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I Vampiri: Limited Edition
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Radiance Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (20th October 2024). |
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The Film
 When the bloodless bodies of beautiful young women start washing up along the banks of the Seine, Inspector Chantal (The Great Silence's Carlo d'Angelo) has no leads but intrepid reporter Pierre Lantin (The Mad Butcher's Dario Michaelis) starts publishing a series of attention-grabbing articles proclaiming the murders to be the work of a vampire. In spite of this seeming sensationalist fear-mongering it seems that he does not mean a literal vampire as the word had been applied historically to serial killers in some European countries Pierre actually does some of his own detective work and discovers that all of the victims had the same rare blood type. When he interviews the friends of one of the victims, Lorette (The Scorpion with Two Tails's Wandisa Guida) recalls that one day they were followed by a strange man who Pierre believes is the one he saw in a photograph taken of the victim. When Joseph Signoret (Lady Morgan's Vengeance's Paul Muller) evades Pierre's pursuit, he goes to the respected Professor Julien du Grand (The Burning Court's Antoine Balpκtrι) who has used the man's drug addiction to coerce him into supplying him with victims for his experimental treatments of his reclusive cousin the Duchess Margarita du Grand demanding money to get away whereupon the professor's assistant (boxer Renato Tontini) murders him. To avoid the possibility of suspicion falling upon the professor and scandal upon the family, the duchess and the professor fake his death. The pace of the experiments does not slow, however, as Lorette has vanished after being asked by a blind man to take a letter to a dilapidated palazzo. Pierre's investigation gets sidetracked by his professional obligations to cover the society page and attend the duchess' ball although he suspects the intervention of the duchess' niece Giselle (The Avenger of Venice's Gianna Maria Canale) whose attention he spurns just as his father had those of the duchess whose obsession with him destroyed his family. Pierre's colleague Ronald (White Nights' Angelo Galassi) himself becomes obsessed with Giselle, and when he vanishes after hanging around after the ball to make a play for her, Pierre starts to wonder if the strange goings-on have something to do with the du Grand family. I vampiri is regarded by film historians from the boom of horror fandom in the seventies onward as the first Italian post-war horror film as well as the first of the country's gothic horror films directed as it was by Riccardo Freda, a journeyman director of historical spectacles who would become known as a major practitioner of the horror genre due to his tendency to get low budget productions greenlit as wagers, and photographed by the great Mario Bava who also finished the film as director when Freda departed on the tenth day of a twelve day schedule. Rather than the pure Italian gothics for which both became known, I vampiri is a hybrid of horror, a thriller in the French policier mode rather than the giallo a term used for more traditional detective and police noir books and films before it became associated with body counts and the seedy underbelly of the jet set with a bit of a serial feel appropriate to the title which recalls along with the French setting the works of silent film crime auteur Louis Feuillade's Les vampires (indeed the scoring of Roman Vlad does indeed descend into orchestral barnstorming appropriate for a serial during the opening titles and the climax of the film). This unevenness of tone and genre seems as much due to the production troubles as the evolution of the almost non-existent genre in Italy at this point with Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein not yet released there and the more influential Horror of Dracula and Brides of Dracula along with the Roger Corman Poe films (particularly The Pit and the Pendulum) to come. Freda's and Bava's first solo works in the genre, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock and Black Sunday respectively, are evidence that they were able to refine their own differing approahttps://dvdcompare.net/comparisons/film.php?fid=21034ches to the genre (Bava also got to better refine an in-camera transformation effect he first exploits here). The stalking scenes are exploited by Freda and Bava for their expressionist possibilities with chiaroscuro light and shadow, along with a pre-giallo black gloved assassin seizing scantily-clad young women; however, while an Italian horror film made a few years later would have kept at that and suggested a sex killer before revealing the true nature of the crimes, we see the first body tossed into the Seine by two silhouettes; indeed, the elaborate setup of the abduction of Lorette in contrast to the aforementioned stalkings seems more like Feuillade or even Mabuse-ian in the tone of some of the more outlandish abductions to come in the>Edgar Wallace krimi cycle. While there is a certain eroticization of the attacks and scenes of Lorette captive and terrorized, these seem to be more serial damsel in distress actions than what was to come. In terms of dramatic narrative, things are a bit of a mess possibly due to rewrites or the speed with which Piero Regnoli (Burial Ground) wrote the film with not enough time devoted to the tense relationship between Pierre and Giselle or to Lorette as his love interest (which the climax certainly suggests was well-established) so it seems more convenient that Lorette was the next victim who happened to have the same blood type than possibly jealousy. As striking as Freda's muse Canale is, the film gives her little time to play the femme fatale, particularly along the lines of those in other Freda gothics including other ones named "Margarita", and the professor is a functional role rather than an obsessed proto-Dr. Hichcock. Pierre is the usual perfunctory Freda hero while Guida like Canale a former beauty queen, and who later married producer Luciano Martino who then famously had a long relationship on the side with Edwige Fenech gets little to do than be manhandled and scream a lot. While characters whose drug addictions were used to manipulate them into crime would be a minor recurring theme in the giallo genre, there seems to be no reason that Signoret comes back to life at the climax other than possibly the professor using his body to "process" the blood before transfusing it to the duchess (although we see it transfused directly from Lorette to the duchess in one scene), and the film squanders the idea of the resurrected Signoret causing the deaths of the professor and the duchess (in a potential scene that could have anticipated the draining of one of the villains of the later purer Italian gothic Nightmare Castle). What there is to savor is primarily in the gorgeous Cinemascope photography of Bava, along with his glass matte illusions and "animation" of the crumbling du Grand chateau with roaring fires and billowing drapes along with the chiaroscuro catacombs. One cannot help but wonder if French filmmaker Georges Franju might have seen I vampiri because while both take some inspiration from Feuillade's silent films, Freda's and Bava's film seems to anticipate sequences and the overall tone of Franju's later Judex notably the ball sequence and Eyes Without a Face (which itself, of course, would prove highly-influential with a strain of post-war mad doctor Euro horrors) including the more lyrical turns of Vlad's score which anticipate Maurice Jarre's playful scores for those films. Freda has a brief speaking role as the doctor who performs the autopsies on the victims and is interviewed by Pierre, although that casting choice might have had more to do with the budget and scheduling than any Hitchockian vanity. 
Video
I vampiri had a hard time getting to English-speaking territories, turning up in the U.K. in 1960 as "Lust of the Vampire" running fifteen minutes shorter and then in 1963 in the U.S. as "The Devil's Commandment" in a version that was also shorter than the Italian version but also added some nudie inserts as well as a poorly-acted additional scenes (more on that below). While the U.S. version made the rounds in the grey market, the Italian version finally turned up in subtitled form on VHS and DVD in 2001 from Image Entertainment as part of their Euroshock line via Bava producer Alfredo Leone's acquisition of the U.S. and U.K. rights to several Bava and Bava-adjacent titles for exploitation on video. The anamorphic transfer did not make the leap to Anchor Bay's Bava sets with the rest of his filmography; however, anamorphic transfers of the U.S. version and the German version accompanied the Italian version in a German two-disc edition from Anolis in 2009, although it did not contain the outtake footage of Signoret's guillotine execution discovered on the German trailer that first turned up on Anolis' Blood and Black Lace. The film's Blu-ray debut was as a 480i extra on Arrow Video's Blu-ray/DVD combo edition of Black Sunday in 2013, but it would be nearly a decade until Italian rights owner RAI created a 2K restoration which debuted on Blu-ray in France (quickly followed by an Italian Blu-ray of questionable legality). Radiance Films' U.K. Blu-ray should be of interest to fans on both sides of the pond since it is region free and English-friendly but also features three versions of the film: the Italian version (81:31) from the recent 2K restoration, the British "Lust of the Vampire" (65:36) from "archival materials courtesy of the BFI National Archive," and "The Devil's Commandment" American version (72:18) from an SD video master. The Italian version's 2K restoration looks the best, virtually spotless even if the high definition resolution exposes the rough edges of Bava's glass mattes blending locations with hanging miniatures as well as the color gel dimmer effect used for the transformation scenes. In addition to offering better assessment of the Gothic production design and Italian location stand-ins for Parisian environs, the transfer also allows the viewer to better notice how Bava and Freda enlived threadbare sets of a few props with atmosphere through composition and the use of light and shadow.  Although transferred from unrestored and worn materials, the British version is perfectly watchable and worth checking out to see how the Italians tried to rework it for export. Whereas the Italian version opens with the titles on establishing shot stills of Paris followed by the latest body being fished out of the Seine, the export version opens with the title on a shot to come of upside down street lightis against darkness as reflected in the water where two figures will drop a body and a stalking sequence of a young woman. Deletions include a few redundant sequences like Pierre visiting the home of Lorette's parents (The Fourth Victim's Miranda Campa and The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse's Charles Fawcett) and waiting for her which precedes the scene present in all versions of Lorette's father reporting her disappearance to the inspector with Pierre an onlooker and no suggestion they arrived together. Another deletion includes one of the scenes in the newspaper offices. Present in the export version is an addition to the scene of captive Lorette stumbling into a chamber of chained skeletons in which she does not faint from that sight alone but of inserts featuring a rat that leaps at the camera and then crawls near her unconscious body. Giselle becomes the granddaughter of the duchess, a poor choice as being a niece might have suggested a more singular, obsessive devotion. Pierre Lantin becomes "Pierre le Salle", Ronald Fotaine becomes "Philip Almandine", and Inspector Chantal becomes "Inspector Morinais" and the newspaper inserts have French names and surrounding text while the headlines are now in English (despite the setting, the newspapers were entirely in Italian in the Italian version). The entirety of the credits appear at the end as a scrolling crawl with no attempt at Anglicizing any of the cast or crew. That it contains no more footage from the Italian version and does include the additions to the export version, the U.S. version suggests that the sixty-five minute running time was always that of the export version (which is not that surprising considering the length of some American and British B-pictures of the fifties and early sixties). The credits sequence appears at the end as with the export version but in a different font and including among the cast the American performers and adding some of them to the crew, including editing and associate producer credits to Fouad Said (Take the Money and Run) who might have also photographed the added scenes since he was a cinematographer and the later innovator of Cinemobile Systems which allowed film and television crews to more easily go out on location (a profitable invention that he sold to Taft Entertainment later). As with the export version, the first scene is the stalking of the girl fished out of the Seine later but it adds flatly-shot inserts of a body double undressing and taking a bath intercut with the shots of the assailant. The lengthiest insert is the painfully bad seven minute stalking of another new character with the killer less than ten feet behind her in empty alleys who seeks safety in a "Parisian" restaurant with an acrobatic cabaret act and a maitre'd who calls her "ma'amzelle" before she is murdered while trying to call her lover. The final twenty second addition features The Munsters' Al Lewis doubling for Tontini and tearing the clothes of a double for Guida. The original film materials were no more worn than the U.K. transfer but the source is an old SD video master which looks softer overall.
Audio
The Italian version features an uncompressed 24-bit LPCM 1.0 mono track and optional English subtitles. This is the cleanest-sounding option with the high ends of Vlad's score reined in, highlighting some of the more playful touches during the scene of Lorette's abduction, the ball, and the sequence of Giselle obsessively listening to a music box. The U.K. version features an unrestored English LPCM 2.0 mono track and the U.S. version features a Dolby Digital 2.0 mono track. The English dub is not very impressive, with performances ranging from flat to shrill (poor Canale is not served well during her transformation scenes). The Italian version has optional English subtitles we have not compared the translation to the earlier one while the British version has SDH subtitles (no subtitles are included for the American version). 
Extras
Extras start off with a new audio commentary by Mario Bava biographer Tim Lucas who elucidates the Feuillade connection but also discusses Freda's career as a director of historical spectacle and his preference for it whereas his horror films were the results of wagers with producers. Lucas also discusses Freda's relationship with Canale and suggests that she never forgave him for walking off the production. While it is interesting to hear him discuss how Bava achieved the film's visual effects from glass mattes here used to blend real locations with maquettes prepared by production designer Beni Montresor who worked on few films but won multiple awards for his opera set designs more fascinating here is his attempt to distinguish the storyline of the original shoot and the alterations made by Bava through speculation on the logic of certain sequences as they relate to one another as well as telltale signs like dates visible on set dressing in which the year ping pongs back and forth between 1956 and 1957 as well as the continuity error of the date changing on the professor's tomb between two shots. He also discusses the visual touches that are in line with Bava's tastes and some of the thematic ones we would see throughout Freda's genre work.  "Bloodthirst" (17:17) is a 2013 documentary with film historian Fabio Melelli and 1975 archival footage of Bava demonstrating the transformation effect on a television panel show while actor Michaelis is heard on a 1998 audio interview. Michaelis discusses his beginnings modeling in photo novels which he continued to do after his acting career ended and he has vague memories of what he shot for Freda and what he shot for Bava. Melelli discusses the film's position as the first Italian post-war gothic and gives his assessment of the film and the cast, lamenting that Michaelis did not have a better career. "The First Vampire" (14:44) is a 2022 interview with filmmaker Lamberto Bava (Demons) who recalls his father's friendship with Freda, learning under his sculptor/visual effects artist grandfather Eugenio Bava, and his working relationship with camera operator Ubaldo Terzano who was often credited as cinematographer on films Bava directed but also photographed. He also notes that although the film was shot in Cinemascope, his father preferred to 1.85:1 frame. In "Leon Hunt on I vampiri" (20:55), Hunt discusses the film in the context of Italian horror as well as other cycles of genre and the circumstances that made it viable for Bava and Freda to move on after the film and do more in the genre. The disc closes with "The Devil's Commandment" U.S. theatrical trailer (1:41) although sadly Radiance was not able to include the German trailer which featured exclusive footage of the unused scenes that established Signoret as a criminal executed by guillotine and then put back together and resurrected by the professor rather than the junkie he is in the film (although late in the finished film there is a shot of his stitched throat). 
Packaging
The limited edition of three-thousand copies comes with a reversible sleeve featuring artwork based on original posters and a booklet featuring new writing by Roberto Curti, author of Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1957-1969 and is presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings. This material was not supplied for review.
Overall
Swimming in Gothic atmosphere but tonally and narratively inconsistent, I vampiri is nevertheless an entertaining and stimulating turn in the right direction for both Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava as two of Italian horror's major practitioners.
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