review

DVD Review: 'What Have you Done to Solange?'

DVD Review: 'What Have you Done to Solange?'

Arrow Video continue to impress with their Blu-Ray releases of Italian Giallo films - this time with Massimo Dallamano's salacious and disturbing What Have You Done to Solange?. The film was released in 1972 (at the height of Giallo fever) and it positions itself as one of the more intriguing exponents of the genres. Dallamano (who had previously worked as a DOP on Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More) delivers a lush-looking, highly disturbing and suspense-rich work that is enriched by Ennio Morricone's hunting score. 

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DVD Review: 'La Grande Bouffe'

DVD Review: 'La Grande Bouffe'

Arrow Films' recent release, Marco Ferreri's 1973 extremely dark comedy La Grande Bouffe, is unlikely to leave spectators indifferent - for better or for worse. Upon release, the film divided the public, who either hailed it as a masterwork of cutting social and political satire, or condemned it, as Roger Erbert caustically put it, as as a nihilistic 'chronicle of gluttony and self-hate'.

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DVD Review: 'Eyes without a Face'

DVD Review: 'Eyes without a Face'

When Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage) was presented at Edinburgh Film Festival in 1960, seven audience members fainted, prompting his French director, Georges Franju, to caustically remark: 'Now I know why Scotsmen wear skirts'. The film scandalised audiences around the world, and it nearly cost a job for a dissenting English critic who admitted she rather liked it.

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DVD Review: 'Rabid Dogs'

DVD Review: 'Rabid Dogs'

Mario Bava (1914-1980) was an influential  yet incredibly underrated Italian director (or, as he would have put it, a 'humble artisan of cinema'). During his long and prolific career, he experimented with a number of different genres (horror, sci-fi, peplum, western) with mixed results. He is mostly well-known for his supernatural horror films Black Sunday (1960), Black Sabbath (1963) and Kill, Baby Kill (1966), and for consolidating the 'classic' formula of what is known as the Italian Giallo with The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1962) and with his lush, spellbinding Technicolor masterpiece, Blood and Black Lace (1964). 

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