House on the Edge of the Park
Suspicious Death of a Minor
Seven Shawls of Yellow Silk / The Crimes of the Black Cat
Sunday, 5 April 2009
Poster purchases
Via Ebay, around £50 in total with current poor exchange rates.
House on the Edge of the Park
Suspicious Death of a Minor
Seven Shawls of Yellow Silk / The Crimes of the Black Cat
House on the Edge of the Park
Suspicious Death of a Minor
Seven Shawls of Yellow Silk / The Crimes of the Black Cat
I Maniaci / The Maniacs
First things first: despite the associations that the title and director Lucio Fulci may suggest today, this is a comedy rather than a thriller or a horror film.
The madness is not that of the black gloved killer but rather of an everyday sort, specifically the ordinary madness of people like you or I – or more specifically our Italian counterparts circa 1964.
Rather than exploring this madness through a single set of characters and narrative, the film is structured around a series of vignettes, most based upon a reversal of expectation.
For instance, a driver races what he assumes to be the car alongside him, taking greater and greater risks as he endeavours to prove his masculine potency, as expressed by his macchina, against his challenger, only to be overtaken by a jumbo jet...
While some of the segments, like this one, work regardless of the viewer’s knowledge of Italian history, politics and culture, it’s probably fair to say that to get more out of the film you really do need to have some background.
For the Fulci fan, aware of his own personal background and politics, the film meanwhile provides some early indicators as to why he never fulfilled his early promise as a specialist in the Italian style comedy and became ghettoised as a cult horror director. Specifically, he was just too harsh and too cynical in his approach, too willing to bit the hand that might otherwise have fed him by criticising both left and right, modernity and tradition.
This comes through most strongly in the segment starring Enrico Maria Salerno as a hypocritical left-wing / avant-garde / intellectual author who advises an old colleague who comes asking for advice to spice up his realist account of partisan activity with extraneous sex, violence and bad language, only to then deny the result publication as inauthentic and immoral; Salerno’s character’s dog is telling called Pier-Paolo, whilst he himself makes apparent allusions to the likes of Accatone and Mama Roma.
Another story, in which a souther hitch-hiker and his northern lift gradually convince themselves that the other is out to kill them, helps illuminate Fulci’s understanding of regional relations, to indicate again that his representations of the south(erner) in Don’t Torture a Duckling were not merely an easy resort to stereotype but something more worked / thought through.
There’s also an anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois skit, as two antique hunters think they’ve bought a load of valuable items from a monastery at a bargain price, only for the punchline to reveal that the monastery buys these as seconds wholesale from the furnishers nearby. The segment also features its own internal running gag, with the monk refusing the various things offered him by the couple on religious grounds, to then decline wine on account of his ulcer.
For those less interested in identifying Fulci’s auteur signature, I Maniaci boasts the attraction of a superior ensemble cast, featuring the likes of Lisa Gastoni, Barbara Steele, Margaret Lee and Franco and Ciccio. It also has a charming pop score by Ennio Morricone, with vocal performances by the likes of Nico Fidenco and Rita Pavone.
The madness is not that of the black gloved killer but rather of an everyday sort, specifically the ordinary madness of people like you or I – or more specifically our Italian counterparts circa 1964.
Rather than exploring this madness through a single set of characters and narrative, the film is structured around a series of vignettes, most based upon a reversal of expectation.
For instance, a driver races what he assumes to be the car alongside him, taking greater and greater risks as he endeavours to prove his masculine potency, as expressed by his macchina, against his challenger, only to be overtaken by a jumbo jet...
While some of the segments, like this one, work regardless of the viewer’s knowledge of Italian history, politics and culture, it’s probably fair to say that to get more out of the film you really do need to have some background.
For the Fulci fan, aware of his own personal background and politics, the film meanwhile provides some early indicators as to why he never fulfilled his early promise as a specialist in the Italian style comedy and became ghettoised as a cult horror director. Specifically, he was just too harsh and too cynical in his approach, too willing to bit the hand that might otherwise have fed him by criticising both left and right, modernity and tradition.
This comes through most strongly in the segment starring Enrico Maria Salerno as a hypocritical left-wing / avant-garde / intellectual author who advises an old colleague who comes asking for advice to spice up his realist account of partisan activity with extraneous sex, violence and bad language, only to then deny the result publication as inauthentic and immoral; Salerno’s character’s dog is telling called Pier-Paolo, whilst he himself makes apparent allusions to the likes of Accatone and Mama Roma.
Another story, in which a souther hitch-hiker and his northern lift gradually convince themselves that the other is out to kill them, helps illuminate Fulci’s understanding of regional relations, to indicate again that his representations of the south(erner) in Don’t Torture a Duckling were not merely an easy resort to stereotype but something more worked / thought through.
There’s also an anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois skit, as two antique hunters think they’ve bought a load of valuable items from a monastery at a bargain price, only for the punchline to reveal that the monastery buys these as seconds wholesale from the furnishers nearby. The segment also features its own internal running gag, with the monk refusing the various things offered him by the couple on religious grounds, to then decline wine on account of his ulcer.
For those less interested in identifying Fulci’s auteur signature, I Maniaci boasts the attraction of a superior ensemble cast, featuring the likes of Lisa Gastoni, Barbara Steele, Margaret Lee and Franco and Ciccio. It also has a charming pop score by Ennio Morricone, with vocal performances by the likes of Nico Fidenco and Rita Pavone.
Saturday, 4 April 2009
Impatto mortale / Deadly Impact
This 1984 cop actioner is one of those Italian productions that tries to pass itself off as American through and through. With Nevada and Phoenix locations; Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson in the lead roles and the crew hiding behind Anglo-sounding pseudonyms it almost gets away with it – unless you know who co-star John Morghen is; that behind such names as director Larry Ludman and editor Vincent Thomas we have Fabrizio De Angelis and Vincenzo Tomassi; or recognise a re-used suspense cue from The New York Ripper.
Plenty of John Morghen
Such games aside what really matters is whether the film delivers the goods. The answer is an unqualified yes, with Svenson and Williamson having a good buddy movie rapport with one another; Morghen making for a suitably despicable villain (“he’s wearing body armour – shoot him in the head!”); and plenty of car and helicopter chases, shoot outs, stunts and explosions.
Plenty of this
Maybe we could have done without the obligatory car crashing through a fruit stall set-up, or the soaking of a Salvation Army band as another car smashes into a fire hydrant, but such excesses also demonstrate De Angelis’s commitment to giving the audience what they want and more.
Much the same can be said of a romantic interlude in which Svenson’s goes to see a long-suffering on-off girlfriend, except that it offers not only the opportunity to show some exposed breasts but also to re-affirm the heterosexuality of the two ex-Vietnam buddies, that there is nothing romantic going on between them, the phallic symbolism of Williamson’s omnipresent cigars and Svenson’s hand-cannon magnum notwithstanding.
Indeed, just in case we have not got the message, there’s also a Police Academy-esque scene where Svenson is misdirected to a gay bar, the Lulu Belle. Its denizens do not take kindly to his presence, although he is able to get away merely by making his excuses, without the need to pull out his weapon...
Another Hollywood reference point of the time is Superman III, with the film’s Mcguffin – a computer nerd and his girlfriend have worked out a system to beat the Las Vegas slots by monitoring when the machines are about to make a big payout – having a similar urban legend quality to Richard Pryor’s fractions of a cent scam there.
Plenty of John Morghen
Such games aside what really matters is whether the film delivers the goods. The answer is an unqualified yes, with Svenson and Williamson having a good buddy movie rapport with one another; Morghen making for a suitably despicable villain (“he’s wearing body armour – shoot him in the head!”); and plenty of car and helicopter chases, shoot outs, stunts and explosions.
Plenty of this
Maybe we could have done without the obligatory car crashing through a fruit stall set-up, or the soaking of a Salvation Army band as another car smashes into a fire hydrant, but such excesses also demonstrate De Angelis’s commitment to giving the audience what they want and more.
Much the same can be said of a romantic interlude in which Svenson’s goes to see a long-suffering on-off girlfriend, except that it offers not only the opportunity to show some exposed breasts but also to re-affirm the heterosexuality of the two ex-Vietnam buddies, that there is nothing romantic going on between them, the phallic symbolism of Williamson’s omnipresent cigars and Svenson’s hand-cannon magnum notwithstanding.
Indeed, just in case we have not got the message, there’s also a Police Academy-esque scene where Svenson is misdirected to a gay bar, the Lulu Belle. Its denizens do not take kindly to his presence, although he is able to get away merely by making his excuses, without the need to pull out his weapon...
Another Hollywood reference point of the time is Superman III, with the film’s Mcguffin – a computer nerd and his girlfriend have worked out a system to beat the Las Vegas slots by monitoring when the machines are about to make a big payout – having a similar urban legend quality to Richard Pryor’s fractions of a cent scam there.
Friday, 3 April 2009
Il Mondo porno di due sorelle / Emanuelle and Joanna
Given its title and the presence of an Emanuela amongst the sisters, the casual viewer could easily be forgiven for mistaking Il Mondo porno di due sorelle for a retitling of Joe D’Amato’s Emanuelle e Francoise le sorelline of a few years earlier. It is in fact, however, a different film, albeit one that still represents another entry into the Italian Emmanuelle knock offs in its approach.
Emanuela is played by Sherry Buchanan, a somewhat mysterious actress whose name suggests Anglophone origins but whose screen appearances were invariably in Italian productions and co-productions and who must have been in or barely out of her teens when she made her debut in What Have They Done to Your Daughters, playing a schoolgirl involved in a prostitution ring. (Presumably someone able to lip-read, and thereby determine if Buchanan is speaking her lines in Italian or English can clarify.)
Here, meanwhile, she’s a young housewife, frustrated by her husband Roberto’s lack of affection, physical and emotional cruelties and general unreconstructed male attitudes. ("C'mon get undressed. I'm really in the mood to show you a thing or two") Worse, she comes to suspect that Roberto’s having an affair with her own sister, Giovanna, who keeps disappearing off the radar without explanation. Roberto, however, denies the accusation, telling her in most unreassuringly that he doesn’t “like girls who are built like little boys.”
Emanuela decides to tail Giovanna, finding her sister playing tongue hockey with another woman, then entering a mysterious establishment. Emanuela follows and learns that the place is a brothel, specializing in catering to those with more esoteric, risque proclivities.
Emanuela soon starts visiting the place on a regular basis, as a Belle de jour / fantasy / revenge scenario begins to take shape...
With some surprisingly artful compositions; an intelligent exploration of Emanuela’s neuroses and their origins; effective, uninhibited and committed performances; and an agreeable selection of musical cues, this is one of those entries that offers something beyond the lowest common denominators of sex and sleaze.
Buchanan and Montenero as the two sisters
If a extra-diegetic awareness that Paola Montenero, playing Giovanna, developed a drug problem and appeared in the self-explanatory porn entry Dolce gola / Sweet Throat, adds an uncomfortable frisson to the image of her character snorting cocaine, those without such knowledge cannot fail to miss the way in which director Franco Rossetti uses mirrors and emphasise both voyeuristic and exhibitionistic scenarios in a way that does not always accord with the “visual pleasure” of the implied male spectator. How does the notion of a sadistic male gaze work when we are watching a man, dressed in an oversize nappy, being masochistically humiliated for his own pleasure by a prostitute playing the role of his mother? No doubt there is a way it can be made to fit the theory, or the theory to fit the example, but the need for such intellectual contortions indicates, I would argue, that things in the real world just aren’t that straightforward.
In sum, worth your attention
Emanuela is played by Sherry Buchanan, a somewhat mysterious actress whose name suggests Anglophone origins but whose screen appearances were invariably in Italian productions and co-productions and who must have been in or barely out of her teens when she made her debut in What Have They Done to Your Daughters, playing a schoolgirl involved in a prostitution ring. (Presumably someone able to lip-read, and thereby determine if Buchanan is speaking her lines in Italian or English can clarify.)
Here, meanwhile, she’s a young housewife, frustrated by her husband Roberto’s lack of affection, physical and emotional cruelties and general unreconstructed male attitudes. ("C'mon get undressed. I'm really in the mood to show you a thing or two") Worse, she comes to suspect that Roberto’s having an affair with her own sister, Giovanna, who keeps disappearing off the radar without explanation. Roberto, however, denies the accusation, telling her in most unreassuringly that he doesn’t “like girls who are built like little boys.”
Emanuela decides to tail Giovanna, finding her sister playing tongue hockey with another woman, then entering a mysterious establishment. Emanuela follows and learns that the place is a brothel, specializing in catering to those with more esoteric, risque proclivities.
Emanuela soon starts visiting the place on a regular basis, as a Belle de jour / fantasy / revenge scenario begins to take shape...
With some surprisingly artful compositions; an intelligent exploration of Emanuela’s neuroses and their origins; effective, uninhibited and committed performances; and an agreeable selection of musical cues, this is one of those entries that offers something beyond the lowest common denominators of sex and sleaze.
Buchanan and Montenero as the two sisters
If a extra-diegetic awareness that Paola Montenero, playing Giovanna, developed a drug problem and appeared in the self-explanatory porn entry Dolce gola / Sweet Throat, adds an uncomfortable frisson to the image of her character snorting cocaine, those without such knowledge cannot fail to miss the way in which director Franco Rossetti uses mirrors and emphasise both voyeuristic and exhibitionistic scenarios in a way that does not always accord with the “visual pleasure” of the implied male spectator. How does the notion of a sadistic male gaze work when we are watching a man, dressed in an oversize nappy, being masochistically humiliated for his own pleasure by a prostitute playing the role of his mother? No doubt there is a way it can be made to fit the theory, or the theory to fit the example, but the need for such intellectual contortions indicates, I would argue, that things in the real world just aren’t that straightforward.
In sum, worth your attention
Some more posters
Freda's Murder Obsession
D'Amato's Emanuelle's Revenge
Black Emanuelle, White Emanuelle
Nazisploitation
More Nazisploitation
Soavi's Delirium / Stagefright
Brass's With Heart in Mouth
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Hard Sensation
With the school term over, three somewhat over-aged students, played by Annj Goren, Dirce Funari and someone else, go for a fortnight’s fun in the sun on a private island. The extent to which they can get all-over tans they desire and to sexually experiment individually and collectively is however constrained by the presence of their teacher, played by Lucia Ramirez, as chaperone, and of two sailors who know that any games with the girls are more bother than they are worth in terms of their employment and continuing liberty.
Such concerns are not shared by three escaped convicts, played by Mark Shanon, George Eastman and someone else, who are hiding out on the island after their boat ran aground.
While Eastman remains focused on evading the authorities, Shanon and the other guy are more intent on having fun with the girls and, in the case of the other guy, a homosexual, the sailors...
As any serious student of Eurosleaze can probably tell from looking at the main names among the cast, Hard Sensation is another one of Joe D’Amato’s Dominican Republic pornotropic horrors.
Shanon and Ramirez
Whereas Erotic Nights of the Living Dead combined porn and fantasy horror and Orgasmo Nero porn and cannibal primitive melodrama, Hard Sensation is a combination of porn and the Desperate Hours / Last House on the Left hostage / rape-revenge scenario.
As a slice of sick and sleazy exploitation it does the job in that inimitable D’Amato fashion, with the relative brevity of the film and the sex scenes in the version under review – even when regular hardcore performers Shanon, Funari and Ramirez are involved – appearing more indicative of cuts than self-imposed restraint.
The homosexual convict, a J&B bottle and a symbolic rape / real power scenario
In particular, whilst the rape scenes are not really sufficiently developed to shift from no-means-no rape to no-means-yes porno-rape that they are accompanied by traditional porn funk grooves courtesy of Alessandro Alessandroni (albeit perhaps more likely to be via stock library cues than original compositions) is telling.
So too is that we are told about but not shown any male-on-male rape, as an indicator of where the boundaries of what D’Amato was willing to film in order to shock his audience lay.
On the plus side, the film is better acted than one might expect – again, we must remember that Shanon was an actor who appears to have turned to porn to pay the bills – while the dialogue has a pleasingly authentic air of abusiveness, teaching all manner of useful Italian words and phrases that you don’t get in your average language class.
Those interested in the film should be warned, however, that the video-sourced English subtitled AVI available from Cinemageddon is of rather poor quality, making it for the D’Amato completist rather than the casual viewer.
Such concerns are not shared by three escaped convicts, played by Mark Shanon, George Eastman and someone else, who are hiding out on the island after their boat ran aground.
While Eastman remains focused on evading the authorities, Shanon and the other guy are more intent on having fun with the girls and, in the case of the other guy, a homosexual, the sailors...
As any serious student of Eurosleaze can probably tell from looking at the main names among the cast, Hard Sensation is another one of Joe D’Amato’s Dominican Republic pornotropic horrors.
Shanon and Ramirez
Whereas Erotic Nights of the Living Dead combined porn and fantasy horror and Orgasmo Nero porn and cannibal primitive melodrama, Hard Sensation is a combination of porn and the Desperate Hours / Last House on the Left hostage / rape-revenge scenario.
As a slice of sick and sleazy exploitation it does the job in that inimitable D’Amato fashion, with the relative brevity of the film and the sex scenes in the version under review – even when regular hardcore performers Shanon, Funari and Ramirez are involved – appearing more indicative of cuts than self-imposed restraint.
The homosexual convict, a J&B bottle and a symbolic rape / real power scenario
In particular, whilst the rape scenes are not really sufficiently developed to shift from no-means-no rape to no-means-yes porno-rape that they are accompanied by traditional porn funk grooves courtesy of Alessandro Alessandroni (albeit perhaps more likely to be via stock library cues than original compositions) is telling.
So too is that we are told about but not shown any male-on-male rape, as an indicator of where the boundaries of what D’Amato was willing to film in order to shock his audience lay.
On the plus side, the film is better acted than one might expect – again, we must remember that Shanon was an actor who appears to have turned to porn to pay the bills – while the dialogue has a pleasingly authentic air of abusiveness, teaching all manner of useful Italian words and phrases that you don’t get in your average language class.
Those interested in the film should be warned, however, that the video-sourced English subtitled AVI available from Cinemageddon is of rather poor quality, making it for the D’Amato completist rather than the casual viewer.
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