This would have been, at least for me, DVD of the year 2008. Unfortunately, the lack of the superior English dub (featuring Robert Flemyng's own voice, which - to quote a fellow Hichcock admirer ;-) - "is very important to the character"), and no English subtitles for the Italian track make it a chance wasted, in spite of the stunning PQ...

Update: RE the - what I thought of as "superior" - English dub, Robert E. Seletsky, a great admirer of this film, sent me this interesting e-mail, and kindly permitted me to publish it here:

Hi,

I am very grateful for the wonderful comparison of frame grabs from the different video incarnations of "L'Orribile Segreto del Dr. Hichcock." The Medusa is, of course, a revelation that the film is one of the finest Italian examples of the genre. However, I take issue with your remark that the absence of the English audio track makes this a "chance wasted." You may not know that Robert Flemyng accepted the job without receiving the script. When he saw it, he thought it was dreadful but because he had signed the contract, couldn't back out of it. In a 1992 interview, he said that he planned to act as badly as possible so the film would be too awful to release and never be seen. He tried to convince Harriet White-Medin (Marta) to do the same. She didn't, but he did. He couldn't get away with too much bad acting while Ricardo Freda was directing, but he did it in the post-dub, which is absolutely terrible: he sounds like *he* is being dubbed by a bad actor! The English "translation" of Gastaldi's brilliant, witty, and surprisingly moving script, ruins the film completely, changing names and plot points into nonsense, and is embarrassingly badly written. Even the music cues are handled badly in the English track. Also, the almost entirely American crew of English dubbers are beyond terrible. It is therefore a different, and far inferior, film altogether in English. By contrast, the acting of Flemyng's Italian dubber is expressive, tasteful, flexible, and somehow, with Flemyng's body movements on-screen, far improves the whole performance, becoming the 'Bernard Hichcock' written by Gastaldi, whose beautiful script is retained. And most ironically, while the American woman dubbing Barbara Steele is shrill and stiff, the Italian actress dubbing Ms. Steele sounds amazingly like her--had Barbara's Italian been better! The Italian actors and actresses dubbed their own voices on the Italian track and are wonderful--Silvano Tranquilli ("Montgomery Glenn"), Maria-Teresa Vianello ("Theresa Fitzgerald"), and Harriet White-Medin--an American who had lived in Italy for a long time and was married to an Italian; she was a dialect coach, in fact). Even the minor characters played by Italian actors treat the script with care, which the American dubbers most emphatically do not.

This is not a regular DVD review! Intrigued by the fabulous DVDSavant's essay on "L'orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock," I desperately sought a way to see this - as of yet unreleased on DVD - film. I managed to get my hands on a public domain VHS-to-DVD-R port of "The Terror of Dr. Hichcock" (the UK version of the film), and - full of expectations - popped the disc into my player... Well, I was not disappointed, and immensely enjoyed the film, even in this mutilated form. But seeing this the proper way, as the creators intended, would have to be awesome! I've heard a rumour that "L'orribile..." should be released on DVD in Japan (bundled with Fulci's "Non si sevizia un paperino" & Avati's "La casa dalle finestre che ridono"), so here's hoping the rumour is true. ;-)