![\"Death](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/death_walks_high_midnight_02_blu-ray__blu-ray_.jpg\")
Death Walks at Midnight – image courtesy of DVD Beaver<\/p><\/div>\n
Mario Bava and Dario Argento are the king and crown prince (respectively) of the genre that was born in the sixties, bloomed in the seventies, and celebrated a resurgence in the late nineties as scores of gialli<\/i> rolled out on videotape and DVD in restored and uncut versions. I devoured these releases but, like so many other fans, I also discovered that the pool of Italian horror was, just as with the spaghetti westerns in the 1960s, huge and filled with copycats and knock-offs cashing in on the current trends. The excitement waned as the pool of classics was quickly drained and I worked my way through lesser and lesser horrors just waiting for moments of inspiration. That’s not to say anyone gave up on the genre, only that for a few years the hits were fewer and farther between.<\/p>\n
Labels like Blue Underground, Kino Lorber, Synapse, and Mondo Macabro kept the genre alive during these fallow years. Now Arrow, a British label that recently launched an American line of Blu-ray and DVD releases (through distributor MVD), has injected new blood into the genre with some of the best editions of classic, notorious, and outrageous giallo<\/i> titles in the past couple of years. Most (if not all) of these films have previously been released on DVD, some of them satisfactory, others not so much. They make their respective Blu-ray debuts in impressive deluxe editions. Here are a few stand-out releases from the past 12 months or so, as well as a few choice releases from other labels. And where better to start than\u2026<\/p>\n
Forget the plot, which has something to do with a masked stalker hunting the gorgeous models of a Rome fashion house and a personal diary that becomes the film’s maguffin, and just take in the color and style. The man, dressed in black with a blank white mask that evokes the fashion mannequins of the film, leads his partners, invariably beautiful women impeccably dressed in bright, bold colors, through an often elaborate, usually sadistic, tightly choreographed murder. The plot becomes secondary to spectacle of the dreamy dance of death, choreographed with sadistic precision, delivered in lurid color, spied upon with a restlessly gliding camera. There\u2019s an undeniable edge of misogyny to the whole thing, but the psycho-thriller aspects seem beside the point as the narrative melts into abstract moments of dreamy, disconnected beauty. Cameron Mitchell (who also starred in a pair of Viking movies for Bava) plays the head of the fashion house and, thus, is the prime suspect in the eyes of the obsessive Inspector Silvester (Thomas Reiner)<\/p>\n Previous DVD releases have all been a little disappointing. Bava was a cinematographer and special effects artist before graduating to director. His films are painstakingly designed and painted on the screen and Blood and Black Lace<\/i><\/b> is one of his most beautiful. You can see it right there in the opening credits, a Gothic fashion shoot bathed in intense, unreal sprays of red and purple and green. Arrow gives the film its American Blu-ray debut in a transfer newly mastered from a 2K restoration from the original camera negative, with both the Italian and English language soundtracks (note that American actor Mitchell’s voice in the English version is one of many dubbed by Paul Frees) and newly translated subtitles for the Italian version.<\/p>\n New to this edition and featured on both Blu-ray and DVD editions is commentary by film historian and Mario Bava biographer Tim Lucas and the almost hour-long “Psycho Analysis,” an in-depth documentary on Blood and Black Lace<\/i> and the origins of the giallo genre featuring interviews with directors Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi among others. There is also an appreciation of the film by H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cattet & Bruno Forzani, directors of the giallo<\/i> tributes Amer<\/i> and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears<\/i> (10 mins), the visual essay “Gender and Giallo” by Michael Mackenzie (38 mins), a panel discussion on Mario Bava featuring Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava and Steve Della Casa, recorded at the 2014 Courmayeur Film Festival (11 mins), the complete episode of David Del Valle’s television series The Sinister Image<\/i> featuring his interview Cameron Mitchell (56 mins), and the alternative US opening titles (sourced from Joe Dante’s private print and scanned in 2K especially for this release). Exclusive to the Blu-ray is the neo-giallo<\/i> short film Yellow<\/i> by Ryan Haysom and Jon Britt. The accompanying lavishly illustrated booklet features new essays by giallo<\/i> historian Howard Hughes and David Del Valle and a print interview with Joe Dante.<\/p>\n Director \/ co-writer Massimo Dallamano, the cinematographer of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars<\/i> (1964) and For a Few Dollars More<\/i> (1965) and director of salacious adaptations of Devil in the Flesh<\/i> (1969) and The Secret of Dorian Gray<\/i> (1970), stacks up the genre conventions. One character has violent flashes of the murders, something between supernatural premonition and buried traumatic memory (complete with a sickly inventive bit of stylistic ingenuity involving a murder, a nightmare, and a whip-pan transition). There are obligatory shower scenes (complete with a peeping tom more pervy than menacing) next to imagery of Catholic repression and guilt. In one flashback involving an abortion, the scene transforms from shared act of rebellion to grotesque assault, an act of sadism and sexual violation rather than a medical procedure. The filmmakers may have set the film in Britain but the illegal back-alley abortion is purely Italian, as is the Catholic morality.<\/p>\n What Have You Done to Solange?<\/i><\/b> has plot holes big enough to trap the elephant in the room, but it is unusual and surprising and perversely compelling, with a disturbed twist that gives the salacious and sick predations a psychological grounding. This is not violence sexualized but an angry, vicious assault upon the sexuality of the victims, which gives the film a weird, resonant pay-off, and the lovely and tender score by legendary composer Ennio adds an eerie elegance and haunting edge to film. Solange<\/i><\/b> is exploitation to be sure, but Dallamano doesn’t fetishize or stylize the violence as spectacle. Rather, his film reverberates with a fear of female sexuality and mourning over the loss of innocence. That’s not to say Dallamano transcends the conventions of the genre, but he certainly complicates them.<\/p>\n Features both Blu-ray and DVD editions of the film, newly remastered from a 2K restoration from the original camera negative and featuring both Italian and English language soundtracks with optional English subtitles. It was shot with the actors delivering their lines in English so the dub would better match. Given the international make-up of the cast, the English language version is likely the definitive one here.<\/p>\n New to this edition is commentary by horror historians and critics Alan Jones and Kim Newman, new interviews with actors Karin Baal (13 mins), Fabio Testi (21 mins), and Fulvio Lucisano (11 mins), the half-hour visual essay “Innocence Lost” by Michael Mackenzie, plus a booklet with new essays on the giallo<\/i> scores of Ennio Morricone by Howard Hughes and the career of actress Camille Keaton by Art Ettinger.<\/p>\n Death Walks in High Heels<\/i><\/b> (1971) opens on an attention-grabbing set piece: a masked figure with a big knife stalks and stabs a man on a train, but the real object of his hunt is missing. The victim is\u2014or rather, was\u2014a notorious jewel thief and the police immediately pay a call on the dead man’s daughter Nicole (Nieves Navarro), a celebrity stripper in Paris. So does the killer, who terrorizes her with a knife and the threat of brutal sexual violence unless she hands over the jewels from a recent heist. She hadn’t a clue as to where her estranged father stashed his loot but neither the police nor the killer believe her. As for her hot-tempered boyfriend Michel (Sim\u00f3n Andreu), we’re not exactly sure what he believes. He’s an opportunist kept in high style by Nicole, a situation that tends to bring out the resentment of the ne’re do well. The setting may be France but his attitude is pure Italian machismo, slapping Nicole around to establish the alpha male dominance while living off her earnings. That makes him the prime suspect but certainly not the only one. Frank Wolff is the friendliest stalker on the stripper circuit, following Nicole from one club to the next and finally whisking her out of the country to his English seaside villa to escape the killer and the cops. (Key scenes with Paris and London landmarks were shot on location but otherwise Spain and Italy stand in for France and Britain.)<\/p>\n The quirky Inspector Baxter (Carlo Gentili), a sardonic police investigator with a dry wit and a slow-witted assistant (George Rigaud), is right out of the krimi<\/i>, as are the masked killer (whose faceless appearance is just as much about instilling terror as concealing identity), the gallery of eccentric suspects, and the splashes of gallows humor. And then there’s the voyeurism and the disembodied eyes. The operatic, intense close-ups that Sergio Leone turned into a stylistic trademark of the spaghetti western are transformed by Ercoli into mystery and menace: the eyes of unidentified onlookers, isolated in extreme close-up or framed by the holes of a mask or the lenses of glasses, binoculars, and telescopes. Nicole can’t escape the gaze of lusting men even in hiding and just who is doing the watching is as much a mystery as who is behind the mask.<\/p>\n Death Walks at Midnight<\/i><\/b> (1972) is not actually a sequel but in the proudly opportunistic tradition of Italian genre pictures it recalls an earlier success, in this case the filmmakers’ own. This time around, Navarro is a fashion model named Valentina (a reference to the comic book series by Guido Crepax?) who reluctantly agrees to be the subject of an experimental hallucinogenic drug for an unscrupulous tabloid reporter (Andreu). In the middle of a psychedelic trip she witnesses a gruesome murder in the apartment across the way but apartment is spotless by the time the police check it out the next day, The reporter chalks it up to an acid flashback\u2014there actually was a murder committed in the same apartment months ago and he’s convinced the drug unlocked a memory she buried out of trauma\u2014so Valentina becomes a high fashion Nancy Drew to navigate a world of eccentric informants, colorful suspects, and bohemian allies.<\/p>\n Ercoli pushes his style to more stylistic flamboyance: curious camera angles, unsettling compositions, a sense of Gothic around the edges of the modern world. Valentina’s sometime-lover Stefano (Pietro Martellanza), an artist with a lavish studio, gives Ercoli the opportunity to splash a little abstract color around. He pushes the film through creative set pieces and wild plot twists with a snappy pace, keeping the rollercoaster of suspense and spectacle moving with rapid but smooth momentum. Most refreshingly, Navarro takes the lead in the investigation and in the film. The men are a few beats behind, though no less arrogant for it. She isn’t even obligated to disrobe this time around, which I attribute to a sign of respect and affection from director to actress. The married and lived happily ever until Ercoli’s death in 2015.<\/p>\n Features both Blu-ray and DVD editions of the films, newly remastered from a 2K restoration from original camera elements and featuring both Italian and English language soundtracks with optional English subtitles. High Heels<\/i><\/b> features commentary by giallo<\/i> historian Tim Lucas and interviews with director Luciano Ercoli and actress Nieves Navarro from 2012 (24 mins), screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi from 2015 (32 mins), and composer Stelvio Cipriani from 2015 (26 mins), and a brief video introduction by Gastaldi. Midnight<\/i><\/b> features commentary by Lucas, a 2015 interview with Ernesto Gastaldi (31 mins), visual essay “Desperately Seeking Susan” by Michael Mackenzie that explores at the collaboration between Ercoli and Nieves (27 mins), and the alternate TV version of the film, which runs four minutes longer and features additional and alternate footage. The alternate version is taken from an inferior video source. The accompanying 60-page booklet features new essays by Danny Shipka, Troy Howarth, and Leonard Jacobs. The box set is limited to 3000 copies.<\/p>\n The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave<\/i><\/b> (1971) opens with the attempted escape from an asylum, and then jumps ahead to his freedom. Lord Alan Cunningham (Anthony Steffen) is a handsome widower living in a run-down mansion in the countryside haunted by memories of his dead wife. To deal with the grief he frequents nightclubs and strip joints in the city, looking for red-headed beauties who resemble his late wife, then proceeds to lure into the family dungeon to torture and kill. Yes, all those dreamy, soft-focus reveries of naked romps in the woods turn out to be memories of his wife’s affairs. His release from psychiatric observation was apparently premature but in perhaps the most unexpected twist in the film he shifts from villain to victim. When he marries Gladys (Marina Malfatti), a woman whose wardrobe is defined by dizzying plunging necklines and blouses that surely must be glued to her breasts, mere hours after they meet at Gothic-chic party, the dead Evelyn appears. Whether she’s an actual ghost or an elaborate scheme, there is something decidedly human killing off members of the manor and there is no shortage of suspects\u2014a bitter wheelchair-bound aunt, the brother of the dead wife who slinks around spying on everyone, a devoted cousin who keeps showing up\u2014or victims.<\/p>\n It’s a confused plot\u2014by the time the film ends it’s completely forgotten that he’s an insane serial killer\u2014with details that are a dubious even for the coincidence-laced genre. Seriously, who leaves an open bag of powdered sulfuric acid next to a swimming pool? But it’s also a handsome film with great locations and art direction and a memorable mix of fashions. The walk through the dark, decrepit old manor let slide into ruin that ends up in Alan’s modern, well-life bachelor pad is an effective bit of atmospheric whiplash in a film where the past and present are constantly colliding, and the journey to the family crypt is like a trip back hundreds of years (or at least to an early sixties Italian Gothic horror film).<\/p>\n Red Queen Kills Seven Times – image courtesy of DVD Beaver<\/p><\/div>\n The Red Queen Kills Seven Times<\/i><\/b> (1972) refers to an ancient family curse that a kindly grandfather (Rudolf Sch\u00fcndler) tells his constantly battling young granddaughters, who are already on the verge of fulfilling it: every hundred years, a brutal, bullying heir to the manor is killed by her sister and then returns from the grave to kill seven times, the final victim being her murderer. Jump fourteen years ahead and Kitty (Barbara Bouchet), the blond sister, is now a photographer for a Berlin fashion house and the brunette sister is missing (“moved to Canada,” everyone says) when the grandfather dies and the Bavarian family castle is to pass to the girls. In fact, the sister is dead and the curse begins again as members of the family and the fashion house are murdered by a mysterious figure clad in black with a red cape. Like Evelyn<\/i> before it, the DNA comes from the German krimi<\/i>, and this one is even set and shot in Germany. Details that appear confusing at first\u2014three of the leading actresses have a startling resemblance, to the point that you might mistake one for another\u2014pay off by the end. The plots is overly confusing (common to the genre) bit it ultimately fits together nicely (not so common). Also note an early role by future genre star Sybil Danning.<\/p>\n Both of Miraglia’s films straddle the old and new. Their sophisticated, fashionable protagonists live modern urban lives yet are constantly drawn back to the family manor, a legacy rooted in family history and tragedy. These are centuries-old mansion and castles where paintings of the dead keep the past around as if haunting the place. His character have inherited the baggage of family history and it weighs heavily on them. It’s a sensibility reminiscent of Corman’s Poe films brought into the modern world and that past struggles with the present for control over our heroes.<\/p>\n Features both Blu-ray and DVD editions of the films, newly remastered from a 2K restoration from original camera negatives and featuring both Italian and English language soundtracks with optional English subtitles. Evelyn<\/i><\/b> features new commentary by Troy Howarth and interviews with actress Erika Blanc and critic Stephen Thrower, plus archival interviews with Blanc and production designer Lorenzo Baraldi and a brief video introduction by Blanc. Red Queen<\/i><\/b> features new commentary by Alan Jones and Kim Newman, interviews with actress Sybil Danning and Thrower, an alternate opening, and a brief video introduction by Baraldi, plus archival interviews with Baraldi and actors Marino Mas\u00e9 and Barbara Bouchet and the interview featurette “If I Met Miraglia Today” with Blanc, Baraldi, and Mas\u00e9. The accompanying 60-page booklet features new essays by James Blackford, Kat Ellinger, Leonard Jacobs, and Rachael Nisbet. The box set is limited to 3000 copies.<\/p>\n Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key<\/i><\/b> (1972), directed by Sergio Martino, is the more interesting of the two, and it stars the voluptuous, dark-eyed beauty Edwige Fenech, the sex bomb of giallo<\/i>, in what was (in the words historian Justin Harries) “Her finest and most atypical role.” Oliveira (Luigi Pistilli) is a once popular novelist now blocked and taking out his frustrations on his poor abused wife, Irina (Anita Strindberg). He carries on flagrant affairs and plays the decadent lord of the manor for the flower children of a local tent camp. Fenech is the writer’s gorgeous young niece Floriana, a sexy free spirit who arrives for a visit and immediately stirs things up when she gets involved with a motocross racer, an affair that riles up the writer. Meanwhile all of Oliveira’s mistresses are systematically and brutally murdered. It’s classic giallo<\/i>: a mysterious killer stalking beautiful women, interspersed with scenes of sex, sadism, voyeurism, and utterly gratuitous nudity. But it’s built on a narrative architecture that is faithful to the Poe short story\u2014a black cat named Satan, a family treasure, and a conspiracy of terror behind the murders. It\u2019s just filled out with giallo twists and spectacle, the most glorious spectacle being the voluptuous, dark-eyed Fenech.<\/p>\n The Black Cat<\/i><\/b> (1981), directed by Lucio Fulci, throws in elements from other Poe tales. Patrick Magee stars as a psychic who can send his pet cat to kill his enemies and Mimsy Farmer as a photographer and amateur detective who notices the scratches on each victim that the cops missed. It’s a confusing mystery and a muddled film and while it features blood and nudity, it is tame compared Fulci’s infamous gore classics.<\/p>\n Your Vice Is a Locked Room<\/i><\/b> features a new interview with Sergio Martino (34 mins), the retrospective featurette “Unveiling The Vice” featuring interviews with Martino, star Edwige Fenech, and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi (23 mins), the visual essays “Dolls Of Flesh And Blood: The Gialli of Sergio Martino” by Michael Mackenzie and “The Strange Vices of Ms. Fenech” with film historian Justin Harries (30 mins apiece), and a brief interview with Eli Roth. The Black Cat<\/i><\/b> features commentary by filmmaker and Fangoria editor Chris Alexander, the featurette “Poe into Fulci: The Spirit of Perverseness” with film historian Stephen Thrower (25 mins), a new interview with actress Dagmar Lassander (20 mins), an archival interview with actor David Warbeck (70 mins), and the featurette “In the Paw-Prints of the Black Cat” on the film’s locations (8 mins). The box set is limited to 3000 copies and features a booklet. Also available separately with all the supplements except the booklet.<\/p>\n Columbo<\/i> it ain\u2019t, but Argento has always been more concerned with style than story and his execution of the crimes is pure cinematic bravura. From the simple beauty of a straight-razor shattering a light bulb as the camera catches the red hot filament slowly black out to an ambitious crane shot that creeps up and over the sides of a house under siege in a voyeuristic survey that would make Hitchcock proud, Argento turns the art of murder into stylish spectacle. He even lets his kinkier side show with flashbacks of an adolescent boy and a teasing dominatrix in red stiletto heels, which come back as a key motif of the film. There\u2019s something creepy about Argento\u2019s fascination with the slicing and dicing big eyed, scantily clad Italian beauties, which he addresses with self-deprecating humor in a scene where Neal is taken to task for the misogynist violence of his stories, but his cinematic command of color and movement and point of view gives it a perverse beauty and he knows how pull a cinematic surprise.<\/p>\n![\"bloodblack\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/BloodBlack.jpg\")
Blood and Black Lace<\/i><\/b> (Arrow\/MVD, Blu-ray+DVD), Mario Bava’s 1964 giallo<\/i> landmark. Many experts of the genre have cited The Girl Who Knew Too Much<\/i><\/strong> (1963) as the birth of the giallo<\/i>, but I say this<\/strong> elegant slasher picture and its mix of poetic, haunting beauty with Grand Guignol gore and a bent of sexual perversity is where it really began. If Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch<\/i> turns violence into a ballet, then Blood and Black Lace<\/i><\/b> is murder as ballroom dance. Bava sets the atmosphere with a beautiful yet eerie credits sequence that gives each star his or her own moving fashion still and then jumps into a stormy night, where the winds lash and snap the chains of the hanging sign and twist the streams of the elegant fountain until it resembles the spray of a disaster. Order becomes chaos.<\/p>\n![\"whathavesolonge\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/whathavesolonge.jpg\")
What Have You Done to Solange?<\/i><\/b> (Arrow\/MVD, Blu-ray+DVD) is celebrated as one of the masterpieces of giallo<\/i>. It’s also one of the most disturbing entries in the genre, and not for the reasons you might assume. On the one hand, What Have You Done to Solange?<\/i><\/b> (1972) comes right out of the krimi<\/i>-inspired plots of a mysterious masked killer hunting down victims and leaving their rent bodies on display to taunt the cops and terrorize the community, with a side of salacious nudity out of the schoolgirl films of Germany and the swinging cheerleader and student nurse films of the U.S. On the other, it is about a killer targeting high school girls and murdering them with a sexual assault out of the Jack the Ripper school of hateful misogyny. Our prime suspect is also our protagonist, Enrico Rosseni (Fabio Testi), an Italian physical education teacher in an exclusive British girl’s school. He’s married to a schoolteacher (Karin Baal, introduced as a chilly, severe figure) and sleeping with a student (Cristina Galb\u00f3), though the film takes pains to assure us that she is 18 so it’s okay, wink wink, nudge nudge. The growing suspicions of Enrico send him on his own investigation with his wife at his side and it turns out that their mystery-solving partnership is better than marriage counseling.<\/p>\n![\"deathwalkstwice\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/DeathWalksTwice.jpg\")
Death Walks Twice: Two Films by Luciano Ercoli<\/i><\/b> (Arrow\/MVD, Blu-ray+DVD) is a double shot of giallo<\/i> connected not by story or character but by genre, style, and creative collaborators. <\/i><\/b>Both films are directed by Luciano Ercoli, written by Ernesto Gastaldi and Mahnah\u00e9n (aka May) Velasco, and star Spanish actress Nieves Navarro (under the screen name Susan Scott) and leading man Sim\u00f3n Andreu, a team first brought together for Ercoli’s directorial debut, The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion<\/i> (1970).<\/p>\n![\"killerdames\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/KillerDames.jpg\")
Killer Dames: Two Gothic Chillers by Emilio P. Miraglia <\/i><\/b>(Arrow\/MVD, Blu-ray+DVD) pair up the only two gialli<\/i> directed by Miraglia, who learned the ropes of genre filmmaking working his way through the studio system as a script supervisor and assistant director before making his directorial debut in 1967 with the crime thriller Assassination<\/i>. Miraglia is more indebted to the Gothic tradition in his brief engagement with the giallo<\/i> and his two features, which are embraced by some critics as minor classics of the genre, are more mystery thriller than horror. They also, like Blood and Black Lace<\/i> and Death Walks at Midnight<\/i>, embrace the fashions of the era, which he weaves into the Gothic flashback to create something a little different for the genre.<\/p>\n![\"Red](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/red_queen_kills_7_05_blu-ray__blu-ray_.jpg\")
![\"edgarblackcats\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/EdgarBlackCats.jpg\")
Edgar Allan Poe’s Black Cats: Two Adaptations by Sergio Martino & Lucio Fulci<\/i><\/b> (Arrow\/MVD, Blu-ray+DVD) pairs up two Italian films that use Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” as a foundation for bloody horror but otherwise have little in common.<\/p>\n![\"tenebrae\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/tenebrae.jpg\")
Tenebrae<\/i><\/b> (Synapse, Blu-ray, DVD) \u2013 Dario Argento’s 1982 feature was his return to the classic giallo<\/i> after his excursions into supernatural horror with Suspiria<\/i> (1977) and Inferno<\/i> (1980). Anthony Franciosa stars as Peter Neal, a best-selling thriller novelist whose promotional tour in Italy takes a terrible turn when a mysterious killer recreates the brutal murders from his book with real life victims. At first the killer targets so-called \u201cdeviants,\u201d then Neal\u2019s own friends, and finally promises that the author himself is next on the list, which prompts the author to turn detective.<\/p>\n
![\"horriblehich\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/HorribleHich.jpg\")
The Horrible Dr. Hichcock<\/i><\/b> (Olive, Blu-ray, DVD) is not exactly giallo<\/i> but it is a forerunner to the genre. The 1962 Italian horror from Riccardo Fredo (under the name Robert Hampton) stars Barbara Steele (whose voice is dubbed) as the new young wife to widower aristocrat and famed surgeon Dr. Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng), who wife accidentally died years ago while playing their (consensual) kinky sex games. She arrives in the grand old manor to find the legacy of the dead wife dominating the household.<\/p>\n![\"manhattanbaby\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/ManhattanBaby.jpg\")
Manhattan Baby<\/i><\/b> (Blue Underground, Blu-ray+DVD+CD) \u2013 Lucio Fulci directs yet another knock-off of The Exorcist<\/i>, this one starring Christopher Connelly as an archeologist who brings his family to Egypt. A blind woman in a marketplace gives his daughter (Brigitta Boccoli) an ancient amulet that apparently imbues her with a curse, or perhaps a demonic possession, that she carries back to New York City. Connelly is the token American star in an otherwise Italian cast, with Cinza De Ponti (Miss Italy of 1979) as the family nanny and Cosmimo Cinieri (who also co-starred in Fulci’s The New York Ripper<\/i>) is the antiques dealer and amateur exorcist. Fulci also borrows from The Omen<\/i> Poltergeist<\/i>, and other films, and tosses them all together with his own obsessions (eyes and blindness) in this supernatural mess. Fulci, whose cavalier way with narrative logic stands out in a genre where such issues are routinely ignored, has his fans, thanks to the bizarre beauty and surreal spell of his best films. This isn’t one of his best but it has its moments and Blue Underground delivers a terrific three-disc special edition<\/p>\n