Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An absolute classic, 5 Mar 2004
Black Sabbath is a magnificent film, whether dubbed or subtitled, and I can't disagree more with the other reviewer. The DVD transfer is astonishingly detailed, and adds far more than it detracts: the film is shown in the correct sequence for one thing, and the (new) opening story is uncut and finally makes sense. Perhaps best of all is the newly restored versions of 'The Wurdalak' and 'The Drop of Water', each of which throw up more shadows and atmosphere than in almost any other colour horror film. Bava himself often spoke of this as his masterpiece and it is easy to see why. The issue of subtitling is, of course, one of personal taste but it's only fair to point out that originally only one of the three stories was filmed in English, and therefore the original GB theatrical release suffered from appalling dubbing, which (to my mind) can be just as annoying. Admittedly it's a bit strange to hear Boris Karloff spouting Italian but, that aside, the subtitles don't make too much of a difference. Black Sabbath really is a masterful film, even the English language version is good (and has some extra Karloff introductions) but the picture quality is nowhere near as detailed. The DVD version is truly like looking at a new film. If you don't mind subtitles (in fact even if you do) you should treat yourself to this astonishing collection of horror.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A mixed bag of horrors, 22 Dec 2007
Mario Bava's entry in the Cormanesque compilation horror stakes, The Three Faces of Fear aka Black Sabbath suffers the format's common problem - the variable quality of the individual stories. In this case, in the Italian cut at least, that's somewhat exacerbated by having the best of the three in the middle of the picture, leaving it somewhat anticlimactic. The stories' heritage isn't in doubt, based on stories by Chekhov, Tolstoy and Maupassant, but neither opener The Telephone, about a woman harassed by phone calls that may be from the lover she betrayed to the police, or A Drop of Water, about a nurse who finds herself terrorized by her imagination after stealing a ring from a dead woman she laid out, offer much in the way of surprise or chills. Neither, it's true, does the central and longest story, The Wurdalak, yet that tale of a family gradually picked off by vampires cursed to drink the blood of those they love most in the world is executed with enough panache, striking visuals and unexpected nastiness (a child is the first to die) to keep you intrigued even though you know exactly where it's going. A dubbed Boris Karloff provides the star power for this sequence as well as the introduction and epilogue, which features an initially inept shot that turns into a truly delightful in-joke by the time the end credit is ready to appear (the new intros he filmed for the US version of the film are not included on Anchor Bay's DVD of the original Italian version, although they can be glimpsed in the disc's US trailer, part of an actionably misleading US advertising campaign that included a poster of a headless horseman that doesn't appear in either version of the film!).
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1 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Subtitling rubbish., 8 Jan 2004
This original film was never subtitled in the Cinema in G.Britain
and to wait all this time to get a copy on d.v.d was a complete
waste of money,the whole film is spoilt by the Italian speech
and the english subtitles.You cannot get into each of the three s
tories because you are forever trying to read the words.AVOID AT ALL COSTS.
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