Weirdhouse Cinema: Paganini Horror

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Rural Britain. Gigaclear goes further to bring you fast, reliable, whole home coverage. 100% full fiber, affirmative. Free Wi-Fi installation. Engineers ready to go. Amazon Eero RUNER next level. All from only 16 pounds a month. Cosmic Quasars. Switch to Gigaclear. Faster broadband for rural Britain. 18 month contract. Prices may vary. Verify at gigaclear.com. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema, we're going to be talking about the 1989 Italian rock and roll haunted house thriller Paganini Horror directed by Luigi Cotzie, who we actually just talked about a few weeks ago in the podcast because he was also the director of Star Crash, which will come up again in the making of section of this episode. I want to lead off today by. I wonder if you have any counter examples to this, Rob, because I think of all the films we've ever covered on Weird House, this might be the most quintessential example of to combine sort of two different showbiz cliches, a patchwork script emerging from development hell. Can you can you think of any other contenders that are really like as much to the same degree as this one? Maybe not as much as this one. Yeah, because this one this one really feels fractured and all over the place. It feels like like a corporate brainstorming session for a music themed horror film that should have gone through various other stages, but they ended up just filming the list. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, oftentimes that some sort of, you know, behind the scenes, like reorganizing of things can certainly make for some memorable a memorable mismatch in tone or style. One film that we're going to refer to a few different times is, of course, extraterrestrial visitors known to MST3K fans as pod people. One of one of my favorite films that we've discussed in Weird House Cinema just straight up in and of itself. But like that's a film that is what its unique tone comes in part because they had there was one movie they set out to shoot, and then they kind of pivoted to try and capture the E.T. audience as well. So it it feels a little too cute and a little too horrific at the same time. So I can think of plenty of examples like that, where there's some sort of a pivot, some sort of a shift or two different ideas, maybe a little tug of war behind the scenes. But off the top of my head, nothing really is fractured as this. Yeah, I would say the difference there is that with pod people or extraterrestrial visitors. Yeah, it's a shift in tone. You can like it starts off with the idea that they're going to make this as a bloody, brutal horror movie. And then they're like, well, maybe we can make it a more family friendly affair. And so you get something that's kind of both. Yeah, the same that doesn't really work as either or maybe works too well. Who knows? Yeah. This one is more like totally different ideas for different movies all just thrown into a blender together. Yeah. So do you want a slasher movie where people get stabbed with a violin? We got you covered here. That this movie has that for at least 90 seconds of screen time. Do you want a haunted house movie where people run around dark hallways calling out the names of friends who have mysteriously vanished? I don't know how many people actually love that as often as we get it. I don't know if that's anybody's favorite kind of thing. Kate, where are you? You know, Tina, where are you? But it's got that too. All right. Sorry, I didn't mean to step on you there. Were you trying to stick up for for wandering around dark halls? I mean, I think I like it. I enjoy films in which it happens. So I I'm always like it's going somewhere. They're going to find something or they're not going to find something. Either way, we're leading up to something. Fair enough. OK. Another thing, do you want like a twilight zone style? Are we still alive or are we dead? Is this hell? Are we trapped in behind an invisible barrier kind of thing? Well, that's in there, too. OK. Do you want some kind of science fiction thing about like time loops and wormholes might sneak past you, but that's part of this as well. OK. Yeah. How about would you like a sold my soul for rock and roll type movie about a hellraising rock band who may or may not be dabbling in satanic pack? Always, yes. Yeah. What about a melt movie about a flesh eating fungus that just turns you into, you know, like red oatmeal? Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That that's like all of that's in there. It's all in this movie. I think there are probably some things I'm not even thinking of that I'm leaving out. Did I miss anything big, Rob? Oh, I mean, there's some things that are there's a lot in this film. I think we're already alluding to it is not fully executed. And so there are teases of things where it makes you think you're going in a direction like you think, oh, this is going to be a gateway to hell movie. Yeah. But it's not. But for a little bit, it seems like it's going to be. So it has it has shades of that, for sure. Yeah. So I think this is kind of the ultimate assembled from spare parts movie. And while I think as a result of that, some parts of like the second act really drag and feel kind of directionless, I think it's because of that that amalgamated nature that some parts of the movie just feel like they're not going anywhere. It has that wandering middle problem. It also has a lot of upside in the in like some gorgeously weird and unexpected images and twists. This movie hits you with things that you did not see coming. Yeah, absolutely. You get some bonkers turns and twists here. But again, a lot of times, most of them are dead ends. They'll they'll introduce an element that seems like, oh, this is what this movie is about. This is the this is the killer violin movie. But no, it's not really a killer violin movie. It's something else. And then it's another thing after they pivot from that. So the name of the movie, Paganini horror suggests that in some very significant way, it's going to be about Paganini for various reasons that we'll get into. It's not very much really. But I think it it will still help us understand the making of the story of the movie to talk a bit about who Niccolò Paganini was. So Niccolò Paganini was a 19th century Italian virtuoso violinist and composer who is often described by music historians as the precursor to the modern rock star or pop musician. So for example, instead of having a wealthy patron or being a sort of court composer on retainer, he made money as a touring musician. So he would travel around Europe and play sold out shows. And he was incredibly famous. He was allegedly mobbed by fans in a way that almost resembles Beatles. Yeah. His public persona was also seen as kind of wild and somewhat dangerous like a rock star often is. There were rumors that that his unparalleled skill at the violin had come from making a pact with the devil. And this is not the only time you get a story like this in the history of music. There is Robert Johnson, who, you know, they told the story about he met the devil at the crossroads. Yeah. And the other other historical musicians where people say, oh, they were so good at their instrument, they must have made a deal with the devil. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Led Zeppelin tales and so forth. Yeah. Yeah. So lots of people allegedly actually believed this story. Like it wasn't just something you told for fun. Oh, like that's cool. Like allegedly some people thought he actually did some demonic stuff or he's an agent of Satan in some way. And he was also known for kind of a hard partying lifestyle. I don't want to give the wrong ideas about that. So it wouldn't be like the drug kind of thing that we think of with rock stars in the 60s and 70s. But he was known for a flamboyant personality, a gambling habit and a lot of romantic affairs. And he also had a somewhat gothic appearance. So he was thin with pale skin and dark hair and he liked to dress in all black. His performances were also sort of rock and roll in character. So he didn't just show off his violin skills by performing classic pieces of music. He performed specially composed pieces of music that were designed to show off skills that nobody else could do and like unusual performance techniques that were unique to him. So he like invented some violin playing techniques that nobody had really done before or at least nobody was known for doing before. And you can think of think of this as comparable to famous rock guitar players who were known for kind of stunt guitar solos like Jimmy Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen. So one might be tempted to sort of think of him like, you know, coming out of it, certainly coming out of like past centuries in which music belongs to the people and music is something that, you know, it's in every household, it's in every town, a lot of shared songs. And for the most part, it doesn't really matter who's doing it. And even in courts, you know, a particular king or queen or high ranking individual is going to have a musician or musicians that work for them and play the songs they want to play. But here we have a specialist who is playing his own music in ways that only he can do in amassing a personal following. Yeah. And he's like, he's so skilled at the instrument that he's playing pieces that basically nobody else can play, you know, with the kind of like speed or with these techniques, like plucking with the left hand. And and there are these stories about how he would sometimes before a concert do this stunt where he would intentionally fray a couple of his violin strings so that they would break during the performance. So in the middle of the song, the string would break and then he would finish the piece of music anyway, playing it on the remaining strings or on a single string. Oh, wow. It's some great showmanship there. Yes. So he lived from 1782 to 1840. And there's also this whole crazy story about what happened to his body after death. I didn't read very deeply into this, but basically he died without having last rights performed. And then wherever it was he died, the local religious authorities would not permit him to be buried in consecrated ground. So his coffin and his embalmed remains inside kept getting shuffled around and stored in places. Like I think there was an olive oil press or cement factory. And eventually, like many like decades after his death, his family finally managed to get his body buried in a cemetery in I think Parma, Italy. But yeah, so strange, interesting guy. You can imagine that his life story would make for a really interesting movie. How much of this factors into Paganini horror? Basically not at all, except for the part about the rumors of a deal with the devil. That's that's pretty much it. Yeah, the film, the film holds your hand only a little bit. It seems to lean on some implied knowledge of Paganini that the viewer is supposed to already have downloaded and ready to go. But in part of that, maybe it could be understandable. This is an Italian film. Maybe the intended Italian viewer would have been more familiar than certainly maybe the average international filmgoer today. Paganini has been the subject of various dramatic works over the years, including multiple film adaptations. It was played by Roxy Roth in 1945. It's a song to remember. Stuart Granger in 1946 is the magic, the magic bow. Klaus Kinski in 89's Kinski Paganini, a notorious film that Kinski wrote and directed as well. It also proved to be his last film. And then more recently, David Garrett played Paganini in 2013's The Devil's Violinist, which also features Jared Harris in a role. So the Kinski Paganini movie, which he wrote and directed and starred as Paganini, is called Kinski Paganini? Yes, I mean, I don't know the full history on it. That part of that could have been just like we're going to capitalize on Paganini and then also Kinski, who I'd have to check. I'm not sure if he had died when the film was released. This is like a post death renaming of the film or whatnot. But yeah, it's pretty notorious as you can imagine. Late in life, Klaus Kinski having full command over the direction and writing and acting of a film. It is and this is one that I think there are stories that he tried to get Werner Herzog to direct it for him. And Herzog said, no, I don't want any part of this. So yeah, I'm in no hurry to see it for myself, but it is it's rather notorious because of what it is. And it is Kinski's last film. I think there are also a number of parallels that one would draw perhaps between, perhaps rather incorrectly between the figure of Klaus Kinski and the figure of Paganini. Well, it just makes me think of that movie where William Shatner plays Mozart called Shatner Mozart. Is that true? Is there such a... No, Shatner Mozart. I would not. I mean, I'm picturing it now. And then let's let's try and plant the seeds of this thing so people have false memories of it. Elevator pitch on this is the band from Pod People goes to hell. I would say I would say so. That's pretty good. Similar vibe. It is a horror movie about a band. Though here's a question I had for you, Joe. Does this band have a name? I don't recall it ever being named. I don't think they say the name of the band in the movie. I was watching for I was listening for it on my second viewing. Like, when did they tell you the name of the band? And I didn't find it. So either it went past me a second time or they really in the movie don't say what the band is called. Or maybe it's one of those things where it's it's all about Kate. It's all about the lead singer. So it's just Kate and her band or the Kate band. What have you? I don't know. I like the rest of the band. Man, they're really making the port. The drummer Daniel, he's doing all the work. They're making him go do the deals with the devil. All they they just get to hang out. They didn't ask him to do that. He. That was unspat. Yeah, but he meant well. He was like, I can fix this. I know, I know a dude who has a scroll. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. At this point, you were probably wondering, where can I watch Paganini horror? It's widely available. Joe, I believe you watched it on the Severin Blu-ray and you can speak more to its contents. I watched it on an airplane. I've been flying a lot this month for some reason. I watched it on the streaming platform, Eternal Family, which is partnered with Severin and various other media companies. This one was a good airplane viewing experience, I have to say. The making of this film is a wild, bizarre story. So I'm going to be talking pretty extensively about that in just a minute here. And one of my main sources is one of the extras on the Severin Blu-ray, which is an interview with the director of Luigi Cotzii. Excellent. All right. Well, let's get into the people here. I guess starting with Luigi Cotzii. Is this a Lewis Coates film? I believe that's the way. Lewis Coates. Yes. That's the way he is credited in the actual opening credits. But yeah, he's the director, co-writer on this one. Born 1947, this is our third Coatesii movie following 1983's Hercules, starring Lou Ferrigno and 78's Star Crash, which of course we just did a few weeks back. He's probably best known internationally for Star Crash, as well as his work with Dario Argento and the notorious 1980 alien cash-in, a contamination. This just keeps coming up. And we should just go ahead and watch it at some point. This film, Paganini Har, emerges in 1988. This is after his two-picture Hercules series, 83 and 85, Lou Ferrigno starring in both of those. And it's before his 89 Sinbad film, which also starred Lou Ferrigno. And then also before 89's The Black Cat, which will come up various times during the credits because there are various people involved in this film. They were also involved in The Black Cat. Yeah. As we'll continue to discuss, I have to say for my money, Paganini Har fills very original compared to these other films we've looked at. It's full of interesting, but again, only partially explored themes and concepts and all sorts of jarring shifts as the movie kind of loses its interest in one newly introduced concept and then rushes over to explore another one. Yeah. Yeah. I agree that this, this is probably the messiest Luigi Cotsi film I've seen, but it's also the most original. And I think that's funny because normally, Cotsi, I don't want to be mean to him, but in multiple sources, he seems to be quite defensive about the idea that his films are derivative of other films like that Star Crash is in some way inspired by Star Wars. Like in some moments, he kind of admits that it is and in other moments, he's like, no, it is its own original thing. Well, we always, I think, have to, we have to acknowledge that it's always more complicated than that because it's not like any given director or writer is like, I want to make a film like Star Wars and then they do. Like it's, you know, there's generally, these are creative individuals who have certain ideas, but then there is the market and there are producers and there's money involved. And so sometimes the way you get to make your film is by saying, hey, I have something like Star Wars. And then maybe along the way, someone says, can you make it more like Star Wars though? And there's so many different factors involved. So I can imagine where it, you know, it can be both way for somebody. That's exactly the case actually. And that, that is how he frames it in his, sometimes when he admits the, that some elements of the films are derivative of these more famous films, he's like, that's how I could get funding. He gets into it in this interview that I'm about to talk about as well. So maybe I'll just go ahead and discuss this interview. So I think this is probably the best place to try to tell this long convoluted story of the making of Paganini horror. And my notes here are going to be based mainly on two sources. One is this extra on the Severin disc called Play It Again Paganini, which is an extended interview with Coatsy. My other source is a book called Italian Gothic horror films, 1980 to 1989 by the Italian film historian, Roberto Curti. I would note that both of these tellings are going to be primarily Coatsy's version of events. So I can't vouch for him being correct about everything, but Curt, Curti's account also seems to largely rely on interviews with Coatsy to get the information about how all this happened. But this is the version of the story we've got. So Coatsy claims he came up with the idea for Paganini horror in 1986 or 87. And he says it began with a French-American producer named Nat Wachsberger, who was also the producer of Starcrash, as well as of films like Diamond Bikini in 1971. And they came to Rob Las Vegas. And I will know that Coatsy calls him French-American, but online sources say he was born in Belgium. I'm not sure what nationality he identified. But anyway, Coatsy had worked with Wachsberger already on Starcrash, so they had a relationship. And the situation was Wachsberger came to Coatsy and said, hey, I have made a deal with a certain French actor, a man I don't know if anyone's heard of, but he's known as Christophe Lambert to make a biographical film about Niccolò Paganini. So when I got to that. I watched this after I'd already watched the movie Paganini horror. And I was like, oh my God, the movie I just watched actually started with a biopic about Paganini that was going to star Christophe Lambert. Can you imagine and how you get from point A to point B? I mean, Lambert can play any European and also American. So like there's nothing. He can't be stopped. He's a master of the tongue of the accent. I don't think so. So Wachsberger was anxious to work with Lambert because Gray Stoke, the legend of Tarzan was about to come out and everybody thought it was going to be a huge hit. Wachsberger's bet was that Lambert would be a big deal after this movie was released and he wanted to lock him down for the next project. You know, I had to look into this a bit. I don't think I've ever seen Gray Stoke in his entirety, but Gray Stoke. Yes. Sorry, Gray Stoke, a different film. Gray Stoke was certainly a critical hit though when it came out. It's the first Tarzan movie nominated for Academy Awards, including best screenplay, best makeup and best supporting actor nomination for Sir Ralph Richardson, who we discussed in our episode on Dragon Slayer. His role in the Tarzan movie here was his final role. And the film also certainly made money. I'm always a little, I'm not as good with the, the, the, the monetary side of understanding how pictures do or don't do, you know, but it seems like it made a fair amount of money. And it is also generally pointed out as the film that launched Christoph Lambert's international career. Highlander would never have swung a sword if Gray Stoke had not swung from a vine. This is funny because I cannot adjudicate here. I can't fact check whether the movie was a success or not. But the funny thing is that Coatsy later characterizes it as a total flop. Like Gray Stoke, he says, just a failure. So I don't know if he's, if he's judging it on a different metric there, or if he's just wrong about that. But so, Walksburger hired Coatsy to write a script for this movie about Paganini's life. And Coatsy admits that the story he came up with was probably not going to be of the highest level of historical accuracy. It would be a somewhat fictionalized version of Paganini. And I would have loved to see that. Can you imagine, I wish we could have seen that movie, this, this sort of star crash, Raiden flavored Paganini biopic, but it was never meant to be. Coatsy says, quote, my script was well received, but as we were about to finalize the details, Gray Stoke was released and it flopped. It was a total flop. This alarmed Walksburger who panicked and decided to shelve the project because he didn't believe in using Lambert anymore. If true, that is of course, ridiculous, because how many films after this were made, you know, maybe not at the highest level, but so many films afterwards were made in large part because Christoph Lambert was attached to them, you know? Oh, he's an A-list 90s bad bull. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So funding was gone, scrammed. But Coatsy says by this point, he'd already spent a lot of time studying Paganini and like researching him and putting all this work into the script. So anything else he could do with it. Well, along comes a saving angel, a younger producer named Ugo Valenti. Coatsy had recently directed the horror film Contamination. Again, this is the one with the alien style eggs. And this movie had been shot in Columbia in South America. Ugo Valenti wanted to do another project like that, a horror movie shot in South America and he comes to Coatsy and he's like, got any ideas? Coatsy says, well, I've got this biopic about the life of the violinist Niccolò Paganini that I wrote for Christoph Lambert. Let me see if I can rewrite this into a slasher movie. You know, this is on one level, that's ridiculous. But on the other hand, it's not a bad idea. And you see shades of that film in Paganini horror. It's just kind of obscured by all the other ideas that are involved. Yeah, I admire it. I cannot lie. I admire it. Just I feel like I would not have the courage to push forward like that. But he he says, well, actually, so the way Curti explains it in his book is that first Coatsy transformed his Paganini script into a science fiction film using some ideas left over from the Paganini research, but then cramming them into this original story of like a sci-fi haunted house, quote, where time killed you, making you age or rejuvenate suddenly, turning you into a newborn child and then an egg cell. So I am sort of imagining like a science fiction horror Benjamin Button where you reverse age to death instantly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm digging this as well. You know, I'm imagining a sort of a mashup between some sort of Italian haunted house film and I don't know, House of Leaves or something. Yeah. If you if you regress all the way to an egg cell, do you just stop there? Or do you split apart into a sperm cell and an unfertilized egg cell? And then do you further split apart into, I don't know, amino acids and like what? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think. Okay. I mean, it depends on how solid the science is. It might have you like turning into apes and dinosaurs. I don't know. That would be good. So according to Curtie, the new producer, Hugo Valenti, did not like this direction and he had Coatsy rewrite the script and wanted to add like slasher gores and splatter stuff, thinking that this would help them secure more funding. Also, Valenti hired, according to Coatsy, hired a well known Italian artist and illustrator named Inzo Schiotti to make a poster for the film. This is classic poster first filmmaking where you get a poster before you even have a finished finalized script. Right. And I just want to flag, I had never read much about Inzo Schiotti before, but I briefly did a just kind of dive into a lot of the posters he made. This guy made like thousands of movie posters and over his career. And they're those great classic hand painted horror movie posters from the seventies and eighties. You see on a lot of Italian horror movies, like the VHS box art, the, you know, theatrical posters from this time. It is such a downgrade to go from these great vulgar works of art to that standard, you know, box art style of the nineties and two thousands where it's like a row of actor headshots with an exploding background. I love these old painted covers. I wish we got more like that. Yeah. I mean, I'm glad that so many re-releases and new releases on physical media at any rate are, you know, have gone back and fully, uh, uh, fully embraced the, the old poster art. You know, sometimes they go in new directions and have some, you know, cool new art, uh, as well. And I'm down for that, uh, certainly, but a new slip cases and so forth. Um, but this is a complete side tangent, but one of my big disappointments is you never see this to my knowledge anyway, with books, with like physical books, but like just thinking about someone as popular as Stephen King, for example, they were all these like classic Stephen King paperback covers, uh, that I remember from, from my childhood and, you know, my, um, you know, middle and teen years, especially. And as far as I know, like they never bring those back. It's always some new cover for new paperbacks and those classic paperbook covers are just like, you know, they're just left to the old editions. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I also love that old style. Uh, anyway, so, uh, Coatesy talks a bit about where this image came from. And by the way, I would recommend you look up the Paganini horror poster. I think it's pretty great. Yeah. It's got this skeleton playing a violin skeleton with one eyeball and gray hair playing a violin and there's blood dripping from the bow. And there's a, uh, a man and a woman standing in front of a haunted house with like sheet music blowing in the wind. I can't zoom in. Is this, or this guy and this lady, are they in the movie? They don't look very familiar. They don't look tremendously familiar now. Yeah. So it really does feel like a different picture is, is on the poster, which makes sense. And so this again, was poster first. So, uh, the image of the house used on the poster was one that Coatesy himself found on the cover of a book about the paranormal. Uh, and so they, they brought that in and then, you know, some different design elements, but it's a beautiful poster. So at this point, Coatesy and Valenti, they've got a poster and they've got like a three to four page story treatment for the, the way they want to do the story now. Uh, so the producer, uh, Valenti was like, Coatesy, um, come to Columbia with me to meet this local businessman. I know, uh, this is the guy who's going to co-produce. Then Coatesy tells in this interview, he tells a long story about going around in Columbia, trying to figure out who they're going to work with there. I'm not going to go into all the details, but the very truncated version is there are all these changes like, oh, you can't work with the same crew you used on contamination. You've got to use these other guys. Uh, and then Coatesy is running around location scouting with this potential producer who he says has armed bodyguards with him at all times. And Coatesy speculates that this guy was involved in drug trafficking, but he doesn't offer direct evidence. Uh, ultimately the deal falls through. So the Paganini horror movie shot in Columbia never happens. You know what you're getting with the training course? Small talk about the weather. Oh, this weather. Icebreakers. An interesting fact about yourself. Forgetting every interesting fact about yourself. Biscuits. Being too polite to take the last biscuit. Checking your emails. Regretting checking your emails. Awkward Q and A. Any questions? Anyone? Sometimes in life, you just know what you're getting. Like a luxury bed and a great night's sleep at Premier Inn. You know what you're getting with Premier Inn. So Coatesy and Valenti, they go back to Italy and Valenti is like, you know what? Write the script anyway. We'll get more financing. We'll figure that out later. But Curtie says, uh, after what they put together failed to attract backers, uh, Valenti, the producer, quote, just gave up the film industry and left for Santo Domingo where according to Coatesy, he set up a successful prawn factory. Okay. There you go. Uh, so enter a new producer. We got to get a new one. This time it's a guy named Carlo Maietto. Carlo Maietto was an Italian producer and the husband of none other than Janet Agrin, the actress we talked about in our episodes on full cheese, city of the living dead. She's in that. Uh, and she's also one of the leads in hands of steel. Remember her in that? Yeah. Yeah. Fans might remember us dwelling on her bizarre music video called Teddy bear. Gimme, gimme, teddy, teddy, my teddy bear. One of the weirdest things I have ever seen. Uh, so Maietto optioned the movie and Coatesy went on to do some other projects, including, uh, working with Dario Argento. It sounds like the Paganini script kind of got passed around from desk to desk for a while, just more development hell. Eventually it ended up with producer Fabricio D'Angeles of full via film who had done financial backing for some Luchio Fulci movies. And Fabricio D'Angeles is the final, the name you'll see on Paganini horse. That was ultimately the producer. Uh, D'Angeles called Coatesy in early 1988 and he said, okay, we're going to make this movie, but it's going to be shot in Miami later this year. Uh, eventually we will, uh, come back to this. Coatesy managed to convince D'Angeles not to set Paganini horror in Miami since he said it would not make sense for Paganini to be in Florida. Uh, Coatesy kind of, he thinks about it for a second and then he says grotesque even. Why not? I mean, there's, I don't know, it seems like we're so far into the speculative here. Uh, why couldn't, uh, his ghost be in, in Florida for some reason? Some things you just can't let go. Uh, also there's another thing like in between the time when, uh, D'Angeles gets involved and when they actually shoot the movie, uh, Coatesy was, he has this whole, he tells this bizarre shaggy dog story about another horror movie that he was initially hard to direct, but he wanted to make changes to the script. And the producer would not agree because he had a computer program that showed him with charts and graphs, how the script was already perfect. And I was like, this is 1988. What? I want to know what this computer software in 1988 was that analyzed a screenplay to tell you if it's good or not. Yeah. I don't think we even had Clippy at that point, did we? No. What is he talking about? Uh, I want to know, but anyway. So finally they're moving ahead with making Paganini horror. So Coatesy wanted to shoot in Venice. Uh, the producer said we can't afford to shoot in Venice. That's way too expensive. Instead, I'll give you like a couple of days of shooting in Venice. That's what we can afford. It's very expensive there. So he got some nice exterior shots in Venice, canals and things. And then they also filmed a bit in Rome on a soundstage and then other parts of the movie at this abandoned house, the main house in the movie, uh, which he claims was part of a former church or college, uh, that belonged to an order of nuns and is sort of near this road that goes around the outside, the outside of Rome, kind of like 285 around Atlanta. Um, and, uh, he says it was a good location for shooting because it was abandoned, nothing going on there. Uh, in the meantime, more writers are brought on to make further changes to the script. I got to get some more hands, more cooks in the kitchen here. Uh, so we get a Raimondo del Balzo, Daria Niccolodi, who we'll come back and talk about and Dardano Sacchetti, uh, or maybe pronouncing that wrong, Sacchetti, maybe, um, they, they come in and, uh, they work on the script. Curti says that the final script, uh, was significantly in part due to Coatesy's collaboration with Daria Niccolodi. Uh, she had worked with Coatesy before on a movie he directed that was released under multiple titles, including the black cat and deep profundus. And, uh, it seems to be kind of an unofficial sequel to Suspiria and Inferno. There's some positive talk about this one from users on Letterbox. I kind of want to check that one out. Uh, but, uh, Coatesy claims that Niccolodi's main story contributions to Paganini horror were quote, the esoteric scenes, like the one about the pact with the devil. Uh, I thought that was kind of interesting because like that's the main biographical stuff that's brought in from Paganini, and he's the one who wrote the Paganini movie. So now I'm confused about what came in from that. If she wrote that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe she, it had been messed around so much, you needed somebody to come in and be like, okay, let's ground this a little bit around the character of Paganini. We need just a little bit of narration, a little bit of storytelling about who this guy was and what sort of evil he was up to. Yeah. Kurti here also notes the inclusion of ideas that were recycled from an Italian TV series that Coatesy worked on in 1987 called Turno di Notte, uh, meaning night shift. At least one of these episodes of night shift that he made is called, uh, La Casa dello Strativari, the cat, the, you know, the, uh, the house of Strativari of the Strativarius violins. I can imagine which part of the movie that probably contributed to. Hmm. Uh, so Coatesy claims DeAngelis demanded last minute changes to the script right before they started shooting, particularly he was told to cut out some of the splatter scenes that would be costly and time consuming to set up. So we got a gore in gore out situation here. Uh, and then to make up the difference of what was lost, Coatesy says, quote, I tried to rebalance from this, uh, rebalance the script by inserting some of the weirdest and more fantasy oriented things from my previous version. The result was definitely not a horror movie, but a fantasy or a fantastic with lots of irony and lots of theories on music and time. I see what he's going for there, but I, and he says this in the other interview, he's like, it's not a horror movie. I don't know why he's insisting that. I mean, obviously this is trying to be a horror movie. Yeah. I mean, I've run across various director interviews where they, you know, they'll, they'll be talking about a film that's obviously hard. And they're like, actually it's really science fiction or it's really historical fantasy. Uh, and yeah, I mean, yeah, genres, genres, uh, definitions can be a little silly at times, but come on, this is the horror movie. Uh, few other things about the making of Coatesy complained about the, in his words, ridiculously low budget for special effects, terribly low. Given that they had a very low budget, I don't know. I'm pretty impressed with some of the gore effect scenes. Like the, the fungus melt scene is pretty, pretty good. The, uh, exploding behind the glass wall scene is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I think the gore looks, looks fine. I mean, there, there was nothing in here was, was so amazing that I was like, oh man, who was the team that made this happen? But, uh, on the other hand, nothing was so bad that I was laughing at the effects or anything. Uh, Coatesy goes on a lot in the interview about various compromises to his vision for the film. He's got some, you know, some grievances about how he didn't, it wasn't what he wanted it to be. Uh, like he was not allowed to work with his preferred director of photography, though he has nothing but good things to say about the, uh, the DP that did end up coming on the film. He, you know, he worked with this guy named Franco Leca, who he says was great. He says the producer bought the wrong kind of film for them to shoot on, but they just had to go with it because it's what they already had. Uh, he said they planned to shoot it on Kodak, but they had to use Fuji, which in his telling, uh, tends to have cooler, more pastel light colors. I did a little googling and it seems like maybe that's sort of true. Yeah. If, if that is indeed the case, I can maybe see that in the finished product. You know, it does have maybe especially those scenes in Venice. Yeah. It kind of, yeah. Cooler, grayer color palette, a little bit less of that, that saturated orange you get from some of these Italian films. Um, let's see. Uh, he tried to, oh, he says they, uh, they shot in this old house for about three weeks and then they did the exterior scenes in Venice last, which he describes as being almost like a vacation after spending all this time in the frigid, moldy old house. Oh, and then he brings up something that we actually, I don't know how we haven't mentioned to this yet. Uh, you know, we like a movie with, with some good extra line deliveries, some line deliveries that go a little over the top. I can appreciate a good bit of overacting. Uh, this movie has levels of over annunciation on some of the lines and the dubbing that are just astounding. Like I love it. It's, it's unbelievable. Yeah. This is one of the, you know, a lot of times we're like, yeah, you know, would you watch the dub or you can, you can watch it with subtitles. I don't know. I was only the version I watched only had the option for the English dub. And I highly recommend going that route. It is, it is laugh out loud funny. And I was watching it by myself on an airplane. Yes. Yeah. So I was probably getting some weird looks. Um, the, the scene where she's talking about, uh, uh, we will make a video clip to go with our song, just like Michael Jackson did with thriller. Yes. A video clip. I did have to look that up, by the way. And, um, in, in Italian, a music video is a video clip, or that's one of the main terms for it, but still there's no accounting for the way that is, it is enunciated in the dub. Like the mouths are coming open as if there's like somebody cranking a jack in between the teeth. It is awesome. Uh, but, uh, so, so Coatesy says he, he takes full responsibility for the weirdness of the dubbing in the film. Uh, but then I thought kind of strangely he identifies the main problem with the dubbing being that the younger actors and actresses were dubbing their own lines as opposed to having professional voice actors come and dub over them. And since the young actors didn't have much experience with dubbing, he says they came off as quote overacting a bit. Um, but again, I wouldn't, I wouldn't change it. I wouldn't trade anything, but he, he defends the principle of having actors dub their own lines because he says, if you have someone else come in and do the dubbing, the actors are only quote half actors, but we have seen plenty of examples of him having other people come in and dub lines. And I think, I think Donald Pleasance is dubbed by somebody. Oh, Donald Pleasance is clearly dubbed by someone else. And, and, and that's to his detriment, you know, because Donald Pleasance has a certain kind of delivery in his voice, his voice is almost as iconic as someone like Peter Lorre's, you know, so you want to hear Donald Pleasance's voice. So it's a little weird hearing someone else's English language voice coming out of him, probably less weird if you're used to hearing him dubbed anyway. Um, but I don't know, the whole, I have actors thing. I mean, there are plenty of examples of, of actors that we love who are almost always dubbed like Paul Maschi, for example. So, uh, but I guess I see where, I see where he's coming from here, especially as far as the young actors are going. So the young actors are doing their own dubbing when maybe we should have had some pros come in and do it for them. And then on the flip side, Donald Pleasance, they couldn't get him back to do his own dubbing. So yeah. Uh, so he says, uh, Paganini horror, this is a quote actually, uh, in translation of obviously he's speaking Italian in this interview. So this is all the translated subtitles. He says, uh, Paganini horror was poorly received. And I can tell you why, because it came out when Fulci was at the peak of his fame, Fulci and his cinema. Uh, therefore, I think he uses the word Fulci, Simo. Um, therefore the people who went to see it expected something in the style of Lucio Fulci, only the film was made by Luigi Coatsy. It was something completely different from their expectations. Also because the film is full of ironic touches and like Americans would say inside jokes. Uh, so, you know, he's saying it's made with a sense of irony. I can pick that. I think yes, they are making it with a sense of irony. Uh, I don't really see this at all. It's funny that sometimes he's, he really wants to distance himself from the idea that, um, that, you know, his film could be taken as a, as a knockoff of something else, but here he's like, people thought it was a copy of Fulci. And I don't see why anybody would have thought that this doesn't really seem like a copy of Fulci to me. No, no, I didn't really get that sense. Um, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know, maybe there's something in the marketing, you know, certainly that like the guy did the poster art, certainly did poster arts for, um, for Fulci films, but yeah, I don't know. I would say in general throughout these interviews, Coatesy speaks with, I don't know, I could be wrong about this. So I, you know, caveats, all blah, blah, blah, blah, all that, but he speaks with what seems to me like a subtle resentment about Fulci. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, Fulci by most accounts was, was not an easy guy to work with. You know, not a monster as far as I'm aware, but a very driven guy obsessed with realizing his own particular vision, though, I don't think these two ever actually work together. So I think maybe it was, it was, I mean, it's kind of alluding to it. Like Fulci was, was the hotness at that point. Like he was the, uh, the top guy when it came to Italian horror and, uh, or one of the top guys at any rate and, uh, and he was compared to him. And so yeah, there was a certain amount of resentment either, you know, directed or misdirected at Fulci based on, uh, perhaps an unfair comparison that was made. Yeah. Maybe kind of Marsha, Marsha, Marsha. Uh, but you know, another, he actually, Coates, he tells a very nice story about how initially reviews of Paganini horror were overwhelmingly negative. Um, and even he says, you know, when the internet came around, he would, he would go on the internet and see negative comments about it on the web. And then he said, I don't know what changed at this time, but he says around year 2005, he says he started meeting people who would, who would come up to him and say they loved the movie that they thought it was a masterpiece. And Coates himself says it's not a masterpiece, but I'm glad they liked the film. Um, and, uh, then he, he goes on, uh, this bit about how, you know, he's had other films that people characterized as being knockoffs, like that Star Crash was a knockoff of Star Wars, uh, but he argues, no, it's not. Um, we may have used the fame of Star Wars to try to secure funding, but people can now see Star Crash is its own film, which I could say is maybe partially overstating it, but also is partially true. Yeah. I think he really be both things. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, uh, and then also talking about, uh, about alien and contamination in similar ways. Uh, and so ultimately he's like, this film was not a ripoff of Fulci and he's, uh, and it's its own thing. And he wanted to make it really about science fiction more than horror. I don't know how successful on that front he was, but he's very into science fiction and was interested in these time loop type things that you get in the middle of the movie. And so that's the thing that you can sense in these interviews that he's really excited about is like the science fiction stuff in there that he's like, I think you get the feeling that he wishes he could have taken that to, you know, let that be its own thing. Uh, but ultimately he said, this is a quote from that Kurti book. He says, quote, there I was with this beautiful, ambitious script and they handed me a 16 millimeter camera, which was broken, gave me a villa to set the story in and said, start shooting in conditions like these, not even the best film director in the world could have done any better. So he's proud of his work. Yeah. I mean, they should be proud. It's a lot of fun. I highly recommend this movie for the folks who dig this sort of thing. I mean, cause I don't know, you still see reviews online where someone's like, this is not a very good Jalow film. And I think you're going into it the wrong expectations there. Yeah. There are different kinds of movie experiences you can, you can go looking for. This is certainly not as not tightly executed storytelling. And like some of the other great Jalow movies we've talked about, like, like deep red or footprints on the moon or anything like that. But it is a great time. There's a lot of fun in here and there's a lot of talent on display, even though the film is, I think even Kotsi would acknowledge a mess. Yeah. Yeah. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moment you plan and the ones you don't. For the time you forgot your charger at the gate. Passengers, we are now on our initial ascent. Or when you're bouncing between projects like a ping pong ball. We build PCs with long lasting battery life so you're not scrambling for a charger and built in intelligence so you can stay focused on whatever you're doing. Dell Technologies built for you. Dell.co.uk forward slash Dell PCs. Your holiday starts with the airline. Oxford's premium coach service to Heathrow and Gatwick airports up to every 20 minutes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The airline is the most frequent luxury coach service to Heathrow and Gatwick from Oxford. Leave your car at home and start your holiday early. Just sit back, relax and enjoy our fast, direct and reliable airport service day or night. Book now at the airline.co.uk. All right, well, let's let's talk about some of the other folks we've already talked about. Dariah Nickelodea bit here, lived 1949 through 2020. She is again, a co-writer on this or when more or at least one of the writers, one of the main credited writers. And she also has a role in the film playing Sylvia Hackett, the current owner of the spooky mansion La Casa de Sol. Italian actress and frequent Argento collaborator. She starred in five films directed by Argento between 75 and 87. Deep Red Inferno, Tenebrae, Phenomena and Opera. She met Argento on Deep Red, which of course we previously did an episode on. And the two became romantic partners. She was the mother of Asia Argento. And she has screenplay credits on Suspiria and Inferno, but may have contributed to others during her time with Dariah Argento. Her other film credits include Mario Bava's final film Shock from 77 and her writing credits also include 89's The Black Cat, which we've already mentioned. Yeah. That's the one I'm going to come back and check out. Yeah. All right. For the rest of the cast, I'm going to deviate from billing order to try and lay out our characters in a concise way. This is a movie about a band. We may not know that band's name, but let's meet the band. Okay. Okay. So first of all, let's talk about Kate. Kate is our lead singer and she is played by Jasmine Ammoni. Sometimes I think she's credited here as Jasmine Main. Age unknown, as far as I could tell, model turned actress, born into the profession to act her parents. She was Miss Roma in 1983. Only active on the screen from 78 through 89, according to the databases, and mostly action and horror titles, beginning with 78's Fearless and including 85's Demons in which she's in the horror movie within a movie. So I think like she gets stabbed by the director in that film. And she was also in 85's Scandalist Gilda and 89's The Black Cat, her final film role, and also features a film within a film in which she is murdered. Yes. Incredibly intense presence in this movie. Yes. She's awesome. I really enjoyed her. I was like, I gotta check out some of these more movies that I guess she's barely in. But, you know, like the rest of the band, obviously beautiful. But also very intense in her performance, like kind of a skull trying to leave the face performance at times. She's really giving it her all. And yeah, I mean, reading a bit about her, it sounds like she was in the running for various other roles in various other notable Italian genre pictures of the day. But maybe she didn't get those roles or maybe she was just very choosy about the roles that she was taking. Hard to say. Yeah. Well, bravo. I enjoy her greatly in this. So that's Kate. Kate's essentially, she's sort of our protagonist. She's the leader of the band. Yeah, leader of the band. She's the front woman. So fair enough. All right, let's move on to the rest of the band. The lead guitarist is Elena, played by Michelle Clipstein. Age unknown. This is her only film credit. I tried to look her up just in case maybe she's a real musician and she, you know, was in some of their band, but I couldn't find anything on discogs about her. Either. I can't. Is she the one who gets stabbed with a violin that has a knife in it? I think so. The, you know, as is often the case, the rest of the band is sometimes the rest of the band and you can lose track about who's who. Yeah. Because the bass player is Rita, played by Luana Ravignini, born 1968. So at least we know that the age on this individual Italian actress whose other limited credits include 87's sweets from a stranger. And then we have the drummer Daniel, played by Pascal Paraciano, born 1960, Italian actor who previously appeared in 86's Demons 2 and went on to act in 89's the sweet house of horrors. This was a full GTV film and 91's voices from beyond. Also a full G film. And he also did some later erotic film work as well. Which guy was this in Demons 2? Is he one of the exercise fitness guys? That would make sense. I'm struggling to remember if I've seen Demons 2. But that's, oh, he was, you know, a young fit guy and I think was kind of a body guy, so that would make sense. So Demons 1, the premise is people go to a movie theater, they watch a movie about Demons and the Demons come out of the movie and attack the people in the theater. Fabulous. Demons. Fabulous. Yes. Yes. Demons 2, the same thing happens except it's not a movie theater, it's an apartment building. Okay. And I can't remember where the Demons come out of and maybe somebody's watching a movie on TV. There is something on TV. Yeah. And yeah, actually I think he is somebody on a TV program based on the credit. So that would make sense. Yeah. Okay. Then I, yeah, I was misremembering that. I just remember prominently there's some memorable character in there who's like a fitness guy. Okay. Yeah. All right. So that's the band. That's your basic band. Lead singer, lead guitarist, bass player, drummer. And then we have their manager, LaVinia. Is she their manager? What is she? She's just like professionally mean to them. Yes. She is so nasty. I love it, but she is just so unrealistically nasty. We'll get into the main scene here in a bit, but their manager LaVinia is played by Maria Cristina Mastragali, born 1963, Italian French dancer turned actress, still active, appears, appeared to be in a few different, more recent and more obscure Luigi Cozzi films. But she also pops up. She has popped up in some serious dramatic work as well, at least, you know, further down the cast. But yeah, she's great. She's so nasty. We'll get into, we'll get into it when we talk about like the scene where we meet the band for the first time. She has, she just had an amazing clip reel. If you were a director, like a casting director who's trying to hire somebody for a role to tell other people that they're nothing. Yes. I need, I need an actress who can say, you'll never be anything. Your creativity is finished. Yeah. She's the master of negative reinforcement. If that's what you're looking for in a manager, if that's what brings up the best in you, then this is, this is who you need to hire on. She makes it like almost the whole movie. She's there to the end. Yeah, yeah. And she gets a, she gets a good death. Good. Best, best death in the film, I think. Yeah. All right. Is that a quality kill? I think that would be a quality kill. Yes. Okay. All right. Um, we mentioned Donald Pleasants. Donald Pleasants plays the mysterious Mr. Pickett. Uh, we're not going to spoil too much about Mr. Pickett, but we'll get into him when we get into the plot. Uh, Pleasants lived, of course, 1919 through 1995. Legendary British actor who played everyone from Blofeld to Sam Loomis to the president of United States. This is our third Donald Pleasants film. Uh, we talked about 1976 as the devil's men. Uh, we talked about 1987's the prince of, or 1987's prince of darkness. Uh, so we've discussed him more in depth before, but to place this film within his filmography, this was one of eight TV and film credits he had from 1988, including working. Yeah. He, he stayed busy. Uh, yeah, did a, various sorts of films. Uh, so his 88, um, films included the notorious vampire in Venice that of course had Klausk and scan it. Halloween four, the TV movie, the great escape to the untold story, which was a, apparently a sequel to the excellent 1963 film, uh, which also featured Donald Pleasants in a memorable role. I assume he's reprising that same character here. Huh. Yeah. The sequel to the great escape that. Okay. Yeah. Uh, I mean, if it was a major TV film, it's got a good cast, but I've never seen it. I've only seen the original. Um, but at this point we're really close to late era Donald Pleasants here. So it's entering a time period where not much is going to really stand out aside from some lesser entries in the Halloween franchise. And even the schlocky Euro titles are few and far between at this point. Hmm. Um, I would say Donald Pleasants is, is perfectly fine here. But again, dubbed by another actor, it's kind of like when we talked about Christopher Lee in the Mario Bava, uh, Hercules movie, Hercules in the haunted world. Oh yeah. They don't use his voice. Unbelievable choice. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I imagine some of that comes down to, um, some combination of budget and scheduling. Like you've got to get a very busy working, you know, actor that you could, we'll get into, perhaps barely afford to begin with. And are you going to really bring them back to dub their own lines, especially when the, the English language market is maybe not the primary market? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, oh yeah. I, I assume most listeners know this at this point. If you've been listening to our shows about movies like this, but a lot of these movies don't have live sound and this would be another example. So, you know, all of the dialogue is dubbed. It's not just going across languages. It's like, it's totally dubbed, all dubbed. Um, so, uh, Coatsie explains in the interviews, actually, he's totally up front about this, that he had a strategy that he employed in most of his scripts. Uh, so he would always write one character who he planned to be played by a more famous actor. So for example, Christopher Plummer's character in Star Crash. Uh, and then he would have them appear three times in the movie once at the beginning, once in the middle and once at the end. So that the audience would have the feeling of this more famous actor going all the way through the plot, but really he would be able to shoot their scenes in between one and three days. Therefore saving money. In this case, it was Donald Pleasance. Uh, Coatsie says that, uh, fortunately, he takes a moment just to say, actually, it works out pretty well doing this because when you hire these older famous actors, shooting tends to go much faster because they don't need things explained to them multiple times and they do great work on the first take. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy, right? You bring in, uh, somebody with a caliber of Donald Pleasance or Peter Cushing and like they know their lines. Uh, they hit their marks and yeah, they can often do it in one take and then you're, you know, onto the next. Yeah. All right. Uh, let's see. Uh, other, some less important characters, but, but memorable. We have Mark Singer, the horror director. King of horror. The King of horror. Yes. Uh, play, even though he appears to be only like, like what, 20s or early 20s? 20 year old King of horror. I guess, yeah, it's possible. There are probably some precedents for that. He's played by Pietro Geniordi, who lived 1962 through 2025. Uh, Italian actor, this was his first film, but subsequent credits included 89s Killer Crocodile in 94 Cemetery Man. Not to be confused with the Beastmaster Mark Singer. The Beastmaster is in may RC. This is in may RK may RK singer. Uh, so they, so in this movie, the, the character Mark Singer is the famous King of horror, the director of like the world's greatest horror films, but they're going to bring him in to shoot a video clip. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They're like, yeah, he's, I don't know how they got him, but somehow they, they were able to afford him. He's enthusiastic about it. It's like, yeah, let's do it. Let's make this. Yeah. It is brought up that this will be the equivalent of Michael Jackson's thriller. Hmm. Uh, so there's an extra on the Severin disc that's also an interview with Pietro Geniordi, where he talks a bit about his experience making the movie, which he describes almost exclusively in very positive terms. It seems like he had a great time making this movie and felt great about it. Uh, he said he had just gotten out of acting school in Rome. Uh, and Paganini horror was his first important acting experience. And he tells this anecdote about how he got the role. He says, uh, so he's a young actor. He had just moved to Rome, uh, from elsewhere in this case, I think he had originally come from Milan and a big concern when you're a young actor is getting an agent to represent you at this time. So he says he went knocking on a lot of doors, trying to find an agent to represent him and one day he goes for a meeting with this particular agent. It's the very first time they're ever meeting. Uh, and the agent, you know, he goes to this guy's office and the agent tells him, you know what, let's send you for an audition today. Let's send you for this role in Paganini horror. And the agent secretary is like, Oh, no, no, we can't do that. We're supposed to send them, we're supposed to send them this other actor that we already represent, but the agent was mad at this other guy because he had flaked out on something recently and had been making a fuss. So the agent said, here's this kid, Geniordi, send him instead. So it sounds like he got this role on his very first day of looking for an agent purely by coincidence and basically out of spite. So good, good career note kids. It can pay to be at hand when somebody with power is mad at somebody else. Beyond this, Geniordi says that he really has very little experience with horror, except that he loves Argento. And he says, even today he is scared every time he has to get into an elevator because of the scene with the necklace in deep red. But he says making the movie was a very positive experience. He describes Luigi Cotsi as a pleasure to work with, very funny and polite. And he makes this comment a couple of times in the interview that like this was a contrast with his work on some other genre films where he kind of describes the directors as abrasive and domineering over the actors. He says, Cotsi by contrast was very pleasant, quote, a gentleman through and through. He he tried in the interview. It's funny because he's trying to remember the plot of Paganini horror, which he admits that he hasn't seen it in 30 years. So he did not like rewatch it before the interview. Rewatching may not have helped. Yeah. He says, he says, you know, I don't remember much opportunity for characterization, but he still had a great time working on it. He was amazed at the people who were doing the special effects, like at their craft. He was really interested in how they made a latex cast of his head because they have to set him on fire. He had very positive things to say about Daria Niccolodi. He says she was polite and respectful to him. And as I said, he makes this aside a couple of times about mentioning people being respectful to him when he was a young actor. And he says, you know, this really used to be the exception rather than the rule in the industry. But he said, I don't know if he's correct about this, but his perception is that the film industry now is very different. He thinks that compared to when he was young, now generally, like directors tend to treat actors better and actors in bigger roles are more respectful to actors in smaller roles. There's less hostility than he remembers from when he was young. I hope that's true. I hope so. It's good to it. It's always nice to hear somebody reflect positively on one of these films, you know, especially given that we're often talking about lower budget films and films from previous decades, and you just kind of hope that everything went OK behind the scenes. Yeah, well, I mean, that's his point of view. Who knows what other people would say. But I hope everybody had a great time making Pagan the New Horn. He says, I think the word is he says he's really astounded that people are still interested in this film. Not that he thinks it's worthless, but it's just not something he expected people would care anything about 30 years later. He and then there's a quote where he says something like it's the kind of cinema that had no money, but it's also the kind of cinema that did miracles. And I think specifically he's talking about sort of the craft of like what people could pull together with with very little resources. Oh, that's a good I like the way you put that. All right, well, let's let's wind out the people involved and behind the scenes here to the limited extent we can get into them here. I'm going to mention in passing that the character of the mother. I'm not going to say whose mother, though I really do not know if I was supposed to know whose mother it was early on. It's the opening scene of the film. The mother is played by Elena Pompey, born 1966. Other credits include 1986 is the minds of Kilimanjaro. And then finally, the score for Paganini Har is by Vince Timpera. Born 1946, Italian composer best known for his work with Lutio Fulci on the pictures. Some of these are going to be pictures that you might some listeners might not be as familiar with because they include four of the apocalypse from 75. That's a Western. The 1975 comedy. And I think it's supposed to be like a goofball comedy, Dracula in the provinces. I included the poster here for you, Joe. It includes illustrated poster art of a mustachioed vampire biting a woman on the butt. Yeah, she's screaming. So this is not the the Fulci Dracula movie that some of you might be imagining. This is supposed to be just a wide comedy. But anyway, Timpera also scored the psychic in 77. I've seen that one. Yeah. Silver saddle in 78. I've heard that is is perhaps the best of Fulci's Westerns and also 89's The House of Clox. You've seen that one. That one's not so great in my opinion. That's later days. Fulci is. Yeah. But he also apparently was an uncredited writer on one track for 79 Zombie, which was mostly officially credited to Fabio Frizzi. But perhaps he had something to do with one of the tracks there. Other credits include 76's Teenage Emanuel and The Black Cat, which we've already mentioned. I'm going to say great electronic score, in my opinion. And I think one of the film's strongest qualities. So no matter where you're going with the plot and these different elements, in a way, I feel like Paganini Har is grounded in this serene, haunting, synth ambient pieces that kind of like remind you it's like, no, something coherent and spooky is going on. And it kind of like brings you back to that. I thought you would like those parts. I like those parts too. Yeah, with the there's a very subtle synth score and these these kind of swirling pads that are used a lot in the the more atmospheric scenes that I think work quite well. And they're a big contrast to the to the like diagetic pop music that's in the film, which we will also talk about in a bit. Yeah, yeah, this this soundtrack, the score has at least previously been available on vinyl from the label sub-OST. There's a band camp listing for the soundtrack. But I don't think that maybe it's region blocked, but I don't think it was put out digitally. I think it was only put out as a physical vinyl edition. But if you can listen to it and give it a go, I really liked it. I wish it was available for my stream. All right, are you ready to talk about the plot? Let's do it. I think this is one where we're not going to try to narrate the whole movie scene by scene. It'll make more sense if I go ahead here and give a basic summary of the whole movie. And then we can come back and talk about some specific scenes in more detail, especially scenes early on. So warning that spoilers are incoming, if you would like to go into the the Paganini horror without anything ruined. So the basic premise is that this 80s glam rock band, do we ever learn the band's name? I think no, the answer is no, consisting of three women, Kate, Elena and Rita, and this one guy named Daniel, are having trouble coming up with a new single that will make their record label happy. So the drummer Daniel meets with a shady character named Mr. Pickett played by Donald Pleasance, who sells him a piece of sheet music composed by Niccolò Paganini, but never before published or played in public. And the music is called Paganini horror. Their manager, LaVinia, that this is their it stinks person, she says, hell, yeah, this is a hit. I like it. So they plan to shoot a music video for the Paganini song with the famous horror movie director Mark Singer at a creepy old mansion called La Casa de Sol, which is owned by a lady named Sylvia. So they go to the mansion and then they spend the rest of the movie there at the mansion, enduring various horrors and getting killed in different ways. So we get some slashings and stabbings. These are kind of music themed slashings sometimes. Yeah, because in fact, the murder weapon, as we've alluded to already, we have is this cursed violin with human gut strings, so strings of at least allegedly made from the intestines of a human victim, though it doesn't look like that, you know, just look like violin, look like they look like violin strings. But this violin also has an extendable blade that shoots out the base of the violin, you know, almost like it's some sort of a James Bond gimmick. But also, I guess more tellingly, like it's some sort of a Jalow murder weapon. But also it's in the correct spot on the violin that it would seem designed to like shoot into the violinist jugular whilst they were playing. Yeah. But we never get this. Like it seems like that's clearly what we're setting up for. And I'm like, oh man, I can't wait till that happens. That's going to be pretty groovy. And then it doesn't. It's a trap violin, but I think we only ever see it used offensively. Yeah. Somebody stabbing somebody else with the violin. In the most unimaginative way. It now that you mentioned, though, that that he lifted some plot elements from this previous TV production about Strativarius or some sort of haunted Strativarius violin, it does make me wonder, is that where we get to see the jugular booby trapped violin stabbing somebody? I don't know. But I'm really curious now. Well, it could be that, but I was guessing that the Strativarius TV episode was what provided the idea about the melt fungus that comes from the wood used to make Strativarius violins, which is when that scene comes up in the movie later, that it is so amazingly specific. So this is one of the deaths in the film. One of the girls in the band disappears and, you know, her friends are looking around for her. She's nowhere to be found. And then later she turns up melted. It's like Emil and Robocop. And then the guy, yeah. She's just like, hi, I've melted now. And they're like, what is this? And I think it's Daria Nicolodi looks at her and says, oh, I know what that is. That's the fungus that comes from the wood that was used to make Strativarius violins, which is a flesh eating fungus. So possibly leftovers. It's like we've served alongside the evening's offerings. Okay. I tried to look up, I was like, what is that based on anything real? I don't think so. I think it may be very, very loosely inspired by a sort of theory people had about like what makes Strativarius violins sound so special. And there was a theory for a while, I think that it was because of like climate, you know, periodic climate changes in Europe, leading to different growth patterns in the trees that would have had denser wood at a particular time when the wood was being harvested to make the violins. But I don't even think that that theory is much subscribed to anymore. I wouldn't have much to do with melt movie fungus. But anyway, I was like, where does that come from? So there's that there's a lot of running around and people getting lost. Yeah. We alluded to this earlier, people like getting lost in the house. Other people are like, where are they? Can we find them and running through halls? There are these hell tunnels, like pits that open in the earth and drop you into hell and electrocute you, shoot you with electricity. Yeah, it becomes very confusing about, OK, is this person now in the hell realm? Or they're just somewhere else in the house? Hard to say. Well, some people crawl into tunnels and then come out of the tunnels. And it's not clear whether they went somewhere else or they're still in the same place. There are invisible walls, like they some characters try to leave the house in a car and end up smashing the car, like smashing into an invisible wall around the house. And the carcatchers on fire and they die. There's also, I would say, the best quality kill in the movie is the fate of La Vinia, the band's manager at the end, who is crushed by an invisible wall. So she's up against a wall you can see. And then suddenly she's like, oh, I move my microphone. Sorry, but she's doing mime stuff. Death by mime magic, essentially. Death by mime. And then there's a clear pane of glass pressed against her face. So you can see her being smooshed. And she's like, oh, and then scanner style, her head explodes. I didn't see that coming. And that was awesome. Yeah, really well done. And especially knowing that they were on very limited budgets for the special effects. So yeah, that's all terrific. But then also you have Kate getting locked in a big casket-like standing base case, even though nobody's playing the standing base or anything that large. But hey, you can fit the lead singer of a pop band in there and then you can set it on fire. But she does survive that. Yes, she does. It seems like she might not for a minute there. We mentioned that this film involves the devil, but it also involves what the perhaps the lich of of Paganini himself, like some sort of a masked ghoul who is going around killing people with a violin or seemingly unclear. Yeah. So the ending is there. Well, the ending, don't we discover that the Paganini ghoul is Donald Pleasance? Am I wrong about that? I think you may be right. You might be right. Yeah. I apologize if I'm getting that wrong. That's embarrassing if I am. But truly it is hard to remember some details about this movie, even having seen it multiple times now. I do remember at the end, Kate gets an explanation. She gets the whole villain monologue. So Mr. Pickett, Donald Pleasance arrives at the house after all of her friends have been killed in these weird, bizarre ways through the house all night. And she he gets there, he gets out of a car and he's like, hi, I am Satan and you're trapped in hell forever because you sold your soul for wealth and fame. And I don't like people who do that. And then he stabs her. But did she get the wealth and fame? It seems like they haven't even finished the music video and he's already claiming her soul for all eternity. I don't know. I mean, that's a good point. Yeah. Usually these packed with the devil stories, the person, they get the rewards up front. It's just that the bill comes due later. But she doesn't even get the rewards up front. Yeah. I mean, it'd be one thing if it was just fame because you could be like, oh, well, you will be famous for this. But I don't think she really gets the wealth. So yeah. So that's basically the whole plot. But we should zoom in on a few things. I definitely want to talk about a couple of scenes early on. I want to talk about the prologue and I want to talk about the scene in the music studio. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So. Okay. So. No, good. Well, prologue first. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, basically we start off with some wonderful, wonderful, you know, atmospheric scenes of a little girl wandering the streets and then eventually, you know, taking one of the canal boats and through the canals of Venice. It's unclear at first what time zone we're actually in. Like, is this the past? Is this the present? Like. Oh, because she's dressed weird. Yeah. The little girl's dressed like a Puritan. She looks like little, you know, prudence proctor is out here wandering around in the Puritan village. Is she a ghost? We don't know. And there's all this hazy synth music played on top of it. It's really nice. But yeah, I was unsure like where we were in time and space. I mean, I knew in space we were in Venice, but in terms of time, I had very vague ideas of what was going on. Likewise, I wasn't going to be sure for a long time which grown up character this character, this little girl ends up becoming. And likewise, when we meet this little girl's mother, I had no idea whose mother this is, whose prologue this really was. And I don't know if that was by design, if that was an error on my part or just part of the sort of messiness of this film. No, I think it's intentional mystery and even intentional misdirection at first. So I think the answer is we discover it's Daria Nickelodey's character. But where I guess at first we were to think maybe it's Kate, right? Yes, they misdirect you and make you think it's Kate. Well, I'll explain why that why I think that is in a minute. But so just quick fact about this girl wandering around Venice and the Puritan, you know, hood. This girl is Luigi Kotsi's daughter, which I thought was a great choice. Like we need a super creepy kid in the opening scene to commit mattress side. Oh, I know, I'll use my own child. So this strange girl wanders around Venice and she gets in the gondola. She gets she goes down the canal, then she gets dropped off at a mansion. This is the house that will later be featured in the music video part of the movie. And then we go inside the house and we pan over the child's ghastly toys. What is it about children's toys in these old Italian movies always look so creepy, even when they're not supposed to, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, this one is like a doll with a skulls face or something. So one of them. Yeah, that one's supposed to look creepy, I think. So she's playing the we pan over that. She's playing the song on the violin, practicing her violin. The song is called The Witch's Dance. And while the little girl plays the violin down the hall, her mother gets undressed and gets into the bath. Yeah, and some tight editing here on this. Disrobing and getting into the bath. Yes, but they pulled it off. Two things stand out about this bathroom. One is blood red tiles on the walls. Coatesy mentions that he had the idea personally to have the bathroom tiles in this room painted red. He said his set designers thought this was weird, but he stands by it. He thinks it works. Yeah, that's a good idea. And I stand by it. Yeah, absolutely. Also, this bathroom is the echoiest room on earth. The little girl comes in and the mom and the girl start talking. And it sounds like they are inside a steel barrel the size of a football stadium. It's just like infinite echoes. And the mom and the girl talk. So the girl says she finished her violin practice for the day. Her mom tells her, oh, good, you can now go play. And she says, you know, one day you're going to grow up to be a famous musician just like your father. We're not told who he is. But the little girl has this sinister looking doll with a gold skull mask on its face. The girl dips the doll's hair into her mom's bathwater and it gets all wet. Then the little girl gets a hair dryer and starts blow drying the doll's hair while the mom watches and they're sitting there smiling at each other. Well, the girls got the hair dryer like, yes, where's this going? And then the girl smiles and throws the hair dryer into the bath. So zap. This is an electrocution with classic, you know, animated electrical zigzags shooting up into the mom's face. And then the mom is literally cooked. She looks like she has been cooked on a cast iron skillet. Yeah. So, you know, your creepy back story scene here. And that pretty well executed. And also it feels it feels true, you know, as a parent, I know that kids hate being reminded that they need to practice their musical instruments, that they need to do their duolingo and so forth. So this is perhaps going on inside the head of many a child, though most children do not actually heave a toaster or a hair dryer into the bathtub. Thankfully not. Yes. So here, but we cut from directly from the prologue, in fact, cut from a shot of the mother's fried face to the the opening, you know, rock song, the music number. Yes. This this is the first track that we hear from Kate and the rest of the band. And I have to say, when I was listening to it, I was I was like, you know, this song is is a real banger. I'm digging this. They're rocking. It's it's the lyrics are Stay the night high and so you and the the rut row. It's apparently actually saying rock and roll. I had to pull up the subtitles to get that. But stay the night high and so you and the rut row. I think I was hearing like you can. Ruck row. This song is great. It is Bon Jovi, but it's great. It is absolutely John Bovies. You give love a bad name. And I didn't catch it at first. Like I watched it on the plane. I'm like, this is great. Like this is not like the comparison to pod people. What was the song in pod people? Idiot control here. The here are the engines. Well, now, oh, yeah, idiot control terrible song by a terrible band. But in this case, it's like, especially not realizing at the time that it was actually a John Bovi, a bond, a bond, Jovi rather rip off. I was like, yeah, this is great. But it's yeah, it's clearly you give love a bad name. Yeah. I mean, it's like they they nabbed one of the hookiest hooks in rock music. It's like an impossible to miss hooky hook. Yeah. And so they're performing it. And this is to be clear, this is not a concert. This is a recording session in a studio. Yes. But but the gals and Daniel are performing with full concert theatrics. You know, their costumes, you know, their tight pants on despite all facing the same direction and dancing where the stage lights. Yeah, again, this is a recording session. So they could be wearing their sweats. They could be we've all seen actual footage of professional musicians recording and it generally looks pretty gross, you know, because that's not it's not about the perform the visual performance. It's about getting the music down, right? Yeah. I mean, I can respect that. Maybe they've got that purist mentality where they're like, no, we're going to record it live multi track. We're doing it all at the same time. But I think even the bands that have that kind of mentality instead of trying to one track it at a time, even the bands with that mentality are not going to have stage lights on them while they're recording. You're not going to bite the head off of a bat bat in the recording session. You save that for the for the tour. But so as you said, now they do not say it's not part of the movie that, hey, this song is exactly the same as You Give Love a Bad Name. They don't seem to acknowledge that. So I think it is supposed to be an original song. So I would think a like Pop Rock producer would be pretty happy with the song. They're laying down and be like, wow, that's a great hook. Do you give love a bad name? Yeah, like in this movie, these characters have delivered a song that is as good as John Bon Jovi's like greatest hit. And yet right after they finish or even before they finish, like Lavinia cuts them off and says like enough of that and proceeds to absolutely rip Kate a new one over her just complete creative bankruptcy in coming up with this song. She says things so cruel, so hateful that they would, I think, realistically tend to be the last things ever said in a creative relationship. And be it professional or unprofessional. Like there are things that that Lavinia says that there just would be no coming back from. And it just just awful, just awful. I but but laugh inducingly bad. It's so crazy. Like and I would even note that as mean as these lines are in the written form, the line deliveries make them sound 10 times more venomous than they are on the page. I wrote down some of the comments. The sheet they're in the middle of the song. They don't even finish. Is Lavinia says, stop the tape, Paul. It's a complete waste of time. It's the same old stuff. There's nothing original about it. And they get into an argument where Kate's trying to say like, oh, I know what your problem is. You don't like the violin in the song. And I was thinking, did I hear a violin in there? I didn't hear it. We're one. I certainly didn't see one. There's no violin in the song. Yeah. And but I think that's also probably trying to be a misdirection to make the audience think maybe Kate is the girl from the prologue. Yeah, yeah. Practicing the violin. But then Lavinia says it's not the violin. It's the whole song that doesn't make it. There's something missing. I know the difference between a hit and the mundane. And, you know, so she goes on this whole rant about how she is not creative anymore. She says, you keep doing the same stupid things over and over again. And Kate's defense against the Kate's defenses are not good. She goes, I cannot make million selling records all the time. Yeah. The thing I love about Kate in this is like Lavinia is so nasty to her. Yeah. And then Kate decides to follow. Kate should by all rights at this point storm out or like slap her in the face. You would expect that in a film. But instead she suddenly opens up and becomes vulnerable about the challenges of the creative process. Yeah. To this person is just so mean to her. She's like, oh, I don't know. I just can't seem to come up with anything else. And then Lavinia lays into her again. Yes. She just twists the knife. She's like, this isn't it, honey. Maybe their relationship just really is this toxic and maybe there are creative relationships this toxic out there. I hope not because this is awful. So are we to understand this is not like a struggling band on the come up. This is a super famous, super successful band that has fallen into a creative and financial slump. Yeah. Where the best they can do is produce music on the level with John Bon Jovi's greatest hits. Yes. OK. OK. So yeah, that's what's going on. But then meanwhile you get these close ups of Daniel, the drummer in the back of the room. He's like watching this drama and it's like, I've got to do something about this. You could tell his heart is aching. It's like those scenes in Christmas vacation where Chevy Chase's character is talking about how someone should kidnap his boss and and cousin Eddie's in the background to like, you know, kind of like maybe. But in this case, Daniel's like, you know, I know a guy who has a cursed scroll. That can help us with our current creative problems. Meanwhile, LaVinia is still over there, giving more just throwing him out. Like maybe you're all washed up already finished. Yeah. Find someone who can write something for you. You know, talent, talent hack. So in the next scene, Daniel, the band's drummer, who has been watching all this unfold, he gets on a boat and he rides out into some harbor. I wasn't sure where this was. This Venice, you think? I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. He gets dropped off in this abandoned industrial area with these old crumbling factory buildings. He cuts through a chain link fence and then he wanders into a foundry room. And to meet a man named Mr. Pickett. Mr. Pickett is Donald Pleasants. And this is the first time we see him, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when he starts talking, though, he's going to have a deeper bubblier voice than your accustomed to. Doesn't sound a bit, doesn't even sound close to Donald Pleasants. He's in a trench coat and a fedora sitting in the rubble in front of a rusty refrigerator clutched by a rubble in front of a rusty refrigerator clutching a briefcase. And his trench coat seems a little too big for him, like the sleeves are swallowing his hands. He's got this childlike smile throughout the movie where he's almost kind of like a kid in a toy store. You know, he's just looking around like excited to see things. Interesting performance choice. I don't know exactly what he was going for there, but maybe that's just what it's like to be Satan. Yeah. You are perpetually a child about to be treated. Yeah. I mean, it's actually, to the limited extent, we can admire the work of Donald Pleasants in this film. It is, I can imagine him maybe making a choice to play it up this way, because a lot of times, especially in some of these lower budget, you know, Euro pictures, genre pictures, you have the sort of the standard, what you might think of as the standard Donald Pleasants delivery, where he's a very tribe villain who is very stoic about everything. I have a scroll that I will now sell you. And in this, he's got a bit of the trickster about him even early on before we have any idea that he is actually the literal devil. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. So it's not, you may God watch over you all. It's something sillier. And the like fly little demons scene illustrates that as well. We'll get to that in a minute. But so he's hanging out there and Daniel shows up and he says, hey, couldn't we have met somewhere a little less out of the way? And Pickett says, no. No, he says this place is perfect. So they've worked out some kind of transaction ahead of time on the telephone. Daniel hands Pickett a duffel bag. Pickett hands Daniel a briefcase. He instructs him on how to open it. Can you guess what the briefcase combination is? Oh, it's 666, of course. Of course, he gets, he lines them up, pops it open. Inside is a rolled up piece of parchment with a wax seal. And Pickett says the original score, his own personal seal. Daniel just rips into it. He breaks open the seal and unfurls the paper and it is a piece of sheet music. This is the Paganini song in the movie. And we cut to Daniel's apartment where he is playing the song for his band, bandmates while they stand around the piano. Actually, it's not his bandmates. It's Kate and then LaVinia, the manager or the producer. I guess they've made up. They're hanging out there together. Suddenly, it's OK. And he plays the song on the piano and LaVinia is like, yes, hell yes. This will be a hit. Really good. And many people have pointed, I didn't catch this because I wasn't as familiar with the song. I'd heard it before, but I didn't make this connection. But I saw people online pointing out that this song sounds a lot like a song by Electric Light Orchestra called, Twilight by ELO. I looked it up and I was like, oh, oh my God. Oh, it's exactly the same. Likewise. I'm familiar with certain ELO tracks. I wasn't familiar with this one, but when I looked it up, I'm like, yeah, that's it. 100 percent. Yeah. Oh boy. Well, I mean, you know, ELO, that's the Paganini, ELO. It's always one of the challenges when you have media within media. When you have something that is supposed to be a great work within, what is maybe a lesser work? Totally. You know, be it a sitcom about stand-up comedy or in this case, a horror movie about popular music. It's a real challenge. How do you create the idea of a great work, like something that is significantly and genuinely good? One way is just to borrow something from the world of successful media. And that's what they did here. Yeah. Yeah. I know exactly what you're talking about. This is a problem. A lot of people are tempted to write stories about, you know, the most beautiful poem ever written or the most beautiful piece of music or something. But like, how do you instantiate that? I think a lot of a lot of the best works that have a plot element like that include it by only alluding to it. They don't ever let you experience it directly. Yeah. Yeah. You know, they leave it to the imagination. And I think that that often is a good choice. Even if you are capable of producing a very good song or whatever, that it kind of can demystify that kind of story element to have it physically realized in the story. Anyway, so it's but it's a it's a good pop melody because it's yellow, right? Yeah. So both of the original songs from Kate and the band here are really great. So it is convincing, at least. Yeah. It's a Bon Jovi and ELO. So Daniel, he explains to them this song is originally by Nicolo Paganini. He says, I have the original parchment, the real thing. And then Lavini says, oh, well, if it's by Paganini, even though it's in the public domain, we can't use it because it's already well known. And she's adamant what the public wants, the public does not want more of the same. They want something that is totally, completely freak new, brand new. They've never seen anything like it. Which, you know, obviously, that's what people want. Yeah, they don't want to. They don't want to rehash. Yeah. Yeah. So Kate says, hold it, LaVenia. This song was never published before. Paganini wrote the song 200 years ago for a secret sect that held mysterious ceremonies at night. Don't you know about it? And she explains the whole story of how Paganini sold his soul to the devil in exchange for fame and wealth. Which, again, this is what we alluded to earlier. This is this feels like a bit in the movie that very much ties a lot of things together. I mean, doesn't completely tie everything together. But in the same way that I think that the score kind of grounds the movie, this one little nugget of of explanation and storytelling kind of grounds things to some degree and gives you at least a, I don't know, a marked trail to follow through the plot. Yes. So Kate says, it's going to be fantastic, sensational. No one has ever done anything like it before, except Michael Jackson with thriller and his fantastic video clip. And then Daniel says, we could do the same. And this is one of those moments where the over annunciation of the lines is almost overwhelming. It is really awesome. And LaVenia, she's all on board. She's like, yes, we're going to hire Mark Singer, the King of Horror. We're going to shoot it in a lonely house, the kind that scares you just to look at it. And then Kate actually has a house in mind. She says, we're going to use the Casa de Sol where musicians and composers lived centuries ago. LaVenia says, perfect. I know the girl who bought it. So, OK, well, that's good coincidence. So LaVenia explains, she says, that's it, my friends. The house of Kate's video clip, the house of Paganini and ghosts. All right. So I mean, I'd really admire the plotting at this point because we have, OK, we have a mysterious figure. We have probably cursed or haunted scroll of music that was composed for witches and no one knows about. And then we're going to shoot a music video of that music at a haunted house. What could go wrong? It seems like we're going to we have a great setup here for all sorts of angles. No new additional information needs to be introduced into the plot. So we cut to the mansion where the rest of the movie takes place. And we see somebody dressed up like the little girls doll from the prologue. So this gold corpse mask, golden violin, black cape and hat wandering around the old villa. This leads into a double fake out scene, I would say that at first it seems like it's a murder scene. And then maybe you think, wait, is this a dream scene? But then it goes on too long and you're like, I guess this is really happening. We're not in a dream at all. Yeah, I guess it's real. And then it turns out, oh, it's a movie set scene. So it's like when you are it's like in mortal combat when you see Johnny Cage fighting some guys and then somebody else cut and we pull back and see that. So Kate and the way it goes is Kate wakes up and I guess is the white wedding dress. She wakes up in this creepy house full of candles. She wanders around until she finds a piece of paper where Paganini has signed over his soul to the devil. She reads it, then she is stabbed to death with a knife by the guy with the violin. But then we call cut and we are just shooting the video clip. And I really do like the set design here because they're in a room with this giant X made out of candles on the floor. I think it's a cool setup. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine this being maybe not a thriller level music video. But but but certainly on par with some of my favorite creepier videos from the 1980s, you know? Yeah, yeah. So we we cut away and we see the crew and the director, remember the King of Horror, Mark Singer, he is just jumping all over the place with a movie camera handheld on his shoulder. So I'm sure the footage he's getting is great. It's going to be very infocussed. And in this scene, Sylvia explains Sylvia, she remembers, this is Daria Nickelode, this is her house. She says that this is the house where Paganini sold his soul to the devil, killed his wife and then made violin strings out of her and test and intestines. Quote, Paganini's violin had a very unique sound. Maybe it's because the strings played forever, the screams of his poor bride. And then LaVinia is like, ooh, that's gross. And Daria Nickelode is like, well, it's only it's only fairy tales. And then LaVinia says, I don't believe it either. So oh, after this, we get that great scene where Donald Pleasant's over the devil throws money off of the bell tower. Yeah, that big satchel full of money that he got from the drummer. Yeah, he's taking it up to the top of the tower. And at first I didn't know where this was going to go. I thought, OK, this is maybe I thought he was still a mortal at this point. A mortal, not immortal. I thought he was a mortal character. And I was like, is he going to throw himself off this tower with the money? Is it just one of these like I'm just so glad I'm free of the cursed item. But no, something else is going on. And then he's gleefully throwing the money out. Like, is if you don't really kind of a commentary, it's like money only causes you know, misery for human beings. So I have this big satchel of it. I'm just going to give it out wherever this lands. It's going to so, you know, unease. It's going to so jealousy and it's going to cause misery. So I'm just going to going to sprinkle it everywhere. This is at a place called the the company lays like a bell tower of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice. So yeah, Donald Pleasant, he goes inside. He goes up the stairs, goes on the spiral staircase, goes all the way to the top of the bell tower. And then he goes out to this viewing area with the duffel bag. And so he's throwing the wad of cash out. And he's saying, go, go all you little demons. Oh, no way. I'm actually sounding too much like Donald Pleasant. So I said, go you little demon. Yeah, there you go. Go you little demons. Fly away, little demons. Little demons. Yes, fly away. And then finally, he says, let the price for fame be extracted by the one to whom it belongs, his majesty, Satan. So I didn't pick pick up on that the first time I watched the movie. But the second time I was like, oh, OK, that explains more about the ending. So why is Satan mad? Why is he punishing these people who wanted wealth and fame because only Satan should have wealth and fame? Yeah, I mean, the least they could have done is like sing about Satan, like like fit him in the lyrics. I think that buys you a little time. Yeah. OK, so we've already talked through the the broad contours of the rest of the plot. But is there anything else you'd like to zoom in and focus on? I mean, I sort of we've talked about the main bits, but there are there is a lot of bizarre texture throughout there. The scene where they go into the room with the pit in the floor and there are just like there's MC squared scribbled on the wall. Yeah, equals MC squared. And I was like, what is going on there when I saw it? But then that made more sense when I watched the interview with Coatesy and he's like, it's science fiction. It's about Einstein and time loops. Yeah, that's what it's about. We do come back to that at the end. Yeah, I love how this is I'm not knocking this because this is a stylistic choice and it totally works for this sort of film. But I love how everyone is dressed up for the music video and they basically remain in those costumes, even when things get horrific and challenging. I think the most they do is they maybe throw a jacket on over it. But like Kate's still running around and like these crazy like leggings and straps on her legs and all. So 10 out of 10 for that. I feel like the band members are dressed up in there. They all look like they're dressed up for a music video, but for different videos. Yeah. Well, you know, it's sometimes they each have their own identity, their own visual identity in this band, this band that has no name. Well, maybe that's an allusion to the the man who has no name and that man that man is Satan, of course. Yeah, yeah, they should have it should have been like Kate and the satanic trio or something. I don't know. Then maybe Satan would have been OK with it. But again, they're not giving him any credit. I did like a lot of the invisible wall effects in the movie and the interview with Pietro Geniordi. He talks about how in the scene where the car smashes into the invisible wall, he says they did that by attaching a cable to the car and then tying the cable around a tree so they could have the car stop short at full speed for the invisible wall effect. Yeah. Go ahead. Nobody died during that. Good. Good. Good. I mean, I would hope they did that without somebody in the car. But yeah, then also they got the the the invisible wall head explosion. I thought was really good. Let's see. Any comments on sort of the conclusion? I guess one thing we didn't even really get into are the the further discovery of the mechanics about how they're going to defeat Paganini's ghost, they get the idea that you have to play the Paganini song to defeat him and then they get the idea that no, no, no, what you have to do is play the Paganini song backwards to defeat him. And somehow they never managed to do it right. So in the end, of course, all of the characters are damned. But it seems like we're going to defeat him at one point because there's a scene where the sun comes up and like the the Paganini lich character is turned to to dust to ashes, which are the ashes are shaped like a musical note on the floor. Is it a musical note? I thought it was like a treble or maybe the treble. Yeah, yeah. But something improbable occurs. Like, why would it do that? I don't know. Very stylish, though, still points for style. But yeah, it seems like, OK, well, maybe we're going with the standard, you know, Don defeats the legions of hell and everything is restored. But no, then out comes the devil. Here's Mr. Pickett, AKA Satan, and he explains like actually, yes, you're being punished now and you're in a time bubble. Like they're watching new people arrive at the mansion and he's there's this whole going to get them to. Yeah, he's going to get them to. And it's like, you're actually not in their time anymore. You're in a different time. We're in a bubble or something. And this is where we're getting, I guess, into the sci fi aspects of the picture. OK, well, I think maybe that's all I've got to say for now on Paganini horror. But yeah, this one was quite pleasantly surprising to me. If you're in the mood for something wild, wacky, all mixed up. This is this is a good choice. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, this one was a lot of fun. Certainly, if you're in the mood for something with again, just tremendously absurd dialogue and then also just so many wild plot elements. Again, it almost has it almost has first movie energy, you know, where it's like a a filmmaker has so many ideas and they realize they might only get this one chance to pull it off. So they're like way too many ideas incorporated into the thing. We kind of get that here, but for for different reasons, as we explained. Yeah. All right. We're going to go and close it out. But we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Were you familiar with Paganini horror? Do you have thoughts on any of the other Paganini films that we mentioned? Any of the pictures or the players that came up here right in, we would love to hear from you. Indeed, you have you have recommendations for other sort of banned themed horror films. We have, I think we haven't really looked at any of the key metal exploitation films out there, but there are some great ones to choose from. There are also some other good all female rocker horror and sci-fi films. I could easily see us coming back and doing some more of those. So if you have favorites right in. Howard the Duck. Oh, yeah, yeah, I forgot about that. I forgot the main human and it is Leah Thompson as a rock and roll. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. Howard the Duck is certainly on the list. All right. Just a reminder to everyone out there that stuff to blow your mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns. And we just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. If you certainly follow the show, wherever you get your social media, wherever you get your podcasts, rate, review, subscribe and all of that. And if you were on Letterbox, that you know, that excellent site for charting your own cinematic journey and your own cinematic discoveries, look us up there. Our username is Weird House. Follow us, you know, friend us or whatever. But you'll also find a list that includes all of the films we've covered on Weird House thus far and sometimes a peek ahead at what's coming up next. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Pawsway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to blow your mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.