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...