I have also significantly reduced the amount of money I spend on movie tickets. Now I only see films I think will be good (like Drive) and have shifted to purchasing blu-rays. This has spoiled me into expecting great picture and sound quality which is infrequent in multiplexes. I don't want to be too out of touch, so I will rent some quotidian movies, probably on Saturday, while I invest in better films. Here is an obscure gialli The Crimes of the Black Cat.
Sergio Pastore's only giallo is a fun exercise for genre adherents. Play a game of identifying steals from better directors' better movies. Even for a genre film, Crimes of the Black Cat presents very little to justify its existence. A bunch of fashion models start to be killed off by an unknown assailant a la Blood and Black Lace. A blind hero tries to determine who the killer might be, and the only his lack of glasses differentiate him from his counterpart in The Cat o'Nine Tails. The plagiarism doesn't stop! There is even a shot of someone moving through a room of mannequins that is filmed from the same above canted angle as in Hatchet for the Honeymoon. Pastore was either an opportunist, hired help, or a hack with this film, mistaking his idols' manipulations of mise-en- as reasons for their successes. Bava and Argento arbitrarily added these characteristics to their movies, either out of intrigue into their underlying phenomena or artistry.
Pastore has does have some imagination, and his derivative movie may have actually been an inspiration for Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat which uses features more feline murder. This killer surprises his victims with his tabby who poisons them with curare claws. It reads better than it watches. Every time this happens the victim gets a quick scratch and dies. Admittedly, it's hard to imagine a cat killing someone, and Argento and Fulci got around this by evading worldly logic. They also threw in some nudity and a lot more gore that are strangely absent here. I haven't determined if this was a made-for-TV film or edited for its DVD release. If neither is true, the film doesn't subvert or otherwise justify its sophomoric conservatism. This is exacerbated in retrospect by his odd decision to typecast Annabella Incontrera as the aggressive lesbian she frequently played without showing using her implied love scene as a justification for some nudity.
Crimes is an investigative melodrama for the majority of its runtime. Once the killer's identity is revealed, we get an "apology" of sorts in form of an amusing riff on Psycho. The killer attacks a woman in the shower and slices her in plain view. I remain confused as to why we must endure 85 minutes to see this, but I was in need of relief by this point. The razor cuts her breasts graphically in close-up, ironically imprinting the film unjustly into our memory. It ends in a final nod to Four Flies on Grey Velvet with a freeze frame as the credits roll. The last attack is the only inspired part of the movie, and I encourage you to skip to that part if you rent it.
If you live in the United States, Crimes of the Black Cat can only be seen on DVD in a shoddy VHS transfer by the now-defunct DAGORED company. It looks as if they used an Italian tape as the master source as tracking is visible and the subtitles appear superimposed below the image and there are no other language options.
Sergio Pastore's only giallo is a fun exercise for genre adherents. Play a game of identifying steals from better directors' better movies. Even for a genre film, Crimes of the Black Cat presents very little to justify its existence. A bunch of fashion models start to be killed off by an unknown assailant a la Blood and Black Lace. A blind hero tries to determine who the killer might be, and the only his lack of glasses differentiate him from his counterpart in The Cat o'Nine Tails. The plagiarism doesn't stop! There is even a shot of someone moving through a room of mannequins that is filmed from the same above canted angle as in Hatchet for the Honeymoon. Pastore was either an opportunist, hired help, or a hack with this film, mistaking his idols' manipulations of mise-en- as reasons for their successes. Bava and Argento arbitrarily added these characteristics to their movies, either out of intrigue into their underlying phenomena or artistry.
Pastore has does have some imagination, and his derivative movie may have actually been an inspiration for Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat which uses features more feline murder. This killer surprises his victims with his tabby who poisons them with curare claws. It reads better than it watches. Every time this happens the victim gets a quick scratch and dies. Admittedly, it's hard to imagine a cat killing someone, and Argento and Fulci got around this by evading worldly logic. They also threw in some nudity and a lot more gore that are strangely absent here. I haven't determined if this was a made-for-TV film or edited for its DVD release. If neither is true, the film doesn't subvert or otherwise justify its sophomoric conservatism. This is exacerbated in retrospect by his odd decision to typecast Annabella Incontrera as the aggressive lesbian she frequently played without showing using her implied love scene as a justification for some nudity.
Crimes is an investigative melodrama for the majority of its runtime. Once the killer's identity is revealed, we get an "apology" of sorts in form of an amusing riff on Psycho. The killer attacks a woman in the shower and slices her in plain view. I remain confused as to why we must endure 85 minutes to see this, but I was in need of relief by this point. The razor cuts her breasts graphically in close-up, ironically imprinting the film unjustly into our memory. It ends in a final nod to Four Flies on Grey Velvet with a freeze frame as the credits roll. The last attack is the only inspired part of the movie, and I encourage you to skip to that part if you rent it.
If you live in the United States, Crimes of the Black Cat can only be seen on DVD in a shoddy VHS transfer by the now-defunct DAGORED company. It looks as if they used an Italian tape as the master source as tracking is visible and the subtitles appear superimposed below the image and there are no other language options.