Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Follow That Bird

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Several years before he was tossing dance students through painted glass and making Jennifer Connelly summon bugs famed horror director Dario Argento was making some of the most diabolically luscious giallo films that the world had ever seen, and will ever see - his very first movie, 1970's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, is one of the finest examples the sordid genre has to offer.

And this week an exhaustive and extraordinary blu-ray edition of the film was released by the ever-incredible Arrow Films that I cannot recommend highly enough. I've never seen this film's colors, already a thing of wonder, pop like they do on this remastered 4K edition, and the extras are similarly saturated with bountiful gifts for your beckoning eyeballs. Hit the jump for a full list of what's what...


FEATURES
- Brand new 4K restoration of the film from the camera negative in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, produced by Arrow Video exclusively for this release
- High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations
- Original mono Italian and English soundtracks (lossless on the Blu-ray Disc)
- English subtitles for the Italian soundtrack
- Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for the English soundtrack
- New audio commentary by Troy Howarth, author of So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Giallo Films
- The Power of Perception, a new visual essay on the cinema of Dario Argento by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, author of Devil's Advocates: Suspiria and Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study
- New analysis of the film by critic Kat Ellinger
- New interview with writer/director Dario Argento
- New interview with actor Gildo Di Marco (Garullo the pimp)
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Candice Tripp
- Double-sided fold-out poster
- 6 Lobby Card reproductions
- Limited edition 60-page booklet illustrated by Matthew Griffin, featuring an appreciation of the film by Michael Mackenzie, and new writing by Howard Hughes and Jack Seabrook
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You can buy the set right now here -- it's supposed to be available on Amazon too but they haven't got it in at the moment; I think they get their copies a little later than the official Arrow site, so keep checking.

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