Since I’ve seen most of the streaming giallo films with Italian audio and English subtitles, I decided to see if I could find the Arrow Video giallo boxed sets, or at least some of them, for a decent price. Each has three films on Blu-ray but people try to sell them for wild prices like $100 and more. No. Luckily Arrow has most of them for $35 (well, all but one is sold out so I must’ve gotten really lucky). As a bonus, I picked up their Sergio Martino collection. One of the Martino films is also in the White collection (Morte sospetta di una minorenne) so that’s 17 films, 6 I’ve already seen. This will keep me busy.
Back in July 2020 I burned through watching around ten or so giallo films over a couple of weeks, resurrecting my interest from years prior. A week ago I had a similar urge but this time to watch some 1950s/60s gothic horror–castles, curses, brooding women–and wanted to find movies in Italian with subtitles in order to get better listening and hopefully understanding. Some words and phrases will be less useful (i vizi morbosi, il mulino, lei รจ un strega) but there will otherwise be simpler dialog that uses probably 50% of my current vocabulary, and maybe repetition will help me pick up new words and provide examples of simple conversational phrases in context.
A few long time ago (a little over 12 years to be whatever) several geek websites posted a link to a site where photos of a sci-fi convention called Westercon from the 1980 event were posted. The people in the photos were so 80s and earnest and lo-fi that you couldn’t help but be jealous of them and the time they were living in. The geek sites posted additional links to other relevant parties who had valuable/interesting additions to the conversation or who had actually lived through those halcyon days, and each site had their own discussion threads where yet more links were posted and memories from those who had actually been at that convention were retold. It was one of those moments that, meta-wise, made you wish you were a sociologist 200 years from now because there was just so much those photos and discussions revealed about a certain group at a certain time in history along with how they themselves remembered that history.
I’ve been collecting movie posters for almost exactly three years and recently finished acquiring and framing a set of five distinctive East German posters. The poster mania started 1 Nov 2020 (according to my catalog notes) which was of course eight months into the pandemic when we were all finding new interests with our idle hands. It started with me describing the Italian sci-fi movie Wild, Wild Planet (I criminali della galassia, 1966) to Lisa with way more information than anyone would care to have who doesn’t love quirky, 60s, European sci-fi (“ok, so it’s directed by Antonio Margherita and is part of a loose four film cycle centered around the crew of the space station Gamma One…”). In my waxing about the movie I looked up the poster and made the fateful statement of how amazing it would be if I could find an original copy.
Well apparently it’s easy to find. And reasonably priced.
And as soon as Lisa saw the purple boots she didn’t care how boring it is that “Margheriti was otherwise known as a Giallo director and went by the name Anthony Dawson for this film to appeal to American audiences. Not to mention that he’s slyly referenced in Inglourius Basterds.” After I ordered it I was worried I was getting a reprint, but the back of the copy I received looks aged and has a stamp that looks authentic. And anyway, who wouldn’t want this on their wall:
Laser-Ray Girls? Count me in! There’s not one square inch on that poster that isn’t bonkers.
One section of the back of the poster, folded. 67-201 is the NSS number: it was released in 1967 and was the 201st film to be assigned a number. More info that, for some reason?!?, Lisa didn’t care about
