G-A-Y Day(s)- Carmelo Bene- Salomé (1972)- DVD5 (PAL Format)

And here's an even more bizarre movie to go with Oscar Wilde's play.




From Maximilian Le Cain at Senses of Cinema:

On March 18 2002, legendary Italian theatre director, actor and writer Carmelo Bene died at age 64. Between 1968 and 1973 he also made films, five experimental works that marked him as the wildest of Italian cinema’s several wild geniuses. When asked why he gave up filmmaking he replied, “To relax. The way I make cinema is extremely exhausting.” (1) This statement evokes not only the production circumstances of his movies, on which he worked outside the structures of commercial filmmaking as writer, producer, director, actor and decorator, but also the intense energy which animates every scene of his oeuvre. This energy emanates from the cartoonish dementia of the performances, the disorientating speed with which one phantasmagoric image replaces another and the jarringly non-naturalistic use of sound and music. No director has ever come closer to the heightened expressive freedom of animation in live action cinema than Bene.

By the time he made his first film, Bene had been a prominent figure in Italian experimental theatre for a decade. He was born in Campi Salentina near Lecce in 1937. After a brief stint in Rome’s National Academy of Dramatic Art he formed his own theatre company. A staging of his adaptation of Camus’ Caligula in 1959 had first brought him notice. His subsequent career earned him the reputation of being a provocateur, with the police closing down several of his productions, notably Christ 63 in 1963. His work also drew much acclaim, with Pasolini hailing Bene’s “autonomous and original” (2) theater as the only exciting work being done in an otherwise worthless experimental theatre scene. Bene played Creon in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (Edipo Re, 1967).




His first film, Our Lady of the Turks (Nostra Signora dei Turchi, 1968), is a fragmented series of scenes centred around the cathedral at Otranto in which the protagonist (Bene) tries repeatedly but unsuccessfully to meet Saint Margherita. It was adapted from Bene’s own 1965 novel. His second film, Capricci (1969), works with ideas from Manon and the Elizabethan play Arden of Faversham. The third, Don Giovanni (1971), is taken from a story by 19th century author and dandy Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, Le plus bel amour de Don Juan, and Salome (1972) is a version of Oscar Wilde’s play. The brilliantly titled One Hamlet Less (Un Amleto di meno, 1973) combines Shakespeare with Jules Laforgue.

Bene’s films are critical explorations of the texts they are based on. He operates by returning these stories to a sort of primordial dramatic and intellectual state of chaos where ideas, narratives and characters struggle to come into being. As Deleuze pointed out (3), Bene is concerned not with beginnings or endings, but with the middle, an engagement with a perpetual becoming, a world of constantly shifting potentiality. He achieves this by questioning and throwing off balance every aspect of his films. The frequently hysterical performances of his actors – or ‘actorial machines’ – are caricatures amplified to the level of the grotesque. Rather than playing characters, the actors become stylised embodiments of some of their defining characteristics, shrieking, slobbering, whispering and drooling their way through a series of events that resemble variations on certain themes or gestures rather than a developing narrative. Bene described his films as “music for the eyes” (4) put together with a “surgical indiscipline of montage” (5). He constantly strives for a glorious visual excessiveness, with unusual camera angles, shifts between black and white and colour, interesting superimpositions and either overtly theatrical – Don Giovanni, One Hamlet Less – or otherwise expressionistically employed settings – the cathedral in Our Lady of the Turks. This anti-naturalistic approach is further heightened by the asynchronous use of sound, which incorporates heavily amplified sounds such as breathing and coughing, shouted or stammered dialogue and sudden bursts of mainly classical music, most commonly opera.




If Bene’s cinema is one of constant becoming, of repetition and incompletion, perhaps the most common recurring theme in his scenes is frustration. Frustrated desire is the key element in the stories of Salome and Don Giovanni and all of his films feature memorable images of frustration – victims of a car crash returning to life in order to crash again but with their corpses in more deathlike positions in Capricci; a man in armour attempting to have sex with a woman in Our Lady of the Turks; Don Giovanni repeatedly trying and failing to put down his tea cup in Don Giovanni; a follower of Christ attempting to nail himself to the cross in Salomè only to discover he cannot nail his last hand down.

After these five exhilarating films, Bene returned to the theatre and writing. Although his later life was dogged by ill health, his work continued to receive attention and acclaim. Yet the films that comprise his self described “cinematic parenthesis” are seldom screened or written about, especially in the English-speaking world. For a director whose work matches the visual power and representational complexity of Kenneth Anger or Derek Jarman’s best work, this a particularly unfortunate oversight.




Technical Information:

Title: Salomé
Year: 1972
Country: Italy
Director: Carmelo Bene

Source: DVD5 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 3.06 GB
Length: 1:13:20
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio: Italiano- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: Italiano, English (custom)

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: Biography of Carmelo Bene (Italian only)




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Salomé Megaupload Links

Canada Day Horror Movie Marathon: David Cronenberg- Scanners (1981)- DVD5 (NTSC Format)

Hey! I thought this was G-A-Y Day(s)! Oh, well...

The only reason I'm horning in on a Canada Day event is that I had to talk L&S into adding Scanners to her list. You see, she's not a fan of Cronenberg and I try to explain to her that Cronenberg made a boatload of great film before his new "phase" that started with A History of Violence. So talking up Videodrome, Rabid and Scanners to her only leads to a blank Canadian stare. Even blanker than the standard Canadian blank stare when trying to explain the concept of "pre-emptive strikes". Whatever. Canadians are fucking strange. Here's Scanners. Happy Hanukkah!



From Rhett Miller at Canuxploitation:

As Cronenberg has developed as a filmmaker, his focus has shifted from the horrors of the body to the ambiguous depths of the mind. His first effort, Shivers, was about parasites and the complications of the physical act of love. Rabid shifted to more personal territory, offering both a lead character (which Shivers did not) and the mental anguish that goes along with disease. Moving further into the mental, The Brood considered psychiatry, although it still represented it in the physical through those pesky little demon children. Scanners, Cronenberg's fifth film, represents a turning of the corner from body exploits to those of the mind. There are no physical manifestations this time, all the conflict occurs within the mind. Cronenberg would take this a step further with more pretentious efforts like Naked Lunch and Spider, where he would actually go into the minds of his characters. Before his artistic conceit though, Cronenberg was channeling the darker voids of Canadian B-movie cinema, and with Scanners he did a damn good job of it.

The film begins in a relatively empty (where are all those extras?!) Montreal mall, where a homeless and tormented Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) wanders. In his head he hears voices not of his own making. They are other people's thoughts, and they ring like loud reverberations throughout his mind. Vale has an altered brain, like 236 other " Scanners" in the world, that not only makes him susceptible to hearing everyone's thoughts, but it also gives him the power to control others' minds. When he hears a lady patronizing him in the mall for being a homeless outcast, he uncontrollably causes her to have a mental hemorrhage. This outburst leads to his capture by leading Scanner " psychopharmacist" Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan).




Ruth takes Cameron to an abandoned apartment, where he ties him up and subjects him to scrutiny by several of his colleagues. As they all pile into the apartment, Vale picks up all their thoughts like a radio does signals, and the thought overload sends him into convulsions. Meanwhile, other doctors involved in Scanner research are meeting in a theatre, where one attempts to read the mind of a volunteer. As the Scanner concentrates, the volunteer seems to channel his thoughts even more intensely, eventually causing the Scanner's head to literally explode into a sea of brain and skull fragments. The volunteer's name is Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), the future leader of the Scanner revolt.

Revok's proposal is to assemble all 237 Scanners and lead them on an attack against the society that irresponsibly created them. The Scanners, like all bad things in Cronenberg's universe, were created by medical research gone awry. When mothers were administered the drug called Ephemerol during maternity, it caused for mental aberrations and a hyperactivity of the brain synapses in their unborn children. Revok has a listing of all the affected Scanners, Vale being the final name. Either Vale joins them, or Revok will ensure his death.

As Dr. Ruth helps Vale increase his mental strength in preparation for the conflict that is to ensue with Revok, Vale runs into Benjamin Pierce (Robert A. Silverman), a Scanner who has been able to control the thoughts in his mind by externalizing them through art (much like Cronenberg). As the violent antithesis of Pierce, Revok achieves the same effect by drilling a hole in his head to release the voices (an actual medical procedure called "trepanning" Ed.). Now, Revok is able to use his mind to kill Pierce, knocking the artistic balance of the world off its course.




Teamed up with another Scanner, Kim Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill), Vale heads off to the biological plant where Revok has been carrying out his operations. Revok and Vale eventually cross paths, and go at each other (literally) head to head. It is a violent battle of wits, as both use their telekinetic powers to destroy their bodies to the point where only one man and one mind are left standing.

On the surface, Scanners is yet another of the exploitive splatter flicks of the early 1980s that Canada was so notorious for producing. Beyond the surface, the film is a deep meditation on the state of the mind in a time of medical and technological experimentation. Like with all of Cronenberg's early efforts, this is a film that seems to be created in direct scrutiny of Canada's ever-controlling public health care system. If a single drug can nearly bring the apocalypse in Scanners, then what can happen when an entire system of state medical control makes a mistake? Cronenberg makes no attempts to hide his bias against medical experimentation, as evidenced by his witty naming of the harmful drug, " Ephemerol" . A play on the word "ephemeral", the irony is that the drug leaves anything but an ephemeral side effect... the Scanners are affected for life.

Unlike Shivers and Rabid, which questioned these themes of medical intervention and technology more broadly, Scanners is ultimately more personal. The film is less about the dichotomy between Scanner and human and more about the battle between Vale and Revok. The way Cronenberg negates a female love interest (O'Neill's character is wasted) puts the focus entirely on the two male characters to the point where their mental sparring takes on a homoerotic subtext. Like homosexuals in an AIDS-afraid early 80s, the Scanners are treated as outcasts, and as a result, they must sense their kind through mental guessing rather than audible comments. Connections between Scanners had to be made by interpreting subtext, much like the conservative society had forced gays to keep their sexuality repressed within their minds.




The final battle between Revok and Vale, accentuated by Dick Smith's amazingly gory effects work, extends the homoerotic undercurrent even further. Both Vale and Revok penetrate each other's minds, complete with moaning, gyrating and bodily stiffness. The swelling of veins on their outstretched arms very much resembles an erect penis. As their mental duel reaches its climax, bodily fluids are shot out of their bodies in a very sexual form of release. In the end only one remains, and the fight serves as a homosexual counterpoint to the climactic battle between husband and wife in The Brood. Cronenberg would extend the homosexual allegory featured here even more explicitly in his later Naked Lunch.

In a time when sex in Canada was only really being explored in detail in Quebec, it is no surprise that much of Scanners was shot in Montreal. The Le's and La's attached to store names in the mall at the opening clearly indicate the film's French locales. Yet, despite a passing reference to Thunder Bay, the film, like the rest of Cronenberg's work, tries to avoid all its associations with Canada, opting for a generic "North American" backdrop.




In a way, the undistinguished setting helps to emphasize the universal concern about the state of man's mind in an ever more scientific age. " With all those voices, how do you develop your own self?" Ruth asks Vale, and this is a question Cronenberg asks the viewer. In an age of extreme medical and technological experimentation, where chips can be implanted in the brain to aid hearing or cells can be cloned, the mind is increasingly becoming a battlefield of control. Like how Revok exposed his brain by drilling a hole in his skull, society has very much exposed the brain to experimentation and media scrutiny. Nothing in the sciences or in the media is off limits today, and the mind, more than ever, is losing its privacy.

Scanners questions many major concerns surrounding the mind, and Cronenberg executes it with some of his most intense direction. Although very little is shown on screen (as the conflicts lie within the mind), Cronenberg manages to keep the pacing and intensity of the film at a much more involving rate than most of his other works. A strong turn by Canadian B-movie villain extraordinaire, Michael Ironside (Prom Night II, American Nightmare) also gives the film a strong jolt of energy. Although Scanners seems more like a blueprint of the Cronenberg to come, it nonetheless is a solid genre effort that ranks as the best in the pantheon of Canadian horror films of the early 80s. Deeper and more ambitious than the likes of My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night, and Happy Birthday to Me, it is more than just a splatter film. It is a splatter film with a mind.




Technical Information:

Title: Scanners
Year: 1981
Country: Canada
Director: David Cronenberg

Source: DVD5 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 3.93 GB
Length: 1:42:58
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~4500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio 1: English- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: Francais- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: Francais, Espanol

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: Theatrical Trailer




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Scanners Megaupload Links

Canada Day Horror Movie Marathon: Jeff Gillen/Alan Ormsby- Deranged (1974)- DVD5 (PAL Format)

Apparenty this German release of the DVD is the only one that is completely uncut. Happy Canada Day!




From Canuxploitation:

Ed Gein's 1957 murderous rampage has been the subject of many films, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho and to a much lesser extent, Silence of the Lambs. This is the Canadian version of Gein's life and his real-life exploits which include murder, grave robbing, cannibalism and necrophilia.

Deranged is a fantastic cult film, which unlike the other versions of Gein's life, offers a kind of semi-humorous fictionalization of actual events. There is so much speculation about Gein's "idiosyncrasies" that the truth is anybody's guess. According to a 1981 documentary which follows the film on some versions of the home video, most of this film is true. However, I don't discount the influence of both Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre in this particular recreation, as the movie obviously draws from some of the fictional events from those films as well.The directors have "changed the names to protect the innocent," so Ed's name is now Ezra Cobb (But Ed wasn't innocent, I hear you protesting). We also have a narrator, who occasionally steps in the frame to elaborate on the events. The movie begins with a short deathbed segment which aims to show the influence of Ezra's mother. During this scene she drops pearls of wisdom on Ezra like "The wages of sin is gonorrhea, syphilis and death!" and "All women are full of disease!". She is the ultimate domineering mother, but quickly dies.




The narrator instructs us to jump forward a few years, and we see that Ezra has "recreated" his mother on her bed with a dress, shoes, and a photograph. He has also taken to berating himself in his mother's voice, just like Norman in Psycho. Ezra is working odd-jobs for his neighbour and friend, Harlon Kootz, and his once well-kept farmhouse is now littered with newspapers and men's magazines. Finally, he decides to "bring mother home," and digs her up. Unfortunately, he has imagined her looking exactly as she had in life, and is shocked when her body parts break off and begin to crumble away. The narrator steps back in to tell us of Ezra's quest for a method to repair his mother's body, from taxidermy to embalming.

While having dinner with the Kootz family one night, Ezra learns that his Sunday school teacher has died. Harlon explains the concept of the obituary section to Ezra, who at first doesn't understand how it works. This is often the case, as Roberts Blossoms' portrayal of Ezra is as an honest, unassuming backwoods cracker. Ezra eventually decides to use the obituary section to find the freshly deceased so he can repair his mother's body with their "spare parts." He announces his plan at the dinner table, and the family laughs, assuming he is joking.Nobody's laughing in the next 'newly restored' scene, as Ezra (with the help of FX man Tom Savini) spoons the eyeballs out of his teacher's head. Then he hacksaws off her scalp and spoons out the brains. He puts the skin of her face over his mother's own face, and creates a kind of mask for her, which seems to work. Then he places the remaining skull on the bedpost to keep his mother company.




The Kootz family convinces Ezra that he needs to start dating, so he goes out with a friend of his mother, a large woman named Maureen. Maureen is a widow who believes she can talk with her dead husband, so right off the bat they have something in common! During a seance, Maureen's husband apparently enters her body (although it is probably just Maureen) and tells Ezra to favour Maureen with the "carnal aspects of marriage," but Ezra replies "Carnival?" After Ezra enters the bedroom he begins having flashbacks to his mother's condemnation of all women. Realizing Maureen is "diseased", he quickly pulls out a gun, and "cleanses" the earth of Maureen, just like his good mamma told him.

Apparently this event sparks his interest in women, and he starts visiting Goldie's, a local watering hole (which plays Stompin' Tom Connors songs!). He quickly becomes obsessed with a waitress named Mary, and decides to add her to his collection. A few nights later, he slashes her car tires (which he blames on "punk kids"), and offers to drive her into town. Instead, he drives her back to his farmhouse and leaves her waiting on the promise that he is going to get some spare tires. Getting impatient, Mary goes into the house and after lots of atmosphere and spooky music, accidently stumbles on several bodies. She runs out of the house screaming until Ezra catches her. He then ties her up, strips her to her underwear, and locks her in the closet. When she comes to, he invites her to the dinner table, where several corpses have been placed in chairs. This scene is very much like the dinner table in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Ezra then informs Mary that she will be his new wife, and starts fondling her at the table. She asks him to untie her so she can touch him as well, and he does, only to be knocked in the head with a bottle. Mary attempts to escape again, but is no match for Ezra, who beats her to death with a human leg bone.




Jump ahead a few more days and into the Kootz home courtesy of the narrator. In discussing the newspaper stories about the disappearance of the barmaid, Ezra tells Harlon in his loveable stupid way that Mary "ain't missing, she's up at my place." Harlon still laughs off Ezra's proclamations, but a little more warily than before. Harlon's son soon appears and introduces his girlfriend Sally, who works at the local Hardware store. Once again, Ezra is smitten. One day while Harlon and his son are off hunting, he goes in the store to buy some anti-freeze, and he leaves with Sally's body. He puts her in the back of his truck, but she is not dead-- she manages to jump out and run into the forest. Ezra begins to track her down, and this hunter/hunted metaphor becomes stronger when Sally gets her foot caught in an animal trap. Ezra finally takes her body back to his barn, and ties her up by the feet. At this point, Harlon begins to get suspicious and goes after his friend. At this point the film slows down into a freeze frame and the narrator explains how the townspeople burned Ezra's house down.

In reality, Ed Gein was arrested and deemed insane. His house was torched much later after residents grew tired of the sensationalism of the case. This low-budget horror film is incredible. Noted Canadian director Bob Clark was a producer, but had his name removed from the film. Tom Savini, who had previously worked with Clark in Deathdream did the great special effects, and went on to work heavily with George Romero in such classics as Dawn of the Dead and Martin.

Not only is this a great film, it is a great Canadian film. Ed Gein lived in Plainfield, Wisconsin, but the makers of this film chose to shoot this in a small Canadian town. The unflinching camerawork is very similar to that of a film like Goin Down The Road. The scene in the bar gets the Canuck treatment as well, with two Stompin' Tom songs (one I couldn't make out, and "She don't speak English and I don't speak French"). If only Ezra had ordered a Labatt's 50 on tap instead of his whiskey sours.

This film is considerably less graphic than Texas Chainsaw Massacre, yet Deranged outdoes it on atmosphere and creepiness. The makers of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer could learn something from this. Highly recommended!




Technical Information:

Title: Deranged
Year: 1974
Country: Canada/USA
Director: Jeff Gillen, Alan Ormsby

Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 4.35 GB
Length: 1:19:41
Programs used: Unknown

Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~4500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio: English- Dolby AC3 stereo @ 224 kb/s
Subtitles: German, English

Menu: Yes
Video: Probably re-encoded

DVD Extras (English with German subtitles):
- Deranged Chronicles: The Making of "Deranged"
- The Ed Gein Story
- Ed Gein: American Maniac
- The Sequel that Wasn't: A Behind the Scenes Look at "Creep"
- Trailers


Thanks to torrentseek at 'tik for the original upload!

torrentseek's notes:

This is not my rip, I got this from another tracker, so I cannot tell you what programs were used. Size indicates it is probably a re-encode. Overall quality is good though. For some strange reason, the German audio track has been removed from the disc. Subs are still there.

The restored scene was not remastered, so it presents a distinct drop in quality. [...] however, this doesn't last very long and should not be much of a distraction.




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Deranged Megaupload Links

G-A-Y Day(s)- Toshio Matsumoto- 薔薇の葬列/Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)- DVD5 (NTSC Format)

Here's some more late 60's Japanese New Wave that fits so nicely with G-A-Y Day(s). You know, the same old story of the marginalized and "lowest of the low" of our society being beat down till they can't take it anymore. Rinse, repeat.




From Jasper Sharp at Midnight Eye:

Looking back at it from the light of the early twenty-first century, one of the most astonishing things about Funeral Parade of Roses is just how little seen it has been. This in itself is something of an enigma. It's not like the title is unknown outside of Japan, having been pretty extensively discussed in books like David Desser's Eros Plus Massacre and Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer. But I was really amazed given its international reputation to learn that Eureka's DVD release actually represents the first of any kind for the foreign home video market. One can only hope that the belated rectification of this grave oversight will serve in some degree to hoist its director Toshio Matsumoto's name up to a higher level on the totem pole of internationally visible filmmaking greats than it hitherto has been and lead to more widespread releases of his other films. Because on the evidence of this kaleidoscopic view of Tokyo's vibrant gay countercultural scene of the late 60s, his work represents something of an undiscovered treasure trove for the Western viewer.




Just to put the name into context, Matsumoto was born in Nagoya in 1932 and rose to become one of the key players in the early Japanese experimental scene with short films like Silver Ring (Ginrin, 1955), the 18-minute documentary on the renewal of the US-Japan security pact Ampo Jouyaku (1959), 300 Ton Trailer (1959), Record of a Long Wide Line (Shiroi Nagai Suji no Kiroku, 1960) and Magnetic Scramble (1968). Many of these early works have been recently made available for the first time in Japan in the three-volume box-set Toshio Matsumoto Experimental Film Works 1961-1987.

Funeral Parade of Roses is his first feature-length work, and was made possible through the support of the Art Theatre Guild, who produced and distributed the film. Though the following decades have seen Matsumoto continuing to practice within the fields of experimental cinema and video installation, subsequent theatrical features, which include Pandemonium (Shura, 1971), A 16-Year-Old's War (Juroku-sai no Senso, 1972) and Dogura Magura (1988), have been rather thin on the ground.




The experimental background is very much in evidence in his first feature. Trying to explain the pleasures of such a scrambled impressionistic piece as Funeral Parade of Roses in plot terms is a pretty fruitless exercise, although the disjointed narrative does reach fever pitch in the latter moments, with developments inspired by the ancient legend of Oedipus Rex so succinctly described in the dark ditty written by 50s American singer/satirist/maths professor Tom Lehrer: 'There once lived a man called Oedipus Rex / You must have heard about his odd complex / His name appears in Freud's index / Because he loved his mother ...'

Those aware of the mythological underpinnings of Freudian theory might have some inkling as what to expect in the gruesome closing scenes. While these in themselves go some way in giving those attempting to sum up the essence of this work in a few choice phrases something to hang their hats on, the net effect of the film is considerably more substantial than such a dime-store Freudian denouement might suggest.




This is as much due to the freak charismas of those in front of the camera as the talent of the director behind it. Admirably carrying the main weight of the drama on his shoulders among a cast predominantly made up of non-professionals and counter-cultural mini-celebrities is a player known solely as Peter. According to an incredibly youthful looking Matsumoto on the on-disk interview, he was scouted especially for the part while working as a transvestite bar hostess in Roppongi. One can immediately see how he caught the filmmaker's eye: Peter, who subsequently played the Fool in Akira Kurosawa's Ran and turned up in several other films during the 70s (the most familiar mainstream appearance perhaps being the 1970 entry of the long-running Shintaro Katsu vehicle Zatoichi, Fire Festival), certainly has all the right moves, not to mention a doe-eyed vulnerability and the ability to project a potently polymorphous form of sensuality that belies his gender. It would be difficult to imagine the film with anyone else in his high heels. In the role of the androgynous bar worker Eddie, Peter wrestles with inner demons while jostling for the affections of drug-dealing cabaret-manager Gonda (Tsuchiya; one of the few professionals in the cast with several roles behind him in Kurosawa films such as The Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood) with rival cross-dresser Reda (Ogasawara) and taking centre stage in a documentary being made about Tokyo's gay culture.




The story really remains only a ruse for a work that is best seen as a fascinating reflection of a long-vanished place and time, caught in a cross-current of international pop-cultural styles and influences and not dissimilar to what was going on in similar circles in other far-flung parts of the world. The colourful underground milieu, populated by a rag-tag collection of cross-dressers, bohemians, druggies and drop-outs, bares easy comparisons with the environment fostered by Andy Warhol and his disciples at his Factory studio in New York - at one point the American underground film scene is explicitly mentioned when one of the characters quotes Jonas Mekas (though another has to correct the mispronunciation of Mekas' name.) The exuberant costumes and pop-art sensibilities recall all the excesses of the European swinging 60s scene as celebrated in William Klein's kitsch cult oddity Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966), and it is rumoured that Matsumoto's false-eyelashed protagonists served as the inspiration for Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Finally the experimental melange of dramatised sequences and documentary footage assembled in a cocktail of freeze frames, onscreen text, sped-up sequences, solarised or over-exposed shots, distorted wavering news footage filmed directly from TV and stroboscopic cross-cuts immediately puts one in mind of the French New Wave.




I offer these foreign examples primarily as descriptive points of reference. While Matsumoto readily acknowledges the early impact of nouvelle vague director Alain Resnais on his work, Funeral Parade of Roses amounts to much, much more than the sum of its influences. And anyway, though its focus on experimental filmmaking technique is very much in keeping many of the other films produced by the Art Theatre Guild - typically those of Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura, Masahiro Shinoda, Susumu Hani and Kiju Yoshida - Matsumoto's film never quite seems like the dry meta-textual exercise in formalism of some of his contemporaries. It also boasts its more playful moments, for example Reda and Eddie's under-cranked showdown, alongside its more poignantly tragic dimension revealed through flashbacks to Eddie's traumatic fatherless childhood.




Technical Information:

Title: 薔薇の葬列/Bara no Sōretsu/Funeral Parade of Roses
Year: 1969
Country: Japan
Director: Toshio Matsumoto

Source: Retail DVD5
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso+mds
Size: 4.35 GB
Length: 01:44:45
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Video: MPEG2 @~ 5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio Channel 1: Japanese- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 384 kb/s
Audio Channel 2: Japanese Commentary- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 384 kb/s

Subtitles: English, English Commentary

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: Director Interview, Japanese Trailer, Poster Gallery




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Funeral Parade of Roses Megaupload Link

Luis Buñuel- Un chien andalou (1929)- DVD5 (PAL Format) and BluRay Rip (1080p-x264)

I'd be hard-pressed to come up with another director or film that has changed the face of cinema with the force that Luis Buñuel and Un chien andalou has. The film is magic. The very first time I saw Un chien andalou was right before Bowie took to the stage on the Station to Station tour back in the day, and even as perfect as the concert was, I was more blown away by seeing a Buñuel film for the first time than I was  in experiencing The Thin White Duke. Come to think of it, If I ever run into David Bowie on a street corner, I'll have to thank him for turning me on to Buñuel. You'll notice that I haven't mentioned Dali once in this diatribe. I wont. Why mess  up a good thing. This is the fully restored Spanish Filmoteca version of the film, and there is no better version until this print appears on BluRay.  Enjoy, fellow surrealists...

SPECIAL ForTheDishwasher UPDATE:

There is now an upgraded x264 version of this film. It's the 1960 restoration and not the Spanish Filmoteca version that was hoped for, but all the same, it's amazing to see it in high def. Enjoy!




From Senses of the Cinema:

"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray




Un Chien Andalou was the calling card of two desperate, unknown Spanish artists. It "came from an encounter between two dreams." The script was an easy and joyful joint collaboration between Buñuel and Dali (Buñuel would continue to write scripts in collaboration for the rest of his life), and Buñuel shot the film quickly over two weeks on a small budget supplied by his mother. Dali later claimed to have had a greater involvement in the filming, but by all contemporaneous accounts this does not seem to have been the case.

The film illustrates Buñuel's awesome ability as a fledgling filmmaker and served as a calling card for Buñuel and Dali into the elite club of the surrealists. After just over seventy years, the remarkable opening sequence still retains its power: "Once upon a time." the introductory title proclaims. A proletarian Buñuel, feverishly puffing a cigarette, sharpens the blade of a razor. He cuts his fingernail to prove it is sharp. He exits the room for a balcony and looks at the full moon. A slither of a cloud is about to bisect the moon. Buñuel forces open wide the eye of a woman who has appeared from nowhere. The cloud cuts across the surface of the moon and the razor slices the eye apart. There is a second title, "Eight years later," which like all of the titles in the film is paradoxical and seemingly irrelevant.




This sequence still shocks and it is purported that Buñuel, although the originator of the idea and the images, was nauseated the first few times he viewed the scene. This is the most famous sequence but it is also the key to the rest of the film. As Jean Vigo so profoundly stated: "Can there be any spectacle more terrible than the sight of a cloud obscuring the moon at its full? The prologue can hardly have one indifferent. It tells us that in this film we must see with a different eye."

It is with this different perspective that the film must be viewed. One sequence leads seductively to the succeeding one, objects from one shot reappear in the next, a process of free association occurs; the illusion of a narrative of sorts develops. Dali stated in 1928, of the film's theme: "the pure and correct line of 'conduct' of a human who pursues love through wretched humanitarian, patriotic ideals and the other miserable workings of reality." This seems to be the general perspective of most writers discussing the film. Nevertheless, Buñuel offered an alternative explanation: "Our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why."




Buñuel wanted to shock and insult the intellectual bourgeoisie. Buñuel later said, "Historically the film represents a violent reaction against what in those days was called 'avant-garde,' which was aimed exclusively at artistic sensibility and the audience's reason." His film was to be 'a gob of spit in the face of art,' as Henry Miller, an obsessed supporter of Un Chien Andalou, was later to describe his own Tropic of Cancer. To achieve this, Buñuel and Dali made a film that was open to a myriad of interpretations, rendering such analyses redundant. The crutch of understanding through narrative or theme is useless. As Dali explained, the intention of the film was, "To disrupt the mental anxiety of the spectator," and one of the easiest ways to do this is to thwart the viewer's ability to logically interpret proceedings. In the film, as in dreams, there is a dislocation of time and space. The disruption of time predominantly occurs through the use of the intertitles which almost appear to be a key to an understanding of the film. The dislocation of space occurs through the opportunistic use of locations. A street and a beach occupy the same space outside the room, itself the central location of the film. What is necessary is to accept the film for what it is.

Yet most critics desire to increase our comprehension and ability to access the film through interpretation. As the film is made by a surrealist, psychoanalysis comes to the fore as an interpretative method. Yet interpretation is ultimately pointless. The most effective manner in which to appreciate the film is to allow the images to seduce, to watch with your eyes and emotions and not to seek an explanation.




This is a first film by two relatively young intellectuals and it is striking. Yet for all its critical and financial success, it never truly achieved its aim of outraging or affronting middle-class sensibilities. Although there are reports of disruptions of screenings, these seem to be based on false memories of events surrounding the release of Buñuel's next film, L'Age d'Or (1930), where the blasphemy and perversion quotient was increased. L'Age d'Or was banned, but Buñuel was disappointed by the bourgeoisie's reception of Un Chien Andalou. He would later justify their response by stating, "What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?" Yet Sergei Eisenstein, on viewing the film in Switzerland in August 1929 stated that the film exposed, "the extent of the disintegration of bourgeois consciousness." Was Eisenstein far from the truth? Buñuel was raised as a member of the feudal gentry in a pious and disciplined Catholic Spain, and although exiled by Franco's regime, he was, by the 1950s, increasingly accepting of Franco, even saying controversially in 1983, "I am even prepared to believe that he [Franco] kept Spain out of World War Two."

Un Chien Andalou was, as were many of Buñuel's later films, a huge success amongst the French bourgeoisie, and a parallel can be seen between the careers of Buñuel and Chabrol. Chabrol is a self-confessed bourgeois who hates the complacency of his class. His films are deeply critical of the bourgeoisie yet his films have always benefited from the patronage of the middle-class. The same can be said of Buñuel. This can also be seen in Buñuel's uneasy relationship with the Catholic church. Undoubtedly the blasphemous content of his first two shorts contributed to Buñuel's banishment from Spain, and his ongoing vitriolic criticism of the Catholic church maintained the enmity of Franco's government. But Nazarin (1958), about a saintly but impractical priest's inability to improve the living conditions of the destitute peasants around him, nor to influence their hypocritical values, won an ecumenical prize from the International Catholic Cinema Office.




Buñuel always liked to shock. The eye-slicing in Un Chien Andalou, and Christ portrayed as the Duo de Blangis (obviously the Marquis de Sade) in L'Age d'Or are prime examples of this. Referring to Un Chien Andalou in 1983, Buñuel wrote, "I suggested that we [the surrealists of 1929] burn the negative... something I would have done without hesitation had the group agreed. In fact I'd still do it today; I can imagine a huge pyre in my own little garden where all my negatives and all the copies of my own films go up in flames. It wouldn't make the slightest difference." Yet, for someone so nonchalant about his work, it is revealing that in the 1960s Buñuel created the sonorised version of Un Chien Andalou, based on the original music (Wagner, a South American tango) used for its original release.

How does Un Chien Andalou fit into the body of Buñuel's work? As with all of Buñuel's films, Un Chien Andalou illustrates Buñuel's obsessions and is replete with references to his upbringing. Recurrent reference points are surrealism and religion, as already mentioned, seasoned with violence and a willingness to shock. Images from Spain appear regularly throughout his work as do images of the poor and suffering. It was Buñuel's only silent film and perhaps for this reason appears more dynamic than his other works. Along with L'Age d'Or and Las Hurdes (1933), the film is very explicit and confrontational. These three films are exercises in style and form. It is here that Buñuel learnt his craft, but thereafter, as Freddy Buache has said, Buñuel could still shock but "He preferred to bury his explosives blandly beneath the surface of an apparently traditional style." However, this could be misconstrued. Rene Clair's surrealist Entr'acte (1924), made four years before Un Chien Andalou, has a greater appreciation of, and daring use of style. It does make Buñuel's film look traditional by comparison. Yet, for a film made as a companion piece to a Dadaist ballet, it lacks Un Chien Andalou's grace and fluidity. Clair may be the greater stylist, but Buñuel is the greater filmmaker.




DVD Technical Information:

Title: Un chien andalou (Spanish Filmoteca Restoration)
Year: 1929
Country: France/Spain
Director: Luis Buñuel

Source: DVD5 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 1.63 GB
Length: 0:21:26
Programs used: Unknown

Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1
Video: MPEG2 @ ~7780 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio 1: 1959 instrumental- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: original instrumental- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s

Subtitles: English, Español, French intertitles

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source


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BluRay Technical Information:

Title: Un chien Andalou
Year: 1929
Country: France/Spain
Director: Luis Buñuel

Source: Retail BluRay
Video Codec: 1080p x264
Container: .mkv
Size: 1.09 GB
Length: 0:16:25
Programs used: Unknown

Resolution: 1440x1080
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG4 AVC H264 @ ~9264 kb/s
Frame Rate: 23.976 fps

Audio: Instrumental- Dolby AC3 @ 256 kb/s
Subtitles: English


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"What Happened to You, Zhang Yimou?": Zhang Yimou- 秋菊打官司/The Story of Qiu Ju (1992)- DVD5 (NTSC Format)

The Story of Qiu Ju, along with Raise the Red Lantern, are personal favorites of mine. This film shows that Gong Li is not just a pretty face and that she has wonderful comedic talent. Qui Ju's one-woman mission to find justice for her husband in a fractured system allows Gong Li to shine. It's interesting that in most of Zhang Yimou's films, there are more Gong Li close-up's than you can shake a stick at. In The Story of Qiu Ju there is only one, but it's one of the most powerful close-ups you'll ever experience. The quality of this print, unlike Red Sorghum, is excellent, so you won't be disappointed if you're a Yimou/Gong Li fan.

Professor Jack Ass asked "What the hell happened to The Story of Qiu Ju?" Nothing happened. We simply took our time. To Live is up next, unless we die. Enjoy the film!




From Roger Ebert:

"The Story of Qiu Ju" begins with a shot of a Chinese city scene, the streets teeming with people, most of them on foot or bicycle. Eventually the camera isolates three of them: A man sprawled uncomfortably on a cart, and two women who are pushing him. One of the women is pregnant. After they arrive at a doctor's office, she explains that her husband has been kicked in the groin by their village political leader.

The doctor is not the sort to inspire confidence. He advises rest. Soon the women - sisters - are making the journey back home again, pulling the cart through cold winter weather to their village.

The husband is inclined to take his fate philosophically, and wait for his pain to subside. Not Qui Ju, the wife. "If we can't fix your plumbing, we may be stuck with the single-child policy," she laments.

She wants to see justice done.




So begins the story of two very stubborn people, Qui Ju and the political head, played by Lei Lao Sheng. Qui Ju is played by Gong Li, the most famous Chinese actress, and the movie is directed by Zhang Yimou, the most successful of the "fifth generation" of Chinese directors. Gong has starred in all of his films: "Red Sorghum," "Ju Dou," "Raise the Red Lantern." Even in the gritty worlds of the first two films, she looked beautiful, and in the third she was glamorous. But here, in Zhang's first film set in present-day China, she looks worn, tired, and very pregnant.

She goes to the local police chief, demanding that the political leader apologize to her husband and make financial reparations. The policeman works out a compromise, but then the leader throws the money contemptuously at her feet. So she refuses the payment, and sets off to appeal the case to a regional leader.

She will spend much of the movie on foot and in crowded trains, appealing to higher and higher authorities, as the film essentially follows her through a vertical cross-section of modern China.

At first, to be sure, we are not quite certain what the film's period is. In Qui Ju's village, life continues as it has for many years, and it is a little shock to see the first automobile in the movie; we could almost think ourselves in an earlier century. Qui Ju is also from an earlier time, and when she visits the regional capital she is quickly conned by a dishonest cabdriver.




The movie is a departure for Zhang, whose "Raise the Red Lantern" was shot almost entirely inside an elaborate set representing a rich man's house. This time, his famous star disguised by drab clothes and a well-developed pregnancy, he shoots on city streets with a concealed camera. One of the pleasures of the film is to see everyday China, which appears on screen unrehearsed and natural. Only three of the movie's actors are professionals, and the others essentially play themselves.

The movie's style and narrative seem inspired by postwar Italian neorealism, which attempted to tell the stories of ordinary people with ordinary problems. Qui Ju stubbornly sets off on one journey after another, appealing to district police chiefs, regional political leaders and finally even to the courts. All the authorities agree that she has a case. They keep suggesting the same remedies: A fine for the village leader, and an apology. But the leader's pride will not allow him to seem humbled before a woman (the husband and his aggrieved loins are by now reduced to bystander status).




There is a point in the film when it begins to seem repetitive: The leader will remain unbending, the Qui Ju will keep appealing. Then we begin to connect with the underlying story of the film, which is about the rhythm of village life, the relationships of friend and family, and the approaching birth of Qui Ju's child. It is also interesting to note her style of conduct. She is angry, but she often quite subdued in her confrontations; her strategy involves tenacity rather than pyrotechnics.

If a similar story were set in America, it would probably be made more obviously funny, and star someone famous for pluck - Sally Field, for example. Zhang's approach is more understated. Watching the film, we find the humor for ourselves, and along the way we absorb more information about the lives of ordinary people in everyday China than in any other film I've seen.




Technical Information:

Title: 秋菊打官司/The Story of Qiu Ju
Year: 1992
Country: China
Director: Zhang Yimou

Source: Retail DVD5
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 4.19 GB
Length: 0:59:35
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: Chinese- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None




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"What Happened to You, Zhang Yimou?": Zhang Yimou- 红高粱/Red Sorghum (1987)- DVD5 (PAL Format)

It's almost impossible to believe that the only source of Red Sorghum is this analogue to DVD HK version of the film, but it is. To think that Yimou's freshman outting is being treated this way by the film community is unconscionable. That being said, the reason we're posting this and the rest of Zhang Yimou's films up to Hero's is to remind people how wonderful a master director he was. I said was. Also, if you're a rabid Gong Li slut like me, this is the first time Her Highness was ever put to film. God, isn't she's beautiful? Well?

Enjoy the ratty film, because that's all there is. More Yimou on the way. I believe that the Story of Qiu Ju is next up.




From David Neo at Senses of Cinema:

My thinking about culture begins the moment it is in ruins.

– Chen Kaige

Zhang Yimou has been hailed as the most creative and outstanding filmmaker of the Fifth Generation. Zhang and his compatriot Fifth Generation filmmakers (such as Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang) were the first post-Cultural Revolution graduates from the Beijing Film Academy (graduating in 1982 this class was labelled the Fifth Generation). They were largely responsible for bringing international recognition to Mainland Chinese films. Prior to the emergence of the Fifth Generation, Chinese cinema was dominated by the production of propagandist films. The Fifth Generation filmmakers challenged the existing system both indirectly and directly; in order to evade censorship, these directors employed the clever use of allegory, symbol and metaphor. In so doing, the Fifth Generation filmmakers have been applauded for their hauntingly beautiful, culturally rich and multi-layered cinematographical language.

Red Sorghum made in 1987 was the first film that Zhang directed. His second film Ju Dou (1990) won numerous prestigious international awards such as the 1990 Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, the Golden Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival and Best Film at the 1990 New York Film Festival. Ju Dou was also the first Chinese film to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, at the 1990 Academy Awards. Zhang’s third film, Raise the Red Lantern (1991) won five prizes at the 1991 Venice Film Festival, and was also nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 1992 Academy Awards.



Paul Clark, a scholar on Chinese film, writes that the images of China in Fifth Generation films “reflect a profoundly ambivalent nationalism”. This is understandable considering the historical and cultural milieu from which the Fifth Generation filmmakers emerged. This profoundly ambivalent nationalism manifested itself in many of their films including Red Sorghum. Red Sorghum can be aptly described as a film involved in a deep questioning and searching for roots. The film’s concentrated focus on folk culture tells a story – or even a “legend”, as the film itself suggests – of the narrator’s grandparents. The narrator’s obvious Chinese background but anonymous identity seems to imply and encourage a universal, grass roots questioning of the Chinese heritage. The narrator is, in fact, not even sure of who his grandfather is, nevertheless, he likes to believe that it is the character of Grandpa (Jiang Wen), who was one of Jiu’er or Grandma’s (Gong Li) bridal sedan-bearers. Inherent in how this story or legend is constructed is a deep questioning of China’s roots – who and how did our (Chinese) ancestors come about? This questioning of China’s roots and origins is also illustrated in the metaphor of the sorghum – how did the sorghum come to grow in this area (the Northeast of China)? The narrator tells us that no one knows and that it simply grew wildly and naturally. The film’s focus on folk culture repudiates or questions the refined and sophisticated notions of Chinese culture; awakening us to more primal instincts.

Red Sorghum‘s return to grass roots seems to also be a celebration of the carnal. The film invokes many ideas of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival; essentially a return to basic biological needs such as eating, drinking, defecating, making love and rearing children. From the start of the film, the body and bodily functions are depicted in the unabashed shots of the sedan-bearers’ naked, sweat-soaked and dust-covered torsos as they teasingly, but vigorously, jostle the bridal palanquin. And throughout the film, the men are shown in various states of undress in their labours; for example, in the wine-brewing scene, the men are only clad in loin-cloths, and are warned of Jiu’er’s approaching presence, and hence are being called to appropriately cover themselves. The scenes of the invocation of the wine god succinctly encapsulate the celebration of the carnal as the characters of the film overtly evoke the Nietzschean celebration of the Dionysian spirit. The semi-nude men displaying their raw masculinity get drunk in the worship of the wine god and chant:

If you drink our wine,
You’ll breathe well and you won’t cough;
If you drink our wine,
You’ll be well and your mouth won’t smell bad…
If you drink our wine,
You won’t kow-tow to the emperor…




But the crudest example of the celebration of the carnal would be Grandpa pissing into the wine vats; which curiously produces the best wine the winery has ever made. It clearly exemplifies Grandpa’s virility. The raw masculinity portrayed in Red Sorghum is a sharp contrast to the traditional (even effeminate) Chinese image of the refined, cultivated and intellectual man that is very much associated with the Imperial Examinations of the feudal system of China. Red Sorghum promulgates a search for roots deeper and more genuine than those of traditional imperial China, as the chant defiantly resonates: “If you drink our wine, you won’t kow-tow to the emperor!”

This sharp attack on traditions is not only seen in the seemingly ludic chant above; but more poignantly in the allegory of the leprous winery owner, who represents China’s obsolete feudal and patriarchal system – which is depicted as impotent and ineffective. The acerbic criticism is made when we find out that Jiu’er is forced into marriage to a leprous winery owner in exchange for a mule – Jiu’er daringly questions her father’s love and even denounces him for such a cruel and callous act. Refusing to be subjected to her ill fate, Jiu’er is only armed with a pair of scissors to guard her dignity; fortunately, the consummation of the marriage never occurs and the leprous winery owner mysteriously dies. The narrator believes that Grandpa is responsible for the death. Jiu’er instead gives herself to Grandpa, who carries her off into the sorghum field and makes a bed out of wild sorghum for her – this is where the narrator’s father is believed to have been conceived. The film blatantly criticises the ineffectual and repressive feudal and patriarchal system of China, boldly awakening and beckoning us to the real and genuine realities of our feelings and primal instincts.




The search for roots can also be seen in the landscape represented in the film. Previously, Chinese filmmakers have represented China through the quintessentially southern landscape of water, trees, cultivated fields and cosy settlement. Red Sorghum, however, defies this tradition and is set in the rough northeast Gaomi Township, where Mo Yan, the author of the novel Red Sorghum, comes from. Contrastingly different from the south, Mo Yan describes the northeast as “the most beautiful and repulsive, most unusual and most common, most sacred and most corrupt, most heroic and most bastardly, hardest-drinking and hardest-loving place in the world…”

Zhang has purposefully chosen this harsh environment for the film, challenging the traditional outlook and established notions of China’s roots. One of the most memorable images in Red Sorghum is found in the last sequence of the film, where we see the mud-caked half-naked bodies of Grandpa and the narrator’s father amongst the corpses. After plotting an ambush and eradicating the Japanese troops, Grandpa and his son (the father of the narrator) are the sole survivors at the end of the film – both these characters’ actual names are never revealed and we are introduced to them simply, almost generically as the nameless narrator’s father and Grandpa, symbolic representations of the Chinese people. The closing images of mud-covered naked bodies and swaying wild sorghum – with folk songs sung as tributes to Jiu’er and the primal beating of the drum – tell us that the characters’ survival and the survival of the Chinese people depend on their ability to shake off the shackles of repression of Chinese culture and return to grass roots.




Technical Information:

Title: 红高粱/Red Sorghum
Year: 1987
Country: China
Director: Zhang Yimou

Source: DVD5 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 3.79 GB
Length: 1:28:10
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 270x576
Aspect Ratio: 16:9 Letterboxed
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio: Mandarin- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None




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