Danza Macabra Vol. 2 – The Italian Gothic Collection

Danza Macabra Vol. 2 – The Italian Gothic Collection
Blu-ray
Severin Films
1963-72 / 1:33.1, 1:85.1
Starring Barbara Steele, Rosalba Neri, Adolpho Celi, Giorgio Albertazzi
Written by Gianni Grimaldi, Corrado Farina, Giorgio Albertazzi
Photographed by Riccardo Pallottin, Antonino Modica
Directed by Antonio Margheriti, Corrado Farina, Giorgio Albertazzi

The conspicuous success of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday provoked a resurgence in Italian horror that saw many filmmakers cribbing from Bava’s own formula, a volatile mix of sex and sadism photographed in the style of a renaissance painting. 60 years later Severin Films rescued a few curios from that strange and sensuous era in a Blu ray set called Danza Macabra – The Italian Gothic Collection. A hard act to follow, it tracked down the elusive Monster of the Opera and gave Lady Frankenstein, always a lovable mix of retro-shock and cheesecake, a much-needed restoration. Severin’s new collection surpasses the first in all regards; Volume Two serves up a baroque campfire tale, a socialist vampire satire, and a shockingly good adaptation of an endlessly adaptable morality play.

Who knew Edgar Allan Poe was a betting man? In Antonio Margheriti’s Danza Macabra, Baltimore’s favorite poet dares a journalist to spend the night in a supposedly haunted castle. A minor thriller that, thanks to Riccardo Pallottini’s cinematography, looks like a major classic, the film features an icon to die for, a near-translucent Barbara Steele at her most ethereal. The nightmarish storyline: Steele and her undead castle-mates are doomed to reenact their crimes every All Soul’s Eve like a theater troupe stuck in a never-ending stage run. The phantoms usually perform before an empty house but the arrival of that foolhardy newsman rewards them with a captive audience. Glenn Erickson goes into detail about Severin’s new restoration here.

Steele had few peers but plenty of challengers to her throne—chief among them was Rosalba Neri, a teenage beauty queen who began acting in 1958 and quickly found work, usually on the sidelines of religious epics like El Cid. Spaghetti westerns and spy spoofs were more her style and her ability to maintain a regal bearing while losing her clothes was a real plus. That distinctive talent lifted her profile, especially in the Italian shockers of the ’70s that mixed sexploitation with horror. In 1971 she achieved cult status with a film that helped define that subgenre—Mel Welles’s Lady Frankenstein. The following year she appeared in Paolo Lombardo’s Lucifera: Demon Lover, or, as we like to call it down at the grindhouse, The Devil’s Lover.

An exploitation film without the courage of its sleazy convictions is inexusable. And a sexploitation film that ignores Rosabla Neri’s most potent skill set is a damn shame. The Devil’s Lover is all that, and boring too. A vacationing Neri and two ditzy companions check in at a famously cursed chateau owned and operated by Beelzebub—that evening Rosabla dreams herself into a past life as, of all things, a virginal bride-to-be named Helga.

Helga has a sinister admirer named Gunther and it appears this gloomy Gus has a different kind of bridal shower in mind. Edmund Purdom, who once toured with Olivier in Antony and Cleopatra, plays Gunther, Aka, the Prince of Darkness, and after a brief, if unenthusiastic roll in the hay with Rosalba, the villagers arrive with torches and pitchforks ready to burn our girl at the stake. Unlike Dorothy waking up back in Kansas, Neri comes to and simply departs the chateau with no lessons learned—except, perhaps, to never return another phone call from Paolo Lombardo. No matter the product, the Italian film industry never wanted for brilliant cinematographers and The Devil’s Lover is no different; Antonino Modica’s cinematography is lovely, and so of course is Neri.

In 2004, a few months after it was revealed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Village Voice published a vivid painting of a vampiric George W. Bush draining the blood out of the Statue of Liberty. The metaphor was not new—in 1971 Corrado Farina made They Have Changed their Face and cast Adolfo Celi as Giovanni Nosferatu, an omnipotent businessman with his teeth sunk in the heart of the proletariat. The dignified Celi would have made a great vampire in the right movie and Farina’s amusing conceit could have made a terrific satire. But the director was working with an amateurish screenwriter—himself—and his notions about capitalism and Godard are hopelessly scrambled.

The story of Dracula provided an apt metaphor for Farina but Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has inpired a cottage industry of shrewd adaptations, among them Roy Ward Baker’s Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde and Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor. Italian filmmaker Giorgio Albertazzi, best known for his role as Delphine Seyrig’s mysterious suitor in Last Year at Marienbad, took the story of Jekyll far more literally than Lewis but like that self-absorbed funny man, Albertazzi found a way to reinvent the legend to exorcise his own demons; with Einstein and de Sade as his avatars, the director crafts a schizoid morality tale for the nuclear age. Albertazzi plays Henry Jekyll, a biomolecular scientist whose discovery could change the shape of the world. He’s also inherited Oppenheimer’s guilt complex but with a twist; when Jekyll “becomes death”, he looks the part.

Set in an Alphaville-like futureworld where nameless wars are still raging, Jekyll is consumed by his own battle, a daily struggle with the beast inside—a giggling sadist named Hyde released into the world by Jekyll’s own experiments. A four part mini-series first broadcast in Italy in 1969, Albertazzi wrote a screenplay that stays close to Stevenson’s storyline but builds its own kind of suspense, not with a monster on the prowl but in a series of classroom dissertations and soul-searching monologues.

It’s an unlikely formula for a horror movie but these talkfests are surprisingly compelling; Albertazzi’s directing is unusually fluid for a rushed TV schedule and the acting is even better, especially in the bravura classroom lecture that introduces Jekyll to the audience, a diatribe about good and evil capped off by a quote from Einstein that doubles as Jekyll’s confession—”I don’t believe in education. Your only model must be yourself.”

Though Alphaville was an influence for set designer Luciano Ricceri (Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Juliet of the Spirits), the steel and glass designs of Fritz Lang’s Mabuse films are echoed as well, suggesting that Jekyll’s world is not much more than a high-tech prison cell. The movie is intelligently cast, with Massimo Girotti as Jekyll’s lawyer and Bianca Toccafondi as the tortured doctor’s formidable secretary—even the secondary characters convey a lifetime of living in a few minutes of screen time. After four hours the movie becomes a little repetitive and, understandably for the multi-faceted artist at the helm, more than a little self-indulgent. Nevertheless, Jekyll is a stirring experience that should reward patient viewers—the production was awarded the 21st Prix Italia for television drama.

Emanuele Taglietti, one of Jekyll‘s set designers, is best known today for cartoonishly overwrought paintings that embody the lurid appeal of many Italian horror films—garish to the point of comedy, they’re 21st Century kitsch. The paintings were collected in a book Sex and Horror—The Art of Emanuele Taglietti and an interview with the jolly Taglietti is one of the many extras on the Severin set.

The restorations for each of these films is superb with Danza Macabra at the head of the class. The film comes with commentaries from Rod Barnett and Steele herself plus a presentation from Italian film expert Stephen Thrower. Glenn goes into more detail on the extras with his review of the 4K disc here.

Along with the Taglietti interview Jekyll‘s extras include an interview With actor Giuliano Disperati and a video essay by Joesph Dwyer, The Double Spiral Staircase Of Jekyll And Hyde. They Have Changed their Face features a commentary from director Farina, an interview with the director’s son Alberto, and short films by Corrado. Rosalba Neri is celebrated in an audio commentary from Annie Rose Malamet and a video essay by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Lady Of The Night: The Feminism Of Rosalba Neri. Severin has also included a CD for The Devil’s Lover soundtrack by Elvio Monti.

A complete rundown of the extras can be found  on Severin’s site.