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...

1970s Italian Sexy Horror

Discussing previous Glittering Images books on Italian cult cinema a little while back I commented that what was needed was a third volume that continued the story begun by La Dolce Paura and continued by Esotika, Erotika, Psicotika. At the time I didn't know that this third volume, 1970s Italian Sexy Horror: Weirdly Erotic Terror Movies from Cineromanzi Starring Rosalba Neri and Other Lucious Beauties of Cinema Bis, was already on the way.

Co-authored by Stefano Piselli and Antonio Bruschini and opening with a dedication to the memories of Renato Polselli and Mickey Hargitay, the profusely illustrated volume is in the now-established dual language English / Italian format for the authors' commentaries, unlike the earlier entries in the publisher's Bizarre Sinema series which also included French text. The fotoromanzi excerpts that make up the bulk of the volume are in Italian only though it is not exactly difficult to work out what is going on from the pictures themselves even if one does not know the language given that the preceding piece on each film describes the sequence and that their subject matter is largely self-explanatory.


The cover artwork, derived from the poster for Mel Welles' film Lady Frankenstein

The films / fotoromanzi covered are Lady Frankenstein; The Night of the Damned; L'amante del demonio; Frankenstein '80; The Devil's Wedding Night and The Reincarnation of Isabelle – i.e. pop surreal, sadean concoctions of sex and violence whose own aesthetic clearly shows the influence of earlier generations of fotoromanzi and fumetti in pushing things that bit further than their filmic predecessors of the previous decade. (Others prime candidates for the fotoromanzi treatment, like Nude for Satan were inexplicably never translated into the format.)

The key filmmaker emerges as Renato Polselli, a favourite of the authors but also someone whose enduring engagement with the form from The Vampire and the Ballerina onwards marks him as a subject worthy of further research.

Besides all the pictures of Rosalba Neri, Rita Calderoni and company in various states of undress and distress the main aesthetic interest in the excerpts lies in seeing how the fotoromanzi authors have chosen to adapt and translate their filmic source material for the printed page and what is altered thereby with the absence of sound, colour and movement and the new ability to fetishistically pick out details for the reader to linger upon and return to. Away from the obvious, one notes the likes of the the jumbo cords and platform boots worn by Lady Frankenstein's monster (p. 25) and the framing of Raoul as a cut-price reincarnation not of Isabel but of Gorka from Bava's Black Sabbath (p. 87).

Now if only one could get the original fotoromanzi – although having said this a quick search on Ebay indicates that they are out there, while Kult Video also has a fair few...




Originals are out there if you look for them

Delirio caldo / Delirium

Dr Herbert Lyutak, criminal psychologist, has a problem: he is a compulsive killer. Determined to bring his crimes to an end, he sets himself up to be arrested, telling his police colleagues the time and place he believes the killer will next strike. Unfortunately another killer is at work and Lutyak's attempt to frame himself fails when - in a neat variation on the device first introduced to the form via Mario Bava in Blood and Black Lace, in that Lutyak does not know who his 'accomplice' is - a murder he couldn't have committed occurs...

This convoluted giallo wallows in sleaze and perversity and is all the better for it. Though released fully 20 years before Basic Instinct, Renato Polselli's film outdoes Paul Verhoeven's on all counts to more than live up to its title with sex, violence, killer lesbians, psychedelic orgies, sadomasochism, bad fashions and trashy garage/psychedelic rock - you name it, Delirio Caldo has it.

Mickey Hargitay, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day, gives an eyeball rolling, over-the top-performance to rival that of Bloody Pit of Horror as Lutyak.

Polselli, credited under his usual Ralph Brown pseudonym, throws in the zooms and wacky camera angles with abandon and draws uninhibited performances from his female leads, including favoured fetish star / muse Rita Calderoni as Lutyak's wife, Marcia.

In sum, they really don't make them like this anymore - more's the pity.

Delirio Caldo is also one of those gialli with an interesting production / distribution history, as made evident via Anchor Bay's highly recommended DVD.

The US, English-language version of the film as Delirium is shorter, running 85 minutes. In what seems a characteristic display of violence being deemed more acceptable than sex there, it removes much of the racier materiala but adds a couple of murders. In addition it attempts to contextualise Lutyak's condition as the consequence of his traumatic experiences in the Vietnam war. Unfortunately any political edge that might have emerged thereby, or from the character's positioning as a Hungarian emigre (much like Hargitay himself), is lost through a it-was-all-a-dream type resolution.

The Italian version, Delirio Caldo runs 102 minutes and unconvincingly locates events in London, with the inclusion of some bobbies in no way compensating for the all-too-Mediterranean environs.