Brand new factory sealed dvd is Out Of Print (OOP) and no longer being manufactured. One of the last horror films in 1965 Italy shot in Black & White. Letterboxed so newer TV owners can use one of your zoom modes. 'Amsterdamned' (1988) was a a Dutch horror film semi-remake of this minus the embalming.

The delirious plot finds a series of young women abducted along the canals of Venice by a menacing scuba-diver, who embalms them in an ancient subterranean monastery and, donning a monk's hooded robe and rubber skull mask, chortles over these "alabaster goddesses" in his "Temple of Beauty."

Meanwhile, Andrea (Luciano Gaspar), a crusading newspaper reporter who somehow never goes near a pen or typewriter, escorts a voluptuous tour guide (Maureen Lidgard Brown) around town with a flock of shapely teenage schoolgirls (led by Luigi Martocci)--tempting bait indeed for the Embalmer!

Whenever he targets a beautiful, likely addition to his collection, the film freezes the frame, allowing the viewer a few seconds to enjoy the aesthetic-fetishistic pleasure which the psychopath seeks to extend by keeping the women as motionless figures for him to contemplate at his leisure.

Of all the death-obsessed films made in Venice, this is by far the sunniest, and it presents a refreshing tourist-board imagery of the country that is wholly at odds with those made by symbolists and foreigners.

Even the nightclub guitarist who takes the stage in an uptight coffin seems more offbeat than a morbid figure. The climax in the Embalmer's lair is exquisite spook-trash as the heroine, trapped in the subteranean crypts, encounters not only the statues but also a series of cobwebbed, disintegrating mummies with grinning skulls.