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)




(Use JDownloader to speed up downloading and avoid file stalls.)

Salomé Megaupload Links

Canada Day Horror Movie Marathon: Vincenzo Natali- Cube (1997)- BluRay Rip (720p-x264)

Here's Cube to end the marathon. Maybe it isn't exactly a horror movie, but it's close enough, and I have to take the dog for a walk. Happy Canada Day.




From Rob Wrigley at Classic-Horror.com:

Cube, a 1997 film by Canadian writer/director Vincenzo Natale, was filmed on a single set, with a small cast, and a small budget. Part sci-fi horror, part experiment, part student film, it has all the markings of a silly, boring, and talky mess. That it avoids most of those pitfalls is a tribute to the crew and cast.

Seven strangers awake to find themselves in rooms of Cube: 14'x14' metal boxes with an exit in the center of each wall and ceiling. Some rooms are trapped with lethal sci-fi devices. None of the doors seem to lead anywhere but to other rooms. It's like something out of a computer RPG. They join together to try to find their way out, and slowly start to unravel the mystery of Cube.




There are just seven actors, and four principals, but they are all solid and engaging: Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), the tough cop who slowly disintegrates, Leaven, a nerdy school girl played with wit and intelligence by Nicole de Boer ("Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" and "The Dead Zone" TV show), Holloway (Nicky Guadagini, Crash), a liberal-paranoid doctor who is delighted to find her conspiracy theories confirmed, and Worth (David Hewlett), as cynical office worker used to being a cog in some unfathomable machine.

Questions of politics, philosophy, and societal standing are on touched on in the dialogues of the characters. Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka are never far out of mind. But what really interests the director is the question: how many ways can one film a cube and still keep it engaging? The answer: more ways than you think. He uses every shot one can imagine to get the most of his limited set: colored lighting, expressionist camera angles, odd close-ups, shots from one cube into the next. The last shot is remarkable: a simple FX shot that serves as both a fitting conclusion and a spiritual metaphor.




It is easy to read allegory into Cube. One character refers to it as a public works project gone unchecked and unmanaged. But the audience can just as easily read Cube as an allegory of life: we don't know the reason or purpose, we are stuck here with strangers, and we have to find a way to make the best of it and cooperate if we want to survive. Viewed this way, the ending is both nihilistic and sublime.

The film contains effective, low-budget photography, solid performances, and a good score. But what really sets Cube apart from so much sci-fi drivel is that the director never forgets that while he can be as philosophical, and intellectual, and clever as he wants, the most important thing is to be entertaining. If there are any lessons to be learned from Cube, they are for film students and low-budget directors. It won't tell you how to live a useful life in an uncaring, arbitrary universe. But will show you how to take a worn premise, a small cast, and a single set, and make a terrific little film.




Technical Information:

Title: Cube
Year: 1997
Country: Canada
Director: Vincenzo Natali

Source: BluRay Retail
Video Codec: 720p x264
Container: .mkv
Size: 5.43 GB
Length: 1:30:17
Programs used: mkvmerge

Resolution: 1280x704
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG4 AVC H264 @ ~8000 kb/s
Frame Rate: 24 fps

Audio: English- Dolby AC3 6.1 @ 640 kb/s
Subtitles: English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Polish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish




(Use JDownloader to speed up downloading and avoid file stalls.)

Cube Megaupload Links

Canada Day Horror Movie Marathon: David Wellington- The Carpenter (1989)- VHS Rip (XviD)

A couple of weeks ago, leclisse and I were watching some crime documentary that had a bunch of trailers at the beginning for horribly low-budget horror movies. We kept looking at each other and saying, "who makes these things?" If The Carpenter had been made twenty years later, in the United States, its trailer probably would have been played with the rest at the beginning of that documentary.

Sadly, this movie has never been released on DVD, and this is the only version available. As always, I will update it as soon as I can.




From Canuxploitation:

Although it suffers from a painfully low budget, The Carpenter is a campy, genre-defying film that is much better than you would expect. Made in Quebec by David Wellington (who scripted Zombie Nightmare), it features a light-hearted approach, the unlikeliest of killers, and unconventional gore scenes.

Alice and Martin Jarrett are your average yuppie couple. Martin is a English Lit professor who sleeps with his students, and Alice exacts revenge by cutting up one of her husband's suits. After he takes her for a brief stint at the local mental institution, they try to start a new life in a new country house that Martin has bought.

Life in the country is just what Alice needs to relax, but the house has yet to be completed. When Alice arrives, extensive renovations are still being completed. The noise of the construction wears on her nerves, especially late one night when she awakens to the noise of hammering. She goes to investigate, and finds a carpenter working on the basement paneling. When she asks him why he has to work so late, he explains his hardworkin' "A job ain't done until it's done" philosophy as he puffs on a pipe and casually shoots rats with his nail gun.




The next day on the construction site, the workers are getting disgruntled pretty fastthey notice the basement was mostly completed overnight, and think that the foreman might be hiring scabs and screwing them out of overtime. Worse, one of the hard partyin' construction workers named Roland shows up drunk on Alice's doorstep, and gives a slurred "yer one high class lady" speech. After slugging back some more wine, he makes his move... but then he hears the sound of hammering from the basement. Proving he is both a lover and a fighter, Roland goes down to kick some scab ass... only The Carpenter appears first, and slices his arms off with a circular saw. Alice calmly watches this, and then slowly walks upstairs as The Carpenter apologizes for the mess and begins cleaning. High on valium, Alice is unfazed by the murder.

The next day, the sheriff stops by to welcome Alice to the neighbourhood. She invites him in for coffee, and before long he tells her the story of the man who built the house. Seems this guy, Ed, was trying to build his dream house all by himself. Wouldn't hire anyone to help him because he believed that hard work was the most important thing in the world. Unfortunately, his materials costs spiraled out of control, and he began getting visits from repo men intent on stopping him from completing his project. So, what else is there to do, but start killing them? After 8 or 9 murders, Ed the Carpenter was eventually killed by police, never to finish his work. Obviously no stranger to slasher movie plots, Alice doesn't have any trouble putting two and two together, and starts having more late night rendezvous with Ed, talking about the value of hard work.




Later, Martin has the foreman fire two of the workers who he sees goofing off. Not surprisingly, these workers get drunk and return that next night to steal some tools, as this will apparently settle the Jarrett's hash. After wrecking the wood paneling in the basement, one worker gets a belt sander in the face and the other gets acquainted with a staple gun and a power drill. When Alice comes down from bed to see what all the commotion is about, she has another conversation about craftsmanship as Ed calmly slices up a body in front of her. Alice realizes that she is falling in love with Ed's manly blue-collarness, and begins mimicking his behaviour in her own painting project. She even repeats Ed's speeches to her husband.

Everything changes when Martin's mistress Sarah shows up at the house to tell Alice that she is pregnant. Oh, Alice isn't too concerned with the infidelity, it's just that Sarah starts badmouthing the house. Ed suddenly appears and helps Alice aim the nail gun at Sarah's back. When Martin comes home and finds Sarah's body on the floor of the living room, he gets hysterical and slaps Alice. Once again Ed appears out of nowhere and teaches Martin a lesson about why it isn't right to hurt people by putting his head in a vise and slowly closing it. Finally, Alice's sister stops by, and sees the hardware-related carnage. To stop her from calling the cops, Ed tosses her into a wall. Nevermind the cold-hearted murder of five innocent people-- this sole brutal action causes Alice to realize that maybe her romance with a psychopathic handyman's ghost isn't working out the way she wants. When Ed tries to seal the deal by offering to caulk her gaps, she replies, "No. You're dead and you smell bad." With everyone else dead, it's up to Alice and her sister to put Ed's soul at rest before he is, like, totally a jerk to her.




In the end, all the male characters are revealed as insensitive clods, from the cheating husband to the boorish construction workers to Ed and his wacky old-fashioned values. Other characters in the film are portrayed in an over-the-top manner as well. The sheriff, who only serves as chief plot expositor, is played for laughs, as is a stereotypical Qubcois paint store owner with a perpetual cigarette in his mouth.

The Carpenter's low budget "straight-to-video" atmosphere is present in almost every scene, including the awkward fade-outs and a major continuity error in introducing the sister. This is counterbalanced by the fresh approach that The Carpenter takes to the usual cat-mouse relationship in American horror films. How many slasher films have a polite, protective maniac who calls ladies " ma'am" ? In fact, how many films at all feature a romance between killer and victim based on mutual respect and a love of Bob Vila reruns?

The scenes of hardware-related deaths are unorthodox in that if you blink, you'll miss them. There are no prolonged shots of lead-up with the buzzsaw, closeups of viscera or elongated deaths Ed just walks up, kills the guy, and starts cleaning up, so the blood doesn't soak into his hardwood floors. This is only in keeping with Ed's character, and all his talk of efficiency and hard work. It is because of this, though, that the film takes some heat as being "not scary" and " boring," but that's what makes The Carpenter a successful, lighthearted parody of the serious American slasher films of the late 1980s.




Technical Information:

Title: The Carpenter
Year: 1989
Country: Canada
Director: David Wellington

Source: VHS Rip
Video Codec: XviD
Container: .avi
Size: 699 MB
Length: 1:26:30
Programs used: Unknown

Resolution: 528x400
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG4 @ ~800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: English- MP3 Stereo @ 128 kb/s
Subtitles: None





The Carpenter Megaupload Link

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




(Use JDownloader to speed up downloading and avoid file stalls.)

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.




(Use JDownloader to speed up downloading and avoid file stalls.)

Deranged Megaupload Links

Canada Day Horror Movie Marathon: Ivan Reitman- Cannibal Girls (1973)- DVD9 (PAL Format)

We're taking a brief break from our G-A-Y Day(s) celebration to give you some of the best of the worst of Canadian film.

Here are some Cannibal Girls to say "Happy Canada Day" to everyone back home in the Motherland.




From Canuxploitation:

Shot in 1972 by a then-unknown filmmaker Ivan Reitman, Cannibal Girls may not have been the first Canadian horror film ever made, but it quickly gained a reputation as one of the sleaziest Canadian B-movie concoctions of its era. Where previous attempts at horror in Canadian cinema had largely been sober affairs like the blood and sex-free Reincarnate or Catholicism-driven Quebecois efforts like The Pyx, Cannibal Girls took its pulpy cues from drive-in fare south of the border and delivered a more visceral experience to audiences. A purposely trashy and surreal tale of a couple that has a run-in with some blood-hungry honeys in an isolated small town community, the film was an important harbinger of things to come for a young Canadian film industry still grappling with its own identity. The country's first big international B-movie hit, it set new standards of depravity (and comedy!) and served an important incubation ground for both Reitman, who would become one of Hollywood's most sought-after talents in the wake of 1984's Ghostbusters, and future SCTV performers Andrea Martin and Eugene Levy, both appearing in their first major feature film role.

The movie follows Cliff (Levy, sporting an impressive afro and moustache combo) and his new girlfriend Gloria (Martin), who are stranded in snow-bound Farnhamville after their car breaks down. While waiting for the run-down service station, the pair decide to crash at a local motel. There, the owner tells them of the town legend, about a trio of young girls who would bring men home to kill them and eat their remains. Since that dark period, the house where the girls once satisfied their unnatural desires has become a fancy local eatery.




Fascinated and slightly repulsed, Cliff and Gloria nevertheless decide to head to the town's most infamous address for dinner. The only customers of the night, they are welcomed by the mysterious proprietor Reverend Alex St. John (Ronald Ulrich), who regales them with more grisly local stories as three familiar-looking waitresses serve their meals. The meal is wonderful, even if the company is somewhat awkward, but the meal goes so long that the Reverend suggests the couplespend the night in the house, despite Gloria's protests and insistence that something is quite wrong with the whole creepy set-up.

Turns out Gloria had good reason to worrybefore long, the Reverend enters their bedroom with his three girls in tow. Cliff is quickly chained to the bedposts, and the Reverend attempts to hypnotize Gloria to kill her boyfriend with a knife. Mortified, she escapes and manages to hitch a ride with a doctor, who gives her a sedative and promises to take care of her. When Gloria awakens, she is back in her motel bed with Cliff. She suddenly realizes that her harrowing experience at the house was nothing but a bad dream... or was it?

Even before Cannibal Girls, Reitman and his film partner Dan Goldberg had become infamous names in Canadian cinema circles for their daring student feature The Columbus of Sex, which landed the pair in the Ontario courts over obscenity charges (which were eventually dropped). After securing CFDC funding, the partners made a sexy college comedy follow-up Foxy Lady, but it was a mostly unsatisfying experience that encouraged Reitman and Goldberg to set their sights on the lucrative horror market, from which many enthusiastic young directors graduated to mainstream filmmakers. Shot for only $12,000 with a vague premise and largely improvised dialogue, Cannibal Girls is a fun little exercise in Canadian horror even though it doesn't stand up to much scrutinythe story is frequently confusing, the acting sometimes suspect, and the extended dream sequence plot twist discouraging. While some of this can probably be attributed to the extensive re-shoots Reitman and Goldberg decided were needed to flesh out the story, there's no denying that Cannibal Girls is a quintessential example of 1970s grindhouse cinemamessy, amateurish, crude and not afraid to wallow in its sleazy subject matter.




What's most notable, however, is that the film is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. There's a noticeable vein of dark humour running throughout, as a pre-SCTV Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin manage riff off of each other as the young couple that can't seem to catch a break, but their performances are largely deadpan, such as when Levy awkwardly impales a cigarette to the loose end of a guitar string, or Martin coaxes the stalled car back to life by telling it how much she loves it. The humorous bits don't fully blend in well with the sleazier horror aspects of the premise, resulting in a sometimes unsure tone, but the seeds of Reitman's spooky humour are evident. Much more interesting is Ronald Ulrich's unsettling, sometimes campy turn as the Reverend. A charismatic Svengali in a top hat, cape and gloves, the Reverend is part Charles Manson and part Vincent Price, and is fond of quoting Shakespeare and vaguely demonic poetry. Imposing pictures of him are seen all around town, hovering over kitchen tables as the locals chow down on large hunks of raw meat and comment on the taste of human flesh as though they were discussing fine cuisine. Also keep an eye out for Fishka Rais, better known as Igor on the Hilarious House of Frightenstein, who has a short cameo as a deli owner.

Despite its lurid title, Cannibal Girls is not as drenched in the red stuff as most viewers might expect. The bloodshed never gets more gruesome than in one flashback sequence of the girl's earlier flesh-eating fun, in which one man is chained to the bed while the girls pour blood over his chest and proceed to eat him alive. This lack of solid spectacle turned out to be a major problem for the picture when it was picked up for distribution by American International Pictures, home of schlock king Roger Corman. Unsure of what to do with the bewildering and bizarre picture, a special "warning buzzer" gimmick was added which was heavily advertised in the film's advertising campaign (in fact, the trick was "borrowed" from 1966's Chamber of Horrors) . The gimmick worked like this: before a scene of potentially squeamish fun,a buzzer would go off, and easily-upset members of the audience would know to close their eyes until a doorbell sound indicated the surely indescribable horror was over. The William Castle-style ballyhoo obviously made an impression on some, including teenager Lawrence Zazalenchuk, who copied it for his Sudbury-shot gore effort The Corpse Eaters the following year.




But The Corpse Eaters wasn't the only film intent on imitating Cannibal Girls' makeshift ode to the box office power of boobs and blood. By looking beyond our borders and gaining U.S. distribution, the film once again opened up international market to budding Canadian shlockmeisters in a way that hadn't been achieved with 1963's The Mask, the first Canadian B-movie to make a splash outside of the country when it was scooped up by Warner Brothers. Similar exploitation films like Deranged, Shivers and Death Weekend followed almost immediately, the latter two even produced by Reitman, who had since hooked up with the likeminded masterminds at Cinepix, John Dunning and Andre Link. While arguable not as successful as these later films, Cannibal Girls nevertheless did pave the way for a more lurid brand of Canadian B-cinema, one that was, for a while, unquestionably supported by the government's film programs.

Another unique aspect of Cannibal Girls is that it is an unabashedly Canadian film that is actually set where it was filmed. A University of Toronto sticker and a maple leaf flag are clearly seen, and the dialogue specifically references Toronto on at least one occasion. The Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill stands in for the fictional Farnhamville, and the film plays on the terror of small town isolation that is part of most Canadians' upbringings. When Cliff and Gloria discover the breadth of the community-wide conspiracy of cannibalism, there's simply no escape without access to a carthey are destined to remain part of the terrifying town forever, in the clutches of the Reverend's vampire-like cabal of bloodthirsty killers. Reitman also makes the most out of his snowy locale to strand the couple and then heighten their claustrophobiain fact, Cannibal Girls was the first snowbound Canadian horror ever made, and is topped only by The Ghostkeeper's use of the frozen landscape as a source of despair and loneliness.

Despite some obvious problems, Cannibal Girls remains a true slice of vintage Canadian B-cinema that holds up better than many of the more restrained horror efforts that preceeded it. Harkening a new age of unabashed exploitation in Candaian cult filmmaking, it's a landmark effort that remains essential viewing for Canuxploitation fans who, despite the film's rarity, already know that these girls "do EXACTLY what you think they do!"




Technical Information:

Title: Cannibal Girls
Year: 1973
Country: Canada
Director: Ivan Reitman

Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.31 GB
Length: 1:19:25
Programs used: DVD Decrypter, ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~6800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio 1: English (with warning bell)- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: English (no warning bell)- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s

Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched

DVD Extras:
- Cannibal Guys: Ivan Reitman & Daniel Goldberg in Conversation
- Meat Eugene: Eugene Levy Talks
- French Credits
- Trailers
- TV and Radio spots
- Gallery
- PDFs of Press Book and Take One




(Use JDownloader to speed up downloading and avoid file stalls.)

Cannibal Girls 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




(Use JDownloader to speed up downloading and avoid file stalls.)

Funeral Parade of Roses Megaupload Link