La Frusta E Il Corpo 1963 1080p BluRay x265 Hevc 10bit AAC 2.0 Dual-HeVK

The Whip and the Body (1963), aka La frusta e il corpo, directed by Mario Bava, restored and remastered, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including original Italian theatrical stereo, English stereo dub, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057078/

Video encoded in two-pass 9 500 kbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image.

English subtitles OCRed, proofed and corrected.

Note : Some more gothic horror from Mario Bava here, but this film became very controversial and even banned in cinemas in Italy because of the themes of sadomasochism that run throughout. Christopher Lee is an excellent lead, doing his usual sneering evil nobleman thing, this time with added flogging, and this is perhaps as gothic as any color film has looked, with deep blacks pierced by Bava's beloved colored gels.

It's in essence a psychological ghost story, a young nobleman named Kurt returns to his father's castle in spite of having been banished after his affair with a servant's daughter led to her suicide and him breaking off his engagement to the beautiful Nevenka. In his absence, Nevenka has married his brother Cristiano, but she might still be longing for Kurt and their... special sexual practices. No one seems particularly happy to see him back, but things get even worse when he's mysteriously murdered, and then apparently starts haunting the castle as perhaps the world's first BDSM ghost, doling out nightly whippings to a confused but excited Nevenka.

This is a pretty good looking remaster, with the exception of some shots with optical effects, and it conserves the contrasty, saturated look of the cinematography very well. Both the original Italian track and the English dub sound fine. Too bad there's no commentary track, I'm sure a lot could be said about this, how it got made, and how it had trouble with distribution.

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