Obscure Italodisco videos on DVD!

**JussiK** · November 6th, 2005, 06:02 AM

Synapse DVD company has issued Al Festa's mindbending "Fatal Frames" from 1996, and in the extras section there's a special Al Festa music video segment. These vids of acts like Raff, Biancaneve, Peplum etc are guaranteed to make you toes curl - each presents a mid 80's landscape of pastels and dayglo spandex, girls in massive shoulderpads and Spandau Ballet-lookalike guys with grotesque mullet hairdos. The Peplum video is quite good however as is the song itself and has a strange otherwordly quality to it's images - Roman symbols float in the air and shoot laserbeams at chorus girls, stock footage battles rage over huge temples in the desert etc.

**Marcodj** · November 26th, 2005, 12:07 PM

Hello JussiK,

where to find more details about those music videos included in this DVD ? Are full clips ?

Thanks!

**JussiK** · November 28th, 2005, 01:36 AM

I don't think there's articles or printed info on the vids as such, but the whole package is available thru any good dvd store. Just google "Fatal Frames dvd " and you're there.

**Marcodj** · November 28th, 2005, 03:11 AM

Yes I think so... but if I will find a guy he bought a copy of this DVD...

**Marcodj** · November 30th, 2005, 02:51 PM

I found a complete review here:

http://www.horrordvds.com/modules.ph...wreview&id=189

**JussiK** · December 1st, 2005, 02:18 AM

MarcoDj - whoever wrote that review has got to be the most clueless person ever to attempt to discuss a genre film, let alone an Italian giallo. Anyone with any sense of reality can immediately see Fatal Frames is an absolutely hilarious and hysterically overblown piece of total trash, deperately aiming for trendy MTV-style imagery and falling horribly on it's heavily made up face. And just because the film is so incredibly bad it transcendents all serious criticism and works as ott entertainment. Take the scene where the police inspector produces a photo of a bloody severed head and asks a passerby if she recognises the victim. The passerby deadpans "sure, I know her, she worked here" and smiles cheerfully to have been of help. There's an endless avalanche of amazing dialoque and mindbending situations like that. The cast looks like rejects from a cheap early 90's California soap or a porn video. The men are all blockhead bodybuilders and sport long ponytails, the women have massive silicon boobs and too short skirts for their not-exactly model-like figures. The final twist is legendary for causing spectators at film fests to fall over in screaming laughter, the naffest conclusion ever in a genre that always cherished absurd "psychosexual" motifs for the crimes. And those music videos, they are rarified triumphs of typically 80's style bad taste, yet so much more fun to watch as anything on heavy rotation today.