there’s a great article on WATCH- MEN that could also discuss the good, the bad and the ugly! But #147’s round table was definitely worth the price of admission! Constantine Nasr Los Angeles CA
Constantine Nasr is a documen- tary filmmaker, video archivist and audio commentary pro- ducer whose DVD credits in- clude THE GREEN MILE and the FOX HORROR CLASSICS sets.
A DIRECTOR WRITES
Excuse my bad English, I am Giovanni Pianigiani, the director of the Italian movie DARKNESS SURROUNDS ROBERTA that Eric Somer reviewed in the pages of VIDEO WATCHDOG [147:48]. In the picture of the stabbed girl enclosed with the review, the writing proclaims: “Trieste-born director Giovanni Pianigianni [My name is Pianigiani] (FIVE DEAD ON THE CRIMSON CANVAS) continues to mine Dario Argento territory in DARKNESS SUR- ROUNDS ROBERTA.” FIVE DEAD ON THE CRIMSON CANVAS is a movie by Joseph F. Parda, shot in 1996. I met Joe Zaso for the first time on the set of Demon- ium by Andreas Schnaas in 2000!!!
DARKNESS SURROUNDS
ROBERTA is a movie I love, but in reality is the only movie I have made in the style of the Italian giallos. NIGHT’S VAMPIRES is a brutal political splatter (I adore Romero!), the episode “Pilgrim- age” in RED MIDNIGHT is blas- phemy horror stuff, and my latest movie La canzone della notte (“Night’s Song”) is a musical bizarre noir!
About the “hilarious” lines in English... Yes, I know that I have worked with Italian actors that struggled with English a little... But the problem is this: We make
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genre movies, and in Italy the film industry doesn’t exist, not one “normal” company of production makes horror, mystery, and so on. So we have to work alone, and obviously for the foreign market... But the question is: If I make a movie in Italian, with En- glish subtitles, will American horror audiences agree to watch a movie in Italian with English subtitles?
Yassmin Pucci is my favorite actress and I’ll continue to work with her! (She is also in the latest movie of Timo Rose and in La canzone della notte!)
Anyway, thanks for the re- view—it’s important for us that people know that the movie ex- ists! (And that it’s full of sex, nu- dity, absurd plot and twists, ah ah I adore my blind detective that goes around sniffing every- where!!! And the love scene be- tween Yassmin and the man with the mask! And the absurd people of the night club! And the crazy lines about trash in the little street of Caserta!!! And and and and and and and!!!)
Giovanni Pianigiani e-mail
We thank Giovanni for writing, and for elucidating some of the problems encountered when working in Italian horror cinema today. We regret the captioning error.
TRUE BLUE
I just wanted to give another vote in favor of the magazine’s new direction. There are far too many video publications chasing the same batch of new releases every month. It’s refreshing to find a magazine that covers top- ics that interest its writers, regard- less of the age of the movie or the video release.
With that said, I do still wish you’d increase your High Definition
coverage. That’s not to say that you need to rush to review IRON MAN 4 or SPIDER-MAN 17 on street date, or that you need to give over all of your pages to HD reviews. I think there are plenty of interest- ing genre titles being released on Blu-ray both domestically and abroad to warrant at least a little more attention. When a title like DIARY OF THE DEAD is avail- able on both DVD and Blu-ray, a “Perfectionist’s Guide to Fan- tastic Video” really ought to be reviewing it in the best available edition.
Most issues only have a single High Definition review, which is disappointing for a magazine with the “HD” so prominent in its logo. Which also reminds me that I wish you’d go back to the old logo. Not over this issue, but be- cause the “Video WatcHDoG” ban- ner is just aesthically not very attractive.
Anyway, still loving the mag. Keep up the good work.
Joshua Zyber Jamaica Plain MA
In this issue and the prior two, we have taken Blu-ray out of its isolation booth and shuffled it into our general coverage with more BR in each issue. This could only happen as more of our reviewers became able to cover it, and the fact is, few com- panies are sending us BR prod- uct for review, though I believe we’re the only film review maga- zine on the market emphasizing high definition in our logo. Some PR handlers, like the one repre- senting Dimension, will not make BR titles available for re- view; even Criterion, one of our most dependable suppliers, has yet to share any of their BR titles with us. So we cover what we can. As for the cover logo, we do things here on a “unanimous or bust” basis, and Donna hap- pens to prefer the HD logo.
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