The Egyptian is hosting a short Italian Grindhouse festival these next 7 days! Yesterday featured the legendary Cemetary Man as well as Argento's Opera. Fortunately for those that missed this double, both are available at Amoeba. Tonight the Cinematheque is showing a Carroll Baker double with Paranoia (Orgasmo) & A Quiet Place to Kill (A Drug Called Helen). Over the next week they'll cover sword and sandal territory, spaghetti westerns, psychedellic giallo & italo-crime. Films featuring Edwige Fenech, John Cassavetes, Klaus Kinski, Steve Reeves, Christopher Lee & many more favorites. Many not on DVD!

Compete Calendar here.

Egyptian Theatre
6712 Hollywood Blvd. (@ Las Palmas)

Mummy films are unique among classic monster movies in that they're neither primarily based upon myths or literature. Only Isaac Henderson's 1902 play, The Mummy and the Hummingbird and Bram Stoker's 1903 novel, Jewel of the Seven Stars, have inspired cinematic adaptations (the latter spawning four to date) with its subject of an archaeologist attempting to revive a mummy. There were a few examples of the mummy in literature, as with Edgar Allan Poe's "Some Words with a Mummy," Théophile Gautier's The Romance of a Mummy, Ambrose Pratt's The Living Mummy, Louisa May Alcott's "Lost in a Pyramid or, The Mummy’s Curse" and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lot No. 249" and "The Ring of Thoth" all deal with mummies, albeit not always in a horror setting, and have never even loosely been adapted into film.

The rise of mummy films seem to be directly related to a then-widespread interest in archaeology and, more specifically, an enduring western vogue for Orientalism and fascination with the Near East.  Several major discoveries in the field of Egyptology occurred in the 20th century and helped renew and increase interest in one the the planet's oldest, most complex and enduring civilizations. Yet fascination with Egyptian mummies, with their tantalizing ties to the ancient past, never really translated into a healthy monster subgenre, only sporadically rising to the level of more continually popular monsters like vampires and ghosts.

Film fans in Los Angeles take note, the Egyptian is screening some very rare and completely amazing Giallo this month.

For those of you unfamiliar with the genre a quick search on Wikipedia comes up with this:

Giallo (pronounced IPA: ['ʤallo]) is an Italian 20th century genre of literature and film. It is closely related to the French fantastique genre, crime fiction, horror fiction and eroticism. The term is also used to mean an example of the genre, in which case it can take the Italian plural gialli. The word giallo is Italian for "yellow" (see Wiktionary: giallo) and stems from the genre's origin in paperback novels with yellow covers.  

All genres have their fair share of crap to wade through, but I feel Giallo is one of the most difficult. It's a catch all genre that DVD companies and, in the past, tape traders padded full of dull "action films," painful "horror" and sleep inducing "sexploitation." Aaah, but like a good Roughie, when you find the right film, it's well worth the wade through the dirty waters. Although the Egyptian festival is by no means complete, it's an amazing selection.There are so many interesting, if not great, Giallos that it would take an annual festival to really do it right....Anyone listening???