Well, I say in full, but this is actually the shorter US edit, which cuts out twenty odd minutes of the film. Gone are most of the scenes between David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi, which are actually quite sweet and charming, and add to whatever vague arc these characters are meant to have. This isn’t a great transfer (with a fair amount of color loss) but if you haven’t seen this before it’s worth a watch. The brutality is intact, and most importantly so is the soundtrack by Goblin. It’s one of those films that is worth watching just for the music.
The Profondo Rosso score is as good as any score that came out in the 70s. Yes, that’s saying a lot, as the mid-to-late 70s were a golden age of soundtracks—from Blaxploitation to John Williams to big commercial hits like The Exorcist/Tubular Bells, Grease and Saturday Night Fever—but with its combination of horror-atmospherics and tightly woven sleuth-funk it’s truly brilliant.
If Dario Argento is anything, he’s a master of atmosphere, and it seems obvious to say that he was at his zenith when he worked with Goblin. Profondo Rosso is the first fruits of that collaboration, and while they may have topped it with their work together on Suspiria, this is still a filmic landmark.
Goblin’s Profondo Rosso - The Complete Edition is available to buy on CD.
Deep Red has just been released on Blu-Ray, you can find it here.
The Independent Film Channel website has posted their choice of the “The 50 Greatest Opening Title Sequences of All Time.”
Number one is Saul Bass’s iconic and often imitated opening titles for Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. In the number 27 slot is one of my favorites Taxi Driver. The yellow cab emerging from a cloud of sewer steam as Bernard Herrman’s ominous score plays on the soundtrack is some dark New York poetry. Michael Chapman’s lysergic cinematography adds to the nightmarish mood.
Here’s the list in full with video clips: “The 50 Greatest Opening Title Sequences of All Time.”
Via IFC
Yes, that’s THE Goblin, Italian prog supremos and soundtrack authors of Suspiria, Dawn Of The Dead, Tenebrae, Deep Red and more. Not only will this be the first time the band have played in Scotland and the North-West, but this will be their first shows in the UK featuring founder member Claudio Simonetti.
I know, right?! I haven’t been as excited about a gig in years!
OK, I know this is only relevant to readers in the UK, but amazingly there are tickets left for both shows (why haven’t they sold out?), so if you live in Newcastle/Gateshead or Glasgow, there’s still time to catch the band in action. I’ve had my ticket for ages - it wasn’t cheap but it wasn’t extortionate (£22 inc booking fee - it’s cheaper in Gateshead) and this is GOBLIN we’re talking about here. Beloved of horror afficianados, prog rock fans, electronica and dance artists, break spotters, goths, metal-heads, sleuths, zombie hunters and Black Forest headmistresses alike.
Tonight Goblin play at The Sage in Gateshead, with support from Warm Digits.
Tomorrow they play The Arches in Glasgow, as part of the city’s Film & Music Festival, with a special occult-cinema manifestation from the band OV.
Tickets are available directly from the venues (follow the links above) or from Ticketmaser (here’s links to The Sage and The Arches).
If you don’t go, here is what you are missing:
Goblin - “Tenebrae” live in Paris 2009
Goblin - “Suspiria” live in London 2009
Goblin - “Profondo Rosso” aka “Deep Red” live in Paris 2009
“Murmurs Of Middle-Earth,” a new work in progress from Australia-based remix wizard Pogo, is one of the sweeter things I’ve heard in the past couple of days. Pogo is a bit of a one trick pony, but I like the trick and still find it alluring.
Pogo, Nick Bertke, will be kicking off a tour of the USA in March. I’m wondering how his work will translate to a live context. Word is he’ll be at SXSW and if so I’ll be there to see for myself.
Via Pogo
Directed by Robert Downey (senior) in 1966, Chafed Elbows was one the first underground films to actually be seen outside of lofts or basements in Greenwich Village. I saw it when I was 15 at the Key Theater in Washington D.C. I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on but I liked it.
Using still photos, some moving images and comically surreal voiceovers, Downey’s subversive slice of New York bohemian humor would later be amplified in his cult classic Putney Swope.
In his 1967 column for the New York Times, film critic, and square, Bosley Crowther did his best to come to terms with Chafed Elbows to humorous effect:
Everybody in this wacky movie about a busy day in the life of a hyperthyroid moron is an unregenerate mess—from the fellow himself, whose mad adventures include a mistaken hysterectomy, which results in the removal from his innards of 189 $10 bills, to his snaggletoothed, scratchy-voiced mother with whom he is having an incestuous affair, to his bald-headed, viper-tongued psychiatrist who rattles off his words like Groucho Marx.
They’re all hideous, obscene, repulsive people on the order of some of the slobs in comic strips, only these are much more irreverent and filthy-mouthed than any comic-strip characters would dare to be. And I would hastily overlook them and drop this film with much of the trash in the underground, if it weren’t that there is in “Chafed Elbows” a promising modicum of lively, acid wit.
Here’s the rarely seen Chafed Elbows:
Previously on DM: Putney Swope.
A moving and intimate short film portrait of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: artist, musician, pandrogyne, by Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma.
“Because Genesis and Jaye were so obsessed with each other, they wanted to literally become each other. Plastic surgery seemed like the best way to accomplish this goal, but once Jaye passed on, their grand project was left unfinished. Still, Genesis’s body tells the tale of a love story that transcends gender and the limits of human flesh.”
Previously on DM
New QA with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
Thee Psychick Bible: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
With thanks to Robert Conroy
Here’s a fantastic artifact of one of the best shows ever to grace broadcast TV that I remember seeing back in the day but for some reason never picked up. Being ostensibly the tapes we saw Agent Cooper constantly making for his unseen assistant, Diane, quite a bit of this seems to have been created just for this release while other sections could have been lifted straight from the show. In any case it’s a big bundle of vintage and lesser-known Lynch-ian goodness. Below is most of the cassette in Youtube form. Follow the link at the bottom to get the entire thing.
More audio excerpts after the jump…
Filmed on December 9, 1971 in Hong Kong after the release of his first movie, The Big Boss, Bruce Lee’s interview with Canadian journalist Pierre Berton was long thought to be lost. It was discovered in 1994 and aired as a TV special in Canada as Bruce Lee: The Lost Interview.
Berton is unimpressive as a talking head but Lee is both charming and wise beyond his years.
Part 2, Part 3
Via The Awesomer
Last year, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim co-hosted a special screening of director James “The Master of the Romantic Thriller”™ Nguyen’s “so bad it’s good” feature film, Birdemic: Shock and Terror at Los Angeles’s beloved art house, Cinefamily. After a positively mind-melting 90-minutes had elapsed, Heidecker stood before the audience, microphone in hand, silently surveying the psychic damage the film had caused before asking: “Don’t you all just feel like total assholes for sitting through that?”
Cue 200 people laughing and nodding in vigorous agreement.
But, hey, you can’t exactly get this kind of entertainment just anywhere, all right? How many Plan Nine from Outer Space-type winners should the human race be allowed?
Birdemic: Shock and Terror “tackles topical issues of global warming, avian flu, world peace, organic living, sexual promiscuity and lavatory access.” You, know, all the big issues. Director James Nguyen, a 42-year-old Vietnamese refugee, wrote, cast and shot the film over four years, diverting money saved from his career as a software salesperson in Silicon Valley toward making his Hollywood dream come true. Nguyen’s dream might be Roger Ebert’s worst nightmare, of course, but I don’t think that the director was really thinking much about how the critics would react to his film (It’s hard to tell what he was really thinking).
In a recent interview about the film, co-star Whitney Moore had this to say when asked about people who assume Birdemic was “faked”:
I have spoken with people who believe that Birdemic was faked, and I always ask those people if they have met James Nguyen. If they have, and they still believe that he is some mastermind of irony and comic timing who can make a movie like Birdemic intentionally, then there is nothing I can say to change their mind. Nor would I.
In any case, it’s out today on DVD and Blu-ray from our friends at Severin Films and now you can see for yourself the film that’s seen “midnight movie” fans across the county get very… well, very perplexed, let’s just say… WARNING: Do not try to watch Birdemic: Shock and Terror alone. Not because it’s too scary or anything, but because it must be seen with others, others who, like you, yourself, should be stoned into complete oblivion for this dubious cinematic treat. I think anyone who watches Birdemic: Shock and Terror by their lonesome would just be too pathetic. So don’t do it.
UPDATE: There will be a special midnight screening of Birdemic: Shock And Terror at Cinefamily, here in Los Angeles this Friday (1st anniv. screening, director & cast in person!)
Here’s one of my, er, um, “favorite” scenes from Birdemic: Shock and Terror... “Where’s Becky?”
