Has anyone seen this?


I found a very low-quality copy of this on VHS at a thrift store for 50 cents. It's hard to fairly judge what I just saw because the dubbing and duplication were so bad, but all I could give this was 5/10 stars based on what I saw.

Joan Collins is voicing English, while the rest of the cast appears to be speaking Italian. All the dialogue is dubbed. Has anyone seen a better version, and does anyone know if this even played in U.S. theaters?

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Hey, WarpedRecord,

I just found a copy of this film at the back of my old DVD shelf!!!

I don't know how long I have had it for, but it is still sealed in its shrink-wrap packaging......

It is a Payless double DVD, and this copy of it is called 'Fatal Charm', and is coupled with Goldie Hawn in 'Lovers and Liars'.

It was in a bargain bin for $2.....or that's what the sticker on the front cover tells me.

I'll give it a viewing sometime this week, and I'll let you know how it looks.


^_^







The Opener of the Way is waiting....

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Hello, Anubis-45:

Thanks for the reply! Please let me know what you think of the film once you get through it ... assuming you are able to. I found it a challenge, and almost five years later, I barely remember watching it.

I'm pretty sure I unloaded my cheapo VHS of this film at a thrift store a few years ago, along with a cheapo DVD of "Lovers and Liars." That seems to be a good double bill because both are foreign productions featuring English-speaking stars from, shall we say, the second tier.

There are a lot of these productions that appear to have fallen into the public domain, with questionable copies flooding the market. I find it very difficult to judge whether the movies are actually any good because the copies are so poor and probably severely trimmed.

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Hello again, WarpedRecord,

I got around to watching this movie last evening, and whilst I thought that it was a (reasonably) good yarn, I felt that it was completely spoiled by the narrow screen size, which was smaller that 4x3, in fact it was almost in a square format!! In some scenes, the characters were half cut out of the picture altogether. It was, as you noted, almost impossibly dark, which made it all the more difficult to follow.

The sound quality was bordering on the atrocious, with muted and muffled, dubbed, dialogue, and an annoying effect ( - whatever were they striving for? -) of having one blaring piece of soundtrack music emanating from the (R) channel, whilst another, non-related and unsynchronised piece of music was playing in the (L) channel.... To say that this made it jarringly difficult to listen to would be an understatement....

The acting was mid-1970s schlock, with the only redeeming features being Joan Collins' <ahem> upper attributes, and some very nice 1970s motor vehicles, which included a nice green Porsche 911 Cabrio, and a gorgeous yellow Honda CB750F, which was being ridden, very erratically and dangerously, through heavy city traffic, by Maurizio Merli - or, at least, his stunt double....

I see what you mean about Joan Collins being the only one to be speaking English, for her dialogue was the only such that lined up with her lip movements. The rest of the dubbing was barely adequate, but I got the gist of it.

Some nice action scenes, which mostly revolved around our 'hero' beating up, or being beaten up by, various other thugs....and, at one stage, one of the bad dudes gets whacked through a glass window with a garden shovel....nice touch.! (That brought a "YES!" from my lips....)

By the 1:25 mark, I was beginning to do a bit of squirming in my seat, and then, at 1:28, it just sort of ground to a final halt, and the credits rolled.

I rewound and replayed the final two words that the Merli character said to his accomplice, a few times, but I couldn't make out what they were.....Maybe you could enlighten me???

Oh well......What was I expecting for One Dollar? Perhaps Goldie Hawn in the accompanying 'Lovers and Liars' will justify the other Dollar spent.......

Twanged it off and out, and headed for bed.

Zzzzzzzzzzz.


^_^




The Opener of the Way is waiting....

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Hello, Anubis-45:

Thanks for your thoughts. It sounds like we both agree that this film is pretty much eye candy, and as such, it's really junk food. This was made during a much different era -- an era that I love -- and it probably has to be seen from that perspective to be appreciated -- or should that be tolerated? This was before the era of home video, and pay cable was barely just getting started, so audiences weren't very selective.

Joan Collins is smokin' hot here, when I think she was in her prime, but unfortunately I remember very little about this film five years after I last saw it. Sorry, but I can't help you with what Merli said to his accomplice. I'm pretty sure I donated this film to a thrift store a few years ago, along with a few thousand other titles, including "Lovers and Liars."

Hopefully you'll have better luck with "Lovers and Liars," another film I barely remember. The very talented and very prolific Giancarlo Giannini is in that one, but as I recall he wasn't a very good pairing with Goldie Hawn. I gave both of these 5/10 stars, so I found them pretty average. But the fact that these copies are so distractingly bad might have something to do with the low rating.

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I just watched a high quality copy streaming on Prime and I was quite surprised when Joan Collins appeared. I not sure of her age at filming but she was amazingly beautiful in this.

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