Ryan K
08-17-2006, 10:19 PM
Has anbody seen Dario Argento's film Jenifer? It was Argento's short film for Showtime's Masters of Horror, and was just released on DVD Tuesday.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0643108/
I bought the DVD and watched it tonight. Pretty good, nothing spectacular. Very gory, but kind of predictable. But when I was watching some of the special features, Argento said the movie was based on a comic book. Turns out its based on a Bruce Jones' story from Creepy #63 illustrated by Bernie Wrightson also called Jenifer.
Has anybody read the story or seen the movie?
The Masters of Horror series prided itself and kind of marketed itself as a horror anthology that would allow the director's to do whatever it wanted. However they censored Argento's Jenifer and refused to air Takashi Miike's film Imprint (can't wait to see that one). I'd read online reports and I beleive a report in Fangoria magazine that Jenifer would be restored for its DVD release. This was incorrect. But the scenes that were deleted are included in the Dario Argento interview featurette. For those of you that saw the film on Showtime and didn't see theses scenes, and don't want to buy the DVD, I shall provide spoilers. Spoilers which included a bit about the ending of the film so the rest of you are warned.
-There's 4 or so seconds clipped out of the scene where Jenifer and Steven Weber have sex in the car. When Jenifer performs oral sex on Weber there's a couple second shown where her deformed mouth is on his penis (prosthetic I'm sure).
-This next one's real bad. At the end of the movie, when Jenifer is eating the groin area of the shop lady's son in the basement, there's a lingering (7 or 8 second) shot of Jenifer with his penis in her mouth chewing on it. She releases it and the penis clearly has a biteful missing from the head. She then bites at it again.
Fairly unsettling stuff. And its easy to see why even showtime would shy away from that. It would easily get an NC-17 from the MPAA. Still, I wish for the DVD release it would have been edited back in. Not because I think it would have added anything to the movie, but because Argento intended it there, he wouldn't have objected to it being restored, and because the DVD was probably the last place to do it. Oh well.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0643108/
I bought the DVD and watched it tonight. Pretty good, nothing spectacular. Very gory, but kind of predictable. But when I was watching some of the special features, Argento said the movie was based on a comic book. Turns out its based on a Bruce Jones' story from Creepy #63 illustrated by Bernie Wrightson also called Jenifer.
Has anybody read the story or seen the movie?
The Masters of Horror series prided itself and kind of marketed itself as a horror anthology that would allow the director's to do whatever it wanted. However they censored Argento's Jenifer and refused to air Takashi Miike's film Imprint (can't wait to see that one). I'd read online reports and I beleive a report in Fangoria magazine that Jenifer would be restored for its DVD release. This was incorrect. But the scenes that were deleted are included in the Dario Argento interview featurette. For those of you that saw the film on Showtime and didn't see theses scenes, and don't want to buy the DVD, I shall provide spoilers. Spoilers which included a bit about the ending of the film so the rest of you are warned.
-There's 4 or so seconds clipped out of the scene where Jenifer and Steven Weber have sex in the car. When Jenifer performs oral sex on Weber there's a couple second shown where her deformed mouth is on his penis (prosthetic I'm sure).
-This next one's real bad. At the end of the movie, when Jenifer is eating the groin area of the shop lady's son in the basement, there's a lingering (7 or 8 second) shot of Jenifer with his penis in her mouth chewing on it. She releases it and the penis clearly has a biteful missing from the head. She then bites at it again.
Fairly unsettling stuff. And its easy to see why even showtime would shy away from that. It would easily get an NC-17 from the MPAA. Still, I wish for the DVD release it would have been edited back in. Not because I think it would have added anything to the movie, but because Argento intended it there, he wouldn't have objected to it being restored, and because the DVD was probably the last place to do it. Oh well.