This is a good horror movie. The "Drop of Water" segment scared the crap out of me the first time I saw it. Pretty much anything directed by Mario Bava is worth seeing.
But, if possible, for once I'd argue for the American cut of this one, despite the remarkably (and atypically) awful music Fred Kaz spat out...since the current US dvd of this one takes the Italian release, with much better music, but an Italian actor dubbing Boris Karloff. This was a typical interantional-cast Cinecitta production, meaning that all the actors were postdubbed, but also that all of them were doing their lines in their native languages at time of filming, meaning that in the Angophone cuts, Karloff does his voice and all the Italians, et al., are dubbed by replacement actors (unless, as with the Italo-English Barbara Steele in BLACK SUNDAY, they were already fluent in English). Hearing a rather clumsy Italian voice coming from Karloff when you could be hearing Karloff himself, as with the AIP release, is far more distracting and diminishing of the longest segment of the film than reading subtitles will ever be...and, again, even worth putting up with the rotten soundtrack.
5 comments:
This is a good horror movie. The "Drop of Water" segment scared the crap out of me the first time I saw it. Pretty much anything directed by Mario Bava is worth seeing.
Agreed.
But, if possible, for once I'd argue for the American cut of this one, despite the remarkably (and atypically) awful music Fred Kaz spat out...since the current US dvd of this one takes the Italian release, with much better music, but an Italian actor dubbing Boris Karloff. This was a typical interantional-cast Cinecitta production, meaning that all the actors were postdubbed, but also that all of them were doing their lines in their native languages at time of filming, meaning that in the Angophone cuts, Karloff does his voice and all the Italians, et al., are dubbed by replacement actors (unless, as with the Italo-English Barbara Steele in BLACK SUNDAY, they were already fluent in English). Hearing a rather clumsy Italian voice coming from Karloff when you could be hearing Karloff himself, as with the AIP release, is far more distracting and diminishing of the longest segment of the film than reading subtitles will ever be...and, again, even worth putting up with the rotten soundtrack.
Hm..."if possible" referred to something I edited out...sorry.
Wow, that's a particularly bad trailer. (Though the music is still better than Kaz's for the film.)
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