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Collector’s box on the horizon: Severin assembles hours of video extras and text illumination for another group of films featuring favorite actor Christopher Lee. The roundup of titles bookends his career as a screen vampire, with one of Lee’s earliest vampire roles and also his last turn as Count Dracula. Looming large on the academic side of Severin’s research are experts and biographers Kat Ellinger, Barry Forshaw, Troy Howarth, Kim Newman, Nathaniel Thompson and Jonathan Rigby, who also contributes a hundred-page book.

The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee Collection 2

Blu-ray

Uncle Was a Vampire, The Secret of the Red Orchid, Dark Places, Dracula and Son, Murder Story

Severin Films

1959-1989 / Color / 2:39 widescreen, 1:66 widescreen, 1:85 widescreen

Street Date July 26, 2022

Available from Severin Films / 134.95

Starring alphabetically: Marie Hélène Breillat, Catherine Breillat, Joan Collins, Robert Hardy, Adrian Hoven, Klaus Kinski, Sylva Koscina, Herbert Lom, Susanne Loret, Jean Marsh, Marisa Mell,...

May 31st sees the release of The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee Collection 2 from Severin Films, bringing more cult classic Christopher Lee films to Blu-ray, including Uncle Was a Vampire and Dracula and Son! We have all the details below, along with a trailer, and a look at the box set artwork:

The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee Collection 2

To celebrate the centennial of the legendary actor, Eurocrypt Collection 2 presents five of the most unexpected, underrated and underseen films of the iconic actor’s European career. Immediately following Horror Of Dracula, Lee reprised the role in the quirky 1959 Italian comedy Uncle Was A Vampire. Lee speaks fluent German opposite Klaus Kinski for the crazed 1962 krimi Secret Of The Red Orchid. In the 1974 UK psycho-thriller Dark Places, Lee toplines a cast that includes Joan Collins, Herbert Lom and Jane Birkin. Lee’s final performance as The Count in the 1976 French comedy Dracula And Son...

Italian film director and screenwriter who established a new school of social-realist comedy

The Italian film director Mario Monicelli has died aged 95, after jumping out of a hospital window in Rome. Monicelli directed more than 60 films, most of which he co-wrote. He was best known for I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal On Madonna Street, 1958), which was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language film. It was remade by Louis Malle as Crackers (1984) and turned into a Broadway musical, Big Deal, by Bob Fosse in 1986. Monicelli's original is one of the most internationally admired Italian comedies of the past 60 years.

Born in Viareggio, Tuscany, Monicelli was the son of a journalist, Tomaso Monicelli, who founded one of the earliest Italian film magazines. Tomaso killed himself in 1946. Mario studied at the universities of Milan and Pisa and took an early interest in films. With the future publisher Alberto Mondadori, he collaborated...

Marcello Mastroianni, Renato Salvatori, Vittorio Gassman, Big Deal on Madonna Street (top); Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi, The Great War (middle); Anna Magnani, Totò, The Passionate Thief (bottom) Mario Monicelli, the (co)writer-director of Italian cinema classics such as I soliti ignoti / Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), La grande guerra / The Great War (1959), and I compagni / The Organizer (1963), leapt to his death from a fifth-story hospital window in Rome. Monicelli, who had been suffering from prostate cancer, was 95. Though not nearly as internationally known as, say, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Franco Zeffirelli, Monicelli was perhaps the best portraitist of Italian sociopolitical mores during the second half of the 20th century. For instance, one of Monicelli's earliest efforts (co-directed with Steno aka Stefano Vanzina), Vita da cani / A Dog's Life (1950), chronicled the travails of a provincial theater troupe in post-World War II Italy. Aldo [...]...