|
|
|
Mill of the Stone Women: Standard Edition
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Arrow Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (10th December 2024). |
|
The Film
 Assigned to prepare a paper on the centennial of the "Mill of the Stone Women", a macabre carousel of wax statues of statues in a windmill in the village of Veeze designed by the grandfather of local art school professor Gregorius Wahl (Secret of the Red Orchid's Herbert Boehme), young journalist Hans Van Arnim (Sweet Violence's Pierre Brice) catches the eye of (and catches sight of) Wahl's beautiful daughter Elfie (The White Warrior's Scilla Gabel). In spite of warnings from Wahl and mysterious live-in physician Dr. Bohlem (Dr. M's Wolfgang Preiss) that excitement could kill Elfie – along with the withering watchful eye of housekeeper Selma (The Third Eye's Olga Solbelli) – Hans meets her in secret. Upon reconnecting with childhood friend Liselotte (The Hands of Orlac's Dany Carrel) and realizing that he loves her, Hans tries to gently let Elfie down, but she is angry and suffers an attack. Hans falls ill and is nursed back to health by Liselotte, having sworn to keep secret Elfie's death to preserve her reputation. Little does Hans suspect that Elfie suffers from a strange blood disease and has been died and been revived multiple times by Dr. Bohlem using the blood of unwilling human subjects. When Liselotte vanishes, however, Hans and Liselotte's classmate Raab (The Carpet of Horror's Marco Guglielmi) question the resemblance between one of Wahl's new carousel statues and missing figure model Annelore (Django Kills Softly's Liana Orfei). Overshadowed by Mario Bava's Black Sunday, Giorgio Ferroni's Mill of the Stone Women is dripping in Gothic décor, macabre statues, medical experiments, and missing women in florid Technicolor. Although Carrel plays the good girl – and provides a glimpse of nudity in some versions of the film – Gabel's Elfie does embody the duality of woman in the Barbara Steele scream queen mold, sheltered and sad yet sensual upon first meeting with Hans, and then jealous and violent when spurned, revealing herself to possess more carnal knowledge and cynicism than normal for a horror movie heroine of the period of genre cinema. Predating the Bava film by a couple of weeks in production following it in release, as well as other early examples of period medical horror like Jess Franco's The Awful Dr. Orlof, Mill of the Stone Women does pale in comparison, squandering the opportunity for stalking and abduction set pieces in the disappearances of Annelore and Liselotte that neither Bava nor Franco would miss and, at best, terrorizing its male protagonist in a manner similar to that of Steele's heroine in Riccardo Freda's The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. The structure of the narrative is also rather odd, introducing the mysterious doctor early on but not really making much of Elfie's treatments until the third act, and the transformation of the victims into statues a seeming convenience of abducting and killing girls for medical use. While Hans is wrapped up in the drawn-out drama with Elfie and Liselotte, he and Raab cotton up to the mysterious goings on at the mill rather quickly in comparison. Ferroni's later horror film Night of the Devils – an adaptation of Alexei Tolstoy's "The Family of the Vurdalak", the same source of the third story in Bava's Black Sabbath – was a more atmospheric and accomplished work, but he remained a jobbing director for the remainder of his career. If Mill of the Stone Women is to be regarded alongside Black Sunday as the start of the Italian Golden Age of Horror, then it finds its analog on the other side of the Italian horror boom with Sergio Stivaletti's Wax Mask. 
Video
An Italian and French co-production – and possibly German given the German cast members who appeared in Italian co-productions – Mill of the Stone Women was produced in a number of versions with star Brice being given various billing positions: the mostly-identical Italian and English export versions, the French version which included a flash of Carrel's nipple – a more indulgent view appeared in Japanese publicity material – as well as an exclusive scene, a shorter German version that billed Preiss above the title since it was released in Germany two years after The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, and a shorter American version supervised by Hugo Grimaldi that featured moved around scenes, some redubbed some dialogue, and some ridiculously misogynistic opening narration ("Trouble began with a women. Here in the country village of Veeze outside Amsterdam, Holland, you're about to meet a young man, a writer, who would deny that obvious truth. For he is naive; he respects, he loves women. He is about to change his mind"). Stateside, we got the American version on VHS and Beta from Paragon along with a later, poor quality VHS retitled "Icon" featuring the export version while the British got two pre-cert and one 15-certificate VHS titled "Drops of Blood" running just over eighty-five minutes even though the X-certificate theatrical version was only trimmed slightly from ninety-five minute export cut. When Mondo Macabro released the film on DVD in 2004, they utilized an anamorphic transfer of the French version, substituting the American title sequence and moving the French-exclusive scene to the extras along with the American version’s psychedelic optical-treated version of Hans' delirium to the deleted scenes. This version included both the export dub and the modified American dub along with the French track and English subtitles. France's Neo Publishing DVD featured separate French and so-called "American" versions – the latter actually the same composite as the Mondo disc – while Germany's NEW label DVD also featured Mondo's composite version.  Germany was the first territory to release the film on Blu-ray with Subkultur featuring the export, French, Italian, and German versions with English options for the export and Italian versions as well as a German-language commentary and an archival interview with Preiss (who died in 2002), while a more recent edition from Pidax featured all four versions but dropped the commentary track. Unfortunately, Subkultur elected to do four separate encodes on one disc, resulting in low bitrates for the all but the international version. France's Artus Films put out a mediabook of a composite version with the French track fitted to it along with a new interview with actress Orfei, a piece by critic Alain Petit, and two selections of alternate scenes from the Italian and American versions. Arrow Video first released the film as a two-disc limited edition (also available in the U.K.) in 2021. That edition featured the Italian version (95:36) and English export version (95:37) on the first disc with the bulk of the extras while the second disc featured the French version (89:51) and the American version (94:29) while the new U.S. standard edition drop the second disc. The aforementioned Italian and export editions come from the same 2K restoration of the original 35mm camera negative utilizing branching to present approximations of both cuts since the Italian version includes the brief bit of Carel's nudity for the French cut and the export version lacks the English-language insert of Elfie's letter to Hans (which was included on the British and American theatrical releases and is also included on the bonus disc's transfer of the American version). The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen transfer is a big improvement on the earlier DVDs, greens and reds are saturated without seeming boosted, giving a sense of naturalism to other colors that draw one's eye to the likely inspiration from Flemish paintings in the visuals. The enhanced resolution does draw attention to the use of models and miniatures as well as the rough edges of some double exposure shots. 
Audio
The Italian and export versions feature LPCM 1.0 mono tracks in their respective languages that have been cleaned up but are not entirely free of background hiss. All dialogue is post-dubbed by the international cast, and the Italian track sounds a bit smoother in delivery but the English track is just as "original" even if the dubbers trip over names like "Liselotte" and "Annelore". Optional English subtitles are provided for the Italian version and SDH subtitles for the English version (unfortunately the structure of the disc does not allow for toggling audio and subtitle tracks to compare the dialogue).
Extras
The Italian version is accompanied by an audio commentary by Tim Lucas, author of "Mario Bava: All The Colors of the Dark", who describes it as the first serious Italian horror film in color (Uncle Was a Vampire being a comedy) and noting that its prolonged production started before and finished after Black Sunday, and that Bava being at Galatea might have been called in as cinematographer for reshoots, as Lucas cites shots and lighting comparisons between the work of Bava and the film's credited cinematographer Pier Ludovico Pavoni (Gladiator of Rome), as well as the suggestion that Bava's sculptor father Eugenio – who carved the likenesses of saints for the Catholic church – might have been responsible for the wax statues in the film. He also points out other aspects o the film's Italian horror patronage in props that appear in other films as well as the film's own borrowings from the art world and the non-existent "Flemish Tales" literary source. "Mill of the Stone Women & The Gothic Body" (24:10) is a visual essay by author and critic Kat Ellinger who examines the nineteenth century fascination with sickliness and near-death as signifiers of delicate femininity as well as the motif of bodies encased in wax or clay to freeze death and its origins in Victorian death photography and the opening of Madame Toussaud's wax museum. She also draws parallels between the notion of Elfie as a sort of vampire and Wahl's choice of victims from a lower social status with the later unconventional vampire films Thirst and Shock Treatment (the Alain Jessua film).  "Turned to Stone" (27:07) is a reedited piece based on the 2019 interview with actress Orfei conducted by film historian Fabio Melelli for the Artus disc, in which Orfei recalls being in a circus act with her brothers when she was asked to audition for Fellini. The audition did not go anywhere but it did get her some exposure, and appeared in small film roles, television, and the theater before Mill of the Stone Women. Of the film, she discusses her dim recollections of Ferroni but most vividly recalls having her head cast for the film. Melelli appears throughout to provide some background on Ferroni, making the case that he could have been as much a genre stylist as Bava but only did two horror films. "A Little Chat with Dr. Mabuse" (15:52) is a 2002 interview with actor Preiss in which he goes through his scrapbook and discusses his Hollywood roles and his Mabuse roles, getting a little cheesed off that more effort was not taken to make more believable the notion that he is other characters in disguise, and that his own screen time in the series was progressively less, with one of the later entries crediting him via producer Artur Brauner utilizing footage from earlier entries. The disc also includes the U.K. "Drops of Blood" titles (1:30) which open with a freeze frame shot of the windmill for the title card, poor quality German opening credits (2:43), the U.S. theatrical trailer (2:02), a German theatrical trailer (3:19), and a poster gallery (11 images), a stills and lobby cards gallery (77 images), the entire German pressbook (14 images), and the U.S. pressbook (19 images). 
Packaging
The paper extras have been dropped from this edition.
Overall
Overshadowed by Mario Bava's Black Sunday and introduction of Italian Gothic horror scream queen Barbara Steele, Giorgio Ferroni's Mill of the Stone Women is nevertheless dripping in Gothic décor, macabre statues, medical experiments, and missing women in florid Technicolor
|
|||||
|