Lucio Fulci Remembered Volume 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond this the picture gets more complicated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paura Productions' website

The Good, the Bad and the Dolce Vita

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today's obscure question

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

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

Dr Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs / Spie vengono dal semifreddo

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

The plot is simplicity itself.

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

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


Price in the Pit and the Pendulum?

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


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


Goldfoot and the lookalike General Willis

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

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




The girlbomb Antonelli

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


We are the robots...

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


Franco makes his escape, disguises as a girlbomb

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




While Ciccio gets captured and stuck in the duplication machine

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

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

Prostituzione / Red Light Girls / Love Angels / Sex Slayer

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

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


The face of the killer?


The face of the killer?

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

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

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

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

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




Classic signor Rossi

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


Forbidden photos of a Citizen Above Suspicion...


... and a Respectable Lady Above Suspicion

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

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

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

A Patrick question

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malabimba / Satan's Baby Doll

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




Many of these names appear in both films' credits

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

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

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



The bear


The teddy bear...


Attraction and repulsion, sex and violence...

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

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

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




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


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

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

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




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

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


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

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