario Bava's Blood & Black Lace and Dario Argento's Deep Red. I'll admit that some of my motivators were A: I had recently purchased a copy of Deep Red that I hadn't watched yet, B: it offered an excuse to buy Blood & Black Lace, and C: I misremembered Deep Red as being Tenebre. Also, the color theme appealed to me as the use of color was definitely one of the highlights of Amer. Not to mention that it was appropriate to have a color theme for a giallo movie night.
Anyways, having recently seen Amer--which, did I mention, did superb color work primarily through use of colored gel inserts on classic super 16 mm Kodak film?--and also the color-restored version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it was difficult to separate out the scratchy faded print of Blood & Black Lace used for the DVD with the brightly colored version that exists in my head. I would drop $30 for a Criterion edition in a heartbeat.
Deep Red turned out to be much better than I remembered. I think this is partly due to the fact that the previous version is the 22 minutes-pared-down version that wikipedia falsely claims is the only available outside Australia (as the DVD I have, I'm fairly certain, is the full original Italian cut). I think I also forgot just how much of the movie is just slow-paced, awesome imagery, which is just... well, awesome.
So anyways, the moral of the story is, I'm pretty sure I did an even better job of picking movies that inspired Amer than I'd intended, as there was clearly a lot of both directly incorporated into it. In a good way.
(As an aside, I would like to state for the record that Amer is highly recommended for fans of film in general, most particularly fans of giallo, and doubly so for those named Phil. Imagine, if you will, a movie made entirely out of the awesome shots from a Mario Bava or Dario Argento film, with truly minimal dialogue attempting to carry the plot but rather letting the audience do the heavy lifting themselves. The sort of movie Mario Bava or Dario Argento probably wanted to make in their prime but couldn't convince anyone to let them, as shot on classic Super 16mm Kodak film.)
Anyways, I loved it so much that I decided to share some of its progenitors with the movie night gang, Mario Bava's Blood & Black Lace and Dario Argento's Deep Red. I'll admit that some of my motivators were A: I had recently purchased a copy of Deep Red that I hadn't watched yet, B: it offered an excuse to buy Blood & Black Lace, and C: I misremembered Deep Red as being Tenebre. Also, the color theme appealed to me as the use of color was definitely one of the highlights of Amer. Not to mention that it was appropriate to have a color theme for a giallo movie night.
Anyways, having recently seen Amer--which, did I mention, did superb color work primarily through use of colored gel inserts on classic super 16 mm Kodak film?--and also the color-restored version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it was difficult to separate out the scratchy faded print of Blood & Black Lace used for the DVD with the brightly colored version that exists in my head. I would drop $30 for a Criterion edition in a heartbeat.
Deep Red turned out to be much better than I remembered. I think this is partly due to the fact that the previous version is the 22 minutes-pared-down version that wikipedia falsely claims is the only available outside Australia (as the DVD I have, I'm fairly certain, is the full original Italian cut). I think I also forgot just how much of the movie is just slow-paced, awesome imagery, which is just... well, awesome.
So anyways, the moral of the story is, I'm pretty sure I did an even better job of picking movies that inspired Amer than I'd intended, as there was clearly a lot of both directly incorporated into it. In a good way.