Available on 4K and Blu-ray August 13th, 2024
Masked people distribute gold tickets to seemingly random folks in Italy for a mysterious film screening in an old theater. During the film, members of the audience become hungry for human flesh.
Tag Archives: Italian film
BAD MOVIE MONDAY: SHOCKING DARK (1989)
With the whole world of art on the very brink of an Armageddon caused by the glorified plagiarism software that is A.I. I thought I’d lighten the mood a bit and write a review of a thirty-five year old Italian exploitation movie that didn’t need a complicated algorithm to plagiarize a James Cameron movie. It did it manually. Tubi calls it Shocking Dark, which is also the name of the film’s 2018 North American Blu-ray release, but its official and original title in Italy was Terminator II. It was called that because, in typical confusing Italian movie fashion, it was ripping off Aliens. I guess the producers were trying to pull the old switcheroo on us by pretending to have made a crappy pseudo-sequel to one James Cameron film so we wouldn’t notice that they were actually stealing from a completely different James Cameron film. Didn’t work. Anyway, let’s review this particularly nutty turd directed by the legendary Bruno Mattei.
The Bootleg Files: Ossessione
BOOTLEG FILES 683: “Ossessione” (1943 Italian film directed by Luchino Visconti).
LAST SEEN: We cannot confirm last exhibition of this film.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: There was a DVD release by Image Entertainment.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: For three decades, it could not be seen due to copyright violations.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: The problems were all straightened out and it can be seen.
One of the most famous films in the history of Italian cinema is also one of the most notorious examples of copyright violations. And while the legal issues were eventually sorted out, the sheer audacity of this endeavor is still astonishing.
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