Every Black Friday, Severin brings so much stuff for sale that starts to make you realize that it’s better to buy for yourself than give or receive. This year is no different. This is the first of several guides to what they have for sale starting tomorrow at midnight.

Up first are the Michele Soavi releases!

Cemetery Man: Throughout the 1990’s, Michele Soavi kept the traditions of Italian horror alive. Starting as an actor in films like Aliens 2: On Earth, City of the Living Dead, Demons and The New York Ripper, Soavi would also become an assistant director to greats such as Dario Argento (Tenebre, Phenomena), Lamberto Bava (Blastfighter and the previously mentioned Demons) and Terry Gilliam (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Brothers Grimm). Finally, he’d graduate to creating his own films, including Stagefright, The Sect and The Church.

Cemetary Man is based on Tiziano Sclavi’s novel Dellamorte Dellamore (the best translation is “About Death, About Love”). Sclavi also created the comic book Dylan Dog, whose protagonist looks exactly like this film’s star Rupert Everett (and which was also made into a 2011 film).

Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett, My Best Friend’s Wedding) takes care of the Buffalora cemetery. He lives in a shack, with death and his mentally challenged assistant Gnaghi his only friends. Quite frankly, his life sucks. Young punks in town tell everyone he’s impotent. And his only hobbies are putting together a skull-shaped puzzle and crossing out dead people’s names in the telephone book.

That said, he has a hell of a job to do. The gates of the cemetery read “For those who will rise again,” and after a week, the dead rises from their graves, ready to kill the living. Francesco must kill them when they rise, even if no one wants to hear what a problem he’s facing. Again, the townspeople think he’s a moron, the mayor doesn’t care and, according to Franco, the town’s bookkeeper, he’d have to do a ton of paperwork if he really wanted the help.

While watching a funeral, Dellamorte falls in love with a widow. He waits for her to visit the graveside of her dead husband, then takes her on a tour of the grounds. As they have sex on the graves, her dead spouse rises and fatally bites her. Or maybe it’s a heart attack. Or maybe she isn’t even dead.  That said, seven days later, she also rises from the dead and Dellamorte must put her down as well.

Meanwhile, Gnaghi falls in love with the mayor’s daughter, Valentina. Even when she’s decapitated, he won’t fall out of love, instead digging up her head and starting up a romance. And the widow rises again, leading Dellamorte to believe that he was the one who killed her, not her husband. This causes him to either go insane or to begin seeing the truth, as the Angel of Death appears to him, begging him to stop killing the dead and only kill the living.

The widow has become the unattainable object of Dellamorte’s desire. He even tries to talk a doctor into removing his penis so that one aspect of her, the assistant to the new mayor (oh yeah, Valentina killed her dad when he shunned her new relationship) who is afraid of penetration, will fall in love with him. That relationship ends when she is raped, loses her phobia and marries her attacker.

Dellamorte then goes into town and kills anyone who said he was impotent. Meeting a prostitute in a bar, he realizes that she is also his unattainable love. He kills her and everyone in her apartment by setting it on fire.

Remember that bookkeeper, Franco? Well, he’s killed his whole family and the other murders that Dellamorte has done are all pinned on him. He drinks iodine to kill himself, but before he dies, Dellamorte visits. While visiting, he kills a nun, a nurse and a doctor, finally trying to confess to everything but no one will believe him.

Death reveals himself again and laughs that Dellamorte has not figured out what the difference between life and death is. So our hero packs up the car, grabs Gnaghi and tries to escape the town. As they race out of a tunnel, their car wrecks and Gnaghi is critically injured.

Dellamorte fears that the rest of the world has ceased to exist. He decides to kill himself and Gnaghi before his assistant is miraculously healed. He throws Dellamorte’s gun off a cliff and the two men decide to go back home.

If you’re looking for a narrative film that makes sense, this is not the movie. If you’re seeking a dream meditation of life, love and loss, then fire up your DVD player. Or streaming device, it is 2017 after all. Shot in a real abandoned cemetery, there are moments of poetic beauty and grace, like when the floating fool’s fire lights dance around the graves as Dellamorte and She make love. And there are also moments of abject horror and dread, as the film has an incredibly memorable personification of death.

Soavi would drop out of filmmaking to take care of his sick son in the late 1990s, returning to work in television in the early 2000s. Here’s hoping that he gets another chance to return to features, as Cemetery Man is everything I love about film — strangeness that is not easily accessible or categorized.

The Severin blu ray of Cemetery Man is packed with extras, including:
DISC 1: UHD

• Audio Commentary By Director Michele Soavi And Screenwriter Gianni Romoli
• Trailers

DISC 2: BLU-RAY

• Audio Commentary By Director Michele Soavi And Screenwriter Gianni Romoli
• At The Graves – Interview With Michele Soavi
• Of Love And Death – Interview With Actor Rupert Everett
• She – Interview With Actress Anna Falchi
• Archival Making-Of

DISC 3: BLU-RAY

• A Matter Of Life And Death – Interview With Gianni Romoli
• Graveyard Shift – Interview With Cinematographer Mauro Marchetti
• Head Over Heels – Interview With Actress Fabiana Formica
• The Living Dead Mayor – Interview With Actor Stefano Masciarelli
• The Music From The Underground – Interview With Composer Riccardo Biseo
• Resurrection – Interview With Special FX Artist Sergio Stivaletti
• Cemetery Gates – Interview with Set Designer Antonello Geleng
• Grave Encounters – Interview With Alan Jones, Author Of Profondo Argento
• Trailers

DISC 4: Bonus Soundtrack CD

• Exclusive Booklet By Claire Donner Of The Miskatonic Institute Of Horror Studies

Beyond being available as a $55 UHD release, this is also available in the That’s Dellamore Bundle, which includes the Cemetery Man 4K UHD, Cemetery Man Snowglobe, Cemetery Man 4 Piece Enamel Pin Collection, the new Soavi Hall of Fame Enamel Pin and the Cemetery Man T-Shirt. If you buy those separately, they’re $158. You get them in the bundle for $142.

The Church: Michele Soavi directed four horror films from 1987 to 1994, starting with Stagefright and ending with Cemetary Man that continued the rich tradition of Italian horror. With training from Joe D’Amato and Dario Argento, as well as second unit work on two Terry Gilliam films, he emerged as a unique presence with an eye that combines those aforementioned traditions with a gaze toward the art film and the new.

Some considered this movie a sequel to the Demons series of films, with each movie all based around one cursed place. Demons was all about a movie theater (including Soavi as the Man in the Mask that lures people to their doom) and Demons 2 concerns an apartment building. There are also a million other movies that are and are not connected to that series that only Joe Bob Briggs can properly explain (or this article).

The film opens with the history of the church. Upon finding stigmata on the foot of a village girl, Teutonic Knights wipe out a village — man, woman, child and animal — burying them in a mass grave. It seems the devil had infiltrated the entire town and this was the only way to deal with it. One villager (Asia Argento) tries to escape and is impaled and tossed into the grave. The knights cover the grave with crosses and build a church upon it.

In modern times, we meet Lotte (Argento, again), the daughter of the church’s sacristan, Hermann; Evan, the new librarian who starts a relationship with Lisa (Barbara Cupisti, Stagefright, Cemetary Man), an artist restoring the artwork in the church; the bishop; the reverend (Giovanni Lombardo Radice, The Omen, City of the Living Dead, House on the Edge of the Park) and Father Gus (Hugh Quarshie, Nightbreed, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace).

The cathedral is filled with secret pathways that Lotte uses to go out clubbing, before coming back and getting slapped by her father for smelling like cigarettes and booze. There’s also a rumbling, bubbling undercurrent of pure evil presided over by black-robed monks.

Evan and Lisa may be sneaking off and making love, but he is only really in love with learning more of the church. As she finds his way to the stone with the seven eyes, he kneels before the status and tears his own heart out, holding it above his head as it beats its last, while we’re treated to fast-moving visuals of the pulsating city above the church set to the music of Philip Glass (The Church also features music by Keith Emerson and Goblin).

As the possession of Evan increases — yes, ripping out his own heart was just the start — we’re treated to a litany of insane images. Lisa is taken by a demonic goat. An elderly couple bickers and then the wife is found using her husband’s head to ring a church bell. A man kills himself with a jackhammer. A bridal party photo shoot ends with the bride model impaled. A woman is absolutely destroyed by a subway train. A giant flesh tower of dead bodies rises as the mechanics of the church kick in, trapping everyone there with death the only escape. Oh yeah — there’s also a flashback to the original builder of the church being impaled on his mechanical security system.

The Church is less about a narrative flow and more about a collection of images and moments that add up to one impressive smorgasbord. Soavi saw the other Demons films as “pizza schlock” and ended his artistic relationship with Argento with this film. Yet he was contending with a script that had a ton of other writers, including Argento, Soavi, Franco Ferrini, Lamberto Bava, Dardano Sacchetti (who wrote nearly every major Fulci movie, as well as A Bay of Blood and Shock), Fabrizio Bava and Nick Alexander. What emerges is a wild exercise in style, featuring a multitude of references to artwork both religious and modern, including the painting “Vampire’s Kiss” by Boris Vallejo.

If you’re expecting a movie that’s easy to follow, I suggest you find another one to watch. But if you’re searching for arresting visuals and a technically proficient director who has a ton of visual tricks he wants to blow your mind with, then by all means, get ready to experience The Church.

The Severin UHD release has the following extras:

DISC 1: UHD

• Trailer

DISC 2: BLU-RAY

• The Mystery Of The Cathedrals – Interview With Director Michele Soavi
• Alchemical Possession – Interview With Co-Screenwriter/Producer Dario Argento
• The Eleventh Commandment – Interview With Co-Screenwriter Franco Ferrini
• The Ghostwriter – Interview With Co-Screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti
• Lotte – Interview With Actress Asia Argento
• Here Comes The Bride – Interview With Actress Antonella Vitale
• A Demon Named Evan – Interview With Actor Tomas Arana
• Father Giovanni – Interview With Actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice
• Monsters And Demons – Interview With Special FX Artist Sergio Stivaletti
• Holy Ground – Interview With Make-Up Artist Franco Casagni
• Building The Church – Interview With Set Designer Antonello Geleng
• The Right-Hand Man – Interview With Assistant Director Claudio Lattanzi
• Return To The Land Of The Demons– Interview With Alan Jones, Author Of Profondo Argento
• Trailer

DISC 3: Bonus Soundtrack CD

• Exclusive Booklet By Claire Donner Of The Miskatonic Institute Of Horror Studies

There’s a ton of merch that goes with The Church which you can buy indivdually or as part of the Our Soavi-est bundle of the sale! This one includes all THREE Brand New Soavi titles: The Sect 4K UHD, The Church 4K UHD, and Cemetery Man 4K UHD, as well as the Cemetery Man Snowglobe and 4 Piece Enamel Pin Collection, the new Soavi Hall of Fame Enamel Pin, The Sect Pendant, The Church – Stone With Seven Eyes Pendant, The Church Goat Demon 3D Metal Keychain and Gang Bang Woven Patch, Soavi Signed Postcard, The Sect T-Shirt, The Church T-Shirt and Cemetery Man T-Shirt. It’s all worth $370 but costs $299.

There’s one more release!

The Sect: Between Ed Sanders’ book The Family — which examines the origins of Manson’s Family — and Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil — which suggests that a worldwide network of Satanists is responsible for the Manson family and Son of Sam murders, we’ve come to accept the notion of an organized army of evil. But who are they?

In the revised 2002 edition of The Family, Sanders referenced the Process Chuch of the Final Judgement as the “satanic group of English origin” behind these killings. The Process successfully sued Sanders’ publisher to remove this reference.

That said the die was cast. By 1980, books like Michelle Remembers suggested a deep conspiracy of Satanic ritual abuse. The Satanic Panic of the 80’s found sacrifice and worship around every corner. Perhaps the author you’re reading now was targeted. Yet no real evidence has ever been found.

Michele Soavi’s The Sect concerns that network of Satan as they prepare the way for the Antichrist. From a commune being slaughtered in the early 1970s — a scene with references to the Rolling Stones that repeat throughout the film — to multiple modern murders that follow, including a heart being left on a train and a suicide in public, the devil’s helpers are organized, know how to plan and are well ahead of the rest of society.

Just a note — as cheesy as Sympathy for the Devil reads today — The Rolling Stones were at the forefront of the occult 60s thanks to their association with Kenneth Anger.  If you’re interested in learning more, I’d heartily recommend Gary Lachman’s Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius.

But let’s get back to The Sect. In modern Germany, schoolteacher Miriam Kreisl (Kelly Curtis, sister of Jamie Lee) saves Moebius Kelly (Herbert Lom, Hammer’s The Phantom of the Opera) after an accident and brings him back to her house. Within a few hours, he’s injecting her and shoving beetles up her nose while she sleeps and giving her nightmares of a giant bird having sex with her.

From there, the film descends into more of a series of nightmares than a fixed narrative. That makes sense once you realize that its origins in three different scripts that producer Dario Argento, director Michele Soavi and writer Gianni Romoli couldn’t finish. So you’re left with a film with a giant glowing blue gateway to Hell in the basement, a plot to conceive the Antichrist much like Rosemary’s Baby, an evil Shroud of Turin that can kill and bring people back from the dead and, oh yeah, a super smart rabbit named Rabbit who can use a TV remote.

The Sect has some references to other films, with the first victim being named Marion Crane (Psycho) and another named Martin Romero (obviously, George Romero and his Braddock vampire film Martin).

Following Soavi’s Stagefright and The Church, this film offers less of the pure insanity that he’d bring to bear in his next film (and sadly, final horror film) Cemetery Man. Yet a restrained Soavi is still more visually inventive than a hundred lesser directors. From images of animal-masked children to the evil Jesus that smokes up and annihilates hippies in the flashback, there’s a continual undercurrent of menace and doom.

Strange symbols just appear. People disappear even after we see them arrive. Or they die in airplane accidents and still appear. Kathryn (Mariangela Giordano, Evelyn from Burial Ground, she of the incestual zombie child relationship) shows up to get smothered by the previously mentioned evil shroud. Worms show up in the water. A possessed Kathryn convinces a trucker to kill her. Rabbit symbolism abounds. Kathryn gets back up off the operating table and attacks Miriam before killing herself again, which a doctor tries to explain as a commonplace thing. Long black tunnels lead to a sinister mortuary. The doctor who couldn’t save Kathryn and Damon, the Jesus-like killer from the opening, are working together. A woman’s face is ripped clean off, Hellraiser-style. Even trusted detective Frank is taken over and wants to kill Kathryn now that he knows her secret. Whew. I hope these short bursts of words give you an idea of just how much happens in this movie. It never really lets up, becoming more and more unreal.

Moebius comes back to life to tell Miriam that every moment of her life has been planned, that they own her, that everything has been for this moment of indescribable joy. The cult gathers as the doctor injects her, sending her to sleep.

Finally, the devil comes to take Miriam. In shadow form, he appears to be human, but what attacks her is a giant bird that pecks at her neck and has his way with her. The cult lowers her into a pit as Moebius raves, screaming that he is her father and that she will give birth to the Antichrist. As she waits in the blue basement water, midwives swim around her, facilitating the birth as the moon slowly goes dark.

A giant amniotic sac with a child inside is lifted as the moon goes completely black.

In a shot straight out of Rosemary’s Baby, Miriam moves through the crowd to see what Moebius refers to as their “revenge against God.” He offers her the chance to raise the child.

Cut to her kneeling, beatific in white, as she stares into the blue waters of the well below. The doctor attempts to be tender to her, but Miriam tosses her down the pit.  She makes her way to the rest of the cult and accepts her child, running with it as a motorcyclist chases her and crashes, creating a giant wall of fire.

Moebius screams that they are ger family now. Miriam kneels into the flames of the crashed motorcycle and sacrifices herself to destroy the baby and Moebius.

Fire crews put out the bodies as we see their charred remains wash away — except Miriam is still alive under all of the ash. An eagle circles the sky as Miriam believes that her son saved her.

The Sect is crazy, but it still doesn’t feel as strange as The Church or Stagefright. Yet again, when compared to any other film, it’s odd as hell. It flies by, a mix of imagery and ideas that takes you on a whirling dervish of a ride.

The Severin UHD of The Sect has the following extras:

DISC 1: UHD

• U.S. Release Trailer

DISC 2: BLU-RAY

• Sympathy For The Devil – Interview With Director Michele Soavi
• (You’re The) Devil In Disguise – Interview With Co-Screenwriter/Producer Dario Argento
• Catacumba – Interview With Co-Screenwriter Gianni Romoli
• Cult Of Personality – Interview With Actor Tomas Arana
• Owner Of A Lonely Heart – Interview With Actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice
• In The Shaded Area – Interview With Cinematographer Raffaele Mertes
• Four Times Argento – Interview With Composer Pino Donaggio
• Total Eclipse – Interview With Special FX Artist Sergio Stivaletti
• Oh Well – Interview With Set Designer Antonello Geleng
• The Birth Of Evil – Interview With Film Historian Fabrizio Spurio
• Into The Dark Well – Interview With Alan Jones, Author Of Profondo Argento
• Catacomb In The Kitchen – Michele Soavi Shows Us His Dark Basement
• Italian Trailer
• U.S. Release Trailer

DISC 3: Bonus Soundtrack CD

• Exclusive Booklet By Claire Donner Of The Miskatonic Institute Of Horror Studies

There’s so much more but we’ll get to that in another post. See you at midnight at Severin!