Zombi Holocaust / Zombie Holocaust / Zombies unter kannibalen / Dr Butcher MD / La Regina dei cannibali

This is a film which offers a challenge to auteurism, an approach which I often take in attempting to bring out the stylistic and thematic continuities in the work of Italian filone directors generally recognised, if at all, as mere metteurs en scene.

For the driving force behind Zombie Holocaust is plainly producer and co-writer Fabrizio de Angelis who, having bankrolled Zombie a few months earlier, clearly hoped that lightning would strike twice with this rehash / remake that uses some of the same cast, crew, locations and even, on occasion, footage.


The idea being to make as much money as possible out of the zombie and cannibal filone before public interest waned

This wouldn't in itself necessarily be an issue but for the fact that de Angelis's motivations are clearly 100% financial, of the 'leave messages to Western Union' type, and that in selecting Frank Martin / Marino Girolami as director he has a journeyman helmsman concerned with nothing more than giving the audience what they want, in the form of Alexandra Delli Colli's frequent gratuitous nudity and plenty of crude, unconvincing gore, whilst getting the film in the can as quicky and efficiently as possible.




The first victim is disovered


A somewhat obviously latex human torso, curiously devoid of a ribcage

Put differently, it's filone cinema at worst, where hybridisation of ideas, most particularly from the post-Romero zombie and indigenous cannibal sub genres in particular, results less in progress than patchwork / pastiche / failed bricolage; the last term tying in with the film's dubious anthropological elements.


A pointless establishing shot of a car driving off

We opens in New York city, that frequent mecca for Italian filmmakers seeking to take advantage of US locations at the time, with what first appears as a series of unexplained corpse mutilations at a city hospital.


Another victim...


and a nurse's understandable reaction shot

Doctors Dreylock (Walter Patriarca, who also served as production designer) and Ridgeway (Alexandra Delli Colli) lay a trap for the perpetrator, catching an orderly as he is about to take a bite out of a freshly removed heart. Rather than be taken alive, the orderly then leaps out a window, leading to another one of those plummeting dummy moments we all so know and love, complete in this case with an arm flying off only to be reattached when we cut back to the actor lying in a pool of stage blood.

Dr Ridgeway notices a distinctive tattoo on the man's chest, which she recognises thanks to not only holding another degree in anthropology but also having spent her early years on the same islands, the Moloccas, as the man came from!


A static tableaux shot of Delli Colli undressing; the filmmakers don't bother making use of the mirrored surfaces in the room to add a bit of visual interest

The tattoo is the symbol if Kito, the name of a Moluccan island and its deity, whose cannibal cult was thought long extinct; even more coincidentally Ridgeway also has a sacrificial knife with the same symbol in her apartment, that is stolen soon thereafter by a burglar who suspiciously takes nothing else.






Note the detaching / reattaching limb and the mark of Kito on the man's chest

The two doctors learn that theirs was no isolated incident, with similar incidents at other hospitals. In each case the perpetrator was from the Moloccas and bore the mark of Kito.

In light of these discoveries Dr Chandler (Ian McCulloch) plans an expedition to the islands and invites Ridgeway along on the basis that her knowledge of the islanders and their culture will prove useful. Also accompanying them are Chandler's colleague George Harper and – in yet another contrivance – his girlfriend, Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan), a scoop-hungry newshound who has already gotten on Ridgeway's wrong side with her invasive approach.


A familiar image from Zombie

The plan, Chandler explains, is to first go to see Dr Obrero (Donald O'Brien), an old acquaintance who has spent the past five years in the islands with his medical mission. If anyone knows what is going on it will be Obrero, who should also then be able to provide the expedition with a boat and a guide to take them to the island of Kito itself.

On arrival in the archipelago they are treated courteously by Dr Obrero, though the placing of a severed human head in Ridgeway's bed serves as a reminder that this is hardly safe territory for the white (wo)man.

Obrero's servant Molotto (Dakar, who had performed a similar role in Zombie) is charged with guiding the expedition's boat to Kito.

Engine trouble forces a landing on a nearby island for the night with the plan being to continue on towards Kito come morning. An attack by the cannibalist natives and the discovery of Kito's mark soon indicate, however, that this island is Kito, suggesting that Molotto is either less than competent or has been instructed to try to lead the expedition astray.




More signs of Kito

A series of encounters with the cannibals then thin out the party's numbers faster than Ian McCulloch's hair, before the survivors are saved thanks to a timely intervention by the zombies – creatures created by a certain mad scientist who is also behind the natives' return to their old ways...

Zombi(e) Holocaust is one of those films that was released under an at times bewildering array of titles, including Zombies unter Kannibalen in German speaking territories; the alternate Italian AKA of La Regina dei cannibali; and, of course, the US Dr Butcher MD edit, which cannibalised some footage from yet another film, the aborted horror anthology Tales That'll Tear Your Heart Out. What's most significant here is the way in which these titles emphasise different aspects of the film, presumably to increase its appeal to audiences less interested in zombies than cannibals or mad scientists depending on what happened to be in vogue at any one point in circa 1980-82.








Some of the crude gore and zombie makeup effects

As further evidence of the film's derivativeness we also get the Mountain of the Cannibal God and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals deus ex machina of the white / non-native woman as primitive goddess motif, allowing for yet more gratuitous nudity from Delli Colli, and composer Nico Fidenco actually reusing some cues from his Black Emanuelle scores.

Despite the title Zombie Holocaust is one of the less apocalyptic example of the filone, with the survivors apparently able to return home pretty much unscathed all things considered and the 'natural' order of things restored. As such the implicit message comes across as a less revolutionary, more reactionary one than most of its ilk, namely that some degree of western exploitation of the primitive is justified by our superiority, but that mad scientist type experiments in creating zombie labourers are going a little bit too far...


Delli Colli appears in the same pose in The New York Ripper

It's also worth noting here that 'obrero' means worker in Spanish. Were the good doctor's enterprising experiments thus a misguided attempt to pull himself into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, to establish himself as master rather than slave? Could there be a longer paper / essay on the Italian zombie film as proletarian revenge fantasy and / or expression of Nietzschean ressentiment or somesuch in this?

[The screengrabs here come from the UK Stonehaven DVD release]

Bees Join Hunt for Serial Killers

Or so reads the line on the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7530666.stm

Anyone else think of Phenomena here?

Turkish Torso poster

There's also a nice little contextualisation of the Turkish movie industry of the 70s here, giving some ideas on how the likes of Seytan and Turkish Star Wars came about: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072148/

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly re-issue in UK

In case anyone in the UK isn't aware, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is currently being digitally re-issued to cinemas in its extended form.

The other parts of the Dollars trilogy will follow over the next couple of months.

Zombi 2 / Zombie / Zombie Flesh Eaters / Gli Ultimi zombi / Island of the Flesh-Eaters / Island of the Living Dead / Woodoo

I can hazard a guess at what you might be thinking: another discussion of Zombie? Is there really a need? Well, perhaps not if truth be told, but here goes anyways...

The main issue, I think, is trying to see the film with fresh eyes and thereby recapture something of what it must have been like to have watched it as a first-time viewer back in 1979.

Would we have really expected to see an underwater zombie, never mind a fight between it and a shark?

Would we have anticipated the extremity of the spike in the eye sequence?

Asking these questions and answering them – a 'no' in both instances, except perhaps for those few individuals who had followed Fulci's career to that point and knew what he was capable of – helps emphasise the way in which Zombie works best, as a waking nightmare in which the worst can and will happen in Fulci's worst of all possible anti-Panglossian worlds, whereby the various plot contrivances, inconsistencies and illogicalities thus come to possess a perverse internal logic of their own.






We have come to eat you, travelling east to west and left to right

We open with a boat drifting into New York harbour, an arrival that brings death and disease in its wake like some modern-day version of Nosferatu. (It's always useful to be able to pair up a critically disreputably Italian horror film with a classic of art cinema, isn't it.)

Having nearly collided with the Staten Island Ferry a harbour patrol vessel boards the boat, an early indication of the Fulcean worldview comes across from the fact that two patrolmen are more interested in the potential bonus should the boat indeed be devoid of life than of what fate might have befallen its former occupants; yes, Elisa Briganti scripted the film, but the fact that Enzo Castellari passed on directing it and suggested Fuli as the man for the job is telling.




Where do the centipedes come from?

One of the patrolmen goes down below and is attacked by a monstrous figure who tears out his throat before moving up on deck.

The other patrolman empties his revolver into the creature, causing it to fall off the boat and sink beneath the water.




Note the way Fulci hangs on the image of the New York skyline for a moment after the zombie has been blasted into the bay

As news of the incident spreads reporter Peter West is assigned to cover the story by his paper, while Anne Bowles is questioned by the police, the boat having belonged to her father.

The two investigators soon meet and agree to work together.

A letter from Anne's father mentions a mysterious disease sweeping the Caribbean island of Matool, leading the two to fly out to the Domican Republic and to go in search of a boat they can character. As (bad) luck would have it another two Americans, Brian Hart and Susan Martell, are about to depart on a two-month cruise and agree to take Peter and Anne to the island.

This proves easier said than done, however, until a chance encounter with a shark – and, as already mentioned, another zombie – leaves the boat damaged, compelling the group to cast anchor off the nearest island.


Giving them what they want: breasts...


... shark ...


... zombie ...


... and zombie vs shark

Sure enough, it is Matool and, as a parallel narrative establishing Dr Menard's futile attempts to understand and control the spread of the mysterious plague rapidly spreading across the island has made clear, things are about to get a whole lot worse for all concerned...




Sometimes the zombies seem more interested in watching than flesh eating

As I've said before, Fulci was a better and more subtle director than he is often given credit for, with more to his films than their notorious splatter set pieces.

As evidence of this we can begin by noting the whip pans on the boat as Anne is interrogated by a pair of detectives, as an approach that demonstrates a willingness to experiment compared to the usual establishing shot and shot / reverse shot decoupage, and which also convey Anne's confused state and the detective's inability to summon up much in the way of sympathy for her.

More generally, Fulci again makes effective use of in-camera editing through pulling focus or moving his camera around the action rather than cutting, and displays a strong grasp of the mechanics of generating suspense and shock, using atmospheric build ups interrupted and concluded with dramatic zooms and / or cuts at the right moment.

On the downside some of the more expository scenes suffer from a lack of visual imagination, such as the classical shot-reverse shot pattern of the negotiations over the boat between Brian and Peter. Again, however, a case could also be made for even this scene, that Fulci is visually conveying the conflict between the two men over their conflicting goals – West's need to go to Matool against Brian's desire to preserve his holiday – followed by the formation of a single group of the two that had existed at the start of the scene through the subsequent reframing in the four shot.

Limited resources and retakes are also evident in the way in which the underwater zombie seems to lose, regrow and lose his arm in the course of the fight with the shark and the tendency of the molotov cocktails thrown by the survivors in the final showdown to produce a blast of flame that lasts but an instant – specifically until the next is thrown – and to never set anything except zombies ablaze.

Above all, however, it's about the gore effects and the set-pieces, as the things which really matter to the typical viewer and as the ones where Fulci and his collaborators really deliver the goods.

Who cares if the plotting is full of coincidences and contrivances or the direction seemingly plodding – though I could go in in attempting to justify the construction of many other scenes, I won't, in the hope that the point has been made – so long as there are throat-rippings, flesh chompings and head traumas aplenty and those jaw-dropping I-can't-believe-I-just-saw-that set pieces.








The defining moment of Fulci's career?

Here Fulci, make up and FX man Gino De Rossi and production designer Walter Patriarca also succeed in conveying the physicality of the zombies and the island in a way unparalleled in any other previous zombie film I can think of, with the stenches of flesh, blood, decay, alcohol, earth, sweat and medical chemicals and the feel of the heat and dust almost palpable.

Though there some exceptions to this cinesthesia – a portmanteau term coined by Vivien Sobchack to emphasise the way in which filmmakers can convey all the senses through the audio-visual channels available to them – most notably the way in which the discovery of Mrs Menard's fate and of the two non-feasting zombies in the scene are signalled by sight in another effective shot-reaction shot combination, these can also be taken as a further expression of Fulci's preference for cinematic over narrative logic and as a precursor of the absurdist approach that would become prominent in City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, where the (un)dead can and do appear and disappear at will.

Sound and music are also important, with the voodoo drums and droning zombie synth making a vital contribution to the film's overall effect, with another intertextual indication of this being the way in which many of Fabio Frizzi and Giorgio Tucci's cues would be recalled in City of the Living Dead.

Surprisingly, however, the film perhaps isn't as gory as it could have been, with a certain restraint showing in the way the dead patients have their heads covered and are not always shown receiving a bullet in the head, with the camera being equally prone to focus on Menard. Though budgetary constraints may have again contributed here, these images also tell us something about the doctor, that is he is fundamentally well-meaning and decent, as has not yet become so inured to the act of shooting his former patients that it has become in any way easier.


Menard and Lucas represent different approaches to the living dead

As with Romero's films, the filmmakers leave the zombie plague unexplained, along with their precise relationship with the unseen but near omnipresent voodoo-drumming natives. One thing that is clear, however, is that western science is unable to make sense of the zombies or to provide any answers. “Nothing fits,” as Menard despairingly remarks. More than this, his hubristic insistence on finding an explanation if anything more a hinderance than a help in the circumstances, especially when compared with some of the natives' more pragmatic if reluctant acceptance of the seemingly impossible:

Dr Menard: “Do you know what has caused all this? Is it voodoo?”

Lucas, the native assistant: “Lucas not know nothing. The father of my father always say – the dead, they will come back to suck the blood of the living.”

“That's nonsense! That's just a stupid superstition!”

“Yes, you are right doctor. You know many more things than Lucas.”

“I don't believe that voodoo can bring the dead back to life.”

“And Lucas not believe that the dead be dead.”

Had Menard and Bowles recognised their limits and left the island at the first sign of trouble, it's possible that nothing would have really happened – though then, of course, we wouldn't have had much of a film!

There's also a sense that voodoo may be being used by some of the islanders against the white man, that from a syncretic combination of African beliefs and Catholicism that could be useful to the slave master – as one who no longer really believed in magic but was quite happy to use the additional power it could grant him – it has now transformed into something with a more 'revolutionary' third worldist potential. (The famous “we are going to eat you” tagline, is suggestive in this regard in terms of the implied subject positions of third-world zombie and western world.)








Various members of the Dell'Aqua family as feature zombies

Following on from this, one of the film's weak points is often taken to be its ending. The delivery in the English dub here is somewhat ridiculous and the image of zombies shuffling across the bridge with the traffic below them flowing as normal despite the broadcaster's panicked final broadcast – they're everywhere! they're at the door! they're coming in! aaarrgggh! – not much better. However, the Italian dub is less hyperbolic and makes the more reasonable suggestion that the situation is deteriorating rapidly but not yet lost. Both also giving a neat symmetry to the film in terms of opening and closing words, which are heard over the radio, and images, of boats and New York-ness.

Perhaps the final indication of Zombie's accomplishment is that it is sufficiently rich that we can come back to the film again and, as I have hopefully indicated here, find something new we never really noticed or particularly thought about before.

The Films of Sergio Leone

This 2008 volume from Scarecrow Press presents a revised, expanded and corrected edition of author Robert Cumbow's long unavailable 1987 original, made at a point when, as he notes, information on the auteur and his work was in relatively short supply.

The first chapter, the only one in the introductory section, provides an overview of Leone's life and career. Thought really given little more than the bare minimum – Leone was born in 1929, died in 1989 and made only a few films during his life, which tended to be more successful with audiences than critics – this is all that is needed insofar as Cumbow points the reader more interested in the man than the films to Christopher Frayling's exhaustive biography Something to do with Death whilst setting out his own approach as different yet complementary to Frayling's in his emphasis on the text.

The second chapter, beginning the second section of the book, on the films, also quite brief, is again new and discusses Leone's pre-western work and the continuities between the peplum and the western in terms of narrative conventions and character types, particularly in the mythic dimensions that they tended to assume. There is the odd factual error, like identifying the origin of the term peplum in lying with a type of sandal, and one might have liked to see a more thoroughgoing analysis of Leone's debut film, The Colossus of Rhodes, but the overall analysis is sound and establishes a solid basis for considering the director's better known, 'mature' films.

The third chapter discusses A Fistful of Dollars in more detail and begins to really establish Cumbow's way of working and its distinctive strengths, as he works his way through the film in an almost image by image and scene by scene way to bring out their underlying possibilities. What we see on screen and hear on the soundtrack is, that is to say, what really matters. Though clearly not averse to theory, insofar as he brings out the structural oppositions undergirding the film, thus establishing certain patterns whose continuities, discontinuities and developments he will chart across Leone's subsequent films, Cumbow refuses to put the cart before the horse in the way that most academic studies would by identifying their standpoint as explictly marxist, psychoanalytic, semiotic or whatever.

What he ultimately emerges as is thus an old school Cahiers du Cinema / Sarris / Movie type humanistic, auteurist, mise en scène critic, the kind who is well versed in cinema, culture and ideas in general and who uses his erudition in the first instance to help illuminate the films themselves and only then turns to wider questions; as the book goes on we get references to Nietzsche, Bergson, Jansenism, Bettelheim, Eliade and others, all justified rather than show-offish.

One key reference point in this regard are Chabrol and Rohmer's seminal early study of Hitchcock– a connection made explicit in the 16th and final chapter, where Cumbow concludes with an analysis of Leone as a specifically Catholic filmmaker whose work expressed and advanced a distinctive morality.

Another, more implicit than explicit, seems to be Wollen's influential Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, as one of the few more theoretical works mentioned in the bibliography and as a text which, according to the postscript interview in third edition between Wollen and his one-time alter-ego Lee Russell, questions of art and aesthetics are paramount. (This is something which Wollen's discussion of the usefulness of structural linguistics to the study of film in the main body of the text itself can all too easily make us forget by giving the work a more scientific seeming cast.)

I had the occasional difference of opinion when Cumbow moved away from the details of the films to the wider context, as with his analysis of how different Fistful really was, but found his analysis of the film itself enormously rich in ideas. (Cumbow argues, correctly in my opinion, that Leone's work has come to represent the entirety of the spaghetti western to the general audience for better or worse but I am less certain of his contention that Leone's work was less innovative and more conventional than is commonly thought. I would contend that what's needed here is a finer distinction between the pre-Leone Italian western, with its more imitative approach to the Hollywood western, and the large number of post-Leone westerns which took on board and attempted to imitate his distinctively Italian innovations.)

The remaining six chapters of this section subject For a Few Dollars More, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck you Sucker, My Name is Nobody and Once Upon a Time in America to similar close readings and are again highly impressive and compelling in the main. A recurring theme here, helping account for the inclusion of the Valerii directed / Leone scripted and supervised My Name is Nobody, itself an elegy for the end of the Leone-style western, is the gradual shift from myth to history.

Of the analyses here, I felt that of Once Upon a Time in America to be the weakest, perhaps because Cumbow does not subject the film's mythic images of the gangster film to the same depth of analysis as the westerns and instead tends to subsume them into their more general framework. It may be, of course, that the film is not a meta-gangster movie in the same way as Once Upon a Time in the West is a meta-western, but the importance of film cliché within Harry Grey's source novel The Hoods – which Cumbow is too quick in my opinion to dismiss as bearing almost no relation to the finished film, as per one of Leone's remarks – may suggest otherwise.

Certainly, I would have liked to have seen more of a discussion of the film and its intertexts, particularly given the strength of Cumbow's discussions of the relationship between Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars or the traces of past roles carried by the likes of Van Cleef and Fonda or by image after image in Once Upon a Time in the West. (Then again, maybe this gives other Leone scholars something to do ;-))

The third section of the book, titled The Company gives consideration to Leone's casts and crew and their importance in realising his vision. Though there are perhaps some omissions here – Once Upon a Time in the West comes across as a writing collaboration between Leone and Bertolucci, for example – the two chapters also serve to show that Cumbow is no crude auteurist unawares of the difference that a cinematographer, production designer or editor can make to their director.

The fourth section, entitled The Vision, recapitulates and recontextualises some of the key points made in the film-by-film analyses by presenting them in a more thematic form.

Chapter 12 explores what Cumbow identifies as “the moral geometry of Sergio Leone,” or the way in which his compositions, camera movements and editing are in the final analysis as much moral as aesthetic choices, much as per Godard's oft-cited remark that “Morality is a question of tracking shots.”

Chapter 13 provides a comprehensive lexicon of Leone themes and images from A (anonymity) through to V (violence), providing a useful checklist of key moments to rewatch for anyone interested in his use of and / or attitudes towards – to give a few other examples – musical instruments, timepieces and rape.

Chapter 14 discusses Leone's most important collaborative partnership, that with Morricone, on a theme-by-theme and motif-by-motif basis but without using or relying upon any familiarity with music theory. (There is a book by Charles Leinberger on The Good, The Bad and The Ugly's score for anyone who is interested in something more specific / specialised here, although I haven't read it myself.)

The following brief chapter discusses the issue of the operatic in relation to Leone's cinema beyond the Morricone leitmofit, making the provocative suggestions that had Leone lived 100 years earlier he might have worked in the opera, as the spectacular art form of that era, and that had Verdi lived 100 years later he might have been a filmmaker for the same reasons.

As already mentioned, the last chapter returns us to the moral by bringing out the conscious and accidental Christian iconography of Leone's films to conclude that, once upon a time, he was the redeemer of the western genre.

Appendices provide complete credits and synopses for the films, a bibliography and details of DVD and CD releases.

All told, a thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating read that, like all the best film books, leaves one wanting to watch the films again and, more importantly, anew.

Zombcom Fulci zombie figure

How cool is this? A limited edition 12" articulated figure based on the poster Zombie from Fulci's film, in a wooden coffin box lined with moss and containing a juju charm in a bag. Limited to 100 copies worldwide.

Le Lunghe notti della Gestapo / Red Nights of the Gestapo

This is one of the more unusual Nazisploitation entries to come out of Italy, with none of the otherwise de rigeur concentration camps and only a few sadistic experiments of dubious scientific value.

Instead what we get is a factually grounded narrative that, by virtue of being based on the book of the same name by Bertha Uhland, the wife of the protagonist, here named von Uhler, and a supporting character in her own right, aspires to be taken a bit more seriously as an exploration of the evils of the Third Reich.

The film begins and ends with intertitles, the former announcing Rudolf Hess's dramatic flight to the UK and the latter the beginning of the invasion of the USSR, with the event depicted in between predicated on the first of these and seemingly contributing in no small way to the latter.




A history lesson

As Hess's underling SS man Manfred von Uhler (Ezio Miani) knows that his loyalty will be called into question by his master's defection and is prepared to commit suicide to preserve his, his family's and the SS's honour when he is taken by other, still more sinister, members of the selfsame organisation.




Effective symmetrical shots that wouldn't be out of place in The Conformist; outwith the SS lair and as the film progresses such symmetry and control is carefully lost

They strip him of rank and go through the motions of preparing a firing squad, which Uhler stands before impassively, but unexpectedly then announce that the whole thing was a test, which Uhler has passed, and thus assign him a mission vital to the security of the Reich that, as an ex-SS man whose loyalty to the party may be doubted by all but Himmler's inner circle, he is now uniquely well equipped for.

Uhler is to sound out a number of important civilian elements on the idea of plotting a coup with certain members of the Wehrmacht, in order to weed out those whose devotion to the cause and the war is less than wholehearted. The challenge is that he only has two weeks to bring them all together and acquire the necessary evidence – evidence that, as the film progresses, would in fact seem to be already there and probably not needed given the SS's usually pro-active approach.

Uhler's old friend Helmut von Danzig (Fred Williams), a francophile with no particular enthusiasm for the Reich, provides him with an initial route in while the sexual perversions of most of his targets – one man is obsessed with a particular dancer and actress, another with sucking milk from his partners' breasts as if he were a baby and so on – make it easy to lure them into compromising situations.


Von Danzig's women, with their lesbian tendencies, could also be from Bertolucci's film


As might the child who plays with dangerous toys

It's at this point, as Uhler sets to work recruiting appropriate female company and then lets them loose that the film either begins to lose its way or ups the ante, depending on your tolerance for sleaze, plot holes and sheer repetitiveness – significantly the film runs a comparatively epic 110 minutes rather than the usual 80 to 90 – whether you are willing to credit the filmmakers with attempting to say something meaningful about the nature of fascism thereby, and how far you believe the events depicted are a adequate representation of the truth given that Bertha Uhland presumably could not have been party to them.




Von Uhland and the women he has recruited

The first problem is that it's difficult to get a handle on what Manfred von Uhler is supposed to represent and what we are meant to feel for him.

He isn't an out and out bad guy along the lines of his Salon Kitty counterpart Helmut Vallenberg, being neither power-mad nor much of a pervert but rather a devoted family man and Nazi.

If the tension between these two is never adequately resolved it could be argued that this is quite deliberate and, indeed, makes a point about a contradiction in Nazi ideology – had the issues been explored in a way that made it clear this was indeed the intention.

Similarly, though Uhler sometimes intimates that he has his own agenda he subsequently fails to act on it, despite having foolishly being caught saying this and taking actions that one would have expected to have forced his hand.

Put another way, if Bertha Uhland's goal in telling her husband's story was to exonerate him, she either did a very bad job of it or was misled and / or misused by the filmmakers.

The second major problem is the presentation of the putatively anti-Nazi forces within Germany. Initially they're referred to as prominent members of the intelligentsia, but when gathered at the schloss are presented as a more mixed and sometimes internally conflicted group with those representing of culture and business or new and old money not always seeing eye to eye. Then there is the sense that, as far as the more intellectual types are concerned, they're second-rate figures anyway, furthered by one characters' reference to all those who have left, including the likes of Einstein, Brecht and Mann.

Perhaps more damaging, however, is that the SS are proved right in their intelligence suggesting them to be perverts almost to a man – one is even implied to be a paedophile – such that we're left wondering why their silence and compliance couldn't have been achieved long ago through a spot of judicious blackmail, buying off or other, more permanent means.




The Great Dictator never did this

Certainly, there's little sense of these men being able to take the high moral ground or having the capacity providing any sort of genuinely effective opposition or alternative leadership and every possibility that the unsympathetic viewer will come to regard them as just as bad, perhaps even worse, than Uhler.

This in turn foregrounds the whole question of how far the situation depicted really reflects the truth of Nazi Germany at the time, given the strength of the regime's propaganda machine, the succession of easy victories that already been won and the elimination, imprisonment or exiling of most of Nazi's most obvious enemies, whether real or imagined, during the preceeding eight years – unless we credit the filmmakers with attempting to illustrate the kind of perverse logic by which the regime and / or factions within it needed to be generating new enemies out of a paradoxical self-destructive self-sustenance.

Technically the film is better than most of its ilk, with more convincing period costumes and settings than usual, with the direction and performances also good enough to avoid much in the way of unintentional laughter. Some of the music choices, most notably the SS theme with lyrics in Italian about the sleep of reason breeding monsters – a theme important enough to also appear as an intertitle, albeit mis-spelled in the English translation – and frequent references to the pleasures of the whip, are a bit doubtful.


Luciano Rossi as a bearded intellectual

Tom Felleghy appears sans moustache as the head of an asylum who has managed to condition sadistic, masochistic and nympomaniac female patients in the hope that they might prove useful to the Reich – it won't ruin anything to say that they do – while Luciano Rossi is cast against type not as a Nazi pervert but as a relatively upstanding anti-Nazi professor.

A genuine oddity that's worth a look for curiosity value alone.

Il Profumo della signora in giallo

Or, a couple of Fenech things.

First, another image of one of her perfumes:



Second, there are currently lots of rare Fenech films on Cinemageddon for your downloading and delectation, including things like The Black and Blond Pussycat and The Sins of Madame Bovary.

Le Tue mani sul mio corpo

A bourgeois family gathers at their home by the sea for the holidays. There is Andrea (Lino Capolicchio), the neurotic student haunted by memories of his dead mother; his father, a publisher (Jose Quaglio); his new trophy and / or gold-digging wife, Mirelle (Erna Schurer), who is far closer to Andrea's age than her husband's; Mirelle's mother and, before long, her friend, Carole (Colette Descombes) and her partner Jean.


Andrea on his motorcycle, fantasising about taking a death trip




Male and female voyeurs

It soon emerges that Andrea is obsessed with and secretly spies upon Carole, whilst Mirelle – who knows of Andrea's obsession – alternatively flirts with and mocks the already confused young man.




Some of the images produced by Andrea

Later, following a party, Andrea introduces a black woman, Nivel, indicating that she is his fiancee in a bid to shock his father and stepmother: “Nivel will be a splendid wife. I want many, many children. Lots of little cannibals that eat you all up”; subsequently Nivel performs an interpretive dance in which she dresses as both a KKK man and his victim.




Playing with identity

The intrigues and games continue, gradually becoming more serious until, eventually – literally the last scene of the film – there is a murder.

Technically accomplished and well constructed, Le Tue mani sul mio corpo – i.e. your hands on my body, although with the 'you' and 'me' references remaining free floating and shifting – is a challenging film that demands more of the viewer's active involvement than is often the case, with director and co-writer Brunello Rondi preferring to make his points elliptically rather than obviously.

At the start there's a considerable degree of uncertainty over the characters' relationships to one another belied by the neat who's who summary above such that, for example, when we first see Mirelle, we're possibly inclined to think that the man she's with is her boyfriend and / or that she's Andrea's sister.

It's a strategy that works well to foreground Andrea's sexual and other confusions and makes his state more intersubjectively shared by the audience, whilst also providing a more perverse cast to the family as a whole.




The fragmentation of space and identity

Much the same can be said of the general lack of attention to time, place and state within the film, cumulatively giving a somewhat dreamlike quality to the proceedings – what is objectively real and what is in Andrea's mind's eye – and again conveying his lack of purpose and direction.

Individual scenes displaying a carefully thought and worked through mise en scène in which the placement of the characters within the frame – alas often compromised by the pan and scan presentation on the copy I watched – and the decoupage tell us as much about what is going on as the well-crafted dialogue and situations.


Pieces of the puzzle – woman as enigma and piece of meat

Thus, for example, Andrea tries to show his sophistication to the slightly older Carole by making her a cocktail, but then finds he cannot remember the recipe and, pouring her a whisky instead, fills her glass more as if it were wine, with extreme close-ups of Carole apparently returning his gaze suggesting a connection, whether real or imagined, between them.

If there's thus a definite method to the film, the question the giallo enthusiast may find himself asking is whether it is really for him, emerging as it does more as a bourgeois melodrama / psychodrama than as a thriller in the conventional sense. While it's certainly true that the likes of Lenzi's psico sexy films of the period – Colette Descombes having actually appeared in Orgasmo the previous year – also have considerable dramatic elements and a similar tendency to focus on outwardly respectable bourgeois types, they counterbalance this with conventional conspiracies motivated by passion or financial gain and a willingness to present obvious set pieces alongside the more mundane narrative. (In this regard Le Tue mani sul mio corpo is perhaps more reminiscent of Death Laid an Egg for the way in which it too fuses narrative and set-piece, albeit in a more restrained, 'tasteful' and bourgeois way than Questi and Arcalli's masterpiece of Marxist satire.)

This said, the persistent emphasis on traditional giallo scenarios of past trauma erupting into the present, of the pleasures and dangers inherent in voyeurism voyeurism, and the persistent foregrounding of blocks of yellow within the mise en scène – if there's a curtain, a towel, a telephone or piece of swimwear it is almost guaranteed to be yellow – clearly indicate that the film is sullo stesso filone, albeit in its own north by northwest manner.

Capolicchio makes us empathise and sympathise with his character even as we necessarily retain a greater degree of distance from him than we would another more typical protagonist, while Jose Quaglio – also excellent as the blind fascist ideologue in The Conformist – plays the bourgeois patriarch as if to the manner born. Erna Schurer turns in one of her better performances as Mirelle, the character demonstrating a self-awareness about what she really represents to her husband and step-son, and the actress that she possessed brains as well as beauty thereby.

Giorgio Gaslini provided the score, an effective mixture of lyrical and jazzy cues, while the cinematography by Alessandro D'Eva, art direction by Oscar Capponi and the editing by future director Michele Massimo Tarantini are uniformly accomplished, never detracting from Rondi's vision.

[Thanks again to the good folks at Cinemageddon for making the film available and doing the English subtitles.]

Slash Hits Volume Three: Mullet Massacre

This third 48-page glossy colour A5 volume in Midnight Media's ongoing Slash Hits series provides a comprehensive overview of slasher and related forms such as the giallo – represented by the likes of Phenomena, Murderock, A Blade in the Dark and Stagefright – over the four years from 1983 to 1987.

The period comes across as one dominated by the continuation of the Friday the 13th series, the emergence of Nightmare on Elm Street and the gradual decline of major US studio interest in the form beyond these properties, but with no let up in independent productions, good, bad and indifferent.

Each film, from the best known franchise entries to the most obscure shot on video regional ultra-low budget independent production, is given a concise and entertaining write up cum evaluation, typically of a hard but fair sort, along with specific ratings on the key fan criteria of breasts and blood, with ratings of between one and five been given in each case.

Crucially, however, the value of the film in its own right and as a genre product are recognised as different, such that the likes of The Stepfather and Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer can be acknowledged on their own distinctive merits, despite a relative paucity of one or the other formula ingredient.

Providing a good checklist of films and themes such as treatments of the final girl and the gender transgressive killer or scenario, another major area where the publication shines is in foregrounding the increasing postmodernism / self-reflexivity of slasher product over this period, demonstrating that Scream was really nothing new except for having a name director and studio backing behind it.

La Bambola di Satana

Following the death of her uncle, Elizabeth (Erna Schurer) arrives at the family castle with her fidanzato Jack (Roland Carey), a journalist, for a reading of the will.


Dolls and black gloved killers, what more could one want?

After dinner with the other guests and servants, in which the history of the castle and the family are discussed, Elizabeth and Jack are taken to their rooms – a conservative touch which provides an early indication of the film's at times awkward straddling of 60s and 70s styles, whilst also serving as an important plot point insofar as it allows for the easier terrorisation of Elizabeth at night.












Schurer's characteristic expressions

Instinctively heading for the room she used to stay in when she visited the castle as a child many years ago, Elizabeth is shocked to discover the first of the castle's many secrets. An old servant whom she had been informed was dead is in fact very much alive, albeit wheelchair-bound and apparently insane.




Bava they are not

The next day uncle's will is read, naming Elizabeth as the principal beneficiary to no-one else's particular surprise.




Black gloved hands at work

Later the housekeeper takes Elizabeth, Jack and some of the others on a tour of the castle's dungeons, complete with reproduction torture chamber and identified as being like something out of a giallo novel by another guest; meanwhile another young woman, ostensibly a landscape painter vacationing in the vicinity, proves to be searching for something in the castle grounds along with some unidentified confederates with whom she communicates by walkie-talkie...


Note how the candelabra is shedding absolutely no light at all

That night Elizabeth finds her sleep troubled by extraordinarily vivid nightmares involving the castle, its staff and Jack – if, that is, they are in fact nightmares and not a carefully stage-managed reality designed to drive her mad or to her death...

Released at the end of the 1960s, La Bambola di Satana – not to be confused with the later, more explicit and supernatural horror themed La Bimba di Satana – is one of those entries that hedges its bets by throwing in just about gothic horror and giallo motif the filmmakers could think of into a plot that's half Agatha Christie and half Scooby Doo; fans of the latter style of giallo may care to note that the film climaxes with the literal unmasking of the hitherto disguised chief villain.

Besides the aforementioned madwoman (not) in the attic, torture dungeon and sinister servants, we also have plenty of dark corridors illuminated only by the light from a candelabra; a black-gloved figure whose face we never see until late on; wolves howling outside in the dark; storms every night and a beautiful heroine / damsel in distress who spends much of her time in nightwear that leaves little to the imagination.

Obviously also inspired by the wider fumetti culture of the time, with the credits even being presented as a series of posed stills from later in the film – many also in black and white rather than colour – La Bambola di Satana is perhaps better as a collection of static images than as an actual movie.

While director Ferrucio Casapinta – whose sole film credit this seems to be – definitely has an eye for an arresting composition and tries hard, with the nightmare sequences well rendered, the technical aspects of the film are lacking at times elsewhere, with the zoom lens work sometimes stop-start rather than smooth and far too many attempts at atmospheric and / or realistic lighting going awry as the use of a candelabra, the switching of a bedside light, or a flash of lightning fail to produce an appreciable changes in illumination.

This in turn serves to distinguish La Bambola di Satana from other films of its kind, such as The Virgin of Nuremberg and The Bloody Pit of Horror, albeit to its detriment insofar as they each really work as films in their own right; perhaps the most telling aspect here is the way the makers of Bloody Pit of Horror have the confidence to incorporate the making of a fumetti into the film's narrative, poking fun at what they themselves are doing and indicating that it's all in good fun, not to be taken too seriously.

As Elizabeth, Erna Schurer doesn't have too much to do except look pretty, vulnerable and scared along with screaming on cue. She's adequate to each task, with her background as a photomodel in fumetti clearly giving her the kind of expertise in creating one-dimensional characters needed by the film.

Roland Carey's Jack is similarly flat, the kind of traditional hard-headed hero whom one is never really inclined to doubt or consider as having ulterior motives, with this again serving to give the film a distinctly old-fashioned and comforting feel when compared to the likes of The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (with its similar gothic / giallo crossover) or what a George Hilton type might have brought to the role.

Much the same can be said of the rest of the performers, with the absence of an eccentric character actors of the Luciano Rossi or Pigozzi type being felt along with that of more recognisable female glamour presences beyond Schurer herself.

In line with the general 60s / 70s crossover, Franco Potenza's score is a mixture of contemporary rock pieces and jazzy cues – the former playing diegetically in the nearby trattoria – and old fashioned horror mood music.

Dangerous Pictures Act

Those in the UK with an interest in horror and exploitation films hopefully already know about the Dangerous Pictures Act, whose dangers of misapplication are cogently addressed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oszEa30Ghc

New community / group for cult cinema

Here: http://cultmediastudies.ning.com/

Thanks to David there for bringing it to my attention :-)

Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali / Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals / Emanuelle's Cannibal Adventure / Trap them and Kill Them

Whilst working undercover, posing as a patient in a mental hospital, Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) is understandably shocked by the sight of a nurse running screaming into the corridor, blood gushing from where her right breast used to be.


Yeah, and Marlboro-smoking chimpanees might fly out my butt...

Investigating further, Emanuelle discovers that the nurse, whose habit of making unwanted lesbian advances towards her patients seemingly precludes much in the way of sympathy, was tending to an unidentified and mute patient who had been found in the Amazon rainforest.

Even more intriguing is the distinctive tattoo above the young woman's pubic region – a placement which naturally also allows for the a convenient bit of full-frontal female nudity – identified as the mark of a cannibal tribe believe to be extinct for the past half-century.


This time round Emanuelle conceals her camera in a giallo-style doll


D'Amato regular Dirce Funari appears as the white cannibal girl

Convicing her editor that this could be the scoop of the century, presumably thus trumping her earlier exposes of white slavers and snuff film producers, the ace reporter seeks out the assistance of Professor Mark Lester (Gabriele Tinti), an expert on the subject of cannibalism, to mount an expedition into the Amazon.






A touch of the old mondo snuff footage as two African adulterers are punished for their sexual transgression

Arriving, Mark and Emauelle rendezvous with an old friend of the anthropologists, Wilkes (Geoffrey Coplestone) who knows the area and its tribes well. Though unable to accompany them, his daughter Isabelle (Monica Zanchi) and her tutor Sister Angela (Annamaria Clementi), whose convent lies upriver, join the expedition along with a couple of guides, Felipe and Manolo; that night Isabelle watches Emanuelle and Mark as they make love and masturbates, while later the two women wash each other in the river.

As the party pulls ashore to make camp for the night Emanuelle is attacked by a snake and is saved by the timely intervention of Donald McKenzie (Donal O'Brien), who invites them to join him at his camp inland, along with his wife Maggie (Susan Scott / Nieves Navarro) and their guide Salvatore (Percy Hogan).

Donald explains that he is on a hunting expedition but also proves to be a voyeur, looking in on Sister Angela and Isabelle as they sleep, half-naked. Meanwhile Maggie and Salvatore go off into the undergrowth for a tryst.

All the while none of the group notices none of the group notices that they are being watched from the undergrowth by the waiting cannibals...

The next morning one of the guides goes missing while the party's boats prove to have been cut loose from their moorings. Continuing on foot, they then discover the remains of one of the nuns from the convent...

One things about the cannibal filone which I'd never really thought about until watching Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals again was its unusual production pattern. Though enough films with cannibal themes were certainly made in the ten year period between 1972 and 1981 there doesn't seem to be any obvious rise and fall to their production, with a fairly steady flow of productions from the same few directors – Lenzi, Deodato, D'Amato – instead and only the occasional opportunistic interloper on the territory, most notably Sergio Martino with the at-times not dissimilar Mountain of the Cannibal God.

Seen in retrospect the thing that distinguishes D'Amato's forays into the filone, whether through the character of Emanuelle Nera as here or in his other pornotropic ventures without the character such as Papaya Love Goddess of the Caribbean and Orgasmo Nero, is his emphasis upon sex over violence and gore.


Is it just me or did anyone else half expect to see Captain Hagerty's zombie surfacing behind them here?

Thus, in addition to all the sexploitation material outlined above, the opening New York also sequences present Emanuelle fantasising about making love to Lester and saying farewell to her current boyfriend in her own special way, presumably for anyone in the audience who felt that only one display of Gemser's naked form every five minutes wasn't enough already.

This said, once the cannibals finally make an appearance in the final half-hour the nastiness quotient does increas significantly and, moreover, should not disappoint the horror audience – excepting those who are regrettably sufficiently jaded to need their random animal killings – with D'Amato also handling the shock moments well, using rapid cuts, zooms and stinger sounds to augment their effectiveness whilst also conveying something of the subjective experience of the characters.






Some of the gore

In his analysis of the Black Emanuelle films, Xavier Mendik suggests that they existed primarily to allow Italian audiences to see Emanuelle degraded and objectified on account of her monstrous non-whiteness. While a sophisticated theoretical analysis, it arguably downplays the extent to which the character is displayed as desirable – surely the main reason for the success of the franchise – and the way that the white / non-white boundaries are more complex than a simple attraction / repulsion dynamic would allow for.


Can we honestly say one of these women is presented as desirable and the other as monstrous?

It's hard to square the sheer popularity of the Emanuelle series and character with the idea that Italian audiences went to see these films primarily out of a perverse, sadistic desire to see Gemser and the other non-white characters humiliated, degraded and generally 'put in their place'.

Nevermind that Gemser's character is presented as a model of sexually liberated, desirable womanhood or that D'Amato seems to have regarded the actress with far greater respect than many of white Italian actresses he also worked with for her straightforwardness, professionalism and refusal to do hardcore material.

Indeed, if anything I would argue that a film like the actioner Tough to Kill, in which Percy Hogan's comedy negro Wabu evenually turns the tables on all the whites – nominal pretty boy hero Luc Merenda included – who have regarded him with outright contempt or benign indifference throughout, comes closer to being a joke at the expense of the white racist who has laughed along with them and at Wabu than anything else.

Though there's nothing quite so pronounced here, we do have Mackenzie's critique of African safaris of the sort represented in Africa Addio, as safe, predictable and inauthentic, as he stresses that knowing that there is genuine danger, that the hunter can become the hunted, is fundamental to the real experience.

Another interesting scene is that in which Maggie gazes on Salvatore and his phallic weapon whilst masturbating, before instructing him to come with her into the undergrowth for that one-on-one encounter. Salvatore is presented as being able to fulfil Maggie's needs in a way that her impotent husband cannot, without there being any obvious racist element to their mutual lovemaking scene. Though we might certainly question if Salvatore is really in a position to refuse Maggie's demands, there's no indication that she is out to humiliate him by playing slave mistress Mandingo type games.




Which of these female and male desiring gazes is barred?

Nor is either lover really punished for the act, such that is cannot be understood as any more transgressive than anything else on show for our delectation – with the notable exception of McKenzie's decidedly non-consensual mauling of Isabelle.

Basically, in D'Amato's pre-AIDS world the message seems to be that anything goes – except perhaps male homosexual activity, as the one type that still retained that element of “monstrousness” even in the work of more avowedly progressive directors – just so long as no-one gets hurt.

Likewise the very fact of having a white middle bourgeois woman as the active bearer of the gaze against an objectified black proletarian man here again challenges classical formulations of this theory and exposes some of their own unspoken assumptions and blind-spots. ('Let she who is without sin cast the first stone,' as it were.)

Though D'Amato's depiction of the cannibals themselves can no doubt be criticised from an ethnographic or anthropological perspective – as can the factual error of having an African chimpanzee in a supposedly South American rainforest – to do so omits the film's exploitation nature and that it is first an foremost a fiction intended to entertain.

It also arguably implies that the vast majority of fiction films should be likewise criticised for their factual inaccuracies or liberty taking or else the imposition of a double standard whereby excuses are conveniently found and made for those films whose politics and representations the critic agrees with. (Where are relativism and respect for the ways of the other here; does an “obvious” cinema also suggest that we would be better using obvious empirical material rather than theoretical sophistry to make sense of what it offers its implied audience it in the first instance?)

The acting, with all the members of the cast D'Amato regulars, is acceptable and in some cases – Navarro, O'Brien better than might be expected – the dubbing relatively poor and Nico Fidenco's engagingly trashy music present and correct.

Enough said, really...

Red Harvest

I picked up this seminal world of hard-boiled fiction on the grounds that it was an inspiration for both Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and had also attracted Bernardo Bertolucci at one point, though his attempt at making a more faithful adaptation of it appears to have came to naught.

One of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op stories, it is told in the first person by the unnamed private investigator, a representative of the aforementioned agency. He arrives in the mining town of Personville AKA Poisonville, population 40,000, having been hired by one of the town's public citizens, Donald Willson.

The Op and Willson never get the chance to meet, however, with Willson being gunned down the same night as the Op arrives. He soon learns that Willson's was a relative newcomer in Poisonville but had already earned the reputation as an honest man and thus troublemaker, and that his father, Elihu Willson, had built up the town from nothing but then lost control over it during a labour dispute:

“[O]ld Elihu didn't know his Italian history. He won the strike, but he lost his hold on the city and the state. To beat the miners he had to let his hired thugs run wild. When the fight was over he couldn't get rid of them. He had given his city to them and he wasn't strong enough to take it away from them. Personville looked good to them and they took it over.”

The Op's confidant, a labour organiser named Quint, identifies four different figures who run the town from behind the scenes, maintaining an uneasy balance of power amongst themselves and with Willson: bootlegger Pete the Finn; bondsman and fence Lew Yard; chief of police Noonan and gambler 'Whisper' Thaler.

While his subsequent attempts to clean up the city see him make arrangements with and feed information to each of the five men, the scenario cannot really be described as a 'servant of two masters' plot in the manner of Leone's film, with the intrigue and conflict between the various figures considerably more complicated than that between the Baxters and Roho, and the Op tending to present himself as more of a neutral power broker rather than identifying himself with any faction.

The Op also brings in some outside help in the form of another couple of men from the agency rather than being self-reliant, although their role is primarily that of observers and might be compared to that of the coffinmaker and barkeep in Fistful.

There is also less sentimentality than Leone's film, with no counterpart to the 'holy family'. Instead the two women who appear, Willson's widow and especially Dinah Brand, who is out for whatever she can get from the Op and the other men around her, are hard, uncaring figures.

A good read in its own rights and an interesting one in seeing how things changed cross-culturally when it was liberally adapted for the screen. (Though the most faithful in its prohibition America setting, Walter Hill's Last Man Standing also takes liberties with the source material, in giving Bruce Willis's character a more heroic role in defending a prostitute and in again reducing the number of factions and subplots to more manageable numbers.)

Also of note, though more in terms of the giallo, is a subplot late on where the Op is uncertain whether he has committed a murder himself and must thus find the real perpetrator before he is caught by the (corrupt) police.

Le Deportate della sezione speciale SS / Deported Women of the SS Special Section

Though featuring the expected elements of sex, sleaze, sadism, shocks and showers, this 1977 Nazisploitation entry from Rino De Silvestro is unusual in other regards, evincing a comparatively serious and sombre tone at times and featuring a few scenes which hint at a challenge to the viewer's pleasure in watching the film.


De Silvestro makes his bid for authorship

Set in the dying days of the Third Reich, the film begins with the transportation of a mixed group of female prisoners by a filthy but perhaps surprisingly roomy cattle car.

Flashbacks establish our main protagonist, Tanya Nobel, an aristocrat of German extraction who has renounced the Reich and the Volk in favour of her Polish resistance lover; as is usually the case in the filone story takes priority over history.




Erna Schurer and John S

Tanya immediately earns the enmity of Trudy, who is determined to become a Kapo once they arrive at their destination. Trudy's character is more sketchily drawn, however. While there is an element of class resentment to her remarks – “Leave her alone” “Oh yeah! Just who the fuck do you think you are! Your aristocratic background doesn't mean shit here! You're up to your neck in it just like the rest of us!” – it isn't that clear why she is a prisoner rather than a Nazi in this regard beyond her lesbian proclivities, though I certainly suspect that she is something of an anti-social element who could not be relied upon to put the values of the Reich above her own gratifications rather than a leftist.

Whatever the case, it soon emerges that this is another one of those films where the activities of the Nazis themselves don't seem particularly geared towards the instrumentally rational goal of winning the war nor the value rational one of ridding the Reich of those they deem undesirable; while the two goals were perhaps not altogether incompatible when the war was going well by the time the film is set they almost certainly were in terms of suggesting conflicting deployments of men and material.




A Suspiria-style lightbulb shot and a row of less than happy campers

As the train pulls into the station, Tanya and another prisoner make a bid for freedom. Trudy notices and alerts the guards. Tanya is thus recaptured while the other woman is gunned down; again, students of Nazi crimes rather than their representation in the Nazisploitation filone might have cause for pause here as to the probability of this scene.

From the station, the prisoners are transferred to the camp, apparently located in an old castle. Trudy gets her wish to become a kapo and thus gets to dish out rather than receive the same humiliation and brutalisation as the others as they are processed and assigned new duties.

Tanya is earmarked to be a field whore serving in the Joy Division until the camp commander Erner notices her name on the roster. As another flashback explains, Erner is infatuated with Tanya, althought she had always refused his attentions.

Erner thus decides to keep Tanya in the camp and resolves to make her love him, resulting in a battle of wills between the two as the other inmates struggle to survive amidst the capricious wardens and kapos that all builds to a dramatic and suspenseful climax...








Kapo Trudy wielding her phallic baton

As is often the case in the filone, the reasons for the prisoners being in the camp – whether their 'crimes' are ethnic/religious, sexual, political or otherwise – are not specified with the exception of Tanya.

Unsurprisingly the incidence of homosexuality – as a 'perversion' – is presented as be far higher amongst the Nazis and their confederates than the prisoners, with two wardens getting into a catfight over their respective claims over one piece of live property:

“She's my whore”

“Oh yeah, fuck you. What are you going to do about it?”

“I'll show you! [slap]”

Far more surprising and interesting, however, is the scene of male homosexual activity between Erner and his devoted underling, Dobermann [sic] by virtue of giving the implied male heterosexual audience something they didn't expect or desire; as one IMBD reviewer remarks: “This was the last thing I was expecting to see [...] Needless to say, a big turn off.”


Ernst and Dobermann

Significantly this scene is also presaged by one of the battles of wills between Tanya and Erner, as she pointedly refuses to gaze at his humiliation of two other field whores by compelling them to make out with one another and then fellate him, before then moving to seduce Dobermann – a combination cumulatively suggesting a somewhat Sartean dynamic of looking and refusing to look that, while being about power, cannot be reduced to male / female, active looking / passive to be looked at ness. (“You have to look! You can't refuse my spectacle!,” as Erner screams at Tanya.)

Despite this difference, one of the problems with the Nazisploitation filone more generally that again emerges is that of scale. These low-budget films lacked the resources to convincingly depict a larger-scale camp with hundreds or thousands of prisoners, only ever being able to present small-scale and somewhat specialist facilities with only a couple dozen inmates at most at a time.

Their production design also tends to be that bit off, as when the rows of improbably comfortable looking beds and the showers with abundant hot water and soap for those long shower scenes come across as more appropriate to a prison, convent or girls' school – a lack of specificity which further highlights the ease with which the same basic stock scenario, situations and sets could so often be redressed by a simple substitution of mother superior for head warden or SS doctor.




Tanya refusing to gaze...


... making a defiant, resistant gaze of her own...


... and as the laughing woman...

On the plus side, the direction is more accomplished than many others of its kind, with some effective camera set ups and movements. Likewise although the inmates – including Stefanio D'Amario and Sara Sperati – are as usual that bit too healthy and well-fed looking to really convince as the real thing, they and the other performers – including Erna Schurer, Solvi Stubing and John Steiner amonst the Nazi contingent – are uniformly committed to their roles and, within the melodramatic, operatic and campy boundaries of the filone, more than adequate.

Stelvio Cipriani' score is another asset, although some of his cues are recognisable from elsewhere, such as the lush, romantic piano piece that build ups to the Countess's murder in Bay of Blood.

Genova a mano armata / Merciless Man

If it would be difficult to think of a more generic title for a poliziotto than Genova a mano armata, writer-director Mario Lanfranchi's 1976 film nevertheless manages to produce the occasional surprise amongst the de rigeur shoot outs, brawls, chases, crosses and double-crosses.

Specifically, rather than being a dedicated crime fighter or a gangster, our protagonist (Tony Lo Bianco) is an ex-cop kicked off the force for inappropriate conduct.

Taking advantage of his father's Italian origins he's relocated to Genoa and set himself up as a private investigator – a post assumed against the wishes of local cop Gallo (Adolfo Celi) who is convinced 'The American' is up to something but cannot put his finger on anything specific.

Not that it can be said that the American has exactly shone in his new occupation, with his most recent case going spectacularly wrong on all counts as he failed to save a kidnapped businessman from being killed, the ransom from going missing and the kidnappers from escaping.

Nonetheless given that a group of gangsters seem intent on following the American's every move and also warn him against further involvement in the case he does at least have some leads to go on when the victim's daughter, Dr Marta Mayer (Maud Adams), hires him to track down her father's killers and bring them to justice one way or another...

Whether on account of the cross-over between the hunters and hunted or the apparent omission of 15 or 20 minutes of material in the version I watched, Genova a mano armata had a somewhat choppy narrative, being prone to jump from one plot point or incident to another without bothering too much about the finer details of the whys and wherefores

Though the eventual resolution goes some way to explaining how this should be so, it's also one of those cases of too little too late.

Other incidents along the way such as the American's shooting up heroin in order to infiltrate a private clinic he believes is involved in the increasingly confusing affair – presumably an idea borrowed from the French Connection 2, just as a later bus hijacking recalls Dirty Harry – strain credulity, without being well enough put together to get by on character, performance or direction alone, especially when we're not really given much reason to care about Lo Bianco's character to begin with.

Bond fans may care to note that the film may well be unique in starring not one but two of that franchise's major villains in the form of Thunderball's Celi and Octopussy's Adams, while the presence of Howard Ross / Renato Rossini as the leader of the gangsters should be a plus as far as Italian trash fans are concerned as will Franco Micalizzi's characteristically energetic score.

Torso poster

My latest Ebay acquisition: a nice and garish US poster for Torso. The price of the shipping to the UK is almost as much as the poster itself :-(

Il Colosso di Rodi / The Colossus of Rhodes

Set in the period between Greece decline and Roman ascendancy, The Colossus of Rhodes begins with the ceremony marking the completion of the titular Wonder of the World.

Ten years in the making, the giant statue over the entrance to the island state's main harbour promises to alter the balance of power in the Mediterranean, giving Rhodes and its allies a near impregnable base.




Two views of the Colossus, in benign mood / mode


A later fight on its shoulders, giving an idea of the film's scale

Accordingly the Phenecians, the first villains of the piece, have sent an emmisary to Rhodes to negotiate with King Sirse for access to the harbour, the plan being to raid Greek ships and split the proceeds.

Sirse is wise enough, however, to impose a limitation on the number of Phenecian ships and men permitted into the harbour at any one time, both as a means of securing his own position and hopefully avoiding arousing suspicion amongst the Greeks, Rhodes traditional ally.

Sirse's advisor Thar has his own plans and is secretly plotting to overthrow his ruler with the aid of the Phenecians, hundreds of whose troops are being brought into the island in the guise of Macedonian slaves.


Sirse, Thar and the Phenecian emissary negotiate over a model of the harbour – a precursor to McBain's simulacra of Sweetwater station?

In addition another faction amongst the island's nobility also hopes to bring about a regime change, being dissatisfied with Sirse's rule and what they see as the vainglories of the Colossus. Unlike Thar they are loyal to their homeland and are looking to Greece for assistance.

All this means that everyone wants to know where the loyalties of the heroic half-Rhodean warrior visiting his uncle after his recent wartime exertions for Greece, Dario, lie and if he is just the innocent abroad that he appears to be...

Though entirely enjoyable in its own right, the main interest that The Colossus of Rhodes holds for many viewers today – myself included – is likely in its status as the official directorial debut of Sergio Leone and the extent to which it contains the same signature touches and themes as can be found in his later films.

The chief differences from the westerns are that the distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys are more straightforward and obvious, and the failure of the protagonist to play different factions against one another for his own benefit.

As Dario says at one point, “I don't play the hero” – rather he is the hero.

Leone's approach to history is also somewhat distinctive here, playing that bit faster and looser in terms of historical details. Though he acknowledged that it would probably take a lifetime's research to pursue authenticity here, it could be argued that in the case of the western he did do this research into its myths and history. Just like his later films, however, Leone also proves inclined to go for what he felt to be right in terms of the impact or effect it would have on the audience, as with a Colossus three times the size of its historical counterpart, positioned in a different place and tricked out with all sorts of fancy gadgets.






The Colossus reveals one of its secrets, raining fire down on a ship trying to pass beneath it

The film's approach to identity and allegiance is also somewhat reminiscent of Leone's later films, as when the difference between a Macedonian slave and a Phenecian warrior comes down to a uniform or the way in which Dario's love-interest Diala and uncle Lissipus do not revealing their true allegiances until late in the day.

There are also some surprising reversals of expectation, as with the way it looks like these selfsame slaves are about to be sacrificed to the god Baal rather than be housed in the dungeons of the temple until the moment to strike arrives, or the attempted forcible abduction of Dario by the Rhodean rebels after he stubbornly refuses to come along quietly and listen to what they have to say.

While the film is very much on an epic scale, it also largely succeeds at the more intimate level. In particular two of the female characters rank amongst the best developed ones to appear in a Leone film for some time, albeit with a relatively straightforward good girl / bad girl, if not madonna / whore, distinction emerging as the film goes on.

There's also an intriguing aspect to the rebels' motivation. It's not entirely clear what Sirse has done to incur their enmity other than following what they feel – admittedly correctly – to be the bad counsel of Thar and, perhaps, putting his own personal glory above that of Rhodes and the welfare of its people.






Some Blondie-style sharpshooting threatens to send a rebel to i leoni

Nevertheless, the other citizens of the Island seem happy enough with the building of the Colussus and the promise of prosperity and security that it offers, or are at least not generally that vocal in their complaints.

As such, there is perhaps the hint that the conflict is, much like the subsequent representation of American and Mexican civil wars in The Good the Bad and the Ugly and Duck You Sucker, primarily between two elite factions and the kind of thing which the masses would do best to avoid getting entangled in.


A somewhat unexplained, Duck You Sucker style massacre scene

There is a difference from these later films in that it is more idealism rather cynicism that eventually triumphs. Given Leone's remark that the distinction between his and Ford's westerns could in part be attributed to their respective backgrounds – Roman pessimism and American optimism – this may be a reflection of the film's own historico-mythic setting or that Leone was not interested in undertaking a wholesale re-invention of the peplum in the same way as he would later be with the western.




Two of the rebels undergo torture in a classic piece of homoerotic sadism

It is perhaps somewhat curious in this regard that the film is credited to Leone whereas A Fistful of Dollars was originally accredited to the pseudonymous Bob Robertson, such that he moved from being identified with his work to a position non-identification – albeit with a name that referenced his director father, Roberto Leone – before going back to identification from For a Few Dollars More onwards.

Presumably this loss of authority on Fistful can be accounted for by the fact that at the time it was still a relatively untested genre for Italian directors. Whereas the the historical and mythical epic was actually invented by the Italians in the silent era, such that the contemporaneous work of Cottafavi and others could be understood as a post-fascist reclamation of Italian cinematic heritage, the western, like the Gothic horror, was initially perceived as a foreign genre which Italians had no obvious aptitude for, leading filmmakers to attempt to pass off their product as of US or UK origin as generically appropriate.

This said, just as the practiced viewer can easily spot the stylistic and thematic differences between Hammer and Italian Gothics, part of the whole reason for the spaghetti westerns proving so fresh and attractive to many audiences at the time was their evident differences and departures from the Hollywood models.

It is this, despite Leone's attraction to The Colossus of Rhodes as a project apparently residing mostly in the opportunities it afforded him to ironicise the form after his uncredited and unofficial, straight debut on The Last Days of Pompeii, is perhaps where the finished product proves lacking compared to its immediate successors.




The deceptiveness of appearances, as we think the slaves are about to be sacrificed to Baal's gaping maw

The balance between following convention and introducing innovation is more heavily weighted towards the former than would later be the case here, such that cliché and pastiche tending to appear as such rather than as parody, subversion, deconstruction or any of the other preferred oppositional critical terms of choice.

Though some horse riding sequences outside of the city of Rhodes and some brutal and inventive torture scenes could easily have seen service in one of the later westerns with different musical accompaniment, costuming and design, the urban and sea-front locations that dominate elsewhere tend to makes Leone's direction generally that bit more anonymous than it would later become.

The contrasts between close-ups and background vistas are less extreme and more conventional, the former serving more in a classical Hollywood manner than as the exploration of the geography of weather-beaten, life-worn, distinctly unglamorous physiognomies. (As an aside, there is perhaps also a connection to be explored here between Dreyer's Joan of Arc, as the film of the facial close up, Pasolini – who, as Bertolucci notes in an interview, greatly admired Dreyer's film and drew inspiration from it when making his directorial debut, Accatone – and Leone's mature work a few years later.)




The camera assumes an independence from Dario's point of view, circling back to incorporate the seer within the seen of the set.

Leone's rhetorical, mannerist camera style is however in evidence when Dario pursues Diala into the crypts of her ancestors, where a 360 degree pan starts from his point of view and concludes by incorporating him within the camera's gaze as it comes to rest once more. The same sequence also sees a (wo)man with no name incident when Dario, reading out the names atop each mummified noble, encounters Diala standing in a vacant spot and plays along with her – “Hm, no name here” – before continuing on his way as if he had not seen her.

Likewise, traces of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly can perhaps be seen when a galley full of rebels proves to have been beneath Dario at the quayside all along and in a colisseum sequence where ranks of Phenecian archers are dramatically revealed at the back of the arena as Thar makes his bid for power.




Somehow Dario remained unaware of the ship's presence until it was pointed out to him


Similarly no-one in the coliseum seems to have noticed the rank of Phenecian archers amassing above them

As with the likes of the shoot out between Blondie and Tuco and Angel Eyes' gang and in the remarkably silent battlefield the two magnificent rogues stumble into shortly afterwards, there is here the sense of Leone experimenting with off-screen and on-screen space and the relationship between visual and aural data sets, formulating these for the first time along the lines that if you can't hear it or see it within the frame then it doesn't have any existence.

There's perhaps also vague hint of Tuco and Blondie's repeated riffs on “two kinds of people” in Dario's ironic references to Rhodes as the “Island of Peace” every time someone gets attacked or murdered.

A number of the performers like George Rigaud and Roberto Camardiel would go on to be spaghetti western regulars, the two actually appearing together as Scots and Irish patriarchs in Seven Brides for the McGregors, with Camardiel also appearing in For a Few Dollars More.

La Mano lunga del padrino / Long Arm of the Godfather

We open with a daring attack on an army convoy carrying a consignment of weapons. But for the technology on display – cars, trucks and submachine guns – it could easily be a scene in a spaghetti western, all the more so when one of the robbers proceeds to make off with the loot, leaving his companions for dead.

As Long Arm of the Godfather's title suggests, however, we're actually in poliziotto territory. In truth, however, the term is something of a misnomer here insofar as no members of the police or other authorities are ever seen ever as taking any interest in the case, which is a curious omission given that you would think that soldiers would be the kind of crime to that attention.




Noir-ish imagery with Lawrence

This is not to say, however, that the perpetrator of the betrayal, Vincenzo, is about to have things easy since his ex-boss Don Carmelo is, as his title indicates, a rather prominent gangster and soon proves to have also survived the incident.

And then there's the issue of actually finding a buyer for the guns...


Erica Blanc, intelligent and charming as ever

Directed and co-written by Nardo Bonomi, whose only credit this is, the latter role in conjuction with Giulio Berutti of Killer Nun fame, this is nasty little crime film where Peter Lee Lawrence / Karl Hirenbach's Vincenzo provides our point of identification almost by default.

About the only things he has going for him in comparison with Adolfo Celi's old school Don are that he is the attractive young underdog aspiring to have his day and is acting at least partly out love, in the form of Erika Blanc's somewhat more level headed and forward thinking moll, Sabina.





Shades of giallo

Otherwise, however, they're cut from much the same cloth, with the action providing that familiar mix of car chases, shootouts, men beating one another and women up to car door slamming type sound effects, and a reasonable degree of suspense over what is going to happen next.


This is the kind of film where the nightclub owner is more interested in whether the dancer can also serve drinks than her primary talents


Yet another savage beating

Though nothing outstanding Bonomi's direction is efficient, with a good use of locations and some eye-catching camera set-ups. The performances are more going through the motions than truly inspired, although there is an added poignancy to the denoument if one is aware Lawrence and Blanc's rumoured real-life relationship and of the actor's subsequent suicide less than two years later.

5 per l'inferno / Five for Hell

Directed by Frank Kramer / Gianfranco Parolini from a Sergio Garrone story, this is a routine Dirty Dozen inspired World War II action / caper film that illustrates what we might, building on the insights of film academic Christopher Wagstaff and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, refer to as an example of the “hat movie”.

By this, I mean a film whose genre could easily have been altered by the simple act of changing the characters hats and other paradigmatic details of costume and setting: substitute Nazis with Mexicans and occupied Europe with the US-Mexico border and we would have something close to a spaghetti western like Kramer's Sabata.


Luciano Rossi does his look

We begin with Gianni Garko's always smiling Lieutenant Hoffmann recruiting his hand-picked team of misfits, including a safecracker, a baseball pitcher, an acrobat, a strongman and Sgt Johnny White, who doesn't seem to have any special talents but maybe doesn't need any on account of being played by the man himself, Luciano Rossi.

Their mission, which involves the skills of each member in that typical Parolini specialists and gimmicks way, is to steal the details of Hitler's secret attack plan K to save the lives of 50,000 of their comrades, knowledge of the plan and its location having come through Margaret Lee's undercover agent, Helga Richter.


Lee and Kinski, to the manner born

The challenge is the plans are located in a Wolf's Lair like base guarded by troops led by the arrogant and sadistic SS Colonel Hans Mueller, incarnated with typical disdainful relish by Klaus Kinski.










Only in a Parolini film would a baseball and a trampoline be typical military equipment

A good ensemble cast, a high-spirited if anachronistic score, no-nonsense direction and a general sense of everyone enjoying themselves make Five For Hell worth a look for fans of the stars and auteur, though those with a preference for harder-hitting war action or a more realistic and historical approach would do better looking elsewhere.

Zio Tom / Farewell Uncle Tom

In this challenging mondo / documentary hybrid two Italian filmmakers, Jacopetti and Prosperi, travel from the present day to around about 1850 to investigate the history of slavery, presenting a kaleidoscopic portrait of the instution and its role in the southern USA through reconstructions of real personages, places, incidents and testimony that show the contradictory scientific, religious and other discourses offered by white southerners in defence of the indefensible.


The I am Cuba style opening to Zio Tom

Thus, to identify one recurring motif, the black could be denied human rights and dignities if he or she were understood as an animal rather than a human, but this then raised questions over what it meant for the white man to be sexually attracted to the black woman, implying that he were engaging in a kind of bestiality.

Existing in two somewhat distinct 'official' forms, Farewell Uncle Tom / Zio Tom is unsurprisingly a difficult film to watch and to attempt to write about given its content and, more unusually, production history.

Like the earlier Africa Addio, to which it was intended as an anti-racist response to refute the allegations that had been made against the filmmakers – allegations which that film's discourses support to some degree, insofar as the argument seems to be that Africa was not yet ready to be given its freedom by the hastily retreating colonial powers, comparing them at one point to parents who had abandoned their unruly child – it is a film that cannot fail to evoke a strong response in the viewer, where emotional and visceral reactions constantly threaten to overwhelm the ability to take a more detached view.

Much as with the previous film, Prosperi and Jacopetti come across as misguided, with their film becoming what it sought to expose through the very process of taking a documentary style approach.

The biggest single problem is that, in order to convey the scale of the slave enterprise and have access to enough compliant blacks who could be subjected to the same degradations as their great-grandparents, they made the proverbial deal with the devil in the form of Haitain dictator Papa Doc Duvalier.



Two images from the slave ship, suggesting the sheer scale of the film and the enterprise of slavery

While the hundreds of extras in the Haitian sequences – others were shot in the US, in Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi – were probably not slaves in the strict sense, we might well wonder how far their own lives were significantly better and whether they were really in a position to give free and informed consent to their participation in the film in full knowledge of what would be required of them.




Say what you like about Prosperi and Jacopetti, they knew how to compose an image

Indeed, in some instances like the silver and gold painted pre-pubescent 'twins' included in a reconstruction of a camp specialising in slaves for sexual and breeding purposes – some white men apparently developing a taste for pairs of black children for pederastic sex – it's entirely possible that the filmmakers' dubious show-and-tell reconstructions would actually be deemed illegal today.




The 'twins' and the pederast slaver


The freakshow continues – the General, a midget black slaver, and an extra special slave who “has three”


The same slave resists the camera eye, putting his hands up to block our gaze

At the surface level the Italian and English language versions of the film play quite differently.

Some material is unique to one version or the other, like the Erzebet Bathory like sadist who only shows up in Zio Tom and the slave church with its synchretic voodoo-style reinterpretation of Christianity in Farewell Uncle Tom.

Other scenes play in slightly different ways, with the race scientist Samuel Cartwright only being named and contexualised via voice-over introduction in the English version which runs a bit longer than its Italian counterpart.


In the English version an educated slave expresses his false consciousness in identifying with his master while also inadvertently making the Marxist sounding statement that “Workers are not free and never will be”

At other points the same footage is used in different places. For example, in Farewell Uncle Tom the image of a helicopter flying over a plantation introduces the filmmakers arrival in the past and the south, whereas in Zio Tom it appears at the end to signals their and our departure.

Even the musical cues differ, with the English version making use of a more varied range and tending more towards mickey mousing, as when a mammy's waddle up the stairs is accompanied by a ponderous elephant like theme, whereas the Italian sticks largely to variations on the main catchy march theme.

Most of these changes are not particularly significant in terms of meaning however, with the quantity of unpleasantness still much the same, being sufficient for the casual viewer not to need to subject themselves to both films and to quell the need for an ultimate “atrocity exhibition” type edit that incoporates each and every scene in its entirety.

The biggest difference between the longer Italian version, at 136 minutes, and the shorter English one, at 123 minutes, is that the former begins with a contemporary prologue and cuts back and forth between past and present on a number of occasions throughout the narrative whereas the latter begins and stays in the past until the final present-day sequence it shares with the Italian version.

Taken as a whole I would probably say that linear English version is the more coherent, insofar as it really helps us to understand the climactic sequence, while the Italian version's juxtapositions of past and present are more problematic if thought-provoking.

The filmmakers point in the Italian version through this seems to be that the more things change the more they stay the same. This emerges as a critical notion when it highlights ingrained racism in the dominant white society of 1960s America – white and black as two nations, separate and unequal – but is decidedly awkward when it tends to deny his black counterpart a voice with which to counter the same 19th century slave stereotypes, incorporating him mainly through unrepresentative footage of riots and carnivals that makes him alternately threatening / dangerous and simple minded / harmless.

Yes, whites are in the carnival footage as well, but 'we,' the implied white audience, 'know' they are like us, as individuals as well as representatives of types: watching the preceding material we probably do not identify with a slave trader like Mr Schultz but with anti-slavery figure like William Makepeace Thackeray or Harriet Beecher Stowe, even as we notice the historically bounded limitations of their discourses.

Thackeray's criticism of slavery is based on its inefficiency, that five servants in the Englishman gentleman's home perform the same work as 30 in his southern counterpart's and without the same overheads, while Beecher Stowe voices her belief that the black is inherently inferior even as she has the idea of writing Uncle Tom's Cabin.

This said, the inclusion in the Italian version of different political figures responses to Martin Luther King's assassination, such as Leroy Jones saying that he was an Uncle Tom figure and advocating violent revolution and Eldridge Cleaver the need for continuing his work, do illustrate contrasting and sometimes contradictory perspectives in the 1971 present.

Indeed, they prove dishearteningly prescient in prefiguring the love / hate speech and juxtaposition of quotations from King and (early) Malcolm X in Do the Right Thing, nearly 20 years later. The fundamental questions remain the same:

What is the right thing?

Forgiving and forgetting?

Forgiving but not forgetting?

Seeking reparation?

Seeking revenge?

Both versions of the film are stunningly constructed, making a strong case that Prosperi and Jacopetti as one filmmaking entity that traditional auteurism, with its focus on heroic figure of the individual director, needs to come to terms with.

The admixture of classical, realist, impressionistic, surrealistic and expressionistic techniques within the mise en scène as and when appropriate; the skilful match cuts and montage editing; the memorable and evocative music: are all are spot on to the extent that watching only one version of the film, you would be hard placed to to find anything that looked or sounded out of place or which could be imagined as being otherwise.


Jacopetti and Prosperi once more remind us of their and the camera's presence

Indeed, given that all this and the filmmakers constant voice-off interventions and interjections – one tending to be questioning and the other knowing – along with the very anachronism of their presence constantly make us aware that we are watching a film, perhaps the only way in which a criticism based on form rather than content might make sense is through the relative conventionalism of Farewell Uncle Tom / Zio Tom's sound-image relationships.

Music is always employed conventionally in an emphathetic / anti-empathetic manner, while contrasts between the word and image are resolved in favour of the latter giving the lie to the former in an image centric fashion, as when the slave transporter tells the buyer that his ship is clean while beneath deck cockroaches and rats add to the misery of his cargo.

Had the filmmakers not done this and created a greater distance between sound and image, one wonders what left-wing critics would have said on being presented with a film that could lay some claim to formal and political radicalism, albeit with a decidedly ambiguous, quite possibly 'wrong' politics.







Black rage, white fear




Zabriskie Point

Yet again this is also one of the things that is most refreshing about the film. Rather than preaching to us and pretending the know the solution, Prosperi and Jacopetti present the facts of the intractable problem of slavery and its racist legacies, leaving it up to us to draw conclusions on the way forward.

A good example of this is the casual question to Cartwright of whether he is Jewish, to which he replies in the affirmative. It is not a singling out of one group over another, in that the filmmakers also making comparable points about Protestant and Catholic southerners elsewhere – e.g. having received a papal edict that they were no longer to own slaves, one group of Louisiana Jesuits sold rather than freed theirs – but rather a point of detail that allows a point about later racist pseudo-science to also be made. What Cartwright does here in his attempts to prove that the black is not a human is really little different to the Nazi's subsequent attempts to demonstrate that the Jew was similarly other less than a century later: the oppression and dehumanisation stay the same, even if the identity of the victimisers and their victims changes.

In this regard it is apparent that, whatever their faults, Jacopetti and Prosperi's films do express a consistent worldview, even if it often amounts to little more than cynicism and a despairing, even nihilistic cry: “we are all fucked, more or less.”

For all its contradictions, Farewell Uncle Tom / Zio Tom emerges as Prosperi and Jacopetti's masterpiece and an absolutely vital piece of cinema whose power to shock and to provoke a response – in my case, this piece of writing – has not been diminished one bit.


The black man assumes control of the camera and its power to objectify








And of the world, or at least a microcosmic metaphoric representation of it in a child's beachball

Indeed, I would be tempted to place the final ten minutes of the film, a slow motion eruption of spectacular violence to acid rock freak out somewhat reminiscent of Zabriskie Point's finale, in which we witness a black man entertain fantasies of killing his white oppressors – or random stupid people on the beach; take your pick – whilst quietly reading William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, amongst the finest moments of the Italian cinema of this period. It is at the same level of accomplishment as the Ecstasy of Gold and Truel sequences in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly or the opening quarter-hour of Suspiria, the kind of thing that remains burnt into your memory long afterwards and which can be endlessly watched and thought through.

Something else to think about in relation to the film, galleries of racist caricatures and imagery: http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/menu.htm

Virus / Inferno dei morti viventi / Hell of the Living Dead / Zombie Creeping Flesh / Apocalipsis caníbal

We open to the strains of Goblin's driving prog rock, playing over images of a chemical plant. Something is wrong at the euphemistically titled “Hope Project” in New Guinea.


Das blinkenlights

Just how much becomes evident as two technicians discover a dead rat in what is supposed to be a sterile area, before the creature reanimates, climbs inside one of the men's protective suits and bites him to death.

The reanimating agent and the zombies that result sweep through the facilty with alarming celerity until no-one is left alive.




Zombie technicians / technocrats and natives

Professor Barrett does, however, manage to put out a final message, indicating that “Operation Sweet Death” must be considered a failure and pleading “may God forgive us and pardon us for this evil that we have created.”

The next sequence presents a stand-off between a “terrorist” group, who have taken the US consulate hostage, and the authorities, who are preparing to send in an elite four man SWAT team, comprising Lieutenant Mike London and his men, Osborne, Vincent and Santoro to deal with the situation.


The SWAT team

They do so, without particularly worrying about whom they are killing nor the terrorist's demand that the Hope Centres be shut down and dying delivery that they are all doomed, their attentions being more focused on New Guinea vacation they are given as a reward.

The team soon have cause to doubt their masters, find themselves deposited in the middle of nowhere without radio contact: “You can always count on the government for a perfect example of organisation,” as London says. (Coincidentally the SWAT team then proceed by “dead reckoning,” the same name as is given to the battle-bus in Land of the Dead.)

Meanwhile investigative journalist Lia Rousseau – a reference to the enlightenment philosopher and through Romanticism and Emile the notion of the noble savage? – her cameraman Max, and the family with whom they are travelling – the child having been bitten and succuming rapidly to zombification – encounter some of the flesh eaters in an otherwise deserted settlement.


The zombie child; is it just me or are zombie children and elderly under-represented within the genre?

The SWAT team arrive in time to save the filmmakers, although this poses them with a dilemma. For the nature of their secret mission, any notion of a vacation forgotten in what could either be taken as careless writing or anothercomment on official duplicity, is such that they cannot allow any witnesses to live.

Fortunately for Lisa and Max, who are here to investigate the rumours around the Hope Centre, the ever growing number of zombies provide a bigger threat to everyone for the time being...

The greatest difficulty in writing about Hell of the Living Dead is that no description can really be adequate to it, as the kind of special film which really needs to be experienced for oneself.

Directed by Bruno Mattei under his Vincent Dawn alias – the surname of course further cuing us in to the film's main inspiration, Dawn of the Dead – and written by his long-term partner in crime Claudio Fragasso, the film is nothing if not entertaining, albeit with the likelihood that you will be laughing more than anything else.

Combining the zombie and mondo filone, the film's highlights include masses of poorly integrated stock footage of animals not native to New Guinea, like elephants and jerboa, much derived from Barbet Schroeder's documentary The Valley Beyond the Clouds; characters who quickly establish that the only way to stop the zombies is by shooting them in the head Romero-style but nevertheless persistently fail to pursue this approach; a spot of dubious anthropology as Lia strips down to her thong and paints herself in order to befriend a native tribe; and a near-deserted lecture theatre seeing service as a United Nations debating chamber.


The debating chamber

At the same time, however, there's a certain idiot-savant quality to the last of these, suggesting as it does that the first world really does not care about the third except for when it is understood as a problem for the west, in line with film's discourse around population control and the way in which first world's attempts to deal with this via the ironically named Hope centres becomes an issue only at the point when it it threatens to go out of control and cause a fatal PR disaster.

The message seems to be that having the population of New Guinea or other third world country consume themselves is fine, but having the same happen in the US, whose population, per head, consume far more than their equitable share, is not.

In this regard, one also wonders if the film's recycling of ideas, music and footage from other productions could in itself be taken as a gesture in the direction of an ecologically friendly approach to filmmaking or as a comment on the inherently cannibalistic nature of Italian filone production itself. Probably not, in all honesty, but intriguing possibilities nonetheless.

The whole media aspect is also surprisingly well handled, conveying confusion, disbelief, the suppression of information and the dubious self-interest of the reporter in a manner that actually predates the recent Diary of the Dead at times, even as elsewhere – a talking head scientist indicating how a cadaver with all four limbs removed still reanimated – the film's sullo stesso filone Dawn of the Dead origins are again being highlighted.

Given that it was borrowed from other films – Romero's, Beyond the Darkness and Contamination – Goblin's music is actually rather well used, rarely feeling out of place and highlighting Mattei's long experience as an editor.


Yes, this is a man in a top hat and tutu doing a dance routine as zombies close in

The performances are over the top but impossible to assess beyond this on account of the dubbing. It doesn't really matter though, inasmuch as the two combine to impart a live cartoon or comic book like feel, with this impression further enhanced by the frequent what-the moments, the best of which is perhaps one character's donning a top hat and tutu and doing a singing in the rain routine – without regard for the small detail of being in a house surrounded by zombies at the time.




Two acceptable faces of exploitation cinema


And a less acceptable one – how would the filmmaker or viewer feel if this were their child?

Gore fans will not be disappointed by Hell of the Living Dead, though there is a clear split between the harmless comic book zombie splatter material, which culminates in one victim having their tongue torn out and the zombie them forcing their eyeballs out from the inside, and the more exploitative and distasteful footage of native practices, apparently derived from Akira Ide's 1974 mondo movie Nuova Guinea: Isola Dei Cannibali.

Another nice blog

With various links that will be of interest to Italian and Eurotrash junkies, including some Al Brescia sci-fi.

http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/

Kaput Lager Gli Ultimi Giorni Delle SS / Achtung! The Desert Tigers

Kaput Lager Gli Ultimi Giorni Delle SS

The title card is odd, half in German and half in Italian.

Wouldn't a kaput lager be a broken camp?

Maybe if it's the last days of the SS then it might make sense.

Whatever, it certainly cues us in as to the kind of thing to expect from this late Nazisploitation entry from Luigi Batzella, directing under his Ivan Kathansky pseudonym, and starring Richard Harrison as the heroic US commando, Gordon Mitchell as the camp commander and Lea Lander as the sadomasochistic lesbian doctor.

Rather than the European theatre of war, our location is North Africa, as a mixed group of British and American soldiers, along with some Arab alllies, mount a daring raid on a German base.

Some murkily photographed confusingly directed action scenes follow, the kind where the confusion seems less the filmmakers's attempt to convey the reality of a firefight than basic lack of ability.


A dangerous mission


An over-confident doh! moment

Major Lexman (Harrison) and company lay their demolition charges and blow stuff up, but are captured as they make their getaway and sent to the nearest POW / concentration camp, where von Stolzen (Harrison) gets a chance to strut his stuff and ve have vays voice, ordering that a Jewish prisoner be whipped regardless of the small detail that he is already dead.

Next, the action shifts to an Arab settlement, where the Nazis drag off some women, whom they take to Dr Lessing (Lander) for her inspection and approval. The story's location again makes things a little odd, as Lessing spouts the obligatory Nazi racial inferiority stuff as if her prisoners were the more usual Slavs or Jews. Then again, it could be the filmmakers' attempt at subtly critiquing the notions of race, along the lines of Arabs also being a Semitic people, although this would probably once more be to grant them too much credit.

Later, von Stolzen takes Lexman around the camp's dungeons, including the castration of some Bedouins who attacked his staff car, while Lessing turns her attentions to the Jewish virgin who has conveniently been brought to the camp for normal service to be resumed. The girl's humiliation arouses Lessing, who then tries to get it on with the English nurse / prisoner, Clara, begging that she be whipped. “I've been dying for it for so long,” she explains, in what is presumably not intended as an ironic reference to the Nazi's actual treatment of homosexuals nor as a commentary on the attraction / repulsion dynamic often bubbling away barely beneath the surface of fascist sexual ideologies but rather as the checking off of another generic requirement or two.


The wonders of point of view: note how we are positioned on the same side of the bars as the prisoners, looking out at our / their tormentors.

The worst crime that the film commits is not this parade of bad taste – this synopsis only takes us about one-third of the way in – given that this is after all what we expect from a Nazisploitation movie and watch it for. Rather, it is being boring.

Yet, this is also a charge that could be levelled against most entries in the filone, with their tendency to present a few moments of jaw-dropping what-were-they-thinking material strung together with longer passages of utter banality.


The obligatory degenerate Nazi orgy scene

As such, the real problem is that even the sex, sadism and sleaze set-pieces just aren't that memorable, lacking the delirious qualities of their counterparts in SS Experiment Camp – no line here comes close to topping the all-time classic of “you bastard, what have you done with my balls” – and Batzella's more notable contribution to the cycle, The Beast in Heat, which may have an equally awkward mix of Nazisploitation and war movie tedium but at least has those completely over-the-top performances from Macha Magall and Salvatore Baccaro to enliven the former aspect.




The whip and the body...

In this regard, the biggest surprise is perhaps the presence of Lander, given that she is better known for her appearances in classier fare like Blood and Black Lace, where she appears as Lea Kruger, and Rabid Dogs.

That Lander appeared as Lea Kruger can be put down to her more famous cousin, Hardy Kruger. Seeing as he disliked playing Nazi roles because they reminded him of his own time in the Hitler Youth and Wermacht, one wonders if he had any thought of his cousin's involvement here, or just recognised it as part of the reality of being a working actor in Italy circa 1977.

Marcello Giombino provides entertainingly cheesy score as appropriate to the proceedings as it would be inappropriate to anything more serious, complete with kitschy lieder playing over Lander's sexy scenes as a twisted leitmotif.

L'Occhio selvaggio / The Wild Eye

Before Cannibal Holocaust there was The Wild Eye.

For this 1967 films presents an indictment of the mondo film-makers mentality but, like its later counterpart, uncomfortably sometimes comes perilously close to becoming what it seeks to condemn – albeit with this also having the effect of implicitly asking the audience to question their own motives in viewing such material.

Director Paolo Cavara was certainly well-placed to make the film, having served as assistant to Prosperi and Jacopetti. Having become increasingly dissatisfied with their methods he attempted to put his past behind him, here presenting several scenarios and situations clearly derived from the Mondo Cane films and Africa Addio to illustrate his former colleagues working methods.

The film opens in the savannah, with a scene that could almost have been taken from a behind-the-scenes or making-of type documentary on Africa Addio.

The filmmaking crew, comprising director Paolo (Philippe Leroy) and cameraman Valentino (Gabriele Tinti) relentlessly pursue a gazelle in their jeep with the intention of making its heart burst, much to the distress of Barbara (Delia Boccardo).

Barbara: “I can't stand to see that poor animal suffer.”
Paolo: “Then shut your eyes.”

While Prosperi and Jacopetti's film doesn't feature the exact same image, it is full of hunting and safari sequences where the coincidental presence of the filmmakers as yet another slaughter takes place cumulatively emerges as contrived.

It becomes apparent, however, that Paolo – the match with the director's own forename almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, though his own role in relation to his former colleagues films would seem to have been more like that of Valentino, the hired hand doing what he is told in an only obeying orders way – is focussed less on cruelty to animals than mankind, as he then stages the jeep's running out of petrol to make the safari party endure a dangerous trek through the drylands with inadequate supplies of water to add a bit more drama to the material, filming at opportune moments along the way.

With some of the party fearing imminent death, Paolo even tries to persuade them to make last confessions to the camera. “If any of you, in this extremely dramatic moment – you must realise the predicament we're in – would care to record a statement of any sort, you can do it now.”



A multiplicity of wild / savage eyes

Already, however, we have also got an indication of where the filmmakers cannot go, insofar as the mise en scène within the chase sequence contained shots taken from multiple points of view to indicate that there was in fact a second jeep and camera crew always present at the scene but unacknowledged, namely that of Cavara and company, recording Paolo.

The film's limit point is thus established: if The Wild Eye proceed to present the diegetic Paolo's Nietzschean “gaze into the abyss,” his extra-diegetic counterpart does not allow us a gaze into the film's own potential mise-en-abyme. Situated at the crossover between popular and critical cinemas, we are not about to get a more thoroughgoing examination of the roles played by editing, post-synchronised sound and the addition of empathetic musical cues in the construction of the film expeience. Dziga-Vertov Group era Godard it is not.

Having gotten this criticism out of the way – and admittedly only a criticism if one takes an ultramontane view of critical cinema, taking a preaching to the converted film like Wind from the East as the ideal over a mass appeal one like A Bullet for the General – it has to be acknowledged that The Wild Eye works well both as expose of Jacopetti and Prosperi's practices and as thought-provoking entertainment, not least for making us think about exactly what the term entertainment means when the mondo film and its offshoots, all the way down to today's 'reality television' are considered.

After the group have been rescued – as Paolo and Valentino always knew they would – the episodic, travelogue nature of the narrative is established, along with a romantic subplot between the Paolo and Barbara, with whom he has become obsessed in an otherwise uncharacteristic display of emotion and lack of professionalism. (One wonders if there's here a roman a clef element to the piece, that Barbara might represent Belinda Lee to Paolo's Jacopetti.)

Paolo pursues Barbara and her husband to Egypt and soon persuades Barbara, who still has not realised that he staged the desert incident, to come with him to Singapore and continue to appear in episodes of his documentary, as “the straight-laced English woman, who is always being shocked at the same time as she is succumbing to the so-called lure of the orient.”


An 'exotic,' 'oriental' image

After a spot of sightseeing in Singapore, Paolo is soon back at work, having Valentino film scenes of mute prostitutes negotiating with their clients using sign before then deciding that no-one would believe the footage – “Reality is boring, lies are entertaining,” as he later summarises – and finding a drugs rehabilitation program that can be more readily sensationalised:

“What means have you to help these opium addicts?”

“With whatever little charity we receive.”

“Look I'm ready to make charity enough to get these gentlemen fat as Buddhas. Of course, I'll have to make some changes when I shoot, if you agree. But you'll be satisfied.”

This cues in a nightmarish scene of the men, lying on the floor, having their cravings whipped out of them as the still-credulous Barbara looks on in horror. (“Take Barbara as a contrast now and then,” instructs Paolo to Valentino, ever-alert to the cinematic possibilities of getting “a good scene.”)

The rest of the film continues in much the same way, as we witness – amongst other scenes – Paolo trying to persuade a Buddhist priest to immolate himself for the camera in what is likely a reference to Mondo Cane 2's reconstruction of the same famous image; negotiating with a group of soldiers to have them execute their prisoners against a wall where the composition is more photogenic, implying the degree to which Jacopetti and Prosperi may have been complicit in a similar scene in Africa Addio; and, as the grand finale, withholding knowledge of a terrorist bombing so that he can have his camera set up beforehand to capture the carnage as it happens.

Within the parameters outlined, the filmmakers scarcely put a foot wrong, the mise en scène convicingly conveying the anti-mondo message. The dialogue, however, is perhaps a touch heavy at times, over-stating what we have already obtained via the camera, editing and scoring. (Interestingly the highly-regarded Italian author and intellectual Alberto Moravia has a credit for contributing to the writing.)

The uniformly solid performances help to get round this didactic element somewhat. Leroy and Tinti could always be relied upon when playing cynical or jaded characters, with the former, much like in Femina Ridens, making his more excessive lines that bit more credible than they would otherwise be by convincing us that they are expressions of his more extreme character. (“I have decided for once and for all where my place in life is – with the bosses. And I'm not ashamed of it like many others.”) Boccarro delivers a remarkly assured, mature performance given her age at the time, 19, giving Barbara an adult understanding of interpersonal relationships and a youthful idealism and naïvete as to how the world as a whole tends to work.

Recommended; hopefully someone will put out a proper DVD version.

Two new Argento books

Two new books on Argento in French, although one, the Jean-Baptiste Thoret one, looks to be an updated edition of a 2002 volume.

More information here:

http://www.amazon.fr/Dario-Argento-Vivien-Villani/dp/8873016170/

http://www.amazon.fr/Dario-Argento-Magicien-Jean-Baptiste-Thoret/dp/2866425197

Lo Strano ricatto di una ragazza per bene / Blackmail

A raid on a nightclub catches Babel Stone (Brigitte Skay) in possession of a substantial quantity of dope, leaving it up to her straight, respectability obsessed father (Umberto Raho) to bail her out of trouble yet again.

Babel, you see, resents her father for his lifestyle and remarriage, following her mother's death, to a younger woman, Stella (Rosalba Neri).


“What did it cost you for this fiasco, huh papa?”

At the beach with her cohorts Claudio (Benjamin Lev), Rick and Eva, Babel then hits upon an idea by which she can both gain revenge on her father and secure their group a much needed measure of financial independence: staging her kidnapping.




The curse of panning and scanning strikes again

Suggesting that they can hide out at his sister's house as she and her husband are on holiday, Claudio and the rest of the gang decide to go along with the ill-thought out scheme. They make a tape of Babel pleading to her father, indicating that he should not involve the police or his daughter will be killed and, in one of their few shows of intelligence, have Claudio go to make the call from a phone booth. Telingly, however, Claudio also leaves the tape, which had been recorded after / over some music, playing as he stops for petrol en route, leading to a frenzied move for the stop button as the message starts.

Mr Stone receives the call and indicates that he will pay the money while pleading that the kidnappers do not harm his daughter.

It looks as though everything is going to plan. But then Claudio's sister and her husband return and everything threatens to quickly come undone for Babel and company...

Like writer-director Paolo Solvay / Luigi Batzella's bizarro horror films The Devil's Wedding Night and Nude for Satan, Blackmail is one of those films which psychoanalytically inclined commentators would probably have a field day with, given the dynamics of the relationship between Babel – a symbolically suggestive name in its own right, implying the failure of communication – her father and stepmother, along with the eventual resolution to the drama.


“Fracaro won the derby”

The scene in which the police captain addresses Babel's father is also worth noting in more sociological. If the captain's suggestion that smoking dope is a gateway to heroin is dubious, it also reflects the older generation's beliefs and their failure to accord with the experiences of Babel and her friends. Further nuance is provided by the captain's suggestion that Babel's father might want to try to get to know his daughter a bit better, coupled with Mr Stone's own indication that he has given Babel everything she might want, understanding this strictly in material terms: he cannot see that times have changed and that his daughter and her generation might have different values and desires from his own.

Two films which thus come to mind as intertexts are Rabid Dogs / Kidnapped and The Killer Must Kill Again, insofar as both occupy similar generic territory, as crime thrillers that aren't conventional gialli or poliziotteschi, and which also emphasise the amateur / professional distinction in crime – the former with the youthful joyriders and with the assassin who's already been caught in flagrante delicto once, the latter with the younger robbers with their lack of composure and self-control – and through this the whole generation gap idea.


Skay, here doing a bit more than her 'tits and a scream' role in Five Dolls for an August Moon

If Batzella's film cannot stand up to comparison with Bava and Cozzi's films otherwise, not least in terms of its highly unsatisfactory conclusion, it nevertheless moves along at a fair pace, only being stalled by some sexy and musical interludes of the sort it's hard to dislike; features decent characterisation and performances, with Skay's self-deprecating performance as the none-too-bright Babel particularly enjoyable; and keeps us engaged by throwing in new plot twists at regular intervals.

Una Ondata di piacere / A Wave of Pleasure / Waves of Lust

The opening image of Waves of Lust throws you, makes you pay attention: it’s upside down.

Has someone made a mistake?

The answer is no: we are sharing the point of view of a man standing on his head.




“How's the world upside down?”
“Basically the same as right side up.”
“Then just as sick.”

Rather than being a simple attention-grabbing strategy on the part of the filmmakers – you can imagine audiences being ready to throw things at the screen or to scream at the projectionist – it's also an image that is crucial to an understanding of this 1975 erotic thriller / drama, recurring as it does at the film’s conclusion.

As a device, the image brings to mind the theories of the Russian Formalists, with their notion of defamiliarisation, taking something we know and take for granted and representing it in an unfamiliar way to make us question our presumptions and assumptions. It was, for the formalists, a key component of poetic language.

Yes, it’s yet another filone film that has more to it than meets the eye and which offers a number of interpretive challenges and possibilities.

It's also a vital film for anyone interested in the work of director Ruggero Deodato specifically, coming at a time when he had spent a number of years in television productions to mark the inauguration of his second, 'mature' period as a filmmaker and the introduction of a number of signature marks that would become more pronounced with his later, more (in)famous works.

In Deodato's best films – amongst which Waves of Lust certainly counts – he rarely gives us what we expect. Unless, that is, what we are expecting is a showcasing of humanity at its worst...

Deodato is a filmmaker who denies us easy answers and heroes and villains, tending more to present a division between the dead and the living, more often than not survivors who have been profoundly affected – or damaged – by their experiences.

He also subverts our narrative expectations. The most obvious instance of this is, of course, Cannibal Holocaust with its two films in one structure, but much the same could be said of his thrillers, Waves of Lust included, insofar as he has never really made a straight giallo.

There's no murder mystery plot here, with the discovery of a dead body early on leading nowhere; none of the familiar iconography beyond the J&B bottle, almost a character in its own right at times as it is consumed in quantities that the manufacturers could hardly endorse; and a fundamentally different logic underlying what we are told, not told and left to decide for ourselves.




Not promoting responsible drinking

The result is a chamber piece in which the air is thick with sexual tension, recalling Polanski's Knife in the Water as much as anything, which keeps looking like it is about to move into more obvious Lenzi-style sexy giallo territory but never quite does – a strategy of formalist retardation, at a stretch – by refusing to signpost an obvious noir-style conspiracy of power, lust and wealth despite the central presence of these three ingredients.

The film presents the story of two somewhat contrasting couples who happen to be vacationing at the same coastal resort at the same time.

The first couple comprises Irem – the man standing on his head – and Barbara. They're a bit younger and a bit counter-cultural, but otherwise deliberately sketchily drawn.

The second comprises Giorgio and Silvia. He's a wealthy businessman with a tendency towards cruelty even when sober, she's his property / trophy and the main target of his verbal, mental and physical abuse.

After a few apparently chance encounters in the resort's marketplace and gallery, Giorgio invites Barbara for dinner. She sends Irem in her stead and then arrives with Silvia, whose presence Giorgio had not counted on.

As the evening goes on, it is decided that Irem and Barbara will accompany Giorgio and Silvia on their boating trip. All manner of sexual and other tensions arise as Giorgio expresses his interest in Barbara – an interest which she reciprocates and Irem, with his hippie ideas, is happy to go along with – but proves reluctant to grant parallel license to Silvia, whom he continues to abuse and humiliate...






Along the way we get just about every combination except Giorgio and Irem

Though not as harsh a film as Cannibal Holocaust or House on the Edge of the Park, Waves of Lust still offers a heady mix of sex, violence and general unpleasantness. Yet, it is all curiously unobjectionable, making sense in its own terms.

Thus, if Giorgio at one point brutally stabs an eel he has caught while fishing it is presented, cannibal film-like, as part of nature, red in tooth and claw and, beyond this as an expression of his capitalist, social darwinist understanding of the world – “You fired 600 people?!” “My business regards no one else” – which, in turn, relates back to his cruelty and borderline psychopathic behaviour.


“You've completely destroyed it!”
“It would have done the same to me”
“No that's not true. Humans are always more ferocious. Animals kill out of defence or for food. Only humans do it for their own enjoyment. You enjoy seeing people suffer.”

Yet, in this, he's also different from David Hess's character in House on the Edge of the Park. Whereas Hess's proletarian character is all untrammeled id, doing things without regard for their longer term consequences, Giorgio, with the possible exception of his bingeing on J&B, is far more forward planning and in control.

He behaves in this way, uses these strategies and plays these games because he knows he can get away with them and that they fundamentally work for him, bringing rewards because of the way 'the system' operates.


“You almost killed me today”
“I'm sorry. The idea of going to jail over you doesn't entice me.”
“Don't worry, guys like you never go to jail.”
“You're right.”

As such, like the bourgeois who set up Hess in House's rape-revenge scenario or the cats paws and manipulators of many a giallo, there is then the awkward question of who are the real monsters are, those who cannot help themselves or those who would take advantage of them in their schemes.

In a similar vein, thought the film contains extensive nudity and softcore sex these elements come across not just as an exploitation film essentials – how exactly would you do an erotic thriller without them? – but also as a part of Deodato's almost anthropologically detached approach.

If as a filmmaker he exploits sex as a commodity, it is also because sex also has a commodified value in the world he is depicting.

Deodato's worldview thus for the first time emerges in Waves of Lust as that uniquely disconcerting combination of the critical – there is little doubt that we are supposed to be against Giorgio – and the cynical / cyclical.

Specifically, his take on revolutions, be they social, sexual or both, looks to be along the lines of “what goes around comes around,” leading not so much to a transcendence of any master / slave dialectics as to a temporary – i.e. 180 degree – reversal of fortunes and positions. As with Cannibal Holocaust's closing remark / question, “I wonder who the real cannibals are,” one suspects that this struck a bit too close to home for some.

Deodato's direction is not quite as accomplished as it would be in later films, being functional and effective without always convincing that he had chosen this or that set up, angle or movement for any specific, 'meaningful' reason. This could also, however, be put down in part to the inherent constraints imposed by the main setting. Certainly there is a contrast between the confined spaces and pointed exchanges of words and glances that tend to predominate on the boat and the sub-aqua sequences – likely the major contribution of co-writer Gianlorenzo Battaglia, best known as an underwater camera specialist – whose blue expanses and silence provide punctuating moments of apparent tranquilty.

Even so, danger is ambiguously present, as when Silvia gets trapped in between some rocks on the sea bottom and must be rescued by the others in a collective effort. Was this an accident or a pre-planned incident, a challenge issued by some of those present to see how others would react? As ever, Deodato provides no easy answers or get out, only questions and challenges.

As Giorgio, John Steiner again impresses in his willingness to go for it in the role of a human monster while remaining believably scary. The role of Iram is well-suited to Al Cliver's laid-back, casual style, with his relative inexpressiveness contributing to the effectiveness of his performance by making Iram that bit harder to read. Silvia Dioniso and Elizabeth Turner, as Barbara and Silvia respectively, likewise impress, delivering credible performances that belie the notion they are only present for decorative purposes.

Marcello Giombini's reedy synth score is one of the film's few weak points, though is not too intrusive and also helps ground the film in its specific time and place with its easy / sleazy / trash stylings that provide an aural counterpart to Dioniso's extra-wide flares and Steiner's tastefully patterned trunks.

Another view:
http://bloodyitaliana.blogspot.com/2008/02/ruggero-deodatos-waves-of-lust-1975.html

Zibahkhana / Hell's Ground

[This is a review I was writing for another site; though its of a Pakistani film rather than a European one, I thought it was worth posting here because many of the questions it raises are similar to those I often return to again and again in the Eurotrash entries.]



This is a film which poses the reviewer problems. On the one hand, its all too familiar horror morality play territory, as a group of teens go off the beaten track and are punished for their transgressions. On the other, it's from Pakistan, a country not particularly known for its cinema, least of all for its horror cinema.

We open with sights and sounds that could easily be from a Hollywood film: a full moon, a lonely road late at night, a car racing along, hard rock blaring from the speakers.

Yet, looking and listening closer we notice the little things: the Islamabad license plate on the car, the less recognisable language of the song's lyrics.

Something appears in front of the car, causing the driver to swerve and crash. Lightly injured, he gets out and tries to find his bearings. Something attacks and everything goes black...

It's another death on this ill-starred road, but nothing for anyone to be overly concerned about, not least our high school and college age protagonists, a mixed group of four boys and two girls with various types present and correct including the spoilt, privileged Roxy; good girl Ayesha, stoner and horror fan OJ and - least familiar and most interesting - the Christian Simon, a poor boy hoping for a scholarship.

Having scored tickets for a rock concert they've concocted a story about a school trip to get round the more conservative and protective parents like Ayesha's and, equipped with plentiful supplies of dope and music - techno and traditional, depending on personal taste - for the trip, pile into the van and set off on the road to hell.

After being delayed by environmental protestors for a while, the group stopping at a roadside tea shack for some refreshments. The proprietor warns them of the mortal danger should they continue on their current course, but in time-honoured fashion, ignore him until it's too late...

Taken as a horror film Zibahkhana / Hell's Ground is easy enough to judge. The question is simple: do it deliver the shocks, suspense and splatter one would expect? With the filmmakers quoting from the likes of the Evil Dead, Zombie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Pieces and the Italian giallo, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Moreover, they also crucially reach beyond these necessary but not sufficient elements, by also giving us credible dialogue and characterisation and performances that actually make us care something about the characters and their fates.

Taken as a cultural document - which, underneath, I would argue that most horror films are, with some of the richest subtexts to be found anywhere in cinema - Hells's Ground is a whole lot more difficult to get a handle on.

Even with - or maybe partly because of - a set of relatively westernised characters such as these, each of whom slips easily between English and Urdu and some of clearly spend more time out of the Pakistan than in it, the contours of the culture and society are just that bit less discernible to the typical Anglophone viewer.

It's difficult to know how far the filmmakers stance is conservative, progressive or a combination of both, and whether this is related - if at all - to the apparently controversial nature of the film within Pakistan, or whether the simple act of making a horror film was itself felt to be a challenge by the establishment.

We're certainly given a set of juxtapositions - traditional and modern, indigenous and foreign / hybridised, rural and urban, religious and secular, Muslim and non-Muslim, science / technology and magic / belief - that offer a route in, but what the non-Pakistani viewer really needs is more of a basic primer and set of comparison points with more familiar western slasher film models.

Thus, to give a list of examples, does telling ones parents that one is going on a study excursion rather than to a rock concert count as a mortal transgression? Does smoking dope? Does failing to go to mosque or to say one's prayers? Does being together unchaperoned with a member of the opposite sex? Does the notion of a masculinised / asexualised final girl apply, especially given that the film's most striking monster, a Leatherface type male figure dressed in a burqa, is clearly transgressing of conventional gender boundaries in the opposite direction the manner of his Hollywood counterpart.

In a sense, however, it's not the filmmakers fault that they cannot provide the answers we might seek: it has again to be borne in mind that this is an experimental movie, doing something no-one had attempted within Pakistani cinema before and that, as such, that it is more about raising questions than answering them.

Moreover, it could be argued that in an age of increasing globalisation, internationalisation and hybridisation of identity that the more important thing is to emphasise the process of working and thinking through these questions instead of pretending we know the answers.

One thing that is clear, however, is that the filmmakers have a genuine knowledge and appreciation for their chosen form, that they have not merely made a Pakistani gore movie to be sold on the basis of its exotic otherness nor gore and grue.

The proof comes from the quoting of the first ever Pakistani horror film, Zinda Laash AKA Dracula in Istanbul and an amusing cameo from its star as the tea shack prophet of doom, along with an extra-diegetic awareness of where Hell's Ground's western backers, Mondo Macabro, are coming from.

Though avowedly celebrating the weird and wonderful of world cinema and marketing their product in those admittedly exploitative terms, Mondo Macabro's genuine commitment to and knowledge of their cinema, their ability to contextualise it so that it makes anthopological and sociological sense, is clear to anyone who has ever watched one of their Eurotika, Mondo Macabro or DVD featurette documentaries.

If the difficulty here is that they and we don't have the hindsight to be able to historicise what Hell's Ground may mean, who's to say that in 20 years time it won't be celebrated as the Zinda Laash for a new generation or as the film which ushered in a new wave of Pakistani horror in its own right?

Recommended for the adventurous horror fan with a willingness to look beyond Hollywood or the current waves of J-, K- and Spanish horror.

Il Mondo di Yor / The World of Yor / Yor / Yor, The Hunter from the Future / Yor, le chasseur du futur

“We will need a lot more hemp before we're through”

Thus sayeth Pag, Yor's sidekick, as they build a raft. But the line could equally be uttered by the viewer in light of the likelihood that a viewing of Yor, The Hunter from the Future will be enhanced by your being in an somewhat altered state of mind.

For, even more so than other Italian sword and sorcery / post apocalyptic / science fiction entries this is the kind of film that it is impossible to keep a straight face while watching.

The film was a co-production between France, Italy and Turkey – with the locales and most of the supporting cast coming from the last, along with a Tarkan-like trash aesthetic – and originally took the form of a four-hour TV series which, like director Antonio Margheriti's science-fiction work in the sixties, was then edited down for theatrical release.

While it's difficult to imagine anyone except the masochistic volunteering to sit through more than 90 minutes of Yor and company, it's also possible that the piece's narrative weaknesses wouldn't be quite so baldly exposed in a longer version.


Yor and his world, apparently acquired through incidental / accidental genocide

As it is what we get here are a succession of all too similar episodic, comic-book derived scenarios: Yor encounters a people, learns a new clue as to his mysterious past, and quickly precipitates the destruction of this people like some one-man Aryan genocide machine.

The pattern begins with Pag and Ka-Laa's people: having rescued them from a dinosaur, Yor is invited back to their village for a feast. The tribal elder notices Yor's distinctive medallion and mentions that a sorceress in the poisoned desert lands bears an identical one. There's a spot of interpretive dance, establishing that Ka-Laa has her eye on Yor, after which a bunch of ape men attack. Yor, Pag and Ka-Laa escape, with Pag getting Yor out of a tight spot for the first of many times, leaving the ape men to kill all the elderly, children and men and take the women of breeding age prisoner. (It seems that the humans and ape men's homes are within easy walking distance of one another, begging the question as to why this had never happened before.)


The medallion maguffin

Then Ka-Laa is captured by the ape-men. As luck and coincidence – read poor writing – would have it a passing giant bat provides Yor with a convenient hang-glider so he can cross the chasm to the ape-men's cave. After a spot of fighting Yor then breaks open a dam, flooding the caverns and kill some of the ape men and the rest of Pag and Ka-Laa's people.


Ka-Laa invites Yor / the spectator to join her

Next Yor heads into the desert lands, where he wipes out the tribe of mutants that dwell therein and takes the sorceress, Roa, with him, leading to some jealousy on Ka-Laa's part before the rest of the ape-men show up and conveniently kill Roa.

Yor's wanderings then them to the ocean front, where yet another tribe gets all but wiped out after a firebird – i.e. space ship / aeroplane – attacks from the sky. The survivors give Yor their most prized possession, a boat, in order that he can seek out the mysterious island from whence the firebird came and fulfil his destiny...

As Pag and Ka-Laa the talismanic Alan Collins / Luciano Pigozzi and the beautiful Corinne Clery are eminently watchable, but also overshadow Reb Brown's Yor with his surfer hairdo and goofy expressions – despite his Flash Gordon-esque theme tune (“Yor's world – he's the man”).




Can we say Star Wars?

Star of the show, however, is the inimitable John Steiner's with his over-the-top caped master villain Overlord (sic) and army of Darth Vader-alike robots borrowed from Aldo Lado's The Humanoid, on which Margheriti did special effects duty.

In the end, however, this is a film whose sheer specialness really needs to be experienced for oneself.

Apocalypse domani / Cannibal Apocalypse / too many AKAs to fit into this space

The film opens in Vietnam with an extended action sequence that sees Norman Hopper (John Saxon) and his men undertake a search and destroy mission against a Vietcong base. Having dealt with the enemy Hopper is shocked to discover two GI's in a pit, feasting on the still-warm flesh of an unfortunate VC. What makes it all the worse is that he knows one, Charlie (John Morghen), from his home town. Moving to help them out of the pit, Hopper is bitten on the arm by the other man, Tommy (Tony King)...






Stock footage...


And some woodland outside of Rome?

The image momentarily turns pixellated and black on white, as Hopper wakes up in his bed, next to his wife Jane (Elizabeth Turner), back in Atlanta.

Another Vietnam flashback, but the war – or more specifically the consequences of Tommy's bite – is about to come back in a major way.

Going to the kitchen, Hopper finds himself drawn to the raw, bloody meat in the fridge. In the morning he feels compelled to bite the next door neighbour's jailbait daughter (Cinzia de Carolis) after she gives him the come on, though since she takes it in her stride it was presumably more a gentle nibble than anything else.






Hopper gets bitten

When Charlie, just released from mental hospital with a clean bill of health phones up to see if Hopper wants to go for a drink, he understandably hesitates.

This merely delays the inevitable encounter, however, as Charlie bites a chunk out of a woman's throat in a movie theatre and kills one of a cycle gang before holing up in a flea-market where he picks up a convenient shotgun.

Hearing about the incident from his wife, who phones to check that he is not the one involved, Hopper races to the scene and persuades the captain into letting him bring Charlie out without further shooting.

Charlie is taken back to the hospital, but not before a few others have been bitten or otherwise infected with virus.

Even worse, by the time the authorities realise that this particular strain of cannibalism is contagious, Charlie, Tommy and Hopper have all been re-united and, along with a recently infected nurse, escape from the hospital in search of more flesh on the city’s streets...


A classic Morghen image


Charlie enjoys the breakfast of champions, in yet another piece of unauthorised J&B product placement

If there was one thing Antonio Margheriti knew how to do it was turn out efficient, unpretentious filone films. A good example of this are the trio of Vietnam films he made in the early 1980s: this one, The Last Hunter and Tiger Joe.

Whereas The Last Hunter takes its title from The Deer Hunter and its plot wholesale from Apocalypse Now, here we start off in Apocalypse Now territory – the Italian title literally translating as Apocalypse Tomorrow – before quickly shifting into something more reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead.

The Dawn of the Dead influence is particularly evident in the composition of the cannibal group, comprising three men, two white and one black, and one white woman, exactly the same as that in Romero’s film. Similarly, that the group has another run in with the gang of bikers seems to be little reason other than that Dawn film also has this.




Hitting the bullseye, as an infected cop fails to obey orders to “put it down son”

Elsewhere Rabid and The Crazies emerge as closer models in other respects, including their emphasis on spurious scientific explanations and living human monsters rather than the living dead – particularly the typhoid Mary figure of Rose in Cronenberg's film with her horrified awareness of what she has become and must do to survive and repeated cries of “I'm still me.” It must, however, also has to be borne in mind that these earlier films had not had the same wider influence outside as Dawn.

While one could no doubt attempt to draw a line of descent here from Night of the Living Dead itself as a film 'about' the Vietnam war, made when it was still ongoing and a more direct critique of US policy was difficult if not impossible for the film-maker there – we can here also note in passing that Apocalypse Now's late 1960s genesis lay in the idea of shooting a film guerilla style in Vietnam itself – the truth is that Margheriti and screenwriter Jimmy Gould / Dardano Sacchetti were less concerned with social comment than commerce. Combining the Vietnam war and zombie horror genres was first and foremost a move motivated by box-office potential: if doing something sullo stesso filone A attracts X viewers and something sullo stesso filone B Y viewers, then why not combine the two filone and their potential audiences?

That the film's inspiration lies in the zombie film means that it's more comfortable viewing than other Italian cannibal titles, being less harrowing than Deodato's work and less unpleasant than Lenzi's.

Though there's a moment of animal killing, as some unfortunate sewer rats get flambé-d with a flamethrower, it’s hardly representative of a desire to go further and further in this direction when we recall that 1964's Castle of Blood and its 1971 remake Web of the Spider had both included the casual decapitation of snakes.

This is not to say that Margheriti skimps on the blood and guts, however. Rather, there are plenty of scenes of those afflicted with the cannibal virus biting chunks out of hapless victims; a Fulci-esque eyeball gouging; the use of a circular saw to cut chunks of flesh out of one victim’s leg and a spectacular demise by shotgun as one character has a large hole blown through his belly. If Margheriti here draws his inspiration from The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, it’s still an impressive set-piece shot.

The location for the Vietnam scenes looks suspiciously like the outside of the cave complex used as a base by the US troops commanded by John Steiner in The Last Hunter. While not entirely convincing as the Vietnamese jungle and not quite matching the stock footage that its integrated with (although later films would see Margheriti and other Italian directors making use of Philippines location shooting in the manner of Apocalypse Now itself) Margheriti keeps the action flowing such that it doesn’t really matter too much, except for to the sticklers for authenticity who one can’t imagine would be watching the film in the first place.

In this regard, John Saxon has frequently indicated in interviews that he accepted the project because he believed it to be a serious commentary on the plight of returning Vietnam veterans. It’s a tough one to swallow unless he didn’t read the script and accepted the role sight unseen, all the more given that his long experience in Italian crime films during the previous decade must have provided him with a working knowledge of how the country’s rough-and-ready exploitation movie industry operated.

As evidence that the filmmakers weren’t taking it all that seriously themselves and just intent on providing their target audience with a fun 90 minutes consider the surname of Morghen’s character – Bukowksi – in a possible nod to the American drunk / poet; that it’s Alberto Di Martino’s war movie From Hell to Victory he watches in the movie theatre scene; or the frequently over-the-top tough guy dialogue and one-liners with their own distinctive, almost self-parodic poetry:


“Do you know who he is?”
“His name's Bukowski, Charles Bukowski”
“I don't mean his name, dumbass, I'm talking about his background. Is he a subversive, a queer, a black, a commie or a Muslim fanatic?”

Whatever Saxon's feelings about the finished product, his performance as Hopper is credible, feeling less about collecting the paycheck as wanting to say something about Vietnam. Morghen and King take a different approach more in tune with their one-dimensional crazy comic-book characters, mugging for the camera and generally hamming things up. Not surprisingly it works.

Elsewhere the likes of Venantino Venantini, Elizabeth Turner and Cinzia de Carolis, almost unrecognisable from her Cat o' Nine Tails days, provide reliable support in the smaller roles; Venantini’s son Luca plays de Carolis’s brother with he and his father obviously conveniently in Atlanta for this and Fulci’s City of the Living Dead at around the same time.

Alexander / Allesandro Blonksteiner's score is a bit hit and miss. It works when he does synth sweeps and atmospheres – some sounding suspiciously like cues from Giuliano Sorgini's Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue to my ears – less so when providing funky action themes that come across as a bit lightweight and out of place.

L'amante di monstro / The Vampire and the Ballerina / The Vampire Lovers

In their book Immoral Tales Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs convincingly argue that many of filmmakers involved in the continental European sex and horror cinema of the period circa 1956-84 were cultured and intelligent individuals.

The films of Jess Franco and Jean Rollin might have seemed silly even stupid to the uninitiated, but as the viewer became more aware of their particular aesthetics and world views, everything began to fall into place: they knew how to make a 'proper' film, following the requirements of the classical style but made a conscious, principled choice not to conform.

One filmmaker whom Tohill and Tombs address only in passing but who would seem to make a suitable case study for a follow-up to their book is Renato Polselli. A philosophy graduate whose films express a distinctive take on issues of psychology, sexuality and morality that strive for freedom from convention and hypocrisy, Polselli was at the forefront of pushing the boundaries within the Italian cinema for nearly 20 years, moving from sexy gothic horror in the 1960s into ever weirder and wilder reaches of erotic and even pornographic horror through the course of the 1970s.

Made in 1960 but not released until two years later – a common fate experienced by Polselli's films, prone to also suffering from censorship troubles and marginal distribution – The Vampire and the Ballerina thus actually pre-dates Piero Regnoli's similar The Playgirls and the Vampire, made later but released in the same year.

Experimenting with then new post-Hammer gothic idiom, the film, co-scripted by Polselli and Ernesto Gastaldi, follow the I Vampiri route of combining the contemporary and the traditional, pushing the boundaries on sex and to a lesser extent violence that little bit further than British films of the same time – the decolettage around the crucifix is that bit more emphasised, the nastiness that bit nastier – while also taking a more conservative approach in using monochrome rather than colour to provide that old-style Universal / expressionistic aura (illusion?) of comfortable familiarity.


Warning shadows

We begin with a familiar juxtaposition of two worlds. The first is that of the peasantry, with their well-founded and fatalistic fear of vampires. (“Another victim; nothing can help her now”). The second is the dance troupe from the city with their diaphanous nightdresses, ballet-cum-burlesque routines and scepticism towards folk superstition. (“Vampires seem so romantic in a way.” “Sure, you would think so, except that they only exist in movies.”)





Various post-Hammer images

Failing to heed the locals' advice, some of the troupe duly stop at the supposedly deserted castle to take shelter from a storm, ignore the hints dropped (“I don't care for the world you live in – it is not my world”) and the vraisemblance between the Countess and her 400 year old ancestress in a portrait, precipitating the usual stalking and staking scenarios and confusions over who is what.

While things eventually resolved in favour of the living over the undead, Polselli still throws the viewer some provocative curveballs.

One is the nature of the vampires inhabiting the castle. Unlike the classic Dracula scenario, where the Count is clearly dominant over his non-aristocratic female brides and servants, here we have the cross-cutting of class and gender power dynamics, insofar as Countess Alda - was turned into a vampire by her servant, Herman, but seeks an escape from her unlife he refuses to grant.

Alda and Herman's relationship is thus characterised by a certain perversity born of mutual dependency, where each is alternately the master and slave needing the other's recognition in a fundamentally sado-masochistic manner:

He: “I, I am your only love. I'm am yours forever. I am your slave. I belong to you.”

She, after biting him moments later: “Now it's done. You are a hideous monster again. I need you, but cannot look at you.”

Intriguingly, Herman turns physically monstrous when aroused, whereas Alda remains beautiful regardless of her situation – she can turn the tables on him by making him angry and exploiting her fatal beauty.

It might be said that Polselli's approach is misogynistic, given another scene in which Herman takes out his frustrations by destroying one his female progeny as she rises from the grave for the first time. I would instead suggest that given the strong female characters found elsewhere in Polselli's cinema it is more about the way in which he approaches human relationships as a whole. If not yet in a position where he could refute the kind of conservative Manichean formulations found in Terence Fisher's films – and arguably also in real world ideologies that would prefer to think of themselves as one hundred per cent pure and untainted – he was already on this path.

If the destruction of the neonate female vampire appears to present an inversion of a scene from Fisher's Brides of Dracula, the funeral procession of this vampire-to-be, with its subjective shots from inside the coffin, suggests another source of inspiration more representative of the European fantastique tradition: Carl Theodor Dreyer's expressionist and surrealist classic Vampyr.










Dreyer

Another surprise is the film's refusal of the conventional resolution entailing heterosexual couple formation. While Fisher's films of this period certainly also subordinated this theme through their emphasis on the celibate savant hero, it still tended to be present in the case of the supporting characters whose world the savant's priest-like sacrifice to God ensured.

Polselli's resolution here thus emerges as most reminiscent of that of The Gorgon, as a later film that threw the underlying limitations of the Fisherian worldview into sharp relief.

The difference, however, was that like Jess Franco – whose own opening contribution to this 'debate', The Awful Dr Orlof, suffered similar distribution difficulties and was released in the same year – he embraces rather than repudiates 'perversity' as a way out of and beyond the conservative notions of sexuality that tend to be implicit in conventional horror, religion and morality.




A moment of light in the dark reveals and questions (questionably) Christian iconography

Yes, Polselli was yet another radical popular avant-garde filmmaker on the cutting edge. Of course, those who went to see Accatone didn't watch The Vampire and the Ballerina, and vice-versa. Therein lies the rub...

Surrealism and Euro-horror / trash

In Stephen Thrower's essential study of Fulci's films Beyond Terror there is a point where he takes to task mainstream critics who apply – or misapply – the term Surrealist to Fulci as a means of recuperating his work within their comfort zone in a so near, yet so far way.

It's a point which has long vexed me, and which I sometimes feel self-conscious about: it is easy to say that a Fulci, Argento or whoever film has surrealist aspects, without looking further – e.g does the classic masked giallo killer refer to Rene Magritte or his pre/proto surrealist precursor here, Giorgio Di Chirico; which artists did Bava prefer – or examining one's own critical / intellectual background and the ways it makes it easy to see and say X and not Y.

Yet, I also feel that many of these directors – less Argento than Fulci, Polselli or Questi – were in some ways true inheritors of the Surrealists in the 1960s because they refused the high/low respectable/not respectable division in their work and simply did things at a less conscious level, without too much thought for how the critics would respond or the consequences thereof.

And that, I feel, is the way in which cinema can best progress...