None are terrible though all three are minor if very different from one another Euro-thrillers. Had they received decent transfers it would be easier to muster a little more excitement about their release. Unfortunately, Retromedia's DVDs are consistently mediocre to poor; the company generally peddles titles perceived to be in the public domain - possibly a wrong assumption in the case of Blood Castle and Fangs of the Living Dead, which may be why they are being dropped this time - and they master them from whatever source material is readily available - often old, 16mm TV syndication prints.

By all accounts, Retromedia is virtually a one-man operation, and there's little doubt that owner-filmmaker Fred Olen Ray has a genuine affection for the titles he releases. He's probably a great guy to hang out with on a Friday night to watch a double-bill of Godmonster of Indian Flats and A*P*E, but releases like Euro Fiends from Beyond the Grave don't do these pictures any favors. Some fans of these kinds of movies are indifferent to the manner in which they are presented; they just want to own them, in any form. In that sense, Ray can't be faulted; he's merely supplying what they demand.

But as home video technologies approach the experience of watching 35mm prints in a movie theater, releases like Euro Fiends from Beyond the Grave are like a throwback to the Stone Age. Ray and others might argue that such releases have a nostalgia value, that they preserve not the original theatrical experience but rather what it was like watching these movies on UHF channels in the middle of the night, or on Saturday afternoons with horror movie hosts like Zacherley and Sir Graves Ghastly. True enough, but such releases beg the question: Do DVDs like Euro Fiends - which aren't region-encoded and thus playable anywhere in the world - discourage (now struggling) boutique labels like Blue Underground, Panik House and NoShame from going to the expense of legitimately licensing original negatives and mag tracks from their owners, or big studio labels from releasing their PD titles? In some cases (Kill, Baby...Kill, The Last Man on Earth) the answer is no, but often I suspect that it does.

Retromedia (as well as other PD labels, like Alpha) are merely catering to consumers with high scratch-and-splice tolerances while others, like this reviewer, prefer to hold out for legitimate releases or import DVDs from abroad offering better transfers.

The Faceless Monster (first released in the U.S. by Allied Artists as Nightmare Castle, a superior title) is notable in that it stars Euro cult actress Barbara Steele (Black Sunday) in a dual role and features a score by no less than recent Academy Award recipient Ennio Morricone. Steele plays an unfaithful wife whose jealous husband tortures and murders both her and her lover. The husband, Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller), had expected to inherit his wife's considerable estate but too late discovers that she's left everything to her mentally ill sister, Jenny (also Steele, this time in a blonde wig). Barely skipping a beat, Arrowsmith plots to marry Jenny and steal away her newfound fortune, but the spirits of the dead wife and her lover have other plans.

This Italian Gothic is all over the map in terms of style and inspiration: it's got Mario Bava's leading lady, Roger Corman / Edgar Allan Poe-like character relationships, Lewtonesque camerawork and a greenhouse straight out of Robert Wise's The Haunting. Director Mario Caiano (billed here as "Allan Grunewald") and cameraman Enzo Barboni (Django) are at least cribbing from the best. And, if nothing else, the film gives Steele lots to do, and she's clearly sinking her teeth into her two parts.

The Red-Headed Corpse (original U.S. release title, The Sensuous Doll, via distributor Beacon Releasing) is an unusual giallo starring a sickly-looking Farley Granger as an alcoholic artist struggling to live off his paintings in what appears to be Istanbul. (The film is Italian, and there's mention of lira, but the film seems to have been shot in Turkey.) He eventually acquires a faceless woman's mannequin, which after he decides to paint it transforms into a beautiful, apparently living woman (Erika Blanc, quite luscious). At first the woman is mute, but eventually she talks just enough that Farley's painter gets abusive with her, while she embarks on a promiscuous lifestyle.

The picture is unpleasant and creepy though a sincerely-made if explicit thriller. It's both hypnotic and confused, with all the loose ends tied up with an explanatory ending like that at the end of Hitchcock's Psycho.

Satanik (U.S. title: Satanic), based on the comic book by Roberto Raviola, is an uninspired rehash of old potboilers like The Wasp Woman and The Leech Woman, films about vain old women using atomic age science (and/or ancient jungle remedies) to restore their long-lost beauty, while cashing in on Mario Bava's high profile Diabolik, about a terrorist/super antihero. This peculiar grafting has Dr. Marnie Bannister (Polish actress Magda Konopka, later in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth), both old and scarred, becoming a psychotic killer to maintain her youthful appearance.

Video & Audio

This double-sided disc presents The Faceless Monster on side "A" with the other two movies on the "B" side. The Faceless Monster is apparently a slight improvement over its predecessor in that it avoids the pixilation and audio problems mentioned in earlier reviews. However, it's still not 16:9 enhanced, and the 1.66:1 image is washed out with poor contrast. The credits are mostly in Italian, with "The Faceless Monster" video-supered in. The Red-Headed Corpse, also 4:3 matted widescreen, is very slightly better, though it has a big scratch running right down the middle of the frame for the first reel or so, and the color is blotchy and the picture grainy. A French-Canadian print running 78 minutes appears to have been the source for this edition. Satanik uses a 16mm print of what appears to be U.S. release version (prints by Movielab). The opening titles are open matte 1.85:1, but the rest of the picture has been reformatted to eliminate all the extra headroom at the expense of picture information on the sides. This results in many awkward compositions, though overall the image is probably the least terrible of the three. There are no subtitle or alternate audio options, and no Extra Features save for Eric Hoffman's brief liner notes.

Parting Thoughts

Euro Fiends from Beyond the Grave will appeal only to die-hard Euro-Trash fans willing to suffer through barely adequate transfers at low bit-rates using poor film elements. All others will want to Skip It.

Film historian Stuart Galbraith IV's most recent essays appear in Criterion's new three-disc Seven Samurai DVD and BCI Eclipse's The Quiet Duel. His audio commentary for Invasion of Astro Monster is due out in June.