Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		5.0
Overall		3.5

Footprints Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 25, 2022

Note: This film is available on Blu-ray as part of House of Psychotic Women Rarities Collection.

Kier-la Janisse has been on the busy side for Severin Films lately, what with any number of supplemental productions as well as both this latest collection and the earlier, in some ways more grandiose, All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror. In that regard, it's kind of ironic in a way that at least some "folk horror" outings tend to feature women who are perceived to be psychotic, or perhaps if not afflicted to that level, emotionally troubled, in plot devices that see "innocents" confronted with some otherworldly horror that no one else believes is real. The "psychoses" in this set are probably more overtly manifest, in that they seem to be objective (mis?)behaviors rather than how others are interpreting those (mis?)behaviors, but one way or the other this is another rather remarkable collection of films curated by Janisse that should attract some niche attention. This set is kind of a companion piece to the eponymous tome Janisse published around a decade ago, which she termed "an autobiographical topography of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films", and which is being republished in tandem with this set in an expanded version (Severin is offering a deluxe bundle featuring the book).

My "geek flag" was probably nowhere more in evidence than in my The Oscar Blu-ray review of the infamous 1966 film starring Stephen Boyd. That review spent a good deal of time talking about one of the actual pluses of that largely lamented film, namely that it had a pretty terrific score by Percy Faith, who was otherwise better known for his so-called "easy listening" albums that often produced top selling singles, including notable film music covers like Faith's rendition of the "Theme from A Summer Place". One of Faith's few other original feature film scores was for a now little remembered 1965 opus called The Third Day, which dealt with an amnesiac trying to piece together a murder mystery where he's the main suspect. Footprints also deals with an amnesiac and a three day time period, and without posting too much of a spoiler it definitely ends up being about a murder (if one not drenched in "whodunit" mystery), but it's a decidedly more psychedelic viewing experience than a glossy Hollywood produced entry from the mid-sixties.

Alice (Florinda Bolkan) is an interpreter who has no memory of the past three days, with the only clue being a torn and discarded postcard advertising a resort town called Garma. If she can't remember the recent past, Alice is almost obsessively haunted by long term memories of an old movie called Footprints on the Moon (also one of the many alternate titles for this feature itself) she was forced to watch as a child, which had a kind of unsettling premise of astronauts being Marooned (so to speak). These "television memories" are in black and white and offer Klaus Kinski a brief but of course memorable cameo. How this peculiar situation plays into Alice's amnesia only becomes more confounding when Alice actually travels to Garma, and is quickly surrounded by a coterie of odd characters who seem to know a lot more than they're letting on.

This film has tinges of any number of other supernaturally tinged thrillers, and it also reinforces a rather odd plot dynamic that is also part of Identikit in particular, in that a woman's quest for "answers" leads to an inexorable rush toward destruction. When it becomes clear that Alice may have resorted to imbibing tranquilizers to calm her shattered nerves, the film almost seems to presage Requiem for a Dream in that "hallucinations" and "reality" become increasingly interchangeable. Footprints kind of interestingly does not really indulge in the structural sleight of hand that the Taylor opus does, but that doesn't mean it's any less opaque. And in fact this film's "Mobius strip" structure would seem to echo the famous T.S. Eliot line that "in my end is my beginning".

Footprints Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Footprints is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Severin Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. The back cover of this release states "now scanned in 4K from the original camera negatives". The first ten screenshots are from the U.S. Cut, while the second ten are from the Italian cut, and as can perhaps be gleaned from some individual shots I've captured shared between the versions, the common footage showed no discernable differences to my eyes. The additional content in the Italian version is relatively brief and tends to "add up" in a bunch of smaller snippets here and there, but once again I noticed no sudden quality fluctuations in the Italian version. Vittorio Storaro's cinematography is a real highlight of the film, and this transfer offers some really beautifully suffused sequences in some of the outdoor moments in particular, but also a really nicely distinct set of black and white interstitials courtesy of the film Alice may or may not be remembering. Because of the quasi-hallucinatory way the story begins unfolding, detail levels can be subject to stylistic flourishes, and some scenes are intentionally soft and dreamlike. Grain can look a bit gritty in both presentations, but never really falls prey to compression problems. My score is 4.25.

Footprints Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Footprints offers DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono options in either Italian or English (for both cuts of the film). Once again, I really didn't notice any huge differences in amplitude or mixes between the tracks, and both offer secure accountings of the film's cool organ drenched score by Nicola Piovani (Percy Faith would have had a field day covering the theme). Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout, though both versions suffer from that oft mentioned "loose synch". Optional English subtitles are available.

Footprints Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Disc One - U.S. Cut

• U.S. Cut (HD; 1:32:45)


• Introduction by Kier-la Janisse, Author of House of Psychotic Women (HD; 6:40) is accessible as either a standalone supplement under the Bonus Menu, or under the Play Menu as an option, which is authored to lead directly to the feature (the Play Menu also offers a Play Without Introduction option).


• To the Moon (HD; 12:03) is an interview with actress Ida Galli. Subtitled in English.


• Nicoletta Elmi: Italian Horror's Imp Ascendant (HD; 11:40) is a video essay by film scholars Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Craig Martin.

Disc Two - Italian Cut

• Italian Cut (HD; 1:36:10)


• Audio Commentary with Film Historian Kat Ellinger


• Light of the Moon (HD; 1:17:57) is an extended interview with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. Subtitled in English.


• Trailer (HD; 2:59)

Footprints Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Kind of hilariously, a recent move my wife and I made forced me to go through piles of, um, stuff we've been hauling around for decades, and in one of innumerable piles of paper I found an old pressbook for The Third Day I must have gotten somewhere along the way. I was kind of delighted to see a huge two page spread in the pressbook devoted to the place I was born and raised, Salt Lake City, as that venerable state capital evidently was the epicenter of The Third Day's marketing campaign, for some inexplicable reason (even one of the versions of the Faith penned ballad in the film touted in the pressbook is from a Utah based singer, as I discovered in doing some Googling). My hunch is Footprints probably wouldn't have saw fit to debut in Utah, but joking aside, this film has a number of curious tethers to a glut of other amnesia based outings, but it also kind of has a bit of the underlying "folk horror" dawning awareness that suffuses such legendary films as The Wicker Man, albeit in a totally different way than that film does. Technical merits are secure and the supplemental package very well done. Recommended.