DVD Review: Spirits Of The Dead (1968)
Go on! Stick Edgar Allan Poe into the IMDB search and you’ll notice it straight away - the numerous cinematic treatments of his work have distinctly non English titles -Portuguese, Danish, Spanish even an early Czech film giving a big clue as to where his main fan base was and is located.
Of course Roger Corman had, through the early 60s, rekindled a keen interest for Poe in his homeland and quite successfully too with 1964’s The Masque Of the Red Death marking the high point. Four years later and falling in with the very ‘now’ trend of compendium films and featuring some very ‘now’ film stars came the Franco- Italian Histoires Extraordinaires (Spirits Of The Dead).
Three...well two giants of European cinema, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini along with ever-so-lo brow but fun Roger Vadim took on the mighty Poe, each presenting a short adaptation of one of his creepy gothic tales.
Vadim’s Metzengerstein starring his then wife, Jane Fonda, playing the debauched sadistic libertine, Contessa Frederica, looking not unlike a medieval Barberella (released the same year by the same director, same star) Falling in love with her cousin (interestingly and perversely played by her brother Peter Fonda) she gets spurned and exacts a terrible revenge. Poe tale that it is though, a nasty twist is round the corner.
The weaker of the three stories it nonetheless delivers in the visuals with some quite amazing scenes especially the fiery demise of the Baron….Oh!..and the kinky Ms Fonda. That’s about all you can say about it though. Flat acting and a dull script fail to excite and the scenes do shift into a kind of camped up version of an aftershave TV ad.
William Wilson, with Malle at the helm, fares a lot better. This time, Alain Delon as the eponymous Austrian student who is …well..a bit of a sadist, discovers to his increasing dread that he his shadowed by a person of the same name. He still lives it up though and even gets to whip Brigitte Bardot. Some good acting and photography with a suitably chilling denouement place this segment head and shoulders above the first.
And then there is Fellini’s contribution to this triptych of terror - Toby Dammit. This is an updating of Poe and has Terence Stamp perfectly cast as a permanently wasted English actor flying into Rome to appear in a new film. He finds himself haunted by frightening, ominous images as his grip on reality gets more and more tenuous. A particularly scary looking girl with a bouncing ball appears and as he loses it he decides to go for a doom-laden, white knuckle drive though a deserted city.
This segment is utterly superior in every way to the other films. From his dream-like arrival at a cacophonous Rome airport we are treated to a whirlwind of experiences both visually and aurally, shouts of paparazzi, camera flashes, glaring, staring faces, po-faced (perhaps Poe-faced) sycophants setting the mood of paranoia and that’s before the more nightmarish images tilts our hero’s sanity. Very tightly directed with scene after scene presented like some opium fulled painting and probably Stamp’s best performance with scenes reminiscent of Don’t Look Now, Suspiria and A Clockwork Orange. All this with an ending that will haunt you forever.
This new print is a great improvement quality-wise on the previous VHS release-the colours will knock you out. For the last part alone, this is worthy of your ‘hard-earned’ by some way.
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