L'Occhio del testimone / Operazione Paura

I picked up these two books on Ebay, intrigued to see what they had to say about Fulci and Italian horror from an insider's perspective. What follows are some not necessarily coherent, but hopefully interesting remarks...

Published in 1992 when Fulci was still alive but his career effectively over, Michele Romagnoli's L'Occhio del testimone is presented as a series of short, impressionistic chapters on a variety of key Fulcean themes – Life and Death; Time; influences such as Artaud, Poe and Lovecraft; women, relationships and love; rivalry with Dario Argento etc – interspersing Fulci's own remarks and reminiscences with Romagnoli's commentary and contextualisation.

The main weakness of the book stems from the circumstances of its production, with Fulci's identification as a horror auteur by this time meaning that there isn't terribly much about his earlier work in other genres; indeed, the filmography at the end splits into two, only providing detailed credits and synopses beginning with One on Top of the Other and omitting anything that doesn't fall into the horror-giallo-fanatasy fantasy spectrum.

This is a omission insofar as one of the points Fulci makes about his career when comparing his work his his arch-rival Argento is his greater versatility: if those taking Argento's side – and taking a side was what it was often about for close on 25 years prior to Wax Mask – might argue that he had the greater depth within the giallo and horror filone, those taking Fulci's could counter that Argento never made a western like Four of the Apocalypse or a comedy like The Senator Likes Women nor managed Fulci's level of productivity.

It's also somewhat odd insofar as another point which emerges through the likes of Fulci's comments on bringing Artaud into a sequence in an earlier western, Massacre Time, is the importance in seeing his work in more holistic terms: I wanted to know which sequence Fulci was referring to and how his application of Artaud here might have differed from, say, The Beyond.

In other ways the book is more successful in contexualising Fulci, however: The very inclusion of references to Artaud, Visconti, Lang, Ford, Elio Petri, Rene Clair, Steno and so on alongside the likes of Argento, D'Amato and De Angelis indicate – if anyone still doubted it – that he was a culturally and cinematically literate figure, with some of these figures remarks also suggesting how he wanted his own work to be understood.

Tellingly in this regard the chapter on Fulci's “factory” period for De Angelis, which saw him work prolifically with a regular team of collaborators like Vincenzo Tomassi, Sergio Salvati and Massimo Lentini, is headed up by a quote from Fritz Lang: roughly translated “I made the Blue Gardenia for the same reason I made Metropolis and others: because I have to eat.”

To paraphrase Marx, men make cinema, but not in circumstances of their own choosing? Or, more critically, that Fulci certainly also had to eat and support his family but perhaps could have gone without, say, his yacht, and might have enjoyed a better reputation had he made fewer films and more of an effort to present himself as an artist in the approved manner?


Artaud


Fulci on the set of Zombi 3

Even if one has the same limited understanding of the language as I do, there are still the behind the scenes and personal pictures to look at. One I found especially touching is that Fulci on the set of Zombi 3 (a film he describes as “a trap [...] into which I fell), finding it eerily reminiscent of those pictures of Artuad shortly before his death.



Published in 1997 and with a very brief preface by Pupi Avati, Antonios Bruschini and Tentori's Operazione Paura – i.e. the Italian title for Kill Baby Kill – presents profiles of ten key “Italian gothic” directors along with an overview of important contributions made by other filmmakers less associated with the form and a filmography of essential works.

The ten key men are Freda, Mario Bava, Margheriti, Argento, Fulci, Avati, Lamberto Bava, Massaccessi and Soavi – in other words, the usual suspects. Presented sequentially rather than alphabetically, each filmmaker gets the same basic treatment: a bit of background on who they are and why they are important, followed by an overview of their career focussing on their major contributions to the horror genre, with each key work getting a synopsis followed by a commentary.

Thus, for example, Freda matters for inaugurating the entire cycle with I Vampiri and for giving Bava the opportunity to direct, with the other key films in his filmography being identified as Caltiki – the Immortal Monster, Maciste in Hell, The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock, The Ghost and Murder Obsession, though I suspect the under-rated Tragic Ceremony would have been given more attention had it been more readily available to the authors.

While the choices thus tend to be fairly safe, this works to the book's advantage as a introductory overview, with films like Freda's disowned Iguana with a Tongue of Fire certainly having their moments and points of interest, but being better approached once the reader/viewer has an idea of where to situate them generically.

Anyone who has the Glittering Images Horror all'italiana volume or Louis Paul's Italian Horror Film Directors probably won't find terribly much new information here, however.

There is more of a sense of discovery in other cases, like Lamberto Bava and Avati, given the relative unavailability of the former's highly successful TV work for Italian television and the latter's films away from The House with the Windows that Laughed and Zeder.

Much the same can be said of the final chapter on other directors and titles, with a useful list of names and titles to check out should the opportunity ever present itself – Byleth, il demone dell'incesto, anyone? (Actually, I've recently downloaded that one, but just haven't had time to watch it yet.)

The thing that really makes one wish some material from the book were available in English translation is that the authors actually have an enthusiasm for the films they are writing about, without being blind to their shortcomings. This may seem a minor point, but when faced with something like of McCallum's Italian Horror Film of the 1960s, in which the author dismisses just about every title under discussion in a way that makes you wonder why he actually decided to write the book the first place, it's an important one.

La Pretora / My Sister in Law

There are two reasons why this is the best of Edwige Fenech’s comedies. The first, and most obvious, is that there’s more of her on display than in any of the others. The second, is that by playing a dual role of two ill-matched identical sisters she also gets a chance to show more of her comedic talents than would otherwise be the case.

The story is simple: Viola is the young, ambitious and, above all, beyond reproach prosecutor in a provincial Italian town. Rosa is her identical sister.


Rosa


Viola

Con-artist Esposito, the victim of one of Viola’s most recent judgement, meets and beds Rosa, and decides to extract his revenge; one of the film’s weak points in this regard is that Rosa’s character is not terribly well developed, in that we don’t really know why she has it in for her sister, beyond hints of resentment at their different upbringings and life chances. (Though she plays dumb, there’s the definite sense that Rosa is far smarter than she’s letting on; certainly she’s far smarter than the men around her, though as ever in the world of Italian sex comedy that doesn't necessarily say terribly much...)


Fulci's cameo

Rosa impersonates her sister and take bribes from some local businessmen. Viola guesses that something is up, causing her fiancé Alteri to go see Rosa in an attempt to get her to see the error of her ways, only to easily succumb to her seductive wiles.




Rosa as Biancaneve




Trivia fans may care to note that the evil queen is played by Marina Frajese

Next Rosa appears in a pornographic fumetti strip as Biancaneve, copies of which are distributed to the public during an obscenity case Viola is presiding over in her other capacity as film censor for the town. (An earlier scene featuring the unseen but heard film’s screening is another highlight, with what seems like the entirety of the town’s respectable male population sneaking into the projection booth to see all the good bits before they are cut out.)




The fumetti image

Then Rosa seduces Viola’s long besotted assistant, resulting in some compromising sex in the office photographs courtesy of Esposito and his lawyer Bortolon that soon find their way into the chief prosecutor’s hands.


Rosa or Viola?


Rosa or Viola – and yet another forbidden photo of a lady above suspicion...

Mercifully for Viola a small giallo-esque detail in one of the images provides the opportunity to extricate herself from the messy situation and turn the tables on Esposito and company…

Though Rosa and Viola are given different dubbing voices they aren’t really necessary to disambiguate the characters, with their facial expressions, movements and demeanours enough if the viewer is paying sufficient attention – which, given that the initial distinction between them might well be summed up as close to ‘one wears clothes, the other doesn’t,’ can probably be more or less assumed anyway when the target vernacular audience is concerned…

The other reason for the device, besides its inherent comedic contribution, becomes clearer later on, however, as the difference between the characters and their voices is then confused just at the point when we – and our on screen counterparts – start to think we have a handle on who is who.

At first glance Lucio Fulci’s contribution to the film is somewhat limited, with the direction functional, establishing and breaking up each scene in an anonymous, classical, degree zero style. Paradoxically, however, the lack of Fulci’s usual signatures – zooms, close-ups of eyes, rack focus between planes of action – arguably becomes a signifier of another characteristic of his work, namely his sheer professionalism. One suspects he understood that this was a Fenech vehicle (the end credits include her shoe and lingerie suppliers, to whom credit must go) and as a director for hire willingly subordinated his contributions to hers, whilst also enjoying the opportunity to again aim some well-placed jabs at the powers that be. (Fulci once remarked that censors should be shot in the head; the problem was that their brains were obviously such small targets…)

I suspect that there was also a fair bit of wordplay that I didn’t quite get, though references to sodomy and fellatio prove easy enough to decipher even with my rather limited knowledge of Italian…

Recommended for fans of Fenech and Fulci alike.

Some giallo posters

All these are currently on Ebay at the moment, if anyone is interested:

Fulci posters

I like these posters for The House by the Cemetery and The Beyond, even though the things with the knife menacing Maccoll has absolutely no relation whatsoever to what is actually in the films...

Lucio Fulci Remembered Volume 1

This disc presents interviews with nearly 90 of Lucio Fulci’s cast, crew and contemporaries. Each was asked one simple question: what was their favourite memory of Fulci and allowed to expound as much or as little as they wanted, without further prompting or interjections from the interviewer.

The aim, according to the project mastermind Mike Baronas, was to try to find out what Fulci was really like, presenting a complement to the films and to the kind of detailed analyses of them provided by Stephen Thrower in Beyond Terror.

Baronas makes it clear in his liner notes that he appreciates what Thrower did, but that Thrower’s textual focus – and, one suspects, more distanced and theoretical approach – didn’t tell him what, as a fan, he really wanted to know about Fulci himself. (It’s worth noting also here that Thrower’s more recent Nightmare USA is less reliant on theory and functions more as an oral history of the US horror independents of the 70s and early 80s.)

The responses, totalling over three hours of material, vary in length from around half a minute (Claudio Ailiotti) to over eight minutes (Beatrice Ring), depending on what someone has to say. Ailiotti, for instance, simply thanks Fulci for giving him a job whereas Ring, who worked under extremely trying circumstances on Zombi 3, finds it difficult to produce any fond memories of Fulci but graciously forgives and strives to understand what made him the way he was.

Some memories are sad, like the tales of Fulci’s long battle with illness, or the will-sapping delays that were to prevent him from realising his comeback with Wax Mask. Others are funny, such as the stories of bets on how often he would change his socks during a production; his nickname of Lucio Pulci (i.e. fleas). Others, like Dakar’s playing on his guitar and singing in lieu of offering his actual memories, are simply touching.

Crucially, there are also moments of insight, such as Catriona MacColl’s reading of that famous picture of Fulci sitting, arms folded, in the middle of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway: a man between two worlds, isolated and defiant. (The image is on the back cover of the DVD.)

Overall, the picture that emerges is of someone who had a difficult life and was at times certainly a difficult person to get on with. Everyone also agrees that Fulci was an intelligent and cultured man, knowledgeable about the cinema and a solid professional.

Beyond this the picture gets more complicated.

Many actors indicate that Fulci could be a bully, with a tendency to pick out victims. Others, however, also indicate that he was surprisingly patient with them, apparently understanding of their lack of experience. Trying to square these conflicting accounts, the impression is that of a professional who expected the same professionalism from his actors and didn’t suffer fools gladly; Sasha Maria Darwin talks about a 'Jekyll and Hyde' aspect to Fulci – Jekyll being Fulci the man and Hyde Fulci the director.

Another area where opinions differ is whether Fulci’s talents deserved better than the B- movies that constitute his filmography, or if his willingness to take on just about any paying job that came his way rather than waiting for the right moment and taking the time to make the A- film that could have boosted his reputation as a serious filmmaker was itself partly to blame for his failure to attain mainstream recognition.

Of the interviewees, one I would really like to heard more from is Jean Sorel, who was unique in working with Fulci before and after his wife’s suicide, on the films Perversion Story (1969) and Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), and is perhaps thus best placed to shed some light on the impact of this event on the director.

One thing that shines out from the disc is just how important a service Baronas and others like him are doing in putting the pieces in place for an oral history of the filone cinema and its personalities; of those interviewed, at least five – Bruno Mattei, Fernando Di Leo, Renato Polselli, Dakar and Jenny Tamburi – have died in the years between their interviews and the release of the disc.

The disc is labelled as volume one. Here’s hoping that interest is sufficient for not only volume two, hopefully featuring contributions from some of those who slipped through the net this time round – Edwige Fenech, Lando Buzzanca and Dario Argento would be three obvious candidates I can think of, the first two also perhaps helping shed some light on whether Fulci was different when working as a comedy director – but also for Baronas to resume his Fulci book project as well.

Mention must also be made of Dave Neabore's music, which captures the sound of Fabio Frizzi, Walter Rizzati and company so well you could almost believe you were hearing previously unreleased tracks from City of the Living Dead or The House by the Cemetery.

Paura Productions' website

The Good, the Bad and the Dolce Vita

This was a book I had wanted to read since reading a review of it in Video Watchdog shortly after its 2004 publication.

Mickey Knox, for those unfamiliar with him, is the American actor who, finding himself greylisted by the McCarthyite witch hunts relocated to Europe to ultimately spend 35 years as an expat in Rome, where he came to present a key point of contact between the host and expatriate film communities.

He was the man whose dialogue coaching of Anna Magnani in The Rose Tattoo helped the Italian actress win an Oscar for her performance in a Hollywood film, and who was behind the English-language version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Covering over half a century from the 1940s in short, easy to read chapters centred around a particular year and occasion, what it comes down to is mass of fascinating name-dropping anecdotes about both international names and films like Orson Welles and Once Upon a Time in the West and local and cult heroes such as Duccio Tessari, Damiano Damiani and Fabio Testi – the last one character in a particularly scurrilous story involves Andrea Occhipinti and an apparent rash of herpes cases during the production of John Derek's vehicle for his wife Bo, Bolero.

While it's sometimes difficult to know how representative Knox's experiences of a particular individual were or whether someone might just have had an off-day or film – if Tessari was a party-hearty drunk, as he implies, this doesn't appear to have negatively impacted upon the director's other films too far from what I've seen, suggesting that Knox's negative evaluation of Turn the Other Cheek might also be attributable to his unhappy and expensive venture into production on the film with the otherwise unidentified 'Luigi' – his picture of Sergio Leone as a great filmmaker but something of a manipulative son of a bitch in business and personal matters has a longer-term basis and accords with that painted by almost all his other collaborators.

Those whose interests are more narrowly Eurocult may find that the balance of the book isn't quite what they would ideally want, with more on Hollywood and Broadway in the 1940s and nothing on the making of Stagefright, for instance, but it's easy going, entertaining and certainly leaves you wanting to know more.

If only Nick Alexander had written his memoirs as well...

Today's obscure question

Can anyone recommend any books or articles dealing with the ways in which Hollywood's back catologue from 1940-45, or thereabouts, was presented and received in Italy and/or France in the immediate post-war years?

I'm especially interested in anything about the extent to which films were subjected to the usual processes of dubbing, or were subtitled or even screened without subtitles, and of the extent to which, for example, the emergence of the whole kind of 1950s Cahiers du Cinema style emphasis on the visual over the verbal can be traced back to seeing films in a context which encouraged readings in terms of mise-en-scene (or the director) rather than the screenwriter.

Dr Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs / Spie vengono dal semifreddo

This was one of those films that I’d been wanting to see for a long time, but approached with a measure of trepidation. On the one hand, it was one of the few films directed by Mario Bava that I hadn’t seen. On the other it had a reputation as something of a 'bomb' itself.

The plot is simplicity itself.

The evil Dr Goldfoot (Vincent Price) has managed to evade capture once again and is soon back to his old tricks with his attractive but explosive girl bombs – i.e. convincing looking fembots equipped with explosive charges.

Working with the Chinese, represented by Hard Job (Moa Tahi), Fong and a bunch of nameless goons, his plan is to precipitate a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR by dropping an H-bomb on Moscow.


Price in the Pit and the Pendulum?

The only ones standing in his way are Bill Dexter, an ex-agent of SIC (i.e. Security Intelligence Command) whose boss Colonel Benson (Francesco Mulé) refuses to believe him when he tells the that Goldfoot is alive and scheming until it is too late; Benson’s secretary and obvious love interest/damsel in distress Rosanna (Laura Antonelli), and two hapless individuals by the names of Franco and Ciccio (er, Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia) accidentally recruited by SIC as the only men with the special talents needed to stop Goldfoot in his tracks…


Franco makes a gesture that means something different to an Italian than a US audience?


Goldfoot and the lookalike General Willis

The results aren’t quite as bad as I had feared, but would hardly qualify as prime Bava by any stretch of the imagination.

The chief culprits are Franco and Ciccio, the extraordinarily prolific and popular Italian comedians who averaged half a dozen films a year at the time by the expedient of doing their usual characters and routines in spoofs of whatever was in favour at the box-office at any given moment (e.g. spaghetti westerns like The Handsome, the Ugly, and the Stupid and Two R-R-Ringos from Texas).




The girlbomb Antonelli

Whilst Franco and Ciccio were clearly very good at what they did, their humour doesn’t appeal to me. Not that it could or should be expected to. There is, after all, a big difference between watching this film as a member of the terza visione in Italy, 1966, caring nothing about its director, and as an Anglophone Bava fan 40 years later.


We are the robots...

Following from this, the larger problem seems to be that the film is simply too much of a mish-mash of elements to particularly appeal to anyone: One could well imagine the same terza visione audience who wanted to see Franco and Ciccio do their thing tuning out when Vincent Price or Fabian were on the screen, and the bulk of the US matinee audience wondering who these crazy Italians were. (Tellingly even the English and Italian titles emphasise different things: Goldfoot and his girl bombs versus the two spies who came in from the semi-cold.)


Franco makes his escape, disguises as a girlbomb

Bava’s direction seems pretty flat and uninspired, though his hand feels evident in the numerous trick shots and the cheap yet sometimes effective designs for Goldfoot’s laboratory, most notably the mirrored room in which the ever-multiplying army of girl bombs exercise.




While Ciccio gets captured and stuck in the duplication machine

At a pinch there is also some characteristic play on the idea of deceptive appearances in a gag where Price is on one side of the mirror frame and Ciccio, as his reflection, on the other, and in the girl bombs more generally, most notably in the sequence where Fabian has to make out the difference between the real and replicant Antonelli’s – part of the difference being that the real one won’t yet make out with him while the mechanical doll double is decidedly more forward – with the result a broken doll/dummy figure on the floor.

Another moment, intriguing in light of the Bava-scripted Schoolgirl Killer with its private girls school setting and cross-dressing killer, is a scene where Dr Goldfoot dresses up as a nun while his girl bombs pose as schoolgirls in order to intercept the bomb from Franco and Ciccio.

Prostituzione / Red Light Girls / Love Angels / Sex Slayer

We open with the murder of a prostitute, Giselle. Nothing particularly unusual about that for a giallo, although the presentation makes it clear that things aren't as straightforward as they seem in that we see both the face of her last client and of the voyeur hidden in the ungrowth.

As such, barring a double-bluff on the part of the filmmakers – and given that the writer-director is Rino Di Silvestro of Naked Werewolf Woman infamy we aren't dealing with an obvious candidate for anything that clever – we can be fairly certain that the guilty party is to be found elsewhere.


The face of the killer?


The face of the killer?

Not that the police can engage in such meta-gaming strategies. All they have to go on is that Giselle is dead, with leads proving difficult to come by on account of her status as scab sex-worker labour whom the other working girls resented. Yet this also helps them determine that Giselle was different from the norm, being a student from a respectable background.

A visit to Giselle's apartment uncovers an expensive gift – complete with what ultimately proves to be the classic classic musical leitmotif to the crime – and a coincidental/convenient appearance by her fidanzato (Elio Zamuto), an obvious suspect but for his own respectable occupation working for Mrs North's (Magda Konopka's) boutique, apparent surprise/shock at news of her death and solid alibi.

Though those who have seen the later Rings of Fear or who are aware of the long history of fashionable glamour in the giallo from Blood and Black Lace onwards may have cause for pause here, however.

To say this isn't really to give anything away because De Silvestro continues to depart from giallo formula in preferring to first introduce the crime and its perpetrators and then have the investigators discover what we already know.

Moreover as the narrative advances to its inevitable conclusion the digressions and subplots, one involving a blackmailing photographer (Luciano Rossi), another a middle aged prostitute who slowly realises that her lover is more interested in her daughter, become increasingly prominent.




Classic signor Rossi

The result is an giallo/mondo/melodrama mix that veers uncomfortably between the comic – the obligatory transvestite – and the tragic – the gang rape of one of the prostitutes (Orchidea De Santis) after she insists that her client wear a condom because she always gets pregnant otherwise and has been advised by her doctor that she can't have any more abortions on account of her anaemia.


Forbidden photos of a Citizen Above Suspicion...


... and a Respectable Lady Above Suspicion

If Red Light Girls thereby fails as serious drama or documentary – though incredibly De Silvestro reportedly received letters from real-life prostitutes praising him for the authenticity of his film – it succeeds, intentionally or not, as trashy entertainment. Again, however, those seeking wall-to-wall sleaze might be better advised to look elsewhere, with the film's aspirational qualities also limiting the extent to which you can expect to see the likes of Konopka and Krista Nell really getting down and dirty.

I watched the film through the evidently cut BBFC X certificated version which runs only 70 minutes. There is also a 85 minute Swedish subtitled edit as Street Angels.

If anyone has any more information on the difference between these versions let me know – especially if there are missing scenes with Konopka, Nell and company...

A Patrick question

Earlier this week I watched the Richard Franklin telekinetic killer in a coma film Patrick. I knew little about it other than that it had spawned an unofficial and considerably grubbier Italian sequel, Patrick Lives Again; that the latter film is so sleazy is hardly surprising when you remember that it's from the Crisanti/Bianchi team.

The biggest surprise for me about Franklin's film was its music, in that I was expecting to hear Goblin but instead got Australian soundtrack composer Brian May (i.e. not the Queen guitarist). I'd forgotten that Goblin's was an alternative score.

Which brings me on to the question/topic: In his book Nightmare Movies Kim Newman mentions Patrick and Patrick Lives Again as an example of the spin-off/rip-off mentality in Italian popular cinema of the time, suggesting that what they show was that a film didn't need to be particularly successful at the box-office to spawn an Italian imitation.

While I agree with Newman's point in the main, I'm wondering how successful Patrick was in Italy specifically (whether the Goblin score boosted its prospects/signalled its relative importance; perhaps a kind of inversion of the treatment the likes of Rustichelli's scores for Bava received in the US, where they were habitually replaced by the more marketable/audience appealing Les Baxter) and the importance of local conditions.

Was Patrick Lives Again really one of those nationally specific sequels, never particularly expected to receive distribution internationally or in English-speaking territories specifically?

I'm also thinking here of the likes of Faces of Death, purportedly a bigger success than Star Wars in Japan on their initial releases; or of the substrata of spaghetti westerns that never circulated in the US or UK; or of the relative box-office success of Dawn of the Dead in different markets and the relative delay in releasing it in the US against Italy, with the question of whether the international prospects for Zombi 2 were really known at the time it was put into production compared to the domestic ones.

Malabimba / Satan's Baby Doll

What we have here are two films made for the same producer, trash-king Gabriele Crisanti, with the same lead actress, Crisanti's then-wife Mariangela Giordano, playing naughty nuns, by two brothers, Andrea and Mario Bianchi.




Many of these names appear in both films' credits

Moreover 1979's Malabimba and 1982's Satan's Baby Doll also utilise the same atmospheric castle exteriors and interiors and tell more or less identical stories of an innocent young woman's possession by a malign, vengeance-seeking spirit; that this innocent is played by different actresses – Katell Laennec in Malabimba, JJacqueline Dupré in Satan's Baby Doll – is perhaps explicable on account of the three-year gap between the productions and the correspondingly limited range of 'barely legal' looking talent the filmmakers could draw upon and then discard.

This 'fresh flesh' aspect, in turn emphasises another aspect that only adds to the viewers' confusion, with both films also existing in softcore and hardcore versions.

Though I viewed the latter versions, released on DVD by Severin, the hardcore footage is hardly essential in either occasion, being very much comprised of obvious inserts where you never see any shots actually attach the sets of genitalia seen in the penetration shots to the name performer like Aldo Sambrell (Baby Doll's drug addicted, wife-murdering paterfamilias) they are supposed to belong and where the money shots that would be foregrounded in a conventional porn production of the period are conspicuously absent.



The bear


The teddy bear...


Attraction and repulsion, sex and violence...

Following from this it's probably fair to say that the softcore versions – which still include plenty of female nudity, masturbation and faux lesbian activity – better represent the filmmakers' intentions, were it not for the fact that their intention was plainly to make as commercial a film as possible.

Plot- and character-wise there's not a lot to be said: the basic rule is that all the male characters are unpleasant and the females sex-crazed, either in their own right or through possession, with the narratives in both cases progressing through a succession of sexual and/or supernatural encounters that frequently precipitate the deaths of those involved – including, in both films, by blow-job and plunge from a height.

There are however a few moments amid the zoom and close-up dominated mise en scène in both films that hint at a aspiration to do a touch more than get the film in the can.




The female voyeur; no doubt we could also talk about the barred signifier here...


In Malambima, for instance, one of the sex scenes with Webley takes place on a bearskin rug which the camera zooms in on. It seems odd at first, but then allows for a neat connection to be made with the following sequence in which the confused Bimba, who had been secretly observing her aunt, indulges in a spot of frottage with her teddy bear – before taking a knife to it.

It's the kind of thing which recalls Jess Franco at his best, where the bold improvisation and experimentation lead further into the kind of psychosexual territory than most filmmakers would be willing to venture.

The séance is also well presented, though the lowest common denominator aspect again inevitably comes through when one of the presence's first manifestations is to make Webley's breasts fall out of her dress – not that they needed much help, since her costumes admittedly tend to be of the threw something on and nearly missed varietal...




The agony and the ecstasy as Sister Sofia is assaulted by the presence...

Satan's Baby Doll is the more atmospheric and effective of the films on the whole, in large part because its score is both better suited to the material and more stylistically coherent and consistent, with gentle Beyond-style piano and vocal pieces that build to harder rocking crescendos as required. Malabimba by contrast uses a less well matched selection of cues plainly culled from the library, with several familiar from other (Andrea) Bianchi entries including Strip Nude for Your Killer and Zombie: Nights of Terror.


An image that incorporates lesbianism, necrophilia and satanism...

The most consistently impressive aspects of both Malabimba and Satan's Baby Doll are Giordano's performances. It's not just the evident commitment and lack of inhibition with which she strips off and gets down to business, but also the sense of distress and despair that pervades her delivery, gestures and expressions. She really makes you believe that she knows she shouldn't be doing these things but just cannot help herself – a state of mind perhaps curiously reminiscent of that of the Eurotrash fan himself, who knows that these films aren't great art by any means, but nevertheless can't help falling under their spell...

Tough to Kill

Written by Paul Cooke and David Zuzelo of Tough to Kill and Tomb it May Concern and available through Lulu.com, this 120 page PDF/print-on-demand book/ebook examines The European Action Cinema Explosion of the 1980s or, more specifically, the contribution made by Italian productions and co-productions to it.

The bulk of the volume is comprised of 80+ reviews of films like Alien From the Deep, Ark of the Sun God, The Atlantis Interceptors, The Barbarians, The Black Cobra (and II and III), punctuated by cheesy video sleeve artwork, almost invariably of grimacing steriod-amped types wielding large phallic weapons.

The write-ups tell you what you want and need to know about a particular film – who made it, who's in it, what it's ripping off (if the title alone doesn't give this away), how much action there is and how far things get bogged down by niceties such as characterisation and plot etc. – and finish up with an “exploding huts” rating of one to five to help the new viewer work their way through the minefield of the good, the bad, the ugly and the frankly inept.

They are also pretty damn entertaining in their own right:

“Ettore Spagnuolo and Alfonse Brescia, the gruesome twosome of European trash cinema, try to add together zero budget and zero market desire to equal a good feature film. It doesn’t compute. However, Miami Cops is the most entertaining movie with Miami in the title that NEVER goes near Miami. And it has chainsaw slashed bad guys going for it.”

“A film that defies description without begging for hyperbole, Strike Commando is action-sploitation that pounds outrageous and entertaining mischief in every minute. Really. The brain trust (read: they trust that you will not use your brain!) of Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso fired on all genre conventions, burping out this incredible entry.”

Reading as someone more familiar with gialli and horror from the 1960s and 70s, it's interesting to see how the pantheon of filmmakers changes somewhat with the shift in time and place. While Castellari and Margheriti are prominent names of the ever-reliable type, the likes of Larry Ludman (i.e. Fabrizio De Angelis) and the above-mentioned Mattei emerge as solid second rank figures at their best delivering brain-dead action fun.

Indeed, one half wonders in this regard if the decline in Fulci's fortunes wasn't correlated with De Angelis's emergence as a director in his own right, as if the canny producer worked out that by directing his films himself he could save money on hiring the likes of Fulci.

It was also useful to begin to piece together the flow of the action-adventure cycle over the course of the decade, with a prevalence of entries sullo stesso filone Raiders of the Lost Ark, Mad Max, Conan the Barbarian or Rambo etc. depending on the exact point in the 80s.

In this regard, however, I also wondered whether it might have been preferable had one of the concluding essays, “Pastapocalypse 80: After they Baked the Big Apple,” which gives something of an overview of key films and stages in the the cycle, come at the start to facilitate access for the newcomer.

Then again, it could be said that part of the joy of this kind of cinema is discovering things for yourself and that providing a short cut to finding out about the delirious like of The Last Match – which I won't describe here so as not to spoil things for you – not only takes some of the fun out of things but also makes it that bit easier for those who don't understand to misappropriate and mock.

The other concluding pieces comprise a tribute to Bruno Mattei and to some of the most notable performers within the cycle – Brent Huff, Lewis Collins (whom many UK viewers may find it hard to disassociate from The Professionals, as I did), Reb Brown and Mark Gregory – and an interview with Edoardo Margheriti, discussing his own work and that of his father, Antonio.

Or, to put it another way, the kind of things which will please the fan and leave the other 99 per cent nonplussed.

The point, of course, is that the internet and the ability to self-publish means that this majority reaction really doesn't matter any more: it's now so much easier for the other one per cent of us to make contact, support one another's endeavours and spread that Eurocult love...

Il Cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza / Dracula in the Provinces

Il Cavaliere Costante Nicosia (Lando Buzzanca) just about has it all: a beautiful wife, Mariu (Sylva Koscina) and mistress, Liu (Christa Linder) and a profitable business, Italy's largest toothpaste manufactory. Mariu and the business came together – by marrying Mariu Costante inherited the factory from her father; clearly nobody thought that Mariu might venture into the world of business in her own right nor ever assume anything other than decorative and familial roles. Perhaps the risk of contamination was too great; as proof, we can look at the example of Wanda Torsello (Francesca Romana Coluzzi), the militant communist union organiser.

Costante's good fortune in turn highlights the other dominant aspect of his make up: all manner of superstitious quasi religious, pre-capitalist beliefs, ranging from having a hunchback on the company payroll so that he can rub the man's hump for luck to getting the homely looking – and thus, by the logic of the genre, assuredly still virginal – live-in maid to urinate on the pieces of broken mirror as a means of counteracting the seven years bad luck it would otherwise bring.


“Dinner in Transylvania's always in the nude,” explains Dragalescu...


The Brides of Dragalescu close in


Costante falls asleep with one of the women...

The aforementioned contamination, meanwhile, could be considered a dominant theme of the film, emerging at just the point when Costante's luck runs out as, following a business trip to Romania and a half-remembered evening with Count Dragalescu (John Steiner) that begian with the count's three vampire brides but ended with the two men waking up in bed together, Costante comes to suspect that he has be infected with homosexuality.


Then awakens besides


Dragalescu!






Back in Brianza and finding himself gazing longingly at the buttocks of the company basketball team as they shower, Costante goes to see Dr Paluzzi (Rossano Brazzi) for advice:

“As I was saying about my cousin [...] he found himself in bed with the man who was his host.”

“Naturally”

“No doctor, it isn't natural at all. This person isn't that kind of person. Well, anyway, he drank something. As a matter of fact I don't know what, but a whole bottle. He fell asleep smashed out of his skull. He didn't know what he was doing. That's the real truth of it doctor, that is the catch! He didn't know if he...”

“If he was penetrated or not.”

“I didn't want to put it that way exactly. Anyway, from that moment he gets these funny sensations any time he sees a naked man. He's afraid of becoming, he's afraid of turning into a...”

“Queer?”

“No”

“What do you mean no, well then exactly what is he afraid he's turning into?”

“A queer”

“Naturally”

“How can you say naturally! He isn't that kind of person, you understand! The man is happily married, a very influential person, financially secure. He has a mistress.”

Etc:

“After your return from Romania, have you been to bed with a woman?”

“Me? Why do you want to know? I thought we were talking about my cousin. No I don't think he's been to bed with anyone because he's feeling miserable. He's probably afraid to go to bed with anyone in case his you-know-what doesn't work any more.”

“Ah yes, that's natural. But he shouldn't worry about it. Talk to your, em, cousin and reassure him. [...] The fact is that one doesn't turn into a homosexual like that in only two hours.”

“Yes, that's what I told him too, but the jerk he wouldn't listen.”

“But you said he was having an affair on the side. That's great: he should go straight to her, do what comes naturally. I guarantee he'll feel better right away unless... unless he's unable to perform. Then we know that on that night you described in such detail he was ...”

“Deflowered”

“Naturally”

“Oh...”

When Liu then accidentally cuts herself and Costante sucks the blood out the wound less it result in an infection another truth thus begins to dawn: he has become a vampire.

Whether this is better or worse depends, of course, on if this condition has taken is a distinctly masculine oral-sadistic or more worryingly polymorphously perverse form.

Or, in less Freudian terms, is Costante a heterosexual vampire or not?

This 1975 comedy forms a natural companion piece to The Eroticist, a satirical fantasy-comedy one-two that showcase Lucio Fulci's versatility and the evident rapport he had with leading man Lando Buzzanca.

The main difference between the two films is perhaps that whereas The Eroticist's affinities with the rest of Fulci's work were evident at both the levels of form and content, the balance in Il Cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza / Dracula in the Provinces shifts somewhat towards the latter, with a more restrained – if still excessive - mise en scène and fewer set-pieces.

Another way of saying this might be to suggest that if The Eroticist was the film of a Surrealist-Marxist, Dracula in the Provinces is the film of a Marxist-Surrealist, premised on the notion that “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” to quote Marx, albeit a Marx clearly in more poetic than scientific mood.

Given the to-and-fro of influence between Fulci and Argento, it's worth nothing that the film also features a German shepherd guard dog called Gestapo with a tendency to attack people according to its own distinctive unfathomable logic, two years before Suspiria.

Il Cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza is essential viewing for anyone working on a comparative study of political and sexual subtexts in the European horror-comedy/satire of the period (alongside Vampire Sterben Nichts, Dance of the Vampires, Hanno cambiato faccia and the Warhol/Morrisey/Margheriti Dracula and Frankenstein pair etc.) or who just enjoys something a bit more immediately thought-provoking than the usual T&A driven Italian comedies of the 1970s.

Il Gatto dagli occhi di giada / The Cat with the Eyes of Jade / The Cat's Victims / Watch Me While I Kill

[This is another piece written for the writing on film class and thus assumes less background knowledge of the giallo; any comments on whether you could understand it as a typical filmgoer welcome, along with whether it contains spoilers if you've seen / know the film.]

The 1970s were a time of considerable economic, social and political unrest within Italy. One way in which this manifested in the country’s cinema was a resurgence of interest in directly addressing the legacies of fascist and war periods, arguably not seen since the early year of neo-realism immediately after World War II.

Though this interest was manifest across both popular and art cinemas, there were noticeable differences in their approaches. Whereas art films like Bertolucci’s The Conformist and 1900 and Pasolini’s Salo often took a confrontational, less comfortable stance in presenting Italian complicity in Fascist evils, their popular counterparts more usually displaced attention onto Nazism and presented narratives of heroic Italian resistance.


Some vaguely Suspiria style lighting

Given this distinction, one of the most intriguing things about Antonio Bido’s The Cat with the Eyes of Jade is the way in which it straddles divide, using the popular form of the murder mystery thriller or giallo to expose a story of collaboration with the Nazis.

It all starts innocently enough as dancer Mara (Paola Tedesco) unwittingly stumbles upon a murder at her local chemists. In a hurry to get to work and reluctant to become involved , she thinks little more of the incident, but is then herself threatened and thus seeks the assistance of her Luca (Corrado) – a move in accord with both the wider giallo preference for amateur investigator protagonists and anti-authoritarian mistrust.

Meanwhile Luca, a recording engineer by profession, has been given a tape of a threatening phone call received by his neighbour, the loan shark Bozzi (Fernando Cerulli). He soon determines that the mixture of noises includes barking Dobermans, marching, shouting and industrial machinery, possibly an incinerator.




Classic giallo tape recorders and photographs

The two cases intersect as an associate of Bozzi’s is murdered and further inquiries uncover that both victims had served on the same jury a year earlier. It was an open and shut case, involving a career criminal by the name of Ferrante (frequent Pasolini collaborator Franco Citti) who had threatened revenge – and who escaped some two months previously.

As so often happens in the giallo what seemed to be a straightforward matter then turns out to be anything but, compelling Luca and Mara to delve ever deeper into the mystery and what one character tellingly dismisses as ancient history, best forgotten about.

There is no getting away from the fact that The Cat with the Eyes of Jade is a derivative film.

Sometimes it seems that just about every image and motif in it can be traced back to one or other of Dario Argento’s films in particular, be it the enigmatic aural and visual fragments that must be deciphered; a traumatic event thought buried in the past but which now murderously erupts into the present; the choreographing of the suspense and violence number set-pieces to propulsive jazz/prog rock freak outs; the enigmatic animal-referencing title itself, or the unsettling proliferation of possible point-of-view shots.




The littlest detail, here the position of two cups, can matter a lot

Yet much like De Palma in relation to Hitchcock, it’s hard to find fault with Bido’s logic here: If you’re going to take another filmmaker as your generic model, doesn’t it make sense to both choose the best available, for obvious reasons, and to make it obvious, forestalling any charges of plagiarism?

Indeed, the one area where Bido’s Argento-isms arguably lead him astray is his use of false point of view. In Argento’s Deep Red, the cumulative effect of such shots is to convey the existence of another inexplicable, irrational, supernatural world shadowing onto this one. The crime that propels the narrative is, after all, a psychic’s recognition of a killer in her audience and precognition that this killer will kill again. Here, by contrast, the world that is unveiled is one which was, alas, all too real.

Yet this also foregrounds one area in which Bido actually goes further than Argento as he takes what was a relatively under-developed subtext in Deep Red and Suspiria and transforms it into a more explicit theme, resulting in a tragic killer-as-victim figure that rivals any in the giallo canon.

Perhaps the greater irony, however, is that a number of facets of the hidden history which constitutes The Cat with the Eyes of Jade’s narrative also emerge when we consider the film’s own mistreatment. Thanks to being released in the USA under the frankly exploitative title Watch Me When I Kill (tagline: “When I go berserk...you're better off dead!”) with the kind of dubbing that makes it all but impossible to fairly evaluate the dialogue and performances, the film was virtually guaranteed to be ignored by the kind of critic who might otherwise have recognised its thematic affinities with the arthouse and have appreciated Bido’s intent.

While I do not wish to claim that The Cat with the Eyes of Jade is a lost masterpiece, I would argue that it is a film that deserves to be rediscovered and re-evaluated in its own terms – broadly speaking those of a European popular cinema aspiring to more than the lowest common denominator – without prejudice. This is what it deserves, not least for being a film which is itself ultimately about the dangers of forgetting the past and of responding to the unfamiliar through easy stereotypical formulations.

Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943

The cover of the book is from a Maciste film poster, further suggestive of pre- and post-fascist cinema connections, with the character having appeared in films in all three periods

What's the relevance of a book on cinema in fascist Italy to the post-war popular cinema? The answer depends, of course, on how you choose to frame the question. Directly Steven Ricci's Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943 is not immediately, obviously relevant. But indirectly there is a lot of useful information and thought-provoking analysis that helps one think about later filone cinema in a different light.

Much like the recently rediscovered “Italian secret cinema” of the 1960s and 1970s, the films produced in the 21 years of Italian fascism were long ignored, typically summarily dismissed on account of their presumed politics or lack thereof in the wake of post-war re-adjustments and re-alignments: whether the overt propaganda of the “black” film or “white telephone” distractions from political and social realities, fascist films were examples of what cinema should not be.

Ricci notes, for instance, that Pierre Leprohon's oft-cited The Italian Cinema devotes 25 pages to the inter-war era compared to 200 on the post-war years.

While fascist-era cinema was actually already undergoing a process of re-evaluation within Italy at around the same time as books like Leprohon's continued to tell this same old story, these re-evaluations took the form of depoliticised aesthetic and auteurist readings, culminating in the publication of a 1979 volume entitled The Fabulous Thirties.

The task Ricci sets himself is to chart the history of Italian cinema during the fascist period without falling prey to these or any other extreme positions and by paying close attention to the films themselves. There were both continuities and discontinuities between pre-fascist, fascist and post-fascist Italian cinemas. Indeed, part of the picture that emerges is that what you see often depends on where you look.

A good example here is dubbing. The history of Italy as a dubbing country dates to the fascist era, with the passing of a law stipulating that all foreign-language films had to be dubbed into Italian. For the fascist regime, dubbing provided a way of literally rewriting films and of promoting their standard version of the Italian language. Thus, for example, The Adventures of Marco Polo, a 1938 adventure in which Gary Cooper plays the Venetian explorer, could be retitled and recontextualised as Uno scozzese alla corte del Gran Khan – i..e a Scotsman in the Great Khan's Court – because the regime disapproved of the film and the actors' representation of a noted Italian hero. For a neo-realist, meanwhile, using regional dialects and accents was a way of signalling a break from and opposition to this past.

Though Ricci does not bring out the connection with the fast and loose approach to time and place (or “chronotope” in a more theoretical vocabulary) in the peplum and adventure films of the early 1960s, it does leave one wondering about the likes of Riccardo Freda's Maciste all'inferno / The Witch's Curse, in which Maciste – renamed Samson for the international audience unfamiliar with a specifically Italian character – finds himself in 17th century Scotland.

This is all the more so since another of Ricci's major themes, the representation of the (male) body in the silent-era strongman film and later more explicitly propagandistic adventure films, almost cries out for an extended comparison with the peplum, superspy and spaghetti western filone. Is it the case, for instance, that all that really happens is that the poles reverse, insofar as a Maciste performs the same mighty deeds in defence of the people but transforms from a fascist to a anti-fascist hero inasmuch as the villain of the fascist era film is coded as a decadent liberal and his 1960s counterpart as a fascist?

Tellingly in both cases the mythical-historical past seems likely to be an national rather than a pre-national one, whereby ancient Rome represents and resembles nothing so much as it does 20th century Italy.

At the same time, however, if we also consider Mikel Koven's vernacular cinema thesis here, it is clear that national identity was likely not the only issue here either, that the same film would say different things to a terza visione spectator in the south as to a prima visione spectator in the north. (Many of the differences in audience patterns discussed in Koven's La Dolce Morte can also be traced back to the pre- and fascist periods, as Ricci's analysis makes clear.)

This brings us on nicely to the giallo. Given of the fascist regime's attempts to purge foreign influences on the Italian language and their close relationship with publisher Mondadori, one first of all wonders if there's a secret history of the term itself waiting to be brought out. How far, that is, did giallo become the preferred term here because i thriller was an Anglicism and noir a French import? What were the political implications of using one or the other?

Whatever the case, it seems clear that part of the reason for the giallo film's late emergence was fascist regime's distinctive stance on crime literature and film: they were tolerated, even acceptable, so long as they presented events taking place outwith Italy's borders to thereby remind the audience of how bad things were in the non-fascist world and of what the regime was protecting them from. Thus, the Hollywood gangster movie was acceptable precisely because it was American, so long as the criminal was not coded as an Italian-American – which dubbing could sort, at least in part.

And again the picture becomes more complex as one looks further, insofar as the likes of Ossessione and Bitter Rice then represent the (re-)emergence of crime in Italian contexts. Moreover there are also important differences from film to film that need to be taken into account: Despite being an adaptation of Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ossessione presents an essentially indigenous criminality untainted by outside influences and thus implicitly attacks the fascist regime: “This is not Italy,” as Count Ciano famously remarked.

In contrast the post-liberation Bitter Rice presents a criminality influenced by Hollywood gangster movies and US culture and arguably presents an emergent left-wing critique of the new post-war Italian re-alignment: “This is not Italy, or at least the Italy we on the left fought for,” as it were.

Linked in with this, Ricci also provides useful discussions of the role of travel and tourism, hinting that the giallo emphasis on jet planes and in-between places and states noted by Gary Needham in his article on the filone might also be re-read as part of a longer history.

In sum, though the fan may not have the same theoretical or cinematic background as Ricci, he or she may well get a lot more out of this book than might have been thought; certainly there are numerous other little details and spurs to further reflection and research which I'll leave the reader to discover for themselves...