News

Renato Polselli’s vampire rally ups the on-screen babe count first and provides horror thrills second, yet Ernesto Gastaldi’s screenplay introduces an interesting wrinkle or two to the bloodsucking genre. This new bilingual release is a good presentation of what for American chiller fans has been a long-absent title.

The Vampire and the Ballerina

Blu-ray

Scream Factory

1960 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 85 min. / L’amante del vampiro / Street Date May 22, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 27.99

Starring: Walter Brandi, Hélène Rémy, Tina Gloriani, María Luisa Rolando, Isarco Ravaioli, Gino Turini (John Turner), Pier Ugo Gragnani.

Cinematography: Angelo Baistrocchi

Film Editor: Renato Cinquini

Assistant Director: Ernesto Gastaldi

Original Music: Aldo Piga

Written by Ernesto Gastaldi, Giuseppe Pellegrini, Renato Polselli

Produced by Bruno Bolognese

Directed by Renato Polselli

We’re told that all of Europe jumped on a horror bandwagon with the success of the first two Technicolor Hammer gothic films, but it took...

Guest Reviewer Lee Broughton is back, with another Italo Western double bill DVD review. Wild East’s ongoing Spaghetti Western Collection continues to grow and this double bill release is particularly welcome since it features two obscure and wholly idiosyncratic genre entries from 1969. Italian Western directors had found it relatively easy to appropriate key plot points and ideas from Sergio Leone’s Dollars films during the genre’s early years but when Leone’s sprawling, mega-budgeted, meta-Western Once Upon a Time in the West was released in 1968 it was clear that this was one genre entry that local filmmakers would not be able to easily emulate.

With scriptwriters and directors now essentially being forced to come up with their own ideas and generic trends, a new wave of Spaghetti Westerns were produced that effectively took the genre in a multitude of new directions. The two films featured here were part of that wave.