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The Horrible Dr. Hichcock
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Radiance Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (6th October 2023). |
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The Film
 Much like the Boris Karloff's ill-fated Dr. Thomas Bolton in Corridors of Blood, esteemed London physician Dr. Bernard Hichcock (The Medusa Touch's Robert Flemyng) has been perfecting an anaesthetic to slow down the heartrate and allow him to perform lifesaving operations. Dr. Hichcock, however, has a novel kink and has been experimenting on the anesthetic's dosages with his wife Margaret (The Giants of Thessaly's Maria Teresa Vianello) who "plays dead" for his necrophilic desires with the complicity of all-seeing housekeeper Martha (Blood and Black Lace's Harriet White Medin). When Hichcock loses a sedated patient, he decides not to use the anesthetic again but his libido gets the better of him and he accidentally overdoses Margaret who suffers heart failure. After the funeral, Hichcock leaves the ancestral estate in Martha's charge and leaves the city to get away from Margaret's memory. Twelve years later, he returns with a new bride in young Cynthia (Shivers' Barbara Steele) but Margaret's memory is everywhere, haunting Cynthia first with visions of a woman wearing Margaret's boots outside her bedroom door, a white-shrouded woman wandering in the garden at night, and the screams of Martha's insane sister echoing through the corridors during stormy nights. At work, Hichcock is finding his attraction to corpses impossible to resist, and Cynthia's hysterical fainting makes for additional temptation until even he starts seeing and hearing evidence that Margaret might still be alive but is she ready to indulge his kinks again?. One of the classics of the Italian golden age of horror, and one of the handful showcasing Steele, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock is as derivative of Rebecca and Suspicion as it is of Gaslight, Roger Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum a hugely-success film in Italy privately screened for Gastaldi as the template for what would become Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body and the Doris Day vehicle Midnight Lace (a personal favorite of Gastaldi's that would inform a number of his women-in-peril gialli from The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh to Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion). The film moves at a quick enough clip through the old dark house atmospherics unlike Nightmare Castle which has Steele going through the same hysterics as either the victim of gaslighting or the supernatural, possibly because Steele's Cynthia seems quite assertive in satisfying her curiosity as a pseudo Bluebeard's bride compared to the more passive bent her good characters had when she was cast in polarized dual roles. The Black Belly of the Tarantula's Silvano Tranquili has little to do as the film's nominal hero until the climactic conflagration (although he does put off the impression of being a bit of a cad unlike some of the stiffer, blatter Italian gothic male heroes). Even in the longest versions of the film, some details are left unclear ostensibly due to Freda pulling out either ten or twelve pages of the script to keep on schedule. The film's transgressive edge, gorgeous visuals, and other positives have largely been attributed to director Riccardo Freda (The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire) although it has become known in more recent years with expanded coverage of the films of this era from the likes of Video Watchdog and the translation of the book "Spaghetti Nightmares" that Freda took the film on a bet and that he had abandoned his previous gothic horror work I Vampiri (which was finished by Bava) and returned to the genre only sporadically throughout his work-for-hire career with the Hichcock follow-up The Ghost, the Edgar Wallace "adaptation" Double Face, and his swan song slasher/gothic hybrid Murder Obsession. The film was produced by Luigi Carpentieri and Ermanno Donati who were also behind Mino Guerrini's The Third Eye a modern gothic tale of necrophilia and taxidermy with Franco Nero later remade by Joe D'Amato as Beyond the Darkness), and the film's choice of necrophilia as subject matter was that of prolific screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi (Libido) more concerned with novelty than pushing the envelope while Flemyng, Steele, and Medin have expressed their unfavorable opinions on the script in interviews (although none of that has detracted from their iconic performances in stock character roles of the Italian gothic). Some of the other works of cinematographer Raffaele Masciocchi (The Wild Eye) suggest he was rising to the occasion here and in The Ghost rather than developing a pseudo-Bavian style of photography of his own, while the barnstorming orchestral score of Roman Vlad (Caltiki, the Immortal Monster) lacks the finesse of the contemporary works of Roberto Nicolosi (Black Sunday), Francesco de Masi (The Murder Clinic), or Carlo Rustichelli (Kill, Baby, Kill!) apart from the elegant (vertiginous) piano leitmotif that pops up with every lightning strike reveal of Margaret's portrait. 
Video
The Horrible Dr. Hichcock was released theatrically in the United States on a double-bill with Jess Franco's The Awful Dr. Orlof by Sigma III in a version that ran just under seventy-six minutes versus the eighty-seven of the Italian and export versions (the U.K. release from future Tigon producer Tony Tenser's Compton-Cameo also ran seventy-six minutes but no prints appear to survive to compare to the later U.S. cut and later U.K. tape releases were sourced from the export version). The shorter version moved the opening graveyard sequence ahead of the opening credits which were abbreviated (they were made up of Anglicized pseudonyms anyway) including the scream that delightfully disrupts the sequence and the opening theme replaced with some orchestral bombast (seemingly two or three cues badly edited together) by someone other than composer Vlad. Many sequences were elided by dissolves which actually added to the languorous atmosphere but also lead to some abrupt transitions including the feeling to time passing between Hichcock's departure and return twelve years later. More annoying than the cuts were the cheesy addition of dubbed-in dialogue, including the pallbearers remarking on the oddness of Hichcock burying his wife in his "laboratory" which is actually the family crypt as well as echoey voiceovers to remind Cynthia of the existence of her husband's laboratory on the grounds and the mysterious locked room. While The Awful Dr. Orlof remained unavailable throughout the 1980s on home video, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock fell into the hands of Republic Pictures for television distribution and eventually was released on their video label NTA Entertainment. The English export version of the film first appeared on fullscreen VHS in the UK as "Terror of Dr. Hichcock" (onscreen title: "Raptus: The Secret of Dr. Hichcock") and in France under its French release title but in a letterboxed transfer in English with French subtitles on the print itself (the label did the same with Incense for the Damned and Corruption). During the 1990s, an English-subtitled Australian SBS broadcast was also making the rounds (a more recent transfer appeared on French television). Sinister Cinema brought this longer version stateside in a dupe of the UK tape with a replacement title card that actually read "Terror of Dr. Hichcock" (as they had with their tape of Bava's Black Sunday which utilized the U.K. tape that featured the "The Mask of Satan" export version). This transfer revealed more saturated colors that seemed more evocative of Technicolor than the NTA tape. Republic and subsequently Paramount's in-perpetuity ownership of the film prevented its release on DVD during the heyday of Euro horror releases as well as subsequent interest for Blu-ray releases. Medusa Entertainment in Italy provided the first new anamorphic transfer which was sadly not English-friendly, followed by a French edition from Artus Films. Suprisingly, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock made its Blu-ray debut stateside through Olive Films' Paramount deal; unfortunately, it was indeed the U.S. cut of the film (76:37) retaining the reddish/brownish bias of the NTA videotape with a sharper image and slightly bolder colors that still lacked the vividness of Technicolor suggested by the European transfers. Two years later, Germany's Ostalgica line offered up an uncut alternative, although it was not English-friendly.  Radiance Films had started mining Italian film with admirable releases of arthouse titles, but their announcement of a two-disc release of The Horrible Dr. Hichcock quickly became one of the hotly-anticipated genre releases of the year. Derived from a new 2K restoration of the original 35mm camera negative, Radiance's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer of the Italian/export version utilizing branching to display the Italian or English credits is the film as you have never seen it before. The Technicolor hues are as rich as suggested from the earlier editions but without the bleeding, allowing interesting textures to come through in clothing, hair, and facial features under gel lighting. That the film's colors are not as hellishly saturated as a Bava film - indeed, some of the blues gels lighter and more evocative of water than moonlight, including a previously unnoticed bit of blue light that hits the white dress and boots of the figure Cynthia sees through her keyhole - allows one to focus on the story (rather than Bava using a bum script to experiment visually) and when red gels do appear, they spike the image with dread (compare the naturally-lit shots of Cynthia's bedroom door when she is safely behind it to the scene where she wakes in bed and sees the red-lit door as the handle starts to turn). The enhanced resolution on the one hand reveals that the panning shot of the theater attended by Hichcock, Cynthia, and Lowe to be a stock shot from an older film while also allowing a fresh assessment of the dιcor of Hichcock's villa of which only Margaret's portrait and the various draperies made much of an impression previously which reveals that the producers allowed production designer Franco Fumagalli (The English Patient) to put quite the effort into dressing locations for a film shot in a rush on a low budget. The branching option also presents the newspaper headline insert about Hichcock's return in the English version framed at 1.85:1 and the Italian version (which added Italian subtitles below the English headline) framed at 1.33:1 with pillarboxing. The second limited edition-exclusive Blu-ray disc features the U.S. version (76:22 versus the main transfer's 87:29). The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer has been digitally-recreated using the new scan, revealing that Olive's 1.78:1 transfer was slightly cropped rather than opened up (necessary since the film was shot with hard mattes) restoring the original colors and making the Paramount master look dull and sickly in comparison.
Audio
Just as branching allows for Italian or English versions in the display of credits, the menu's version selection also determines the choice of Italian or English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks. The tracks are both in better condition that before, reining in the low and high ends of Vlad's score and removing much of the hiss that made Margaret's piano concerto seem like an actress miming a recording. The cleaner tracks heighten the funereal aspect of the Hichcock's kinky games and enhance the suspense of the unscored portions of Cynthia's wandering through and under the villa. English subtitles for the Italian track or English SDH subtitles for the dub are selected based on the version selection, however, they can also be selected from the set-up menu or switched on the fly via remote.  Out of necessity given the added dialogue and convenience given the amount of edits to the track the U.S. version on the second disc utilizes the Paramount master's audio track.
Extras
The film is accompanied by two commentary tracks. On the first audio commentary by film critics Kat Ellinger and Annie Rose Malamet in which they start off noting the film's debts to Hitchcock which extend beyond Rebecca to the gothic elements of his more "American" American productions while also noting that the film opens like a Hammer Frankenstein film with a grave robbing before the necrophiliac twist (a valid observation given the thesis of some of the extras on Frankenstein '80 of Italian adaptations of the Shelley tale reconfiguring the story towards more carnal ends). The pair draw on Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae" and her distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian (or chthonic) as male anxiety in trying to dominate (female) nature through science, contrasting the likes of Hammer's purely scientific Frankenstein with Hichcock whose medical and sexual kinks are entangled, also pointing out the threesome relationship between Hichcock, his wife, and "service bottom" Martha in contrast to Hichcock's overtly sexless marriage and the ambiguity of Cynthia's reaction to Lowe's overtures. It is an interesting track which may inspire viewers to reassess Steele's turn as woman-in-peril and read more into Medin's typecast housekeeper role. The second audio commentary by Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas is actually a feature-length reading by Lucas of a twenty-five page essay that he wrote for Radiance's limited edition booklet that they could not accommodate. The essay compares the following versions of the film: the Italian/export version while also noting that the popular source for the export version in the U.K. tape ran slightly shorter because it replaced all of the dissolves with hard cuts the U.S. version, and Michael R. Hudson's novelization which is closely based on a translation of the original screenplay and does indeed feature more scenes (Lucas does note gray areas where Hudson might be taking some creative license). While this sounds dry on paper, it is actually a very interesting comparison even though it is only scene-specific in chronology and impossible to actually synchronize with the scenes playing onscreen. The effect of the additional scenes from the novelization taking into account possible creative liberties does reveal that the story of Freda ripping out ten sequential pages was apocryphal and may actually have been ten pages of scenes as they appeared in the schedule, as well as the effect of their removal and changes made to scenes that were filmed reveal that Freda's input was not necessarily destructive even if it did create confusion. Hopefully, Lucas will make the essay available in print online as a nice companion piece to his original 1999 comparison from the forty-ninth issue of Video Watchdog.  In "Ernesto Gastaldi on The Horrible Dr. Hichcock" (34:19), screenwriter Gastaldi recalls meeting producers Donati and Carpentieri and pitching the controversial concept of necrophilia and Freda's reaction to it (which seems to have had more to do with the director maintaining a luxurious lifestyle to which his girlfriend and future wife Gianna Maria Canale was accustomed). He discusses Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot, as well as the aforementioned Midnight Lace as well as his interest in female characters as heroines or villains (and hair-raising reference to his intense sex life with wife Mara Maryl) while also noting that the necrophilia of the film and the S&M of The Whip and the Body were just pushing the envelope and that he did not research and claims no authority on the subjects of this writing. "Murderous Husbands: Bluebeard and the Gothic" (28:12) is a visual essay by academic Miranda Corcoran who links the film to Gothic literature and the Gothic-tinged women's pictures and weepies of the forties as well as the immensely popular Gaslight and its source play "Angel Street" the latter as expressions of anxiety about women's worlds shrinking post-war and marriage as a prison, noting that Gothic literature was the first medium to address domestic violence while melodramas set in distant historical period (particularly the Victorian era that became synonymous in the twentieth century with sexual repressing) could comment on those fears and anxieties. In "Madeleine Le Despencer on Necrophilia and Gothic Taboo" (18:12), the author/artist opens with the Poe quote that "The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world," and explores from anatomical incarnations of the Anatomical Venus in the early days of medical training possibly some young men's first viewing of a naked woman and funerary keepsakes from the nineteenth century made of the hair of a dead person, up through medico-legal texts on necrophilia and their classes with reference to Hichcock and the implication raised more than once in the extras that it is never actually confirmed that he actually goes beyond touching corpses and exercises his arousal on a living role player (and if the opening grave robbing sequence had been in its correct place in the script, it might have suggested that he did cross the line in light of his growing frustration with Cynthia and his dead wife's haunting). While Gastaldi asserted that he did no research, the discussion is still interesting due to what she defines in popular culture as degrees away from necrophilia. The disc closes out with a poster gallery and the Italian theatrical trailer (2:46) is included with optional English subtitles (unfortunately, Radiance did not source or try to digitally recreate the U.S. theatrical trailer or the U.K. video trailer available on YouTube in poor quality). 
Packaging
Not supplied for review were the 5,000-copy-limited reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters or the booklet featuring new writing by critic and author Chris Fujiwara on the film; an archival piece by Alan Y. Upchurch, Tim Lucas and Luigi Boscaino on the making of the film featuring interviews with Freda, Steele, Flemyng and others, and critical overview by Cullen Gallagher.
Overall
One of the classics of the Italian gothic, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock can finally be seen in all of its funer-real beauty.
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