Since my trip to Italy I’ve been thinking a lot about the Poliziottesco genre of Italian b-movies. I’ve also been watching my fair share. Raro Video, a publishing house located in Minneapolis, has been brilliant enough to re-release a lot of these films on DVD and BLU-RAY. I worked my way through Fernando Di Leo’s Crime Collection (volume 1), and I’m working on volume 2 currently. What’s more, I got my hands on a copy of Young, Violent, Dangerous (1976) while in Italy—which I plan on watching this weekend.
Raro Video tweeted out a clip from Young, Violent, and Dangerous today that’s got me excited. When I watch it I feel like I’m back in the VHS rental stores of my youth scanning the b-movie section.
They also tweeted out a link to the DVD menu for the upcoming release of Umberto Lenzi’s Gang War in Milan (1973).
Raro Video was recently written up by J. Hoberman in the New York Times about their work “Reissuing the Italian Renaissance.” I love the title of this article, though its larger point is not fully articulated in the piece. The genre b-movies coming out of Italy from the 1960s through the 1980s were a low-budget renaissance of their own that the Italians still refuse to acknowledge. For far too many Italian cinema ends with Pasolini, Fellini, and Antonioni. While I can’t (and won’t) deny these directors’ genius, there’s another, equally influential, strain of genius in Italian cinema that begins with Mario Bava 😉
Netflix doesn’t have enough of these. I feel deprived.
Sharing is caring 😉