Soavi's Masterpiece, Dellamorte Dellamore

Ah man, it's been a long wait for a proper HD release of Michele Soavi's Dellamorte Dellamore, the demented comic book adaptation that's often called the last great Italian horror film.  It had some fine releases on DVD, and I've owned a few of them over the years, but on BD, they were both rare and uninspiring.  You'd be happy to pay to import a German, barebones disc with the old DVD master just because it wasn't compressed to 720p.  We were all excited when Shameless finally announced a BD special edition for 2018 until somebody asked them for the specs and it turned out the frame-rate was botched.  Still, a lot of desperate fans bought it anyway.  But happily, you can put all that behind you now.  Severin has a brand new 4k restoration from the negative with a whole ton of special features on BD and 4k Ultra HD with Dolby Vision HDR, fancy packaging and everything you could want.

Dellamorte Dellamore is based on Italian horror comic Dylan Dog, or more precisely Tiziano Sclavi's prototypical novel about a similar character in the DD universe, Francesco Dellamorte.  Both characters were drawn to resemble Rupert Everett, so it was quite a coup for Soavi to cast him here, not just for the coincidence, but the pitch-perfect performance Everett was able to deliver in a film where, after all, a lot of the cast is dubbed.  And it's not just Everett who's pitch-perfect here; the stylish direction, score, practical effects, supporting cast and the writer's clever blend of humor and genuine ennui are all operating on a level I'm not sure the original source material even fully deserved.  The elements have aligned to lift up an above average graphic novel to a bit of a cinematic masterpiece.

1) 2006 Anchor Bay DVD; 2) 2012 Shameless DVD;
3) 2023 Severin BD; 4) 2023 Severin UHD.

Each of these discs pretty much preserve the slightly pillar-boxed aspect ratio of 1.66:1, though if you look closely, you'll see Anchor Bay's disc is cropped a little tighter and really framed at 1.62:1.  I only replaced the AB DVD with the Shameless because it subtitled the Italian commentary for the first time, but I never realized until I started doing this comparison how they improved the picture.  It's not just the framing, which the 4k restoration has mirrored, but they've got more natural colors and toned down the edge enhancement/ contrast.  Of course, that's all academic now.  The colors are even more natural now and fine detail, like the mayor's hair, has been restored.  Of course, we're comparing UHD to DVD, so they have a huge advantage; but happily they didn't blow it.  Grain is still tough to discern, which seems to be a thing with Severin - are they lightly DNRing their UHDs (or is the Italian company that owns the film materials)?  Because the feature's only about 100 minutes and they've given it nearly 80GB, so it shouldn't be a compression issue.  Not that this looks like Predator anything.  And everything else, like the black levels (especially considering how much of this film is set at night) and the naturalism of the 4k are quite strong.

We're given a surprising amount of options for the audio: a Dolby Atmos track, a 5.1 and a 2.0, both in DTS-HD, all of which sound bold, clear and frankly rather similar.  We also get the Italian 2.0 in DTS-HD, and optional English subtitles for both the English and Italian audio tracks.  I'd recommend the English audio, since Rupert is speaking English in his own voice, but a number of supporting characters are dubbed, so both are valid options.

As far as extras?  Oh boy, Severin has us covered.  But they're not the only special features in town.  Anchor Bay had a nice half-hour featurette, which talked to a number of the key players, including Soavi, screenwriter Gianni Romoli, Sergio Stivaletti and Anna Falchi.  Shameless dropped that, but they preserved that aforementioned commentary from the 2008 Medusa DVD, and they added English subtitles for the first time.  It's Soavi and Romoli together, and it's pretty great.  They go at a good pace and cover a lot, including a few details that don't pop up in other extras.  Both discs also included inserts with notes, the trailer and a bunch of bonus trailers (especially Shameless, they have like fifteen!).

Thankfully, Severin keeps the commentary, too; though they almost don't need it, since the new interviews they conducted are pretty comprehensive and cover just about every topic mentioned and ignored by that commentary.  Romoli's interview goes for a good hour.  And they manage to get a great sit-down with Rupert Everett, which is impressive.  They also got a new interview with Falchi, plus cinematographer Mauro Marchetti, Stefano Masciarelli who played the mayor, Fabiana Formica who played the mayor's daughter, composer Riccardo Biseo, set designer Antonello Geleng and of course Sergio Stivaletti.  There's also a brief interview with Alan Jones to fill in the last few informational details, though he clearly doesn't know what he's talking about regarding the comics.  He goes into a whole explanation of "why hasn't there ever been a Dylan Dog film," when of course there was.  It's no Dellamorte Dellamore, but it has its qualities.  Jones also points out that "in Dylan Dog, the sidekick is based on Groucho Marx.  Here, I don't quite understand what he was doing."  I've never read an issue, and even I know Dylan Dog's sidekick was Groucho, not Dellamorte's, so of course he's not doing the Groucho schtick.  But hey, he's a film guy, not a comic book guy; what do you want?

Also on here is the old featurette that also used to be on that Medusa disc, though this one had subtitles even at the time.  It's good because it was made during production, so it has on-set footage and interviews with a couple people, including the editor and François Hadji-Lazaro, who couldn't contribute to the new features.  The Anchor Bay featurette wasn't so fortunate to make the transition, but that's fine, since nobody says anything in that that they don't also say in these other extras.  There are also two theatrical trailers, the complete soundtrack CD, a glossy full-color 50 page book, and a stylish slipbox.

So this is unquestionably recommended.  A fantastic film that's been in dire need of a fully loaded special edition since the concept existed, finally gets one.  This and Spider Labyrinth in the same month has Severin taking some serious cracks at Italian Horror fans' want lists.  What could be next... Demons 5?

Valentina Vs. Baba Yaga: Director's Cuts, Italian Comics, Lost Films and More!

When I first encountered Valentina, I had no idea about the source material, previous film adaptations or anything.  I caught it on late night cable, and for all I knew, it was just another softcore "erotica" flick, like an 80s Emmanuelle knock-off.  Admittedly, I noticed something was a bit unusual as soon as Valentina was shot to death in the opening credits and the directors' names flew out of her bullet wound.  But, hey, some of those Emmanuelle movies went to some pretty weird places, too.

Update 5/18/17 - 9/12/21: We're kicking off another Update Week here at DVDExotica, where we update older posts in dire need of an upgrade due to important subsequent releases.  Well, I originally ended this post by asking Shameless to please release their director's cut of Baba Yaga to blu; and since then they have.  How could we not go back and cover that?

It's full of creative uses of scrims, too

And in a way, 1989's Valentina is softcore erotica coming in the wake of Emmanuelle.  Valentina, played by American gymnast turned model turned actress Demetra Hampton, spends a lot of time undressing and making love.  She's even got a catchy theme song named after her, like Emmanuelle.  But as many times as this film starts a sex or general nude scene, it cuts quickly away, over and over, each and every time.  I used to think this was just a soft, censored cut of the film, but no, that's just how it is.  Because this film has a lot more interesting ground to cover.  Like, just try and follow this brief synopsis:

Valentina is a fashion photographer/ detective/ international woman of mystery who's working on a photo exhibit on cellos when she discovers she has a famous cellist for a stalker.  She's walking home with her boyfriend Rembrandt when a sexy witch almost runs her over with her car.  Taken with Valentina's beauty, the witch gives her a doll that secretly comes to life and puts a spell on Valentina.  It causes her to sleepwalk to the witch's mansion, which has a giant pit in the floor leading to a secret torture dungeon, where she gets locked in a cage.  Rembrandt figures it out and rescues her, at which point Valentina decides she can no longer resist the temptation of that cellist stalker and starts an affair with him.  But he turns out to be a dangerous knife-wielding psychopath, so she leaves town and goes on holiday to some old European city, stumbling upon a secret cult of people that cannot age and who steal her camera for an immortality ritual.  Meanwhile, dejected Rembrandt buys some antique art pieces from a street vendor, causing a coven of witches to haunt him in order to get them back.  Valentina escapes the cult, Rembrandt defeats the witches, and they reunite in a beach bungalow, where a Lady Terminator-type walks out of the ocean and starts blowing the entire town up with her laser eye-beams!  The whole movie is interspersed with pop reggae songs, dream sequences and artsy photo shoots, making very little sense, but boy is it entertaining!

featuring authentic Robocop vision!

Years later, when I'd put all the pieces of this bizarro-puzzle together, it's just as fascinating, if not moreso.  It's co-directed by Gianfranco Giagni, who also made the terrific, still unreleased Italian horror flick Spider Labyrinth; and it's based on the celebrated adult/ art comic books by Guido Crepax.  Originally, the Rembrandt character was the protagonist, known by his super-hero name Neutron; but his fiance Valentina became more popular and took over as the star of her own book for decades.  And the reason the movie has such a convoluted, episodic feel is because it's actually a mash-up of an Italian Valentina TV series, so we're seeing about six or seven half-hour episodes edited into a single movie.  And the most famous issue of the Valentina comics had actually been made into a movie over a decade earlier, Corrado Farina's Baba Yaga.

1973's Baba Yaga stars Carroll Baker as that sexy witch who almost runs over Valentina (this time played by Isabelle De Funès), and just focuses on this one particular story.  George Eastman co-stars as Arno, who's basically a stand-in for the Rembrandt character, and it has the same stand-out imagery: the pit in the witch's house, the cursed doll, and even some of the same dream sequences, like Valentina fighting her boyfriend in a boxing ring, which both films are taking right out of the comics.  Farina's film has a frankly annoying free-form jazz soundtrack, but is otherwise pretty cool, turning shots of the film into black & white stills to resemble illustrated panels, and making other stylistic choices to merge film and comics, well before Creepshow and Ang Lee's Hulk tried it.  And because it's a feature film devoted to a single story, as opposed to Valentina, which smushes in everything and the kitchen sink, it has time to develop the characters and restore plot points, like the witch cursing Valentina's camera.  I still prefer Valentina, and Hampton captures the character in spades over De Funès, who looks like someone pressed a wig down on her head and never told her what was going on, but both adaptations definitely have their strengths, so fortunately we don't have to choose.

Or perhaps more accurately, we can't choose.  Because the movie Valentina has never been released on DVD or blu in any region around the world.  Or VHS even!  There's just a very rare Japanese laserdisc, and that's pretty much it.  Fortunately, I was able to find a grey market copy from the now defunct Video Search of Miami.  Oh, and yes, the entire Valentina television series was released on DVD in Italy from MHE Ideal Entertainment (you can bet I've got that, too), but while the show is made up entirely of footage from the series - and Valentina fans should definitely seek it out as it features plenty more adventures, including a vampire, gangsters and one episode that's a homage to Argento and giallos in general - the series loses the madcap energy of the spliced together film, which is frankly kind of amazing.  Plus, as a die-hard fan, I tried re-editing the film out of the DVD series to have it in good quality, and there are lines of dialogue and music clips that are unique to the film, so it can't be directly reconstructed (though I pulled it off by cleaning up the audio on the VSoM DVDR and adding mp3s of a couple of the soundtrack songs).  Like, I'd recommend the series to fans of cult Italian stuff and of course the Crepax comics, but the Valentina movie is a unique experience even non-fans would get a pretty good kick out of.

VSoM DVDR on top; 2008 MHE DVD below.

So yeah, the VSoM disc is a grimy, old VHS-recording-sourced transfer.  It's washed out, soft, full of video noise, etc.  I mean, just look at it.  The MHE DVD, on the other hand, is just alright for an old television show on DVD.  But by comparison, it's a friggen' revelation.  You can actually tell what colors things are supposed to be!  Unfortunately, it's got a little bit of an interlacing issue, but otherwise it's no better or worse than you'd expect.  It's fullscreen, which is surely correct for a television project.  They include all thirteen episodes over three discs, and include the complete English and Italian audio in nice, clean stereo tracks.  Zero extras, but it's nicely packaged in a fold-out digibook and external slip-box.  And it's probably the best we'll ever get of the series or the film, as I believe its the copious amount of famous pop songs used throughout (Boy George, Buster Poindexter's "Hot Hot Hot," etc) that are preventing out favorite cult labels from tackling it.

A deleted/ restored scene from Shameless's director's cut of Baba Yaga.

So no Valentina for us, but there's no problem with Baba Yaga.  Diamond originally released it under the title Kiss Me, Kill Me in 2001; and then Blue Underground released it in 2003 with a bunch of cool deleted scenes (and plenty of other extras we'll get to).  In 2009 in the UK, Shameless teamed up with Farina to re-edit those back into the film, because the producers removed them against his will in the first place.  "Finally, after 35 years, you can see my film as it was before the producers hacked it to pieces - Corrado Farina" is printed on the actual DVD label itself!  So that's definitely the DVD version I recommend.  Blue Underground released it again in HD as a 2013 blu-ray, but disappointingly, they didn't release the director's cut.  I imagine the reason is that the deleted scenes were in lesser quality, and they couldn't (or didn't want to pay to) restore that footage to HD, too, to reintegrate back into the film.  But come on, if Baba Yaga were an Argento film, you know they'd at least have given us a composite cut in HD.  So I never got their blu-ray. But then in 2020, Shameless finally did it - released their new director's cut on HD!  And yes, it is a composite cut.

2003 BU DVD top; 2009 Shameless DVD mid; 2020 Shameless BD bottom.

Both DVDs are slightly windowboxed to 1.83 and 1.76, respectively.  The transfers are virtually identical apart from this framing issue, with BU showing a bit more on each side.  Shameless's new blu is properly matted to 1.85:1 and reveals the most along the sides, though it's worth noting it frames the film differently, vertically.  I don't know if one is more correct than the other, but the blu tends to reveal more on the top and less on the bottom.  It's especially noticeable on the second shot of the doll.  It's crisper, of course, being in HD as opposed to the blus, getting rid of that compressed softness.  But what stands out even more is the color correction, replacing sickly greenish yellows with true whites and an image that really pops.  Rewatching this film for the first time in HD, I really felt the impact of Farina's graphic look, and I have to admit, this film rose in my estimation over previous viewings.

2020 Shameless BD.

And let's take a look at Shameless's inserted deleted scenes.  On the DVD, they're interlaced, faded and distinctly lower quality.  On the blu, they're still clearly taken from a rough, standard def source, but they've been matted to 1.85 and fairly de-interlaced.  They've also been color corrected along with the rest of the picture.  So the drop in quality is still there compared to the rest of the film, and you will notice the changes mid-film, but even this footage looks better than the DVD.  Overall, I'd say I wasn't bowled over, but pleasantly surprised.

Shameless also includes both the English and Italian tracks with English subtitles, whereas BU only includes the English and no subs (though that is something they did fix with their blu, which has both audio tracks and subs).  For the blu, Shameless has bumped both tracks up to lossless LPCMs.

Shameless and BU both feature substantial interviews with Farina (they're different, but as you can imagine, he says a lot of the same things in both of them) and a cool, vintage featurette on Crepax's comics called Freud in Color, plus the trailer and a gallery.  Blue Underground also has a neat easter egg, with a (very brief) Tinto Brass interview, where he talks about Crepax's influence on his own work.  And they include an insert with some additional comic and poster art.  Shameless, on the other hand, has a new introduction by Farina, a text commentary/ trivia track and most impressively, a rare (albeit, pretty silly) short film Farina directed in 1973 called Fumettophobia, about Italian comic books like and including Crepax's.  Shameless also throws in a bunch of bonus trailers and some cool, reversible artwork.

And that's just for the DVD.  Shameless keeps everything from their first release for the blu, but they also add a new audio commentary by critic Kat Ellinger, who gives a nicely informed and respectful new track.  This is the kind of film that calls out for some kind of critical support, possibly even explanation, so it's a very welcome addition.

So I still hold out hope that one day Shameless will release their cut of Baba Yaga to blu-ray, to at least give us a definitive version of that film.  They've done it!  And it's hands-down the definitive edition.  Still sadly, what I've always longed for the most, the biggest hole in all our collections, will probably never be filled: the Valentina movie.  But, as with all my M.I.A. posts, I write it with hope alive.  And Shameless's new edition of Baba Yaga does a more satisfying job of holding its place in the meantime.  In fact, pulling back for a more objective look, it is probably the objectively superior film.  And if you didn't know about the Italian set of the Valentina TV series, that's another nice stop-gap.  It's just... not the movie.