REST IN PIECES (1987) Blu-ray
Director: Jose Ramon Larraz (as Joseph Braunstein)
Vinegar Syndrome

"Their dream house brought them together...Their neighbors are tearing them apart!" when Jose Ramon Larraz gets as mainstream as he ever could in REST IN PIECES, on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome.

Helen Hewitt (Lorin Jean Vail, FLEX) and her tennis coach husband Bob (Scott Thompson Baker, OPEN HOUSE) travel to Spain for the reading of the will of her estranged aunt Catherine (Dorothy Malone, THE BIG SLEEP) via a videotape in which she promises Helen riches beyond her wildest dreams before taking strychnine and dying on camera. It is not until the young couple arrives at the estate Eight Manors that they discover the inheritance has some catches. Firstly, Catherine never believed in banks, so the money is hidden somewhere on the property. Secondly, they must continue to let Helen's dear friends – psychiatrist Dr. Anderson, blind David Hume (Jack Taylor, FEMALE VAMPIRE), Reverend Flaherty (Z-CARS' Jeffrey Segal), novelist Stuart Whitmore, sexpot maid Lisa (Carole James, BEAKS: THE MOVIE), gardener Louis (Daniel Katz, THE SEXUAL STORY OF O), stern Gertrude (Paty Shepard, THE WEREWOLF VERSUS THE VAMPIRE WOMAN), and simple-minded Jack (Fernando Bilbao, THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN) – occupy six of the eight chalets on the property rent-free for the rest of their unnatural lives. While Helen starts experiencing increasingly deadly supernatural attacks from the ghost of her aunt, Bob thinks the others are just trying to scare them off. What neither of them know is that Catherine's friends engage in a murderous type of group therapy under Dr. Anderson and are anticipating Catherine's return from beyond the grave through Helen.

Clad in eighties hair, shoulder-pads, and a metal soundtrack, REST IN PIECES seems miles away from director Jose Ramon Larraz's more gothic and transgressive works from SYMPTOMS to VAMPYRES, although it does share some elements. The cult of Aunt Catherine's possibly-undead friends are similar to some of the cult-like groups who draw the young and innocent into webs of perversion while husband Bob is cast in the ambiguous mold of other outwardly well-adjusted males in Larraz's films. Of Larraz's previous works, REST IN PIECES most resembles BLACK CANDLES minus the atmosphere and constant sex, but it also calls to mind the Texas-lensed supernatural slasher PLAY DEAD which shares a backstory of enmity between a pair of sisters which leads THE MUNSTERS' Yvonne de Carlo to supernaturally terrorize her niece with a bewitched Rottweiler that kills her friends. Indeed, REST IN PIECES is one of a trio of late period horror films for Larraz that also included the American-lensed gothic slasher DEADLY MANOR and the more traditional EDGE OF THE AXE (filmed partially in America and in Spain) which downplayed but did not entirely dilute Larraz's style in favor of a more "generic" or Americanized look and feel. In this respect, REST IN PIECES suffers the most, with a bright TV look, a soap opera-looking cast – Baker's soap career would not start until he returned to the states – and a "manor" and chalets that look more like a suburban housing track of "McMansions" with perhaps the most Spanish element being Tony Isbert (THE DRACULA SAGA) as the family lawyer; indeed, one wonders why the film was not set somewhere in the states with the locations and the tagline "Their dream house brought them together...Their neighbors are tearing them apart!" VAMPYRES editor/producer Brian Smedley-Aston (SQUIRM) edited the film.

Released direct-to-video by International Video Entertainment, REST IN PIECES was long in coming to the digital format, but Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer from a 4K restoration of the 35mm original camera negative adds a degree of gloss to a film that has always looked good on video thanks to the bright "soap opera" look of the film's cinematography with only the opening credits opticals looking a bit contrasty (although that is as much due to the still photographs taken on the sly to establish Los Angeles before the story proper begins in Spain). Dialogue and effects are clear on the sync-sound English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track, and the score has presence. Since English was spoken on the set and everyone here is recorded sync-sound, the inclusion of the Spanish dub in Dolby Digital 2.0 mono is less essential (although Vail sound less dreadful dubbed by someone else). The English SDH subtitles do trip a couple times over the thick accents (with "in due course" becoming "of the curse").

The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by film historians Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan, who also provided commentary on Arrow's DEADLY MANOR, discussing Larraz's gothic leanings, his themes including sexuality and the constraints of gender roles – including a hilarious set anecdote in which the Spanish crew were under the impression that Vail was a transsexual – and Larraz's disinterest in the traditionally supernatural genre elements. Ellinger also draws from Larraz's autobiography in which his lack of acknowledgement of the cast apart from the young leads similarly suggests his disinterest in the Spanish horror tradition. Actor Baker appears in the new interview "Piece by Piece" (17:22) in which he recalls the film as his first role after moving to Los Angeles, shooting still photographs at LAX for the opening credits, noting the American and British actors in the cast but mainly hanging around with the British sound engineers and coming up with the release title while joking with them (the working title was simply REST IN PEACE). Although he did not see the film upon release, he thought it was awful just from the script and the shooting but now, having seen it, appreciates it more as a campy horror film than a serious effort. The cover is reversible while a limited edition embossed slipcover is available with the first 3,000 copies ordered directly from Vinegar Syndrome. (Eric Cotenas)

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