Verdict
Summary
Celluloid Dreams, one of the newest boutique labels out there, has just released an massive four-disc edition of Short Night of Glass Dolls, which seems to be an indication that they’re here to stay and they’re not just playing around. The film is presented in a restored transfer that I’d guess is the best the film has ever looked, and if you own the Twilight Time Blu-ray, you can put that one to bed (permanently) because this edition completely supersedes it in every way.
Plot:
A man lies comatose on a slab in the morgue, but his consciousness is very much alive and he struggles to remember the last few days of his life.
Review:
Greg (Jean Sorel) is a journalist from America goes to Czechoslovakia to visit his beautiful girlfriend (played by Barbara Bach) whom he’s hoping to try to whisk away to London so that she can seek political asylum away from the Soviet regime. While in Prague with her, Greg stumbles onto a story that he zeroes in on: young women are being found naked and dead, discarded like trash, and he’s stunned when his girlfriend suddenly disappears. During his brief visit to this country he’s basically a fish out of water in, he begins searching for his girlfriend, while also nosing in on sort of underground world of decadence and hedonism. And then something catastrophic happens: Greg ends up dead – and in the morgue! Doctors are flummoxed by his condition because while he has the typical appearance of a dead man, he has no rigor mortis and his body temperature is higher than that of a corpse. Is he dead? Really dead? Well, no! Greg is trapped in his own body, and he screams out that he’s alive, but it’s as if a spell has been cast on him, and he is powerless, completely and entirely. He struggles to remember how he came to be in the lowly state, and it’s somehow connected to the deaths of all the women, as well as the disappearance of his girlfriend, whom we discover is also dead. At some point, Greg stumbled into an underground society of Satanists and a black mass ritual that explains everything!
An eerie and unsettling giallo-adjacent horror thriller, Short Night of Glass Dolls has a hopeless, doom-filled vibe for fans of the genre, and with its supernatural twist, the movie collides with Satanic cult films such as Rosemary’s Baby, The Mephisto Waltz, and any number of other culty movies from the ’70s. Director Aldo Lado sets the grim tone with a matter-of-fact frankness that treats the proceedings completely seriously, without an ounce of pretense or irony. The film has an Italian flavor, while being filmed in Yugoslavia and West Germany. It was scored by Ennio Morricone.
Celluloid Dreams, one of the newest boutique labels out there, has just released an massive four-disc edition of Short Night of Glass Dolls, which seems to be an indication that they’re here to stay and they’re not just playing around. The film is presented in a restored transfer that I’d guess is the best the film has ever looked, and if you own the Twilight Time Blu-ray, you can put that one to bed (permanently) because this edition completely supersedes it in every way. The four-discs contain the 4K HD version, the standard Blu-ray, a disc with bonus features, and another disc with an alternate VHS version (known as the “Paralyzed Version.”). There’s also a 35mm “grindhouse version”. The film comes with two audio commentary tracks, but Twilight Time’s commentary is not ported over. It has an isolated score track, plus seven featurettes, and more. The four discs come in a sturdy package, a hard shell slipcover, and there’s a thick booklet that sort of sticks out of the box, which is my only complaint for this solid release. The only thing missing here is a CD disc, but since there’s an isolated score track, I guess that’s fine.
