Spirits of the Dead

Like so many late 1960s and early 1970s European horror movies, I first saw SPIRITS OF THE DEAD at my local drive-in (which thanks to COVID, are making something of a comeback). I saw the American International English dubbed version which has a Vincent Price voiceover during the credits. AIP was hoping to tie it in with Price's earlier Poe series. Even though it had 3 different directors, I was struck by the sheer beauty of the film and its overall dreamlike quality. I did not see it again until it came out on VHS in the 1990s. The picture quality wasn't great but the movie still intrigued me although unlike most of the reviewers here, I think it's about more than just Fellini's TOBY DAMMIT.The first story, METZENGERSTEIN, was directed by Roger Vadim and featured Jane Fonda during her BARBARELLA period (she was married to Vadim at the time). Although the dubbing was atrocious and Fonda's outfits were outrageous, the cinematography by Claude Renoir was stunning (the burning barn is unforgettable) and the faux Medieval score was melancholy and effective. Seeing a pre-EASY RIDER Peter Fonda all decked out in leather as sister Jane's unrequited love interest was quite the novelty and actually scandalized some people at the time. The photo spread in Playboy added to the sequence's notoriety.I consider the next segment, WILLIAM WILSON, to be the weakest of the three stories depicted. Director Louis Malle said he did it only for the money and it shows. The original Poe story about a doppelganger (exact double) is one of his best but you'd never know it from this. Alain Delon does his best (his bad dubbing doesn't help) and certainly looks the part of the dashing officer but the set pieces around him are uninspired and often sadistic. They include lowering a boy into a barrel of rats and flogging Brigitte Bardot (in a ridiculous black wig that makes her look like Claudia Cardinale). It also has the worst falling dummy that I have ever seen. Not a total waste of time, but close.Which brings us to TOBY DAMMIT (NEVER BET THE DEVIL YOUR HEAD is the title of the Poe story). So much has been written about this sequence in other reviews that I will let you read them for greater detail. I will say that it is Fellini at his most unbridled and features a marvelous Terrence Stamp performance which I'm sure he patterned after the post-CLEOPATRA Richard Burton. The use of the devilish little girl is straight out of Mario Bava's KILL BABY KILL which was made 2 years earlier. Like so much late Fellini, it's all about the visuals. Whatever you do, don't try and make sense of it. Just go along for the ride. This is the one episode where the English version is essential thanks to Stamp's vocal wizardry. The Italian version robs it of that extra dimension.Finally we come to the issue of the various versions that are currently available. The 1998 Image DVD has a worn print but at least you have the option of the English dubbed soundtrack. Unfortunately you cannot turn off the subtitles which don't match the English version in several places. The 2001 Home Vision edition has a much better picture and sound but there is no English version. While that doesn't hurt Jane Fonda whose French is better than her English, it seriously impacts Terrence Stamp's performance by robbing him of his voice. The Region 2 Arrow DVD is outrageously expensive ($200+!!) and the Region 2 Blu-Ray is dubbed into Spanish. It's time for Criterion or perhaps Kino Lorber to give us a quality Region 1 Blu-Ray with both original and English soundtracks as well as removable subtitles. Until then go with the 1998 Image DVD and use the original subtitled French soundtrack for the first two but the English soundtrack for the Fellini.

I bought this for the Toby Dammit piece, which is fantastic - very ‘60s and very Fellini. Terence Stamp is excellent in the part of the burnt-out, boozed-up title character and the Ferrari is pretty nice, too.The original French title of the film, Histoires Extraordinaires (Extraordinary Stories), is more fitting. It is not a cohesive film, but three shorts (~30 mins.) loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe stories. I haven’t watched the first two shorts in their entirety, but what I did see did not impress me. The Fellini feature is the reason to buy this.A few other details - I purchased the “multi-format” version and received a UK blu ray. It is region ABC, however, and it played just fine in my North American blu ray player. There are a few different language & subtitle options, including dubbed English versions. In the case of Toby Dammit, Terence Stamp’s original English lines & voiceovers are restored. (This is not the default, however; the English dubbing option must be selected.)

I bought this DVD for one reason only: Jane Fonda is absolutely gorgeous in the first episode. I believe this came right after Barbarella and just before They Shoot Horses Don't They. Her outfits seem to be an outlandish mix of Gothic and late sixties mod fashions. No matter, she is stunning in every one. She was still married to director Roger Vadim at the time, and he clearly has ensured that she was lovingly photographed. This was her last sex kitten/symbol role. They Shoot Horses Don't They provided her with her first Oscar nomination and pointed her career in an entirely new direction. The remaster job is fine although the picture does have a slightly grainy quality. It is minor, however and in no way impedes my enjoyment of the movie. I recommend this film to any fan of Jane Fonda'a work. Perhaps a guilty pleasure, but one that consistantly pleases me.

This film in stunning. Regardless that the English dialogue is dubbed over to French & then posted back to English subtitles, it is a throw back to the silent era and then goes beyond Alien, Blade Runner, Seconds and .....The characters' anguish, the directors' effects and the all around talent combined with the varying tales excels. "Toby Dammit" is the real keeper, the other 2 stories set the awesome, tragic stage that is life and death. Toby finishes it off.It's all here: God, the devil, age, time, morality and everything they have in common.... Whether we like it or not.Judge for yourself, but I see Fellini, Scott, Romero, Lucas, Barker and Ford in here. And yes, a touch of Elvis Presley, Lux Interior, Lon Chaney, Jayne Mansfield and John Waters to boot!

Fantastic and definitive version of this mostly forgotten cult classic. Really decent image and sound quality considering the source material. Not the clear as glass Blu Ray you may be used to, but still the best you're probably ever going to get. Also includes each and every version of the audio track, nifty menus, and decent bonuses (even the ten or so seconds of Vincent Price voice over from the 60's AIP version). Has convenient chapter stops so you can watch just one of the shorts if you like. (To be honest: as gorgeous as Brigitte Bardot is in this movie and as wonderful the awkwardness of seeing Jane and Peter Fonda playing love interests for Jane Fonda's at the time husband) the main reason I bought this disc was for Fellini's bizarre, much imitated (especially by Dark Castle) mini masterpiece, TOBY DAMMIT. I recommend the #@&* out of that one. Good stuff all around.

NB - As is their wont, Amazon have unhelpfully bundled the reviews for the various different releases and formats of this film together. This review refers to Arrow's UK Blu-ray release.In the Sixties it seemed you could hardly move for Continental `portmanteau' films - collections of short films by major directors sharing a common theme like Paris Vu Par, Ro.Go.Pa.G or Love at Twenty, which offered marketable but cost-effective international co-production possibilities that could attract big stars for a week or two's work. Spirits of the Dead aka Histoires Extraordinaires was one of the more intriguing ones, offering three of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination (one of the film's many alternate titles) directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini with an all-star cast. Despite being similarly less than faithful to their source, the result is a world away from Roger Corman's remarkable run of Sixties Poe films with Vincent Price (and might have been even more different had original co-directors Orson Welles and Luis Bunuel stayed aboard), though that didn't stop the US distributors adding an introductory voice over by Price to forge a link in audience's minds. Critics weren't kind to the first two stories, alternately hating or being bored by them, but absolutely loved Fellini's, and that acclaim has cast a pall over the rest of the film ever since.Despite the general disdain meted out to it, Vadim's take on Metzengerstein is surprisingly successful on its own terms. The then-Mrs Vadim, Jane Fonda, stars as a perverted and sadistic countess who, when her cousin (Peter Fonda) spurns her advances, burns his stables for revenge only to inadvertently burn him as well and unleash a black stallion that no-one else can approach and with which she becomes ever more fatally obsessed. Neither Fonda is exactly taxed in the acting department, Peter particularly monolithic and wooden, but Jane at least, still in her bimbo days, is suited well enough for her part that it's less of a problem in her case. The opening but far from explicit depravities, with Jane wearing even more outrageous costumes than Barbarella as she has her wicked way with men and women alike, gradually gives way to a convincingly dreamlike dread that may not actually chill but does summon up the spirit of Poe in its restless way, with Claude Renoir's cinematography of burning buildings and thick black smoke blocking out the sunset heralding an increasing feeling of a pending storm about to break. It's the kind of thing that'll either lull you along with it or bore you into hitting the fast forward button, but it does create an atmosphere.Louis Malle's involvement was purely pragmatic: unable to raise the backing for Le Souffle au Coeur/Murmur of the Heart after both Viva Maria! and The Thief of Paris failed to set the box-office on fire, William Wilson with Alain Delon and Brigitte Bardot probably seemed like a good way to raise his profile without taking all the blame if this one flopped as well. He never made any secret that it was work for hire rather than a personal piece, and it shows in a solid but uninspired bit of storytelling that runs efficiently through the plot without ever really conjuring up much in the way of atmosphere or the growing paranoia the tale demands. Even the perversion and sadism is fairly matter of fact, though that sometimes works in the episode's favour as Alain Delon's thoroughly nasty sociopath casually bullies and debauches his way through boarding school, medical college and the army - his idea of bullying involving pits of rats and his idea of debauchery involving scalpels and a whip - only to be constantly plagued by a double with the same name who spoils his fun and destroys his self-confidence until he can bear it no more. It's an elegant production, but, like its blithely monstrous protagonist, it lacks character.The third story was originally to have been a composite of The Masque of the Red Death and The Cask of Amontillado directed by Orson Welles, but when that fell through Federico Fellini, heavily in debt after a science fiction film collapsed in pre-production, filled the gap with his very loose adaptation of Never Bet the Devil Your Head as Toby Dammit, and took what critical praise was going. When the film was subsequently restored and screened as a solo short, it was proclaimed as a lost masterpiece. It's not, but it is a remarkably stylish fever dream - or rather nightmare - that could only possibly have been directed by FelliniTerence Stamp is the self-indulgent and obnoxious movie star jetted into Rome to make the first Catholic Western, haunted by the image of a malignantly grinning child playing with a white ball and consumed by pain and pathetic self-loathing which he expresses with a variety of infantile expressions caught somewhere between a grimace and silent laughing at a dirty word as if never knowing whether to laugh or scream. He's every untalented, selfish, immature and self-destructive egotist who thinks living the rock'n'roll lifestyle and behaving badly is their full time day-and-night job rolled into one manic-depressive bundle of nerves. He knows he's squandered his talent and that he's not just impossible to work with but impossible for even him to stand anymore. He's beyond redemption and working his way down to damnation one infernal circle at a time, from the surreally sun-bleached airport arrivals lounge to a grotesque awards ceremony before driving the new Ferrari that's his only reason for making the film straight into the mouth of Hell. And Fellini films it all from right inside his fevered head as his disorientation at finding himself the centre of attention in an increasingly nightmarishly strange world is mirrored in a visual and editing style that's like you've been spun around the room despite having a drunken headache and can't make much sense out of what's around you.It's easily the trippiest and most visually striking of the three, with Giuseppe Rottuno's vividly stylised photography far more ambitious than anything his two predecessors in the film cooked up, while Nino Rota's signature Fellini sound stamps the master's signature all over the proceedings. It's an exercise in excess and atmosphere that creates a very Felliniesque phantasmagoria that may not be something you'll hold close to your heart but certainly leaves your senses assaulted in a way the other two episodes don't.Arrow's UK Blu-ray release is a bit problematic - at once a clean and pin-sharp restoration but at times looking too clean, as if it's had some of the sin scrubbed out of it and the brightness boosted. This is particularly noticeable in the first story that looks far more atmospheric in the unrestored French version also included on the disc, which shows some signs of color fading but at least looks like it's been graded with an eye for the decadence of the story. No such problems with the other two, though the multi-lingual soundtrack curiously doesn't include Terence stamp's opening narration in English but uses an Italian voice-over artist instead before reverting to Stamp's voice for the remainder. The English dub track is also included on the restored version. Extras are a bit lighter than the packaging makes it seem - the international trailer and Vincent Price's voice-over narration from US version, though the initial copies also came with an impressive 60-page book reprinting the original Poe stories.

This film is worth buying essentially for Fellini's masterpiece. Louis Malle episode is disturbing and intriguing, with an ambiguou Alain Delon and the director usual class, but still a little too simple, while Roger Vadim's one is outrageously bad, empty, just superficially pop and bizarre. Fellini makes one of his best films with his episode here, project Terrence Stamp in the Olympus of young and damned stars and creates a grotesque, nightmarish and amazing visionary tale about Destiny, curse, fame and the dark side of human subconscius, playing with a contrast between e blinding lights of the day and the mass media glamour and the obscure and ancient mysteries hiding round the corner of Rome's surrounding, seen as a deadly trip. Visually as stunning as its HD transfer

I love this movie ... Parts of this film have been maligned by critics and audiences alike .... but i think the whole film works .... each segment has a different tone to it ... part one is decadent and atmospheric .... part two is cruel but with a moral twist .... by killing his OTHER he so killed himself ..... and part three is like a bad acid trip .... hallucinatory and intense .... with a devil character even creepier than the ring .... and about twenty years earlier than the ring to .... the lear on that little girls face gives me the creeps ... that's for sure .... all in all a great and stylish and atmospheric movie .... Awesome ...

As a trilogy of films it is highly entertaining from the sheer class of Fellini to the sado masochism of Vadim with Malle somewhere in between. I keep re-watching it so it must be good.

Three short films from 3 well known directors. Some better than others.You can tell when the films were made, by looking at the females clothesNice to see, but not that you want to see again