The blood of these whores is killing me
No cinema visits this week. And only one film. I guess I’m just not trying anymore. Actually, I’ve been watching quite a few DVD extras this week, and they’ve proven rather more illuminating than the films themselves. Last year, I complained rather vociferously about Sky’s dreadful presentation of the Oscars ceremony, but this year I managed to evade whatever atrocity was served up by the good burghers of Sky Premiere by turning to the internet and watching the whole thing as a no doubt illegal stream courtesy of the great nerds of America who want to watch the Oscars on their computers and will sacrifice anything to make it so. And with only one slight dropout during the nominations for Best Actress, it was highly successful. And I got to see, or rather hear, lots of crappy American ads, so that was nice.
The ceremony itself was pretty good, long but the Oscars should always be long, and lots of the right people won, especially the Coen brothers and Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová and Diablo Cody. I think those ceremonies that share the wealth between several films are often better than those where one film sweeps the lot, although The Return of the King (2003) deserved everything it won. It was also nice to see that Transformers (2007) won nothing, and that Brad Bird thanked Jan Pinkava, the original sole director of Ratatouille (2007).
Blood for Dracula (1974)
Stefania Casini has a relatively small role in this film as one of Udo Kier’s intended “wirgins”, one of the four Italian daughters Dracula is attempting to marry in a “wirginal” state before handyman Joe Dallesandro can deflower them. It’s all to do with the blood, you see. As well as having her neck bitten (it may be a Paul Morrissey directed Dracula movie but it is still a Dracula movie), she also spends most of her time onscreen naked, but this was the 1970s remember and screen nudity had not yet been curtailed by the arrival of the internet. And she was slim, young and Italian. Casini also turned up two years later in 1900 (1976) as the epileptic who has a close encounter with the penises of both Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu at the same time. She appears in a brief bitchy role in Suspiria (1977) and meets a memorably bloody end in a room at the dance school which has been thoughtfully filled with a truckload of bailing wire. The Suspiria DVD has a 25th anniversary making of documentary in which Casini appears, and she is utterly captivating in this. She’s lively, sparky, full of fun, and comes across as a real character. It is no surprise that her later film career in Italy developed into both writing and directing for television and the cinema. A pleasing development for a woman who started her career on the cover of Playmen magazine in April 1973.