DEEP RED (1975) Limited Edition Blu-ray
Director: Dario Argento
Arrow Video USA

"Flesh ripped clean to the bone… and the blood runs red…" DEEP RED on Arrow Video's 4K-restored Blu-ray limited edition of the Dario Argento classic.

Teaching jazz at a music conservatory in Rome, British pianist Marc Daly (David Hemmings, BEYOND EROTICA) witnesses the brutal murder of his neighbor Helga Ullmann (Macha Meril, NIGHT TRAIN MURDERS), a Lithuanian medium who had just that afternoon picked telepathically picked up on long-suppressed memories of a murder from an unknown audience member at a conference on parapsychology. Although he fears that the news story about the murder printed by headstrong journalist Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi, PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT) will make him a target for the killer, Marc is nevertheless compelled to investigate on his own by the nagging impression that he has seen a vital clue that he cannot remember; a notion unintentionally enforced by the ramblings of his alcoholic bar pianist friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia, ZEDER). Teaming up with Gianna – along with Helga's psychiatrist colleague Giordani (Glauco Mauri) and parapsychologist Bardi (Piero Mazzinghi, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES) – Marc draws a connection between the contents of Helga's visions and a child's lullaby he heard when the killer made an attempt on his life with a modern urban legend of a haunted house in which a murder was believed to have been committed years ago. Marc tracks down the author (Giuliana Calandra, LOVE & ANARCHY) of a folklore collection in which the legend appears but she is murdered before he can meet her. With the killer seeming to always been one step ahead of the investigation, Marc starts to wonder just who he can trust.

A massive leap in storytelling and visual style from Dario Argento's earlier "animal trilogy" that had been oft-imitated by the likes of Sergio Martino and Umberto Lenzi, DEEP RED once again revolutionized the giallo genre and the path of his career in which each of his subsequent directorial efforts (amidst television appearances and possessory credits as producer) would be viewed by the Italian public as much-anticipated events. DEEP RED benefits greatly from a script by Argento and Fellini collaborator Bernardino Zapponi (SATYRICON) which finds aural and visual analogues for the concept of second sight with a series of rhyming images and throwaway phrases that greatly reward subsequent viewings; not to mention layers of visually and aurally understated story elements that enrich the film without alienating the uninformed viewer such as Helga's Jewish identity and the notion of a Jewish mystic unearthing the dark and dirty secrets of a Fascist icon. Like the protagonist of FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, Marc is a musician rather than the writer detectives of BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and CAT O'NINE TAILS, and he seems passively and intuitively drawn through the narrative while searching for clues in roundabout manners like tracing the haunted house from the story by a rare tree seen in a photograph while his lie to the villa's caretaker that he is an architect leads to his own realization of an architectural discrepancy that unearths a vital clue. The two-hour plus running time of the film was pruned by over twenty minutes for international release, but the story elements that were lost to English-speaking audiences as well as those that remained but seemed superfluous actually contribute to one of Argento's most richly-imagined narratives: from the battle of the sexes between Marc and equally emasculating and insecure Gianna and the sadistic games of ten-year-old Olga (Nicoletta Elmi, DEMONS) to the self-loathing homosexuality of Carlo, his doting and dotty mother (Clara Calamai, OSSESSIONE), and his transvestite lover Massimo (Geraldine Hooper, THEY'VE CHANGED FACES). Editor Franco Fraticelli (OPERA) employs a staccato editing technique to the Techniscope imagery of Luigi Kuveiller (NEW YORK RIPPER) – whose camera was operated by Mario Bava's cameraman of choice Ubaldo Terzano (BLOOD AND BLACK LACE) – as accompanied by the aggressive prog rock score by Goblin (SUSPRIA) which, in concert with some orchestral and jazz cues of Giorgio Gaslini (SO SWEET, SO DEAD) – make Ennio Morricone's rock score for FOUR FLIES IN GREY VELVET seem in retrospect like a bridge between early and peak Argento.

Before it was released theatrically in the United States by Howard Mahler Films (KILLER SNAKES), DEEP RED's export version (104:53 versus the Italian original at 127:14) was further trimmed of some gore and some directorial flourishes to the version known theatrically as THE HATCHET MURDERS (the title remained DEEP RED onscreen). This edition was released on VHS by HBO Home Video in a faded, murky, panned-and-scanned (and squeezed) transfer that oddly featured Italian end credits even though other editions of the export version had English ones. While a letterboxed Japanese laserdisc ludicrously-titled SUSPIRIA 2 was the easiest way American fans could see the export version, the Italian original was only available as a letterboxed unsubtitled version from Italian-American Domo Video. In the UK, a BBFC-censored VHS of the export version was supplanted by a Redemption VHS of the Italian cut (albeit censored by eleven seconds for animal cruelty) that was subtitled but panned-and-scanned. While the likes of Brentwood and Diamond Entertainment put out the panned-and-scanned video master on budget DVD, Anchor Bay rectified things in the US with a new anamorphic 2.35:1 widescreen DVD transfer of the Italian version with 5.1 and 2.0 Surround Italian and hybrid English/Italian remixes and optional English subtitles for the entire Italian track or for the scenes not dubbed into English. While this version had English end credits, they were recreated over a freeze frame of the final image which ran in motion in previous transfers. The UK got a bottom-of-the-barrel edition from Platinum Media that paired separate so-so letterboxed but inaccurately framed transfers of the export and Italian versions (the latter with burnt-in subtitles).

Arrow Video in the UK released the first Blu-ray edition which featured an HD transfer of the Italian version from which the export version was reconstructed on a second disc. Despite the bells and whistles of a new commentary, featurettes, and the choice of four covers, this edition drew criticism for its transfer which derived from the early high definition master struck for the Italian DVD which came with a Windows WMV HD disc. When Blue Underground released their editions stateside – also featuring separate encodes of the Italian and export versions and bumping up the 5.1 remixes to 7.1 – they did some additional color correction but issues baked into the master like the sickly skintones and noise reduction had already done the damage, making the US edition only marginally preferable. In 2016, Arrow mounted a 4K restoration of the original camera negative for a limited edition two Blu-ray/CD soundtrack edition that sold out quickly and still commands high prices. That region-free edition was followed up by a single-disc Region B-locked disc featuring only the Italian cut with Italian 5.1 and mono tracks as well as a hybrid English/Italian mono track.

With Blue Underground's rights expiring last year, Arrow Video has reproduced the contents of the two Blu-rays of the limited edition for their Region A/B-coded domestic edition; thus following up their 4K-restored editions of THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and CAT O'NINE TAILS with another definitive dual-territory release (Arrow's PHENOMENA being UK-only). Transferred from the original camera negative with some footage missing from the negative restored by negative trims that were discovered archived with the material as well a vintage IP that was used as a reference, DEEP RED is a revelation on the new Blu-ray edition. Color are richer without the yellow-tinge, skintones are healthy, restored textures call attention to Helga's previously black blob of a dress, velvet curtains, grimy walls, and "deep red" bloodshed. A remarkable sense of depth exists in the image not only in wide angle shots but in the movements of the zoom, handheld POVs, or the Chapman crane movements which give life to extremely formal compositions by honing in on the characters who wander into them. The Italian cut comes with Italian 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and LPCM 1.0 mono tracks and a hybrid English/Italian LPCM 1.0 and English subtitles for the Italian track, the Italian scenes on the English track, or full SDH subtitles for the English track. The reconstructed theatrical cut comes with English LPCM 1.0 and SDH subtitles. While the lack of a surround remix of the English elements may seem disappointing, the restoration of the original mixes from the sound negatives is an aural revelation calling attention to Gaslini's incidental orchestral cues too often overshadowed by the Goblin tracks when they actually do contribute dramatically. The dialogue is clear but the sound effects track has always sounded a little canned.

The Italian version – playable with an optional introduction by Goblin's Claudio Simonetti (THE THIRD MOTHER) – is accompanied by an audio commentary by Argento expert Thomas Rostock that had previously appeared on the Scandinavian DVD edition from Another World Entertainment and Arrow's earlier Blu-ray and DVD editions. In addition to such factoids as Gaslini's own students playing Marc's students in the opening sequence, the use of a snorkel camera and macro lens to visualize the interior of the killer's mind, and that Argento originally wanted to introduce telepathy as an aspect of the plot of FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, Rostock also suggests Argento's use of his own hands as the killer's as one of the many qualities that ally him closer to his own mentor Fritz Lang than Alfred Hitchcock. He not only points out the many rhyming images and their significance, but other elements from the Jewish motif to the significance of two switchblades, and how Marc's practice hall discussion of jazz music and Giordani's introduction to telepathy are statements to the audience warning them of the danger of literal interpretations of clues (an approach which diverts Marc's own investigation).

The only new featurette to this and the 2016 UK edition of the film is "Profondo Giallo" (32:57), a visual essay by Michael Mackenzie who draws from the writings of "Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds" author Maitland McDonagh and "La Dolce Morte" author Mikel J. Koven – along with his own commentary recoded separately from any release and once available from his website as an MP3 file – in discussing Argento's return to thrillers after the TV anthology DOOR INTO DARKNESS and the failed historical comedy FIVE DAYS OF MILAN. He couches the film in the frame of Pasolini's "cinema of poetry", the ways in which the killings mirror occurrences viscerally identifiable to the viewers from scalding to chipped teeth, the use of subjective camera (and the suggestion that DEEP RED was more influential on its use in American thrillers than Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM), as well as the contribution of Goblin. Most interesting is his discussion of gender politics in the film (and as a whole in the giallo genre in his earlier video piece for Arrow's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE) as well as how the film invites the audience to laugh at Marc's crumbling masculinity and the inversion of the damsel in distress role whereas his earlier films either were ambivalent about empowered women or saw them as unbalanced threats. He also discusses the maturation of Argento's portrayals of homosexual characters through his first four thrillers – from BIRD's fey antiques dealer to FOUR FLIES' private detective – with a more complex and sympathetic depiction here (with Marc's own discomfort coming across as less homophobic in the Italian version than the export cut).

The rest of the video extras were produced for the 2010 UK Blu-ray, starting with "Rosso Recollections: Dario Argento's Deep Genius" (12:26), an interview with the director who focuses on the idea of "family as the worst element of a person" from his father's own censoring of his liking for American films and the horror genre and a mention of his estranged mother to examples in his films. While MacKenzie suggests that Argento's refuting the idea that Marc might be a repressed homosexual (with Carlo as his Jungian shadow) as defensive, he might also be responding to the equation of artistic sensitivity with homosexuality. Although he suggests that Nicolodi's Gianna might be "more gay," he also states that he does not share Marc's view of liberated women (finding them easier to work with). In "Lady in Red: Daria Nicolodi Remembers PROFONDO ROSSO" (18:47), the actress recalls how Argento was very involved I shaping her performance from her masculine look to her busy and relentless mannerisms, as well as how she and production designer Giuseppe Bassan (SUSPIRIA) opened him up to art "outside the scope of just cinema."

In "Music to Murder For!: Claudio Simonetti Remembers PROFONDO ROSSO" (14:07), the composer recalls how he and his Goblin mates were introduced to Argento through record producer Carlo Bixio, the nature of Argento's "collaboration" on the score (he makes no mention of Gaslini), the surprise success of the album as a result of the success of the film, and Bixio's request in 2007 that he compose PROFONDO ROSSO: THE MUSICAL. Lastly, "Rosso From Celluloid to Shop" (14:30) is an interview with Luigi Cozzi (CONTAMINATION) on the genesis of Argento's Roman shop and museum "Profondo Rosso" with a tour of the exhibits which encompass not only props from Argento's films as director and producer but also props from Cozzi's films and others (including a rhinoceros from Fellini's AND THE SHIP SAILS ON). The disc closes out with the film's Italian theatrical trailer (1:49). A second Blu-ray disc features the export version – which first time viewers may want to watch first – and the English trailer (2:43). Not supplied for review were the six lobby card reproductions, reversible fold-out poster, reversible sleeve, and limited edition booklet featuring writing on the film by author Mikel J. Koven and an archival essay by Alan Jones. (Eric Cotenas)

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