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Murder Obsession
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Raro Video UK Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (10th December 2023). |
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The Film
 When actor Michael Stamford (Conversation Piece's Stefano Patrizi) nearly kills his leading lady Beryl (Black Emanuelle's Laura Gemser) in his latest horror film, he is haunted by the memory of murdering his father (also Patrizi) when he was a child and is overcome with a compulsion to return to his family estate where his mother Glenda (The Case of the Scorpion's Tail's Anita Strindberg) lives alone with manservant Oliver (Black Sunday's John Richardson). His girlfriend Deborah (Waves of Lust's Silvia Dionisio) realizes that she is not in for the holiday he claimed when he introduces her to his mother as his secretary and catches on to the latter's possessive behavior right away. The next day, Michael's director Hans (The Pink Panther's Henri Garcin) arrives to discuss a new project with Michael, bringing along Beryl and assistant director Shirley (Eyeball's Martine Brochard). After dinner, discussion of voodoo and the occult leads to a sleepless night. Hans goes for a walk in the woods and runs into a sleepwalking Oliver, Deborah dreams that she participates in a Black Mass in the villa's dungeons, and someone tries to drown Beryl in her bath. The next day, however, as Michael, Hans, Beryl and Shirley leave Deborah behind and take a drive out into the woods to look at filming locations, someone is planning a welcome home for Michael and his friends with the help of an axe and a chainsaw. Could it be the sleepwalking Oliver or the blackout-prone Michael or someone or something much more sinister? Riccardo Freda's last film curiously finds him in similar Oedipal territories as Mario Bava with his own final feature Shock/Beyond the Door II; however, Freda's approach is more overtly "Gothic" than that of Bava on his own swan song which attempted to strike a balance between modern and classic horror sensibilities; indeed, Freda's old dark house approach manages to be simultaneously appealing and creaky. The cinematography of Cristiano Pogany's (Last House on the Beach) son of Gabor Pogany who shot seven films for Freda including the Italian/German Edgar Wallace thriller Double Face recalls imagery from Freda's Italian Gothic milestone The Horrible Dr. Hichcock and Bava's Lisa and the Devil, particularly shots focusing on Michael's visits to his mother's bedside, albeit shifting the perversion from crepuscular necrophilia to queasy incest; but neither the piano-dominated Franco Mannino score of classical adaptations like Bach's "Well Tempered Clavier" and "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" and Liszt's "Liebestraum" that accompanied the Italian version nor the uncredited synthesizer score the work of Carlo Maria Cordio who reveals that Joe D'Amato was one of the film's uncredited producers and asked him to rescore it, and it does have the sound of his early eighties works like D'Amato's slasher Absurd more so than his more melodic mid-eighties to nineties KORG keyboard work that almost completely blankets the English version are equal to what atmosphere Freda is able to evoke visually. Like Bava, Freda made use of in-camera effects throughout his career but they always tended to look slapdash rather than endearingly old school starting with repeat establishing shots of the villa that look very much like a blown-up still photograph with fake foreground flora that is not out-of-focus enough to be convincing and some wavy distortion in front of the lens for Oliver's moments of astral projection (or sleepwalking dreamt as projection). The film's gore effects are seldom better, particularly a not quick enough shot of an axe to the head that reveals that the grayish prosthetic head is not only badly-made but has no eyes, looking far less accomplished than only somewhat less crude effects work from Carlo Rambaldi on Freda's earlier seventies Gothic horror pic Tragic Ceremony at Villa Alexander or his stab at the post-Argento gory gialli with Iguana with the Tongue of Fire. The film is also rather structurally-odd, with suspense-worthy events such as Hans' encounter with a sleepwalking Oliver and the latter half of Deborah's nightmare depicted in flashback recoutings when they might have been better rendered in the story's present as part of the group's first eventful night in the villa. What isn't ridiculously overstated in the dialogue such as Hans' attachment to his camera is over-emphasized by Pogany's emphatic zooms (or someone else's but more on that later) and music stingers. The supernatural and giallo aspects do not really mesh well a tired after-dinner discussion of voodoo and other occult practices serves to cast suspicion on no one in particular what with invisible beings tracking stop-motion muddy footprints into rooms where visible and corporeal black-gloved assailants strike, not to mention a hilarious giant spider that recalls Luigi Batzella's softcore seventies Gothic Nude for Satan. Had the film stuck to the psychological and used the occult as a delusion of the villain, it might still have earned the memorable closing shot that beautifully, or blasphemously, mimics the Pietΰ lamentation of Christ (particularly Michelangelo's sculpture). Murder Obsession might be a bit of let-down as Freda's swan-song, but it and Lucio Fulci more successful fusion of gore and Gothic in his trio of Lovecraftian zombie films jointly make up a considerably more fitting farewell to the genre than Sergio Bergonzelli's Blood Delirium. 
Video
Murder Obession reached the U.S. through Charles Band's Wizard Video in a big box with the replacement title "Fear" which was also distributed in Canada by Marquis Video which further truncated the shorter English export version by trimming part of Debora's nightmare to fit a T-90 tape the Greek and Venezuelan videotapes bore the original English export title "Unconscious" while the U.K. release was retitled "The Wailing" (although alternate Greek and UK releases featured a garish cover and the title "Satan's Altar"). The Italian arm of Raro Video released the film on DVD in 2007 featuring a non-anamorphic widescreen transfer of the longer Italian version with both Italian and English tracks (and English subtitles for the Italian-only scenes). In 2011, Raro Video USA issued an anamorphic DVD that was a big improvement but featured the English track with the Italian track only included for scenes that were not included in the export version. Fortunately, Raro Video USA made amends the following year with a Blu-ray featuring the Italian version with English subtitles and a separate 1080p presentaiton of the English version which turned out to be a cutdown of the Italian version rather than the export version which featured some exclusive material. Earlier this year, Austrian label Cineploit put out an English-friendly mediabook edition featuring the Italian cut only. While Raro Video has not provided Radiance Films with new masters for their curated label, we were already impressed by what they were able to do with Night of the Devils, and their Blu-ray of Murder Obsession is another impressive release with a 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen encode of the Italian cut (97:17) and a valiant effort to recreate the English export version (91:31) utilizing standard definition inserts of the shots of Beryl intercut with HD cutaways of shots that are featured in both versions wandering the corridors at night that replaced the near five-minute sequence of Glenda and Hans redundantly discussing Michael's murder of his father and her interest in the occult. While they use the same decade-old master, both encodes are superior to the U.S. release with deeper blacks and slightly richer colors. Shadow detail could be better and blacks less noisy, but it is an improvement given the master. 
Audio
The Italian version is accompanied by the Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track with the original Mannino score and it sounds as clean as it always has in the digital realm, while the export version is accompanied by an English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track which appears to have been sourced from the video element used for the SD inserts of the export version rather than the English track from the previous Blu-ray since more pronounced hiss is evident in the silences (although presumably some degree of digital clean-up was performed on the track just shy of introducing noise reduction artifacts). Optional English subtitles are available for the Italian version and HoH subtitles for the English version (since the English version utilizes the image track of the Italian version, subtitles also translate the opening epigraph). 
Extras
New to this edition is an audio commentary by film historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas accompanying the Italian version in which she draws on the work of Roberto Curti in discussing the gap in Freda's directorial career and the changes in the genre during it, and reveals that Freda was less interested in Murder Obsession as a return to form than as a stepping stone for an Alexandre Dumas. Back in 1950, Freda had written and directed the "Three Musketeers" spin-off Il figlio di d'Artagnan but his idea for a follow-up would not be realized until 1994 by Bertrand Tavernier as Revenge of the Musketeers (Tavernier had scripted Freda's sixties spy thriller Mexican Slayride and gave special thanks to Freda in the credits of his 1987 medieval drama The Passion of Beatrice). She discusses the ways in which the film embodies both Gothic and giallo tropes while also noting that its meta-cinema aspects reach back to one of the earliest Italian thriller films titled Giallo which itself sounds like an influence on Bava's The Evil Eye/The Girl Who Knew Too Much which was based on a novel by Edgar Wallace while also noting that the books that primarily made up giallo as literary genre were Italian translations of English and American mystery authors that had been largely unavailable to Italians during the interwar years. She also notes that the source story for the film was a story by credited co-screenwriter Fabio Piccioni that he had initially sold to producer Salvatore Argento and notes its influence on the mother/son dynamics of his son's film Deep Red but also that the story itself was indebted to elements of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (itself an uncredited adaptation of Frederic Brown's novel "Screaming Mimi"), and that there was enough material that had not been mined by the Argentos for Piccioni to not only adapt the property for a graphic novel but also to rework into a film script as early as 1976 under the title "Deliria" (not to be confused with the Italian title of Michele Soavi's eighties Italian horror milestone Stagefright.  Ported over from the Raro DVD releases is an interview with make-up effects artist Sergio Stivaletti (10:05). Stivaletti reveals that the film was one of his earliest effects projects for which he is uncredited and that he was introduced to the film's effects supervisor Angelo Mattei who did the rotting corpses on Argento's Inferno by Lamberto Bava who served on the film as assistant director while his father did uncredited work on the film's in-camera visual effects assisted by his own son Fabrizio Bava). Stivaletti recalls versions of the effects that did not work and concluding that working with the cinema great Freda was not an edifying experience. Ported from the Raro Video USA Blu-ray is an interview with composer Claudio Simonetti (22:04) who did not work on the film but instead provides an overview of horror music from its classical roots to the innovations of Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, and Ennio Morricone, how his progressive rock band Goblin was recommended by Cinevox's Carlo Bixio to perform Giorgio Gaslini's score for Deep Red and how they ended up scoring the film, Keith Emerson's largely orchestral score for Inferno (Argento wanted Emerson, Lake and Palmer for Deep Red), and his own move into electronica with subsequent works for Argento and other genre projects. Also included is an appreciation by filmmaker Gabriele Albanesi (8:33) in which the director of The Last House in the Woods who positions Freda as Italian horror's founding father since Bava worked as his cameraman on I Vampiri (although Bava would end up finishing the film as he did with Freda's Caltiki, the Immortal Monster). He also notes that Gothic horror was out of fashion by the time of Murder Obsession but that Freda's modern slant comparing the meta-cinema touches to that of Brian De Palma and Blow Out is what makes it interesting.  The deleted scene (0:25) is a part of Beryl's nighttime bath attack from a video source.
Packaging
The first pressing of 3,000 copies comes with a reversible sleeve featuring artwork based on original posters and a limited edition booklet with new writing by Mikel J. Koven, author of "La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo" (not provided for review).
Overall
Murder Obsession might be a bit of let-down as director Riccardo Freda's swan-song, but it a considerably more fitting farewell to the Gothic slant of Italian horror.
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