U.S. label Code Red has announced that it will release on Blu-ray Dante Tomaselli's film
Desecration (1999), starring Irma St. Paule, Christie Sanford, Danny Lopes, Salvatore Paul Piro, Vincent Lamberti, and Maureen Tomaselli. The release, which will be distributed by Kino Lorber, will be available for purchase August 7.
Synopsis: One of the most original horror films in recent years,
Desecration is an eerily dazzling and genuinely frightening psychological chiller about a beyond the grave relationship between a teenage boy and his long dead mother. Bobby, a 16-year-old loner, has been emotionally damaged by his mother's early death and a repressive Catholic upbringing. The boy accidentally causes a nun's death, triggering a chain of supernatural events and violent mayhem that leads Bobby into Hell to confront his mother. Powerful childhood demons are exorcised and unleashed as the gates of Hell open in this gripping, hallucinatory film.
First-time feature film writer/director Dante Tomaselli has created an incredibly atmospheric and terrorizing film that he has described as "being in the psychedelic fun house." With its mist-shrouded ambience, photography and trance-like soundtrack, the film, almost subliminally, creates an unsettling mood that crawls beneath the skin. A sensational young talent, 30-year-old Tomaselli has taken the horror genre in a new and exciting direction.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
- REMASTERED (see message from the director below)
- Audio Commentary by Writer/Director/Composer Dante Tomaselli
- Building the Torture Chamber - Featurette
- Desecration - Short Film
- Witches Album - Featuring 13 Tracks
- Still Gallery
- Original Trailer
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A MESSAGE FROM DIRECTOR DANTE TOMASELLI:
"I'm happy to announce that CODE RED and KINO are releasing my film
Desecration on Blu-ray this August. For a while, I didn't think there would be any light at the end of the tunnel since the original Super 16 film print has been missing for years. It's still missing. I have a wild theory the Vatican secretly confiscated my nun nightmare around the time it made its world premiere at the1999 Fantafestival in Rome, Italy. Maybe too many Italian horror fans cheered during the film's scissor attack sequence where an innocent nun is violently slashed by a pair of floating scissors. It's weirdly prophetic that the name of the Catholic boarding school in
Desecration is St. Anthony, the patron Saint of the Lost. In any case, Bill Olsen at Code Red pushed hard for me to find the film print for many months. I searched and it's just gone. So this presentation of
Desecration is culled from the only existing Digibeta master tape available, which means it's about the same picture quality as Image Entertainment's 2000 release. Chris at Imagimedia, who transferred
Desecration, did fine work with having only a Digibeta master to up-res. Finally, when Code Red asked me to send the original nun paintings for the Blu-ray cover art, I had to give them bad news: Those paintings are missing too! Update! I found the nun paintings (preserved on the Blu-ray cover) which were hiding in the basement of the Executive Producer's One Fifth Avenue NYC apartment. The film, though was not there. Still, this gives me hope that it might one day appear but for now please enjoy this Blu-ray restoration of my first feature film,
Desecration.