Last night's filming went far more swimmingly than I anticipated. As Rory is cursed and his dissertation isn't due in for another five days, we decided to record some of his scenes next week, which meant we had the whole evening to do half of the stuff I intended to shoot. Needless to say you can see the benefits, as I was able to take my time much more on each compostion, as you can see in some of the framing below. Rory and Sarah filmed a couple of brief sequences that feature in the first half of the movie, one of which screen caps 1-4 feature in. The last two screen captures come from the second half of the movie where all the excitement kicks in... but I don't want to give too much away! Filming in the city wasn't as difficult as I thought. Picking a Sunday night definitely worked in our favour, as the place was deserted, minus a few foreign students and a handful of tramps asking for spare change. I think the footage really emphasises the "British" element from the locations we chose - you don't get more British than a red phone box, and some areas of Manchester city, especially around the central library and town hall, look both gothic and spooky. I deliberately tried to capture the look of What Have You Done to Solange?; you'll have to let me know how successful I was.
Not too much went wrong either - although there are a couple of nice out-takes involving Rory, who tripped over twice on set, on camera. Clumsy.
As for future filming nights, as planned there should only be one more major shooting night, two at most, the first of which we've tentatively penned in for next Monday or Tuesday. There really isn't too much left to do with Sarah and Rory - some make-up effects (make of that what you will), a handful of short scenes and retakes, and one shot on location in a nearby street named Moon Grove, which, despite being slap bang in the middle of the student digs mecca of Manchester has retained some Victorian glory, complete with cast-iron streetlamps and cobbled street.
Still intending to get on that top ten gialli I keep mentioning... I'm working on it.
Apologies for no updates through the week, but there hasn't been much to report. I could have done an update on Friday regarding Sarah starting to do her hair for filming tomorrow - two days later, but I passed on the opportunity.
Sunday is almost upon us - and the BBC weather forecast warns us only of light drizzle, so it looks like we'll be going ahead with filming tonight. We'll be around the red phone boxes in Manchester town centre, so what problems that'll cause us is anyone's guess.
I've added some extra scenes into the script for Sarah and Rory's character's - I've been so impressed with what they've done so far I thought I'd flesh their parts out, one of which is a sly nod to Sergio Martino's gialli, The Case of the Scorpion's Tail (1972).
After tonight, Rory and Sarah should have a large bulk of their scenes shot for the picture, as long as things go to plan. Which they rarely do. But fingers crossed.
In the meantime, here's yet another still of Sarah from the second filming night.
No filming until Sunday night, weather permitting, so no news on the filming front. Instead, tonight, we watched Italo-trash classic Dr. Butcher, MD (1982).
Made on the coattails of Lucio Fulci's massively successful Zombie the previous year - and promoted as a sequel in certain territories, Dr. Butcher MD piles on the (usually unconvincing but often creative) gore, violence and nudity to an absurd level, which makes for generally entertaining, although most definitely throaway, viewing.
Zombie Holocaust, the European title of the movie, was written by Fabrizio de Angelis, who penned all of Fulci's zombie classics of the early 1980s as well as working on his mysogynistic opus The New York Ripper (1982), and the rare giallo movie Sette scialli di seta gialla (1972), or Seven Crimes of the Black Cat, which features perhaps the most elaborative murder method ever seen on celluloid - a black cat with its claws dipped in curare.
Here's the (totally misleading) American trailer for Zombie Holocaust.
A generally rambling post, but it's Italian cinema chat, so it's all kind-of related.
As it's so late I'll leave the run-down of classic gialli I mentioned on Saturday until later in the week, so not too much news to update you with tonight. I've spent the evening drinking J&B (Edwige would be proud) with Rory, who, my housemate John commented, was dancing the Michael Jackson "Thriller" dance to every song that came on the radio.
Maybe it'd be best if he left the dancing and stuck to acting.
In other "star" news (look out for these names in future editions of Heat, people), Sarah has had a whopping great fringe cut into her hair. Whilst it does absolutely nothing for the continuity of the footage (I'm sure we can work around it); it does look very nice.
Speaking of those two, here's their continuity shots from the first night of shooting. There was a second photograph of Sarah, with Rory grabbing her boobs, but I thought that one had best stay in the archive. You never know. Maybe I'll include it as an Easter egg on the DVD.
As promised... a brief introduction to the giallo genre.
The term giallo dates back to the mid-1920s, when the Italian Publishing Houses began producing murder-mystery/crime novels, printed with garish yellow covers. Closely related to the pulp fiction magazines popular in English-speaking markets at the time, they quickly captured Italian imagination, the term becoming synonymous with mystery and crime.
In the 1960s, giallo began to refer to a cinematic genre of rising prominence in Italy, with Mario Bava's La ragazza che sapeva troppo (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964) laying the genre foundations that would be emulated, elaborated, and celebrated throughout the 1960s, yet to an even greater extent during the genre's pinnacle in the mid-1970s. Often, the story of a giallo movie is rooted in the penny-dreadful literature of the 1930s - Bava's Cinque bambole per la luna d'agosto (1970) draws inspiration from Christie's Ten Little Indians, and Sergio Martino's Il tuo vizio รจ una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave (1972) updates Poe's The Black Cat.
Alongside Mario Bava, argued by many as the "founder" of the celluloid gialli, you won't get very far into the genre until someone mentions Dario Argento. His internationally-successful film The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is generally thought to be the film that bought about the wave of movies in the early 1970s, and would call his 1975 movie Profondo Rossothe apex of the genre. Sergio Martino's Torso would come in the middle of the genre's heyday.
Here's the trailer for Bava's Blood and Black Lace. Last time I checked (March 2008), someone had uploaded the whole movie onto YouTube, along with several Argento movies, including the INSANELY RARE Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971). If they're still there (and trust me, these "whole film" accounts come and go in days), go and watch. :-D
Back to the topic at hand. As for the genre characteristics and conventions, Stephen Thrower provides a neat summary in his book Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, an excellent book about the famous Italian director who made several contributions to the genre before moving into zombie territory in the early 1980s. Anyway, here goes...
"[The giallo is] murder and intrigue, staple features of popular drama... taken to extremes. Suspicion... is ubiquitous because everyone is hiding something. The general tone is one of moral decay and cynicism, with ever more convoluted plots emphasizing morbid details in a Janus-faced world of paranoia or betrayal. The killer flits with credulity-straining ease from crime scene to crime scene, [their] motivation usually as tenuous as his methods are elaborate." (p.63)
Alongside those narrative conventions, gialli films are famous for their visual style, often featuring elaborate lighting and disjointing camera angles. And of course, the fact the genre reached the height of its popularity in the early-1970s means those with a taste for all-things kitsch are rarely left disappointed - just check out Edwige Fenech's giant rotating bed in 5 bambole...
There, that should clear things up for those new to the genre. Coming soon, a few recommended gialli if you're interested in acquainting yourself further, and of course more stills and stories from the production. Stay tuned!
Another new still online today. Here's Roberto, played by Rory Bampton, receiving some pivotal information in a scene from the second-half or Torso. Giallo fans, take note of the ever-present bottle of J&B on the left-hand side, and you might just be able to see the mannequin head on the top shelf in the background, a sly little reference to Blood and Black Lace.
As mentioned yesterday, for the uninitiated, I'll be getting on with a brief introduction to the giallo genre soon, as well as latest developments on the filming schedule.
Just a quick post today. Most people have seen - or even heard of, come to think of it - the original Torso. Therefore, I thought I'd post up some information regarding the film.
One of the archetypical drive-in movies of the early-1970s and favorite of contemporary horror directors such as Robert Rodriquez and Eli Roth, Torso was shown to the cast of the self-indulgent Rodriquez/Tarantino project Grindhouse prior to filming to help them get a feel of the genre.
The film has recently been released in the UK - with dreadful cover art and misleading tag-lines - by Shameless DVD releasing. To pick up a copy, click here. As for a region 1 release, up until recently Torso was available from Anchor Bay, but that release seems to be deleted.
Information on the film itself on the internet, aside from reviews, is scant. Keith Brown's eBlog Giallo Fever provides in-depth academic analysis of the film, along with other Martino and genre titles. Although not 100% relevant here, I might add a few posts on the history of the Giallo to help out those unfamiliar with the genre. I'll see how bored I feel over the weekend. :-D
Like everything else that's ever been put to celluloid/video/webcam, there's some Torso-related clips on YouTube. Find the sensationalized (Torso! Torso! TORSO!) Joseph Bremner Associates US release teaser here, a wonderfully psychedelic European trailer here, and the full US trailer embedded below. Look out for the hilarious voice-over that states "From Carlo Ponti, the man who bought War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago..." If anyone went to see Torso expecting anything in a similar vein to those pictures, they were probably very disappointed.
Whilst we're on the topic of Sarah, here's a continuity shot of her in the main outfit she wears in the movie. We attempted to copy the make-up worn by the women of Umberto Lenzi's "Seven Bloodstained Orchids", with good results. After using practically an entire eyeliner stick, Sarah was ready to go.
She looks excellent. Uschi Glass would most definitely approve.
Okay, so I bent the truth ever-so-slightly. In actual fact, shooting on Torso began a few weeks back. The first night of shooting, involving Sarah and Rory, took place on March 13th. Sarah plays Sarah (imaginatively enough), and Rory plays Roberto, however not the same Roberto as portrayed in the original by Luc Merenda. Unfortunately, at around midnight on the 13th (or 14th, depending on how you look at it) we discovered all the footage from the evening hadn't actually recorded due to a dodgy DV-cassette. So, after that "trial-run", we re-shot the footage on March 27th.
Re-shoots already. Not the best of starts, but the footage second-time-round looks excellent. I've posted a couple of screen-captures from the first night (below). NB: Sarah's dicking around on camera will be in the out-takes reel, and not the film itself.
In between those two nights, I did some location-scouting in Italy; in a small town outside of Rome named Artena. I shot a whole cassette of footage whilst I was out there which will make it's way into the film in a multitude of establishing shots, no doubt.
Back to the 27th, the first 'official' shooting date. After a Chinese take-away and waiting about three hours for Sarah to do her hair, we got started on a pivotal scene involving the two characters. I shan't go into details as to not give too much of the plot away, but the scene is coming together very well. As low-budget productions go, we have to wait until we're all free again. And what with Sarah having a haircut and spouting some rubbish about not being able to wash her hair two consecutive days (must be a girl thing), Rory having a Spanish oral exam, and me having the most shifts at work I've had all year, the next night of shooting will be a week Sunday - April 20th. On that date we'll be shooting on set at Norman Road, and also on location in Manchester town centre, which will probably bring us a whole wealth of new problems.
For a retro fix, here's the gallery from the Halloween Redux Premiere, which took place December 16th, 2007. Click on the cast photo above for a link over to dreaded social networking site Facebook, which, for all it's faults (read: taking over your life), has excellent photo-uploading facilities.
And whilst we're plugging Halloween Redux, here's a YouTube link for the opening sequence of the movie. This clip features Anna Henderson, who will be taking the role of Jane in Torso.
In the original Torso, there are many male characters weaved into the storyline. John Richardson's edgy teacher, Franz; Luc Merenda's dashing doctor, Roberto; Stefano, Daniella's unhinged stalker, played by Roberto Vanzi; as well as a wealth of secondary characters who are all possible of committing the murders around which the film revolves. For the remake, the characters have been reduced. Rather than spend time attempting to develop many characters as possible suspects, the idea for the remake is to instead have fewer people who could be responsible for the crime; however all of them are much closer to the girls than any of the characters in the original film.
Filling Merenda's shoes is Firefly Media regular David Waidson, who has become increasingly active in recent projects. A new character will be played by Rory Bampton (pictured right), playing Sarah's boyfriend. Rory and Sarah are a real-life couple, and they are both newcomers. I haven't worked with either of them before, but they are both very enthusiastic about the project. Especially if there'll be wine on set.
The cast of the original Torso comprised largely of European starlets - Suzy Kendall, one time spouse of Dudley Moore, French actress Tina Aumont, and genre favorite Carla Brait. As for the gents, Italian pin-up Luc Merenda played the Doctor who eventually saves Suzy from John Richardson, a prolific English actor who starred in several Italian-based horror productions.
Re-casting was not an easy process.
The role of Jane, the female lead role, has been given to Anna Henderson (pictured above). Anna worked on last year's Halloween Redux, giving an impressive performance as an ill-fated guest at the party around which the plot circles. Based on this performance, she won the part.
The supporting female leads, Daniella and Ursula, are performed by Caroline Webster and Jenna Mount, respectively. Both are regulars in previous film projects. Caroline plays an update of Tina Aumont's character; as unnerved and worried by the events occuring around her as the original role. Rather than slow the story down by developing four female leads, Jenna's character Ursula is an amalgamation of the two other central female roles of Torso, Ursula and Katia.
New female characters have been introduced to the story. Briony Thompson plays an unlucky waitress who the killer mistakes for an intended victim - these scenes will be shot in the legendary Manchester nightclub The Ritz, where such acts as Frank Sinatra and The Beatles performed in their heyday. Sarah Cunningham plays a friend of the female lead characters, who discovers important information about the identity of the killer, which of course remains a mystery until the final reel. Jennifer Brook, the star of Halloween Redux, also returns for a supporting role, playing Daniella's older sister.
One female role remains, that of Jennifer - named after the Jennifer of giallo cheese-fest The Case of the Bloody Iris. Developments upon casting of that character will be revealed here first.
Welcome to the official blog for a fan re-make of Sergio Martino's excellent giallo classic, I corpi presentano tracce di violenzia carnale, re-titled for the US Grindhouse circuit as Torso.
I'm Antony Southall, the writer/director/editor/producer... if you've ever made a low budget movie - and we're talking REALLY LOW, you know the score. It's me, a gallon of home-made fake blood and a cast of handsome young men and attractive young women, plus all of our heads put together to come up with the best possible results the cheapest possible way.
The aim of this blog is to keep anyone who's interested up to date with the latest new regarding the project. Some visitors here may be familiar - or stumbled across us by accident from YouTube - with The Mardale Massif Movies. If you haven't, check out some of our earlier work here - http://www.youtube.com/user/MardaleMassifMovies. Last year the same team behind this re-imagining released Halloween Redux, a simple yet effective sequel to John Carpenter's 1978 masterpiece. So why choose Torso as the new project?
I've grown increasingly fond of giallo-thrillers over the past few years. Prior to that, my knowledge of the genre was limited mainly to the movies of Dario Argento. Recently however I've become familiar with the often-under-rated works of such directors as Massimo Dallamano, Umberto Lenzi and Sergio Martino, all of whom displayed excellent talent in gialli throughout the early 70s. Torso always stood out for me as one of the most under-rated of its kind due to its well-developed plot, cruel death sequences and, of course, a generous portion of sleaze that seems so ubiquitous with the genre.
That said, the re-make is far from a screen-by-screen remake of the original. Instead, elements from several classic giallo movies have been incorporated into the story. The narrative offers more twists, the death sequences are even more brutal, but the basic premise remains.
If you're interested, stick around with me - I'll be updating the blog often. Over the next few weeks, I'll be introducing you to the cast, discussing the first nights of shooting and asking for feedback on ideas.
Welcome to the blog for the Mardale Massif Movies remake of Sergio Martino's 1973 Giallo Torso. This page will be added to regularly, so check back often for updates on the project.
This movie is a fan remake. Those involved in the project have nothing to do with the film, the director, or its stars, and no infringement is intended.
