When I was a teenager and the internet was young, there weren't many resources readily available in suburban Sacramento for finding the weird, way-out films that made me smile. In fact, at the time, there was really only one place I could go to explore the darker side of my cinematic affinities, the video store.
In the mid-90s, my town had several independent video stores that hadn't quite been gobbled up by the Hollywood Video and Blockbuster chains. DVD hadn't quite arrived and "streaming" wasn't even a twinkle in Reed Hastings's eye, but there were videos aplenty to quench my thirst for the bizarre. At the time there weren't online reviews, YouTube trailers, or a massively connected worldwide community to help me make my decisions. All I had were video covers. Lurid, insanely misleading, glorious explicit video covers.
There were many contenders for the best VHS cover art in those days. Years of accumulated tapes often flowed out from the shelves and into piles on the floor, but one always seemed to have a kind of aura around it, setting it apart from the rest as the most beautifully ridiculous thing I'd ever seen. It was the Paragon Video release of Marino Girolami's Dr. Butcher, M.D.
That cover, seen above on the left, was the US theatrical art for a re-cut version of Girolami's Italian genre mash-up Zombie Holocaust. For probably a decade it was the only version of the film I know, and it wasn't until I jumped aboard the DVD bandwagon in the early 2000's that I even saw the original Italian cut of the film. There are some significant differences, but nothing that would be enough for me to ever declare an outright winner between the two. Perhaps it's nostalgia talking, but I have a very special affection for Dr. Butcher, M.D. in spite of some inherent faults.
The film, smashed together during the apex of Italian horror ripoffs in 1980, combines two of the most popular underground horror subgenres of the time, zombies and cannibals. Both Lucio Fulci's Zombie (Zombi 2) and Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust were released theatrically in 1979, and each spawned its own wave of imitators over the next half decade, but very few films had the balls to combine the two subgenres the way that Zombie Holocaust did. Girolami took the jungle setting common to both -- as well as the New York City wraparound stories they shared -- and used these two seemingly separate genres to create a weird stew of live and undead flesh-eating mania that hasn't been seen since.
The plot to the film is largely inconsequential. In fact, if you've seen either of the films referenced above, you won't really see anything new in Zombie Holocaust. However, the gumption it took to cut and paste these weirdly simpatico elements from very different films into a single project is kind of a stroke of genius on the part of screenwriter Romano Scandariato. Zombie Holocaust is all about the the blood and guts, taking the best gags from each genre and reworking them in a way that is still pretty recognizable, but just different enough not to get sued. Cash-ins don't get much more blatant than this, but hey, who can blame them?
Dr. Butcher, M.D. features all of the gut-gobbling you could ever want, backed by the evil machinations of a mad scientist intent upon creating life after death. It is by no means a good movie, but it's hard not to be entertained. Fans of Italian genre cinema from this era with eat this film up, but if you aren't familiar with the particular rhythms and quirks of these movies, it may take a minute to get a foothold. For my part, I really enjoy this film in both versions, and there's no better way to experience it than with Severin Films' new Blu-ray release.
The Disc:
Zombie Holocaust, as I mentioned above, has a long and complicated history on home video. Once DVD came into the picture, it became very easy for people to see the film as it was originally intended, but the presentation has always been a bit of a problem. This is the third release of the film on Blu-ray in the English speaking world, and having owned all three, I can say that it is easily the best.
The two closest competitors are Severin's new version and the recently released UK version from 88 Films. Both discs were struck from new scans of original vault elements, but the 88 Films disc had some significant shortcomings. The most egregious problem with the UK disc was a baffling color scheme that left many high key outdoor sequences - in particular those shot on the beach - looking really, really yellow. I'm sympathetic to the struggles of recovering quality video from unideal elements, but those sequences were really awful. Thankfully, Severin Films have gone back, restored and color corrected a lot of the imperfections from the previous UK disc. Those beach sequences look like they were tough to wrangle, though, as it appears the film is very overexposed, which impresses me all the more with the work Severin have done.
One thing that is well worth noting is that Severin have gone through the arduous process of recreating the Dr. Butcher, M.D. cut of the film from original elements on different ends of the world. Not only that, they've given each version of the film its own Blu-ray disc which gives them more space to provide bundles of fascinating extras. Because the alternate cuts utilize different editing and soundtracks, there is no seamless branching version, they just give us the choice of which version we'd like to watch, along with the reversible covers seen above.
The discs look and sound great, but it's the massive wealth of extras that put this Blu-ray release into the running for best release of the year. Each disc is loaded down with hours of newly-filmed interviews and recollections regarding this film and the scene from which it emerged in the early '80s.
Appropriately, on the disc housing the American cut of the film, Dr. Butcher, M.D., the extras focus on the 42nd Street experience and American distribution of the film. We get an extended interview with Terry Levene of Aquarius Releasing, who was responsible for buying and distributing many of the cult classics film fans are familiar with today. It's a great interview with a very candid Levene, who doesn't hesitate to speak his mind. At one point Levene even mocks home video companies that approach him for HD transfers of his films - Dr. Butcher, M.D. is named specifically, along with Cannibal Holocaust - as wasting their time on garbage that doesn't rate the upgrade. Out of the hours of interviews included in this set, this one was the clear winner from me, as no one else had quite the bird's eye view on the entire process that Levene did.
The extras continue with a stroll down 42nd Street as described by Temple of Schlock's Chris Poggiali and filmmaker Ray Frumkes (writer of Street Trash, and contributor to the US cut of Dr. Butcher). This is an eye opening look at the history of a street that played home to many of the sleaziest cinemas in the world and the way it morphed into a family-friendly urban wonderland under the careful watch of ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani. The good stuff continues with interviews of Rick Sullivan of the Gore Gazette, the film's editor Jim Markovic, and an illustrated essay from Gary Hertz. All of these extras are worthwhile and an unusually candid look at the way films were marketed and sold in the early '80s.
The Zombie Holocaust disc moves the action to the other side of the Atlantic with interviews from the European contributors to the film. We get an interview with star Ian McCulloch, who describes his experiences in Italian films as troubling, though he now embraces them since they've provided a fan base that he wouldn't otherwise know of. There are a pair of talks with FX artists, first with Rosario Prestopino who talks about creating the mountains of gore featured in the film, and then Maurizio Trani adds to the conversation in his own separate interview.
We also get an interview with actress Sherry Buchanan, who describes her experience on the film, much of which was nude, as challenging. In my opinion, the most interesting piece on this disc is an interview with Enzo Castellari, legendary Italian genre filmmaker and director of films like The Inglorious Bastards (1978), who just happened to be the son of Zombie Holocaust director Girolami. He talks about his father's career and how surprised he was to hear that he'd made this horror film because that wasn't his usual modus operandi. The disc rounds out with some then and now footage of the NYC locations and an audio recording of McCulloch singing Down by the River.
Severin continues to knock it out of the pack with their Blu-ray releases and it's reached a point at which I feel as though their work is worth buying blind, no matter what the film. This is, unquetionably, the finest home video release of Zombie Holocaust to date, and more importantly, a fascinating window into the era from which it was spawned. Cult movie fans, this all region Blu-ray disc is an easy recommendation. Buy it.