Luigi Cozzi once remarked that one of the distinguishing features of the Italian cinema in the 1970s and 1980s was the kind of producer who didn't want to know what your film was like but rather what film it was like.
1988's Robowar - Robot da guerra is a perfect illustration of this point and thus the filone principle in action. For the film, the work of the prolific Bruno Mattei / Claudio Fragasso team, can be summarised neatly as Predator meets Robocop.
After a helicopter is shot down in a remote jungle, a group of ex-Vietnam specialists known as the Bad Ass Motherfuckers are assigned to help a military scientist on a mystery mission.
While the local guerillas / bad guys don't prove much of an obstacle to the BAM's, it soon turns out that there is something far more dangerous out there, the cyborg warrior Omega 1...
Mattei's and Fragasso's work is better than might be expected. But this is perhaps less perhaps because they don't so much take Predator as an inspiration but actually lift plot points, set-ups and dialogue directly from it, all the way through to to the you-have-been watching style end credits.
Taken on its own terms as a no-nonsense action-adventure exploitation film, the area where the film is weakest is not when it comes to realising Omega 1.
For while the film-makers have no problems with blowing up extensive sections of Philippines jungle – or of borrowing footage of such from their back-catalogue, one exploding hut being much the same as another – they didn't have much of the budget for stop motion, computer generated or other effects necessary here.
In particular the heavily pixelated shots that represent the cyborg's POV leave you wondering how he was able to distinguish between friend, foe and landscape to begin with.
Future Fatal Frames director Al Festa contributes a surprisingly decent, if derivative, synthesiser based score.
Showing posts with label Bruno Mattei. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bruno Mattei. Show all posts
Monday, 3 May 2010
Friday, 26 December 2008
Emanuelle e le porno notti nel mondo n. 2 / Emanuelle and the Erotic Nights / Emanuelle and the Porno Nights
You could be forgiven for getting confused here: the original Le Notti porno di mondo, also directed and edited by Bruno Mattei under his Jimmy Mathews pseudonym, featured Laura Gemser, but did not reference her Emanuelle character in its title.
Gemser's introductions / linkings have a certain something...
Regardless, the two films are pretty much interchangeable, featuring similar mondo-style supposedly from around the world but predominantly shot in the same Rome studios. Be it the USA, France or Germany the nightclubs and their audiences look the same, with bottles of J&B prominently placed on just about every table.
The first scenes here depicts a séance that segues into a black mass, complete with virgin deflowering in the name of Satan and one of those peculiarly sexless softcore orgy numbers.
Next we get a Parisian magician who specialises in making clothes disappear and doing the rising cloth routine with a detachable erection that may or may not belong to a nude dwarf who then runs through the audience; an adult version of Luna Park, where an on-leave soldier wins a blow-up sex doll and another person of restricted growth is triumphant with a kind of test your strength machine into which the men insert their penises; and a Lady Godiva routine that hints at a beauty and the bestiality scenario with her pony but doesn't go as far as Emanuelle in America nor La Bete.
This is followed by Ajita Wilson, photographing a lesbian sex show and addressing us straight to camera like Gemser; a Japanese penis transplant operation - here a male voice, purportedly that of a professor, is used to provide extra gravitas - and some New Guinea mating rituals of dubious authenticity as far as the virginity testing of the young women goes if not the stock footage of pigs being clubbed to death for a feast.
The usual mondo footage of animals qua meat
Dwarves are again the order of the day for the subsequent segment, a Biancaneve-themed routine, while detachable phalluses feature in the next, featuring a bodybuilder and his fan club of predominantly middle-aged women.
Biancaneve
Things are rounded off with a report from the making of a porn film; a couple of women wrestling in foam; a science-fiction themed dance routine cum strip show; an Italian stripping housewife TV program and footage from a US nudist event.
While all of the material has a certain historical and sociological interest - Is this what passed for shocking entertainment? What was with the fascination with dwarves? - it is this last sequence that is probably the most interesting precisely because of its status as actuality footage, albeit obviously edited by Mattei into something more interesting. The bodies on display aren't merely those of attractive young women, as predominate elsewhere within the film, but are more balanced between the sexes and across the age spectrum, imparting an appropriately grotesque and carnivalesque tone.
Gemser's introductions / linkings have a certain something...
Regardless, the two films are pretty much interchangeable, featuring similar mondo-style supposedly from around the world but predominantly shot in the same Rome studios. Be it the USA, France or Germany the nightclubs and their audiences look the same, with bottles of J&B prominently placed on just about every table.
The first scenes here depicts a séance that segues into a black mass, complete with virgin deflowering in the name of Satan and one of those peculiarly sexless softcore orgy numbers.
Next we get a Parisian magician who specialises in making clothes disappear and doing the rising cloth routine with a detachable erection that may or may not belong to a nude dwarf who then runs through the audience; an adult version of Luna Park, where an on-leave soldier wins a blow-up sex doll and another person of restricted growth is triumphant with a kind of test your strength machine into which the men insert their penises; and a Lady Godiva routine that hints at a beauty and the bestiality scenario with her pony but doesn't go as far as Emanuelle in America nor La Bete.
This is followed by Ajita Wilson, photographing a lesbian sex show and addressing us straight to camera like Gemser; a Japanese penis transplant operation - here a male voice, purportedly that of a professor, is used to provide extra gravitas - and some New Guinea mating rituals of dubious authenticity as far as the virginity testing of the young women goes if not the stock footage of pigs being clubbed to death for a feast.
The usual mondo footage of animals qua meat
Dwarves are again the order of the day for the subsequent segment, a Biancaneve-themed routine, while detachable phalluses feature in the next, featuring a bodybuilder and his fan club of predominantly middle-aged women.
Biancaneve
Things are rounded off with a report from the making of a porn film; a couple of women wrestling in foam; a science-fiction themed dance routine cum strip show; an Italian stripping housewife TV program and footage from a US nudist event.
While all of the material has a certain historical and sociological interest - Is this what passed for shocking entertainment? What was with the fascination with dwarves? - it is this last sequence that is probably the most interesting precisely because of its status as actuality footage, albeit obviously edited by Mattei into something more interesting. The bodies on display aren't merely those of attractive young women, as predominate elsewhere within the film, but are more balanced between the sexes and across the age spectrum, imparting an appropriately grotesque and carnivalesque tone.
Sunday, 14 December 2008
Mondo Cannibale / Cannibal Holocaust 2
A group of film makers go missing in the jungle where they were working on a documentary about some of the last remaining cannibal tribes. Some time later the footage they shot is screened before the excited and shocked group of television executives who commissioned the film.
It could be Cannibal Holocaust, but it is actually Bruno Mattei's 2003 digital reboot, alternately known as Cannibal World and, arguably more honestly, Cannibal Holocaust 2. This said, it would perhaps be better thought of as Cannibal Xerox, both for a nod to Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox in the form of a penis-ectomy scene and on account of the way in which Mattei and his co-scenarist Giovanni Paolucci all but plagiarise numerous scenes and lines from Ruggero Deodato's film in lieu of writing their own script from scratch.
Maybe Cannibal World gets away with it on being less a remake of Cannibal Holocaust than a contemporary re-interpretation or maybe Deodato was simply disinclined to engage with the subject matter again at this time, here remembering both the reaction his film had provoked and the alternative approach to primitive world ultra-violence seen in Cut and Run compared to its two predecessors in Cannibal Holocaust and Last Cannibal World. (As of August 2008, Deodato was however working on a new Cannibal themed film.)
Whatever the case, with the notably old-school exception of gutting a lizard on camera, the departures from the original source are where Mattei's film tends to get things more wrong than right.
The two key differences are in structure of the narrative and, following on from with this, the composition and dynamics of the film-making team. Though the bulk of the film comprises flashbacks to the documentary film-makers at work and the results, the film within the film structure of Cannibal Holocaust, wherein the first half of the film concentrates on the rescue mission and the second on an exploration of their what they found of the missing film-makers, is not really in evidence.
In particular, the Professor Monroe character, as the one who provided a more moral, anthropological voice on the mondo film-maker's excesses, is here positioned as one of the documentary team, Bob Manson. While he initially serves as something of a counterpoint to his Alan Yates like counterpart, in professing to be more concerned about the wider environment than with viewer ratings – or at least can justify his excesses if they help spread his message more widely – he soon succumbs to an ecofascistic / survival of the fittest / law of the jungle type amorality.
Reference to Cannibal Holocaust's Yates brings us on to the film's second major departure in terms of the group's composition. Their leader, the one who recruits the initially reluctant rival Manson as best man for the job, is actually a woman, Grace Forstye [sic]. The rest of the team is rounded out with Cindy Blair, whose role in the proceedings generally proves to be similar to that of Faye Daniels in Deodato's film, and the less noteworthy pairing of men analogous to Jack Anders and Mark Tomaso.
While the team also have two cameras like their Cannibal Holocaust counterparts, Mattei fails to satisfactorily introduce this detail nor to make use of the apparently different properties of the two cameras within his actual mise-en-scene. Rather there are too many images that do not accord with either camera-person's point of view and instead come across as being staged for the benefit of and recorded by an external, non-diegetic, camera. The impact of this is particularly significant when it comes to the gore scenes: whereas Deodato made impressive use of pseudo-documentary techniques and downright 'mistakes' to prevent us from noticing how unconvincing a given effect might have been, Mattei's comparatively conventional approach makes such shortcomings all too apparent.
Connected to this is Mattei's decision not to use stock footage and the Grace's comments within the film as to the datedness of such practice, that today's more sophisticated audience are sure to notice it. If the distancing from Mattei's own practice within the likes of Hell of the Living Dead is ironic, it is also a strategy that proves less effective than Deodato's admittedly morally problematic re-contextualisation of real atrocity footage as being a put-on for the camera in the infamous 'Road to Hell' sequence of his film. Similarly and paradoxically, Mattei's approach makes it that bit harder to suspend our disbelief that we are watching anything other than a film here.
In a similar vein, the film also lacks that palpable sense of psychosis one gets from its model, of not knowing just how far the film-maker was willing to go in his pursuit of authenticity. Instead, it comes across as a more calculated product, as the work of someone intent on giving his target audience what they wanted, but in a no more and no less manner. If this is no such bad thing in itself, as demonstrated by Deodato's Cut and Run, the issue is that Mattei is not quite as good a film-maker as Deodato and does not have the same resources at his disposal here.
As already mentioned in reference to the figure of Manson, Mattei's characters are also less satisfactorily drawn. Alternatively, however, we might also see this as one of the film's developments / departures from its model, in terms of emphasising that today it is less viable to hold Monroe's doctrine – i.e. that academic would-be detachment from the rest of the corrupt world / system – than it is to succumb to the inevitable.
Cannibal World's rape scene is also of interest in this regard because of its dynamics. While Grace expresses her displeasure at the scene, framing it as wasting film on a porno in a reprise of Faye's critique of the analogous scene in Cannibal Holocaust, Cindy encourages the men. The conflict within the group seems here more about power directly and less about power in relation to gender, of Cindy temporarily asserting her position with the men against Grace in decidedly un-feminist manner perfectly in keeping with the film-makers' we-are-all-complicit post-reality-TV world-view.
Or, maybe not, insofar as it is the TV network executive who emerges as the film's admittedly muffled moral voice, as he asks the inevitably “who are the real cannibals” question to the camera and the spectator...
Longer term fans will want to note that amongst the English dubbing voices can be heard Ted Russoff and Susan Spafford, two voice artists whose careers dated back to the glory days of the filone cinema and can be heard on the likes of The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh, while newcomers may want to check out actress and model Cindy Matic's portfolio.
It could be Cannibal Holocaust, but it is actually Bruno Mattei's 2003 digital reboot, alternately known as Cannibal World and, arguably more honestly, Cannibal Holocaust 2. This said, it would perhaps be better thought of as Cannibal Xerox, both for a nod to Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox in the form of a penis-ectomy scene and on account of the way in which Mattei and his co-scenarist Giovanni Paolucci all but plagiarise numerous scenes and lines from Ruggero Deodato's film in lieu of writing their own script from scratch.
Maybe Cannibal World gets away with it on being less a remake of Cannibal Holocaust than a contemporary re-interpretation or maybe Deodato was simply disinclined to engage with the subject matter again at this time, here remembering both the reaction his film had provoked and the alternative approach to primitive world ultra-violence seen in Cut and Run compared to its two predecessors in Cannibal Holocaust and Last Cannibal World. (As of August 2008, Deodato was however working on a new Cannibal themed film.)
Whatever the case, with the notably old-school exception of gutting a lizard on camera, the departures from the original source are where Mattei's film tends to get things more wrong than right.
The two key differences are in structure of the narrative and, following on from with this, the composition and dynamics of the film-making team. Though the bulk of the film comprises flashbacks to the documentary film-makers at work and the results, the film within the film structure of Cannibal Holocaust, wherein the first half of the film concentrates on the rescue mission and the second on an exploration of their what they found of the missing film-makers, is not really in evidence.
In particular, the Professor Monroe character, as the one who provided a more moral, anthropological voice on the mondo film-maker's excesses, is here positioned as one of the documentary team, Bob Manson. While he initially serves as something of a counterpoint to his Alan Yates like counterpart, in professing to be more concerned about the wider environment than with viewer ratings – or at least can justify his excesses if they help spread his message more widely – he soon succumbs to an ecofascistic / survival of the fittest / law of the jungle type amorality.
Reference to Cannibal Holocaust's Yates brings us on to the film's second major departure in terms of the group's composition. Their leader, the one who recruits the initially reluctant rival Manson as best man for the job, is actually a woman, Grace Forstye [sic]. The rest of the team is rounded out with Cindy Blair, whose role in the proceedings generally proves to be similar to that of Faye Daniels in Deodato's film, and the less noteworthy pairing of men analogous to Jack Anders and Mark Tomaso.
While the team also have two cameras like their Cannibal Holocaust counterparts, Mattei fails to satisfactorily introduce this detail nor to make use of the apparently different properties of the two cameras within his actual mise-en-scene. Rather there are too many images that do not accord with either camera-person's point of view and instead come across as being staged for the benefit of and recorded by an external, non-diegetic, camera. The impact of this is particularly significant when it comes to the gore scenes: whereas Deodato made impressive use of pseudo-documentary techniques and downright 'mistakes' to prevent us from noticing how unconvincing a given effect might have been, Mattei's comparatively conventional approach makes such shortcomings all too apparent.
Connected to this is Mattei's decision not to use stock footage and the Grace's comments within the film as to the datedness of such practice, that today's more sophisticated audience are sure to notice it. If the distancing from Mattei's own practice within the likes of Hell of the Living Dead is ironic, it is also a strategy that proves less effective than Deodato's admittedly morally problematic re-contextualisation of real atrocity footage as being a put-on for the camera in the infamous 'Road to Hell' sequence of his film. Similarly and paradoxically, Mattei's approach makes it that bit harder to suspend our disbelief that we are watching anything other than a film here.
In a similar vein, the film also lacks that palpable sense of psychosis one gets from its model, of not knowing just how far the film-maker was willing to go in his pursuit of authenticity. Instead, it comes across as a more calculated product, as the work of someone intent on giving his target audience what they wanted, but in a no more and no less manner. If this is no such bad thing in itself, as demonstrated by Deodato's Cut and Run, the issue is that Mattei is not quite as good a film-maker as Deodato and does not have the same resources at his disposal here.
As already mentioned in reference to the figure of Manson, Mattei's characters are also less satisfactorily drawn. Alternatively, however, we might also see this as one of the film's developments / departures from its model, in terms of emphasising that today it is less viable to hold Monroe's doctrine – i.e. that academic would-be detachment from the rest of the corrupt world / system – than it is to succumb to the inevitable.
Cannibal World's rape scene is also of interest in this regard because of its dynamics. While Grace expresses her displeasure at the scene, framing it as wasting film on a porno in a reprise of Faye's critique of the analogous scene in Cannibal Holocaust, Cindy encourages the men. The conflict within the group seems here more about power directly and less about power in relation to gender, of Cindy temporarily asserting her position with the men against Grace in decidedly un-feminist manner perfectly in keeping with the film-makers' we-are-all-complicit post-reality-TV world-view.
Or, maybe not, insofar as it is the TV network executive who emerges as the film's admittedly muffled moral voice, as he asks the inevitably “who are the real cannibals” question to the camera and the spectator...
Longer term fans will want to note that amongst the English dubbing voices can be heard Ted Russoff and Susan Spafford, two voice artists whose careers dated back to the glory days of the filone cinema and can be heard on the likes of The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh, while newcomers may want to check out actress and model Cindy Matic's portfolio.
Saturday, 13 December 2008
Zombies: The Beginning
The first thing to say about Bruno Mattei’s Zombies: the Beginning is that its title is misleading. The film functions as a sequel rather than a prequel to Island of the Zombies, picking up where its predecessor had left off.
Indeed, in order to do so it also immediately recontextualises that film's shock ending, in which the sole escapee from the island and the destruction of the Dark Star, Sharon, had transformed into one of the flesh eaters, into one of her recurring nightmares as she wakes up in the Middle East Asia General Hospital. (Here we also get the use of the “Dr Davis telephone please – Dr Blair, Dr J Hamilton, Dr J Hamilton” radio voice.)
Finding none of her corporate masters willing to believe what seems like an absurd story about zombies, Sharon retreats to Wat Sung temple for six months where she is then approached by Paul Barker, a representative of another corporation, Tyler Incorporated.
Barker tells her that a consignment of materials were taken from the zombies’ island to research facility on another island, which has not been heard from since. A squad of corporate marines is ready to accompany Sharon on the mission, for which she will be rewarded with a comfortable place in the Tyler corporate machine...
From here on, as you can perhaps tell, the film unfolds as an earth-bound, contemporary set Aliens rip-off with zombies in the place of aliens, repeating situation after situation from James Cameron's film.
The sole exception, as Sharon meets the equivalent of the alien queen, is more reminiscent of Luigi Cozzi's Zombie-meet-Alien crossover, Contamination.
If the film obviously doesn't match up to the standards of its primary model, it is nevertheless not at all badly made, with dynamic camerawork and editing – here remembering Mattei's background prior to becoming a director – and a commendable straightness amongst the performers even when uttering the most cliché dialogue or repeating scenes straight from Aliens playbook.
There are also some nice stylised Suspiria / Bava style lighting effects inside the submarine that takes the team to the island, along with neat use of frame-within-frame monitor screens to present the chaos of the zombie ambush in the powder room, although the viewer more concerned with logic rather than effect may also question the appropriateness and consistency of the POVs expressed within these.
Whatever its limitations – and here the sound, in terms of both dubbing and scoring is less satisfactory – Zombies: The Beginning emerges as a fitting tribute to its director, his sheer belief in the viability of this kind of cinema and his willingness to take it into the digital realm.
Indeed, in order to do so it also immediately recontextualises that film's shock ending, in which the sole escapee from the island and the destruction of the Dark Star, Sharon, had transformed into one of the flesh eaters, into one of her recurring nightmares as she wakes up in the Middle East Asia General Hospital. (Here we also get the use of the “Dr Davis telephone please – Dr Blair, Dr J Hamilton, Dr J Hamilton” radio voice.)
Finding none of her corporate masters willing to believe what seems like an absurd story about zombies, Sharon retreats to Wat Sung temple for six months where she is then approached by Paul Barker, a representative of another corporation, Tyler Incorporated.
Barker tells her that a consignment of materials were taken from the zombies’ island to research facility on another island, which has not been heard from since. A squad of corporate marines is ready to accompany Sharon on the mission, for which she will be rewarded with a comfortable place in the Tyler corporate machine...
From here on, as you can perhaps tell, the film unfolds as an earth-bound, contemporary set Aliens rip-off with zombies in the place of aliens, repeating situation after situation from James Cameron's film.
The sole exception, as Sharon meets the equivalent of the alien queen, is more reminiscent of Luigi Cozzi's Zombie-meet-Alien crossover, Contamination.
If the film obviously doesn't match up to the standards of its primary model, it is nevertheless not at all badly made, with dynamic camerawork and editing – here remembering Mattei's background prior to becoming a director – and a commendable straightness amongst the performers even when uttering the most cliché dialogue or repeating scenes straight from Aliens playbook.
There are also some nice stylised Suspiria / Bava style lighting effects inside the submarine that takes the team to the island, along with neat use of frame-within-frame monitor screens to present the chaos of the zombie ambush in the powder room, although the viewer more concerned with logic rather than effect may also question the appropriateness and consistency of the POVs expressed within these.
Whatever its limitations – and here the sound, in terms of both dubbing and scoring is less satisfactory – Zombies: The Beginning emerges as a fitting tribute to its director, his sheer belief in the viability of this kind of cinema and his willingness to take it into the digital realm.
Saturday, 29 November 2008
L' Isola dei morti viventi / Island of the Living Dead
Whatever you may think of his oeuvre, there can be no questioning of the Bruno Mattei / Vincent Dawn's commitment to low-budget popular filmmaking.
How many other directors in their 70s would have been willing to go to the Philippines for work and adapt to using digital video? Jess Franco certainly meets the second condition, but hasn't ventured outside more familiar territories of late as far as I'm aware.
The shit is burning show
Vincent Dawn of the Dead
But far from being a case of too little, too late from someone who many may feel should never have made the transition from editor to director in the first place, Island of the Living Dead is a pleasing return to the give them what they want school of gore. It also manages, by way of filone expert Antonio Tentori's script, to throw in some allusions to the likes of Zombie, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and the Blind Dead films whilst apparently taking on board more modern influences in the unlikely seeming form of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise given the name of the production company, La Perla nera - i.e. the black pearl.
We begin with a prologue set during the colonial era, in which a group of Zombie-referencing Conquistadores are overwhelmed by voodoo-using native, slave and pirate forces.
1600 / 1980 / 2006
Following this we cut to the present day as a mixed group of treasure hunters, led by one Captain Kirk, find their vessel developing engine trouble. As (mis)fortune would have it, an uncharted island is nearby, allowing them to limp into shallow waters and apparent safety.
Whilst the engineer - thankfully not named Scott, but Max - stays on board to carry out repairs, Kirk and the other five crew disembark and, splitting up into two groups, go to explore the island. Needless to say they soon encounter the zombies along with their mysterious supernatural masters...
If the use of digital technology benefits Island of the Living Dead in terms of scale, the computer game-ish quality it imparts to some of the effects perhaps doesn't sit too well with the physical abjection so important to the zombie idea, with the more traditional exploding heads and ripped entrails working better in this regard.
An old school make a mask and blast it with a shotgun type exploding head effect
Otherwise the main departures from the old school likes of Hell of the Living Dead are the absence of Ed Wood-esque use of stock footage (thank $deity) and a more progressive seeming mixture of characters. The females not being reduced to tits and a scream figures, instead kicking as much ass as the males, while the ethnically diverse nature of the crew - like related to the film's production and future markets - helps preclude the reduction of the non-whites to comic relief and / or outright racist ignominies.
Indeed, if there's anyone one feels particularly sorry for here it's the actors who formed part of Mattei's stock company in the last years of his life and career. In particular Ydalia Suarez and Yvette Yzon are the kind of 'exotic' beauties who could well have enjoyed Laura Gemser type careers had they just been around 30 years earlier, Yzon also tellingly appearing in Mattei's late WIP film, Anima Persa.
[Twitch Film discussion of Mattei's late films: http://twitchfilm.net/archives/008021.html]
How many other directors in their 70s would have been willing to go to the Philippines for work and adapt to using digital video? Jess Franco certainly meets the second condition, but hasn't ventured outside more familiar territories of late as far as I'm aware.
The shit is burning show
Vincent Dawn of the Dead
But far from being a case of too little, too late from someone who many may feel should never have made the transition from editor to director in the first place, Island of the Living Dead is a pleasing return to the give them what they want school of gore. It also manages, by way of filone expert Antonio Tentori's script, to throw in some allusions to the likes of Zombie, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and the Blind Dead films whilst apparently taking on board more modern influences in the unlikely seeming form of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise given the name of the production company, La Perla nera - i.e. the black pearl.
We begin with a prologue set during the colonial era, in which a group of Zombie-referencing Conquistadores are overwhelmed by voodoo-using native, slave and pirate forces.
1600 / 1980 / 2006
Following this we cut to the present day as a mixed group of treasure hunters, led by one Captain Kirk, find their vessel developing engine trouble. As (mis)fortune would have it, an uncharted island is nearby, allowing them to limp into shallow waters and apparent safety.
Whilst the engineer - thankfully not named Scott, but Max - stays on board to carry out repairs, Kirk and the other five crew disembark and, splitting up into two groups, go to explore the island. Needless to say they soon encounter the zombies along with their mysterious supernatural masters...
If the use of digital technology benefits Island of the Living Dead in terms of scale, the computer game-ish quality it imparts to some of the effects perhaps doesn't sit too well with the physical abjection so important to the zombie idea, with the more traditional exploding heads and ripped entrails working better in this regard.
An old school make a mask and blast it with a shotgun type exploding head effect
Otherwise the main departures from the old school likes of Hell of the Living Dead are the absence of Ed Wood-esque use of stock footage (thank $deity) and a more progressive seeming mixture of characters. The females not being reduced to tits and a scream figures, instead kicking as much ass as the males, while the ethnically diverse nature of the crew - like related to the film's production and future markets - helps preclude the reduction of the non-whites to comic relief and / or outright racist ignominies.
Indeed, if there's anyone one feels particularly sorry for here it's the actors who formed part of Mattei's stock company in the last years of his life and career. In particular Ydalia Suarez and Yvette Yzon are the kind of 'exotic' beauties who could well have enjoyed Laura Gemser type careers had they just been around 30 years earlier, Yzon also tellingly appearing in Mattei's late WIP film, Anima Persa.
[Twitch Film discussion of Mattei's late films: http://twitchfilm.net/archives/008021.html]
Wednesday, 19 November 2008
Follie di notte / Crazy Nights / Notti pazze della Amanda Lear
Given Joe D'Amato's prodigious work-rate and his willingness to engage with just about any filone, it comes as little surprise that he should have made a mondo film, Follie di Notte.
The closest points of comparison are probably the two Jimmy Matheus / Bruno Mattei entries hosted by Laura Gemser and released about the same time, Le Notti porno nel mondo and the self-explanatory Emanuelle e le porno notti nel mondo n. 2, the latter co-scripted by Mattei and D’Amato.
Though Gemser is absent here, her stand in being Amanda Lear – a popular singer of the time, who book-ends proceedings with performances of a couple of her songs in a nightclub – it’s otherwise largely business as usual:
A touch of stock footage of Brazil in an unsuccessful attempt to convince us that the routine there, featuring a panther woman and some J&B bottles, wasn't conveniently filmed in Rome; voice-over documentary type scenes of highly dubious authenticity, such as a black mass cum orgy and a look inside a S&M club filmed with a rather noisy ‘hidden’ camera where outwardly respectable men enjoy being whipped and humiliated; doubts over that Lear knew what she was actually commenting on in her bridging scenes; and the overlaying of the mass of dialogue-free material with stock library music, much of it forming a Piero Umiliani greatest hits collection.
Being a D'Amato production, it's also a touch more sexually explicit than Mattei's films and others of the time, with brief masturbation and fellatio shots amongst the simulated fumblings between the likes of two 'primitive' dancers and a couple of 'lesbian' ‘ballerinas’.
The Amanda Lear variety hour?
There’s even a touch of reflexive self-justification as one segment sees a reporter interview a porn actress, who remarks that there’s no essential difference between porn and other types of cinema and discusses her unusual relationship with her impotent, voyeuristic husband, as clips from one of her movies – or maybe another of D’Amato’s– play on the screen before her and the interviewer. (There is no doubt that Marina Frajese / Hedman appeared in several porn films, including many for D’Amato, more that she is really representing herself here rather than a character.)
The thing that is lacking about this supposedly shocking material is, however, its ability to actually shock anyone who has sat through the full version of the director’s Emanuelle in America – as a film whose fake snuff scenes are far more disturbing than the S&M here, in diegetically going beyond the safe, sane and consensual – or any of the sex and horror themed crossovers he would soon engage in.
On the plus side, D’Amato’s presence as cinematographer under his real name, Aristide Massaccessi, grants proceedings a touch more visual dynamism as he attempts to mimic and further embody the performers delirium rather than just record it.
The film may also encourage us to think about the longer history of the mondo film, as a continuation of the hitherto repressed anti-narrative, exhibitionistic, spectacular and shocking tradition of the early “cinema of attractions”.
Yes, trash meets the avant-garde yet again...
The closest points of comparison are probably the two Jimmy Matheus / Bruno Mattei entries hosted by Laura Gemser and released about the same time, Le Notti porno nel mondo and the self-explanatory Emanuelle e le porno notti nel mondo n. 2, the latter co-scripted by Mattei and D’Amato.
Though Gemser is absent here, her stand in being Amanda Lear – a popular singer of the time, who book-ends proceedings with performances of a couple of her songs in a nightclub – it’s otherwise largely business as usual:
A touch of stock footage of Brazil in an unsuccessful attempt to convince us that the routine there, featuring a panther woman and some J&B bottles, wasn't conveniently filmed in Rome; voice-over documentary type scenes of highly dubious authenticity, such as a black mass cum orgy and a look inside a S&M club filmed with a rather noisy ‘hidden’ camera where outwardly respectable men enjoy being whipped and humiliated; doubts over that Lear knew what she was actually commenting on in her bridging scenes; and the overlaying of the mass of dialogue-free material with stock library music, much of it forming a Piero Umiliani greatest hits collection.
Being a D'Amato production, it's also a touch more sexually explicit than Mattei's films and others of the time, with brief masturbation and fellatio shots amongst the simulated fumblings between the likes of two 'primitive' dancers and a couple of 'lesbian' ‘ballerinas’.
The Amanda Lear variety hour?
There’s even a touch of reflexive self-justification as one segment sees a reporter interview a porn actress, who remarks that there’s no essential difference between porn and other types of cinema and discusses her unusual relationship with her impotent, voyeuristic husband, as clips from one of her movies – or maybe another of D’Amato’s– play on the screen before her and the interviewer. (There is no doubt that Marina Frajese / Hedman appeared in several porn films, including many for D’Amato, more that she is really representing herself here rather than a character.)
The thing that is lacking about this supposedly shocking material is, however, its ability to actually shock anyone who has sat through the full version of the director’s Emanuelle in America – as a film whose fake snuff scenes are far more disturbing than the S&M here, in diegetically going beyond the safe, sane and consensual – or any of the sex and horror themed crossovers he would soon engage in.
On the plus side, D’Amato’s presence as cinematographer under his real name, Aristide Massaccessi, grants proceedings a touch more visual dynamism as he attempts to mimic and further embody the performers delirium rather than just record it.
The film may also encourage us to think about the longer history of the mondo film, as a continuation of the hitherto repressed anti-narrative, exhibitionistic, spectacular and shocking tradition of the early “cinema of attractions”.
Yes, trash meets the avant-garde yet again...
Friday, 11 July 2008
Virus / Inferno dei morti viventi / Hell of the Living Dead / Zombie Creeping Flesh / Apocalipsis caníbal
We open to the strains of Goblin's driving prog rock, playing over images of a chemical plant. Something is wrong at the euphemistically titled “Hope Project” in New Guinea.
Das blinkenlights
Just how much becomes evident as two technicians discover a dead rat in what is supposed to be a sterile area, before the creature reanimates, climbs inside one of the men's protective suits and bites him to death.
The reanimating agent and the zombies that result sweep through the facilty with alarming celerity until no-one is left alive.
Zombie technicians / technocrats and natives
Professor Barrett does, however, manage to put out a final message, indicating that “Operation Sweet Death” must be considered a failure and pleading “may God forgive us and pardon us for this evil that we have created.”
The next sequence presents a stand-off between a “terrorist” group, who have taken the US consulate hostage, and the authorities, who are preparing to send in an elite four man SWAT team, comprising Lieutenant Mike London and his men, Osborne, Vincent and Santoro to deal with the situation.
The SWAT team
They do so, without particularly worrying about whom they are killing nor the terrorist's demand that the Hope Centres be shut down and dying delivery that they are all doomed, their attentions being more focused on New Guinea vacation they are given as a reward.
The team soon have cause to doubt their masters, find themselves deposited in the middle of nowhere without radio contact: “You can always count on the government for a perfect example of organisation,” as London says. (Coincidentally the SWAT team then proceed by “dead reckoning,” the same name as is given to the battle-bus in Land of the Dead.)
Meanwhile investigative journalist Lia Rousseau – a reference to the enlightenment philosopher and through Romanticism and Emile the notion of the noble savage? – her cameraman Max, and the family with whom they are travelling – the child having been bitten and succuming rapidly to zombification – encounter some of the flesh eaters in an otherwise deserted settlement.
The zombie child; is it just me or are zombie children and elderly under-represented within the genre?
The SWAT team arrive in time to save the filmmakers, although this poses them with a dilemma. For the nature of their secret mission, any notion of a vacation forgotten in what could either be taken as careless writing or anothercomment on official duplicity, is such that they cannot allow any witnesses to live.
Fortunately for Lisa and Max, who are here to investigate the rumours around the Hope Centre, the ever growing number of zombies provide a bigger threat to everyone for the time being...
The greatest difficulty in writing about Hell of the Living Dead is that no description can really be adequate to it, as the kind of special film which really needs to be experienced for oneself.
Directed by Bruno Mattei under his Vincent Dawn alias – the surname of course further cuing us in to the film's main inspiration, Dawn of the Dead – and written by his long-term partner in crime Claudio Fragasso, the film is nothing if not entertaining, albeit with the likelihood that you will be laughing more than anything else.
Combining the zombie and mondo filone, the film's highlights include masses of poorly integrated stock footage of animals not native to New Guinea, like elephants and jerboa, much derived from Barbet Schroeder's documentary The Valley Beyond the Clouds; characters who quickly establish that the only way to stop the zombies is by shooting them in the head Romero-style but nevertheless persistently fail to pursue this approach; a spot of dubious anthropology as Lia strips down to her thong and paints herself in order to befriend a native tribe; and a near-deserted lecture theatre seeing service as a United Nations debating chamber.
The debating chamber
At the same time, however, there's a certain idiot-savant quality to the last of these, suggesting as it does that the first world really does not care about the third except for when it is understood as a problem for the west, in line with film's discourse around population control and the way in which first world's attempts to deal with this via the ironically named Hope centres becomes an issue only at the point when it it threatens to go out of control and cause a fatal PR disaster.
The message seems to be that having the population of New Guinea or other third world country consume themselves is fine, but having the same happen in the US, whose population, per head, consume far more than their equitable share, is not.
In this regard, one also wonders if the film's recycling of ideas, music and footage from other productions could in itself be taken as a gesture in the direction of an ecologically friendly approach to filmmaking or as a comment on the inherently cannibalistic nature of Italian filone production itself. Probably not, in all honesty, but intriguing possibilities nonetheless.
The whole media aspect is also surprisingly well handled, conveying confusion, disbelief, the suppression of information and the dubious self-interest of the reporter in a manner that actually predates the recent Diary of the Dead at times, even as elsewhere – a talking head scientist indicating how a cadaver with all four limbs removed still reanimated – the film's sullo stesso filone Dawn of the Dead origins are again being highlighted.
Given that it was borrowed from other films – Romero's, Beyond the Darkness and Contamination – Goblin's music is actually rather well used, rarely feeling out of place and highlighting Mattei's long experience as an editor.
Yes, this is a man in a top hat and tutu doing a dance routine as zombies close in
The performances are over the top but impossible to assess beyond this on account of the dubbing. It doesn't really matter though, inasmuch as the two combine to impart a live cartoon or comic book like feel, with this impression further enhanced by the frequent what-the moments, the best of which is perhaps one character's donning a top hat and tutu and doing a singing in the rain routine – without regard for the small detail of being in a house surrounded by zombies at the time.
Two acceptable faces of exploitation cinema
And a less acceptable one – how would the filmmaker or viewer feel if this were their child?
Gore fans will not be disappointed by Hell of the Living Dead, though there is a clear split between the harmless comic book zombie splatter material, which culminates in one victim having their tongue torn out and the zombie them forcing their eyeballs out from the inside, and the more exploitative and distasteful footage of native practices, apparently derived from Akira Ide's 1974 mondo movie Nuova Guinea: Isola Dei Cannibali.
Das blinkenlights
Just how much becomes evident as two technicians discover a dead rat in what is supposed to be a sterile area, before the creature reanimates, climbs inside one of the men's protective suits and bites him to death.
The reanimating agent and the zombies that result sweep through the facilty with alarming celerity until no-one is left alive.
Zombie technicians / technocrats and natives
Professor Barrett does, however, manage to put out a final message, indicating that “Operation Sweet Death” must be considered a failure and pleading “may God forgive us and pardon us for this evil that we have created.”
The next sequence presents a stand-off between a “terrorist” group, who have taken the US consulate hostage, and the authorities, who are preparing to send in an elite four man SWAT team, comprising Lieutenant Mike London and his men, Osborne, Vincent and Santoro to deal with the situation.
The SWAT team
They do so, without particularly worrying about whom they are killing nor the terrorist's demand that the Hope Centres be shut down and dying delivery that they are all doomed, their attentions being more focused on New Guinea vacation they are given as a reward.
The team soon have cause to doubt their masters, find themselves deposited in the middle of nowhere without radio contact: “You can always count on the government for a perfect example of organisation,” as London says. (Coincidentally the SWAT team then proceed by “dead reckoning,” the same name as is given to the battle-bus in Land of the Dead.)
Meanwhile investigative journalist Lia Rousseau – a reference to the enlightenment philosopher and through Romanticism and Emile the notion of the noble savage? – her cameraman Max, and the family with whom they are travelling – the child having been bitten and succuming rapidly to zombification – encounter some of the flesh eaters in an otherwise deserted settlement.
The zombie child; is it just me or are zombie children and elderly under-represented within the genre?
The SWAT team arrive in time to save the filmmakers, although this poses them with a dilemma. For the nature of their secret mission, any notion of a vacation forgotten in what could either be taken as careless writing or anothercomment on official duplicity, is such that they cannot allow any witnesses to live.
Fortunately for Lisa and Max, who are here to investigate the rumours around the Hope Centre, the ever growing number of zombies provide a bigger threat to everyone for the time being...
The greatest difficulty in writing about Hell of the Living Dead is that no description can really be adequate to it, as the kind of special film which really needs to be experienced for oneself.
Directed by Bruno Mattei under his Vincent Dawn alias – the surname of course further cuing us in to the film's main inspiration, Dawn of the Dead – and written by his long-term partner in crime Claudio Fragasso, the film is nothing if not entertaining, albeit with the likelihood that you will be laughing more than anything else.
Combining the zombie and mondo filone, the film's highlights include masses of poorly integrated stock footage of animals not native to New Guinea, like elephants and jerboa, much derived from Barbet Schroeder's documentary The Valley Beyond the Clouds; characters who quickly establish that the only way to stop the zombies is by shooting them in the head Romero-style but nevertheless persistently fail to pursue this approach; a spot of dubious anthropology as Lia strips down to her thong and paints herself in order to befriend a native tribe; and a near-deserted lecture theatre seeing service as a United Nations debating chamber.
The debating chamber
At the same time, however, there's a certain idiot-savant quality to the last of these, suggesting as it does that the first world really does not care about the third except for when it is understood as a problem for the west, in line with film's discourse around population control and the way in which first world's attempts to deal with this via the ironically named Hope centres becomes an issue only at the point when it it threatens to go out of control and cause a fatal PR disaster.
The message seems to be that having the population of New Guinea or other third world country consume themselves is fine, but having the same happen in the US, whose population, per head, consume far more than their equitable share, is not.
In this regard, one also wonders if the film's recycling of ideas, music and footage from other productions could in itself be taken as a gesture in the direction of an ecologically friendly approach to filmmaking or as a comment on the inherently cannibalistic nature of Italian filone production itself. Probably not, in all honesty, but intriguing possibilities nonetheless.
The whole media aspect is also surprisingly well handled, conveying confusion, disbelief, the suppression of information and the dubious self-interest of the reporter in a manner that actually predates the recent Diary of the Dead at times, even as elsewhere – a talking head scientist indicating how a cadaver with all four limbs removed still reanimated – the film's sullo stesso filone Dawn of the Dead origins are again being highlighted.
Given that it was borrowed from other films – Romero's, Beyond the Darkness and Contamination – Goblin's music is actually rather well used, rarely feeling out of place and highlighting Mattei's long experience as an editor.
Yes, this is a man in a top hat and tutu doing a dance routine as zombies close in
The performances are over the top but impossible to assess beyond this on account of the dubbing. It doesn't really matter though, inasmuch as the two combine to impart a live cartoon or comic book like feel, with this impression further enhanced by the frequent what-the moments, the best of which is perhaps one character's donning a top hat and tutu and doing a singing in the rain routine – without regard for the small detail of being in a house surrounded by zombies at the time.
Two acceptable faces of exploitation cinema
And a less acceptable one – how would the filmmaker or viewer feel if this were their child?
Gore fans will not be disappointed by Hell of the Living Dead, though there is a clear split between the harmless comic book zombie splatter material, which culminates in one victim having their tongue torn out and the zombie them forcing their eyeballs out from the inside, and the more exploitative and distasteful footage of native practices, apparently derived from Akira Ide's 1974 mondo movie Nuova Guinea: Isola Dei Cannibali.
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Articles on or interviews with Bruno Mattei?
One of my film studies colleagues is looking for information on Bruno Mattei.
Can anyone suggest any magazines or fanzines, that have career profiles or interviews with him, especially in English?
I have some myself somewhere in ETC or suchlike, which I'm going to look out, but am sure there are others that I'm not aware of.
Thanks in advance...
Can anyone suggest any magazines or fanzines, that have career profiles or interviews with him, especially in English?
I have some myself somewhere in ETC or suchlike, which I'm going to look out, but am sure there are others that I'm not aware of.
Thanks in advance...
Friday, 25 January 2008
Gli Occhi dentro / Madness / Eyes Without a Face
A madman is on the loose. Worryingly, his distinctive modus operandi appears to be modeled on the fumetti character Doctor Dark, a Jekyll and Hyde figure who is a respectable professor by day and a serial killer by night, enucleating his babysitter victims in a distinctive manner apparently derived from the ancient Egyptians (Dark is a scholar of pagan religions) by way of Lenzi’s Eyeball crossed with Carpenter’s Halloween.
Got my black gloves on, got my ski mask on...
Contrary to what it might look like, this is not Fulci's The New York Ripper
At a press conference organised by comic's publishers, Doctor Dark’s co-author Giovanna Dei comes in for criticism a la Peter Neal in Tenebre, which she deflects in much the same manner as her predecessor, albeit with the responsibilities of “Smith and Wesson” mutating into those of “Black and Decker,” and the foregrounding of media violence and its influence more generally over the specific topic of violence against women. (“How do you reply to the accusation that your comic strip has a negative effect on its readers?”)
Just in case you forget which type of film you are watching
Though she resolves to keep writing the popular, profitable fumetti, and persuades her collaborator to likewise continue, Giovanna also agrees that it would be a good idea to get away from the city and work for a bit. And not a moment too soon, since upon returning to her studio she finds some evidence of the killer’s having paid a visit, including eyeballs floating in a jar…
Contrary to what it might look like, this is not Lenzi's Eyeball
Surprisingly, however, the black clad, masked figure presumably responsible for the crimes then proves comparatively easy to apprehend – albeit after a few more victims and ‘presents’ for the increasingly terrified Giovanna.
The police, however, are not convinced that the man – a reporter, named Caligari no less, who had earlier attended the press conference called by Giovanna’s publisher – is anything but a crank who tried to take advantage of the murders to further his own moralistic agenda…
And, given that we are less than half the way into the narrative nor are we likely to be, nor surprised when the killings continue – especially when the Tenebre intertext and that the fact the film was made too early to be Se7te – i.e. Se7en, Italian style – are also taken into consideration.
I mention the latter film in relation to Gli Occhi dentro / Eyes Without a Face / Madness’s three greatest surprises.
First, that it was directed by notorious hack Bruno Mattei, albeit under the pseudonym Herik Montgomery.
Second, that it was released in 1994 rather than 1974 or 84, Mattei otherwise being the sort of filmmaker who could be pretty much relied upon to cash in on a trend – or even likely-seeming trend – as soon as possible in the time-honoured manner of the filone filmmaker.
Third, that it is actually rather good, making one wish that he had turned his attentions to the giallo sooner and made more films within it, keeping one engaged throughout and delivering the requisite suspense, shocks and generic tropes.
“I thought you’d gotten used to these things!”
“In the movies, doctor, that happens only in the movies!”
“Hmm”
Yes, there are a few moments of ‘gratuitous’ nudity and violence, but to be honest one wouldn’t expect anything else given the giallo and fumetti pedigree, with these in any case forcing us to bracket the notion of gratuitous somewhat: what is an exploitation movie if it doesn’t contain exploitative elements?
In case you had the film and Doctor Dark confused with Sexy Cat...
Fundamentally, however, Gli occhi dentro is harmless fun rather than the kind of thing you might find yourself having to justify enjoying, more a Strip Nude for Your Killer or Eyeball style romp than a New York Ripper scuzzfest.
This is not, it must be understood, a criticism of Fulci’s film. Rather it is about trying to understand each film in its own terms, recognizing that a one size fits all approach does not work.
The more stylized approach Mattei takes, flooding the screen with blocks of bright primary colours, with contrasting yellows and blues predominating, introduces that degree of distance from reality missing from Fulci’s more problematic masterwork.
But then, as Opera and Madness alike remind us, it also “all depends on what you mean by reality”
The actors aren’t the greatest, but have the right looks for their roles, especially the attractive, vaguely Cristina Marsillach like Monica Seller / Carol Farres, who also displays a nice line in Fenech-style hysteria.
Where is she now – another victim of the death of the Italian popular cinema?
The scoring, if hardly giving the best of Morricone or Nicolai’s work two decades earlier a run for the money, nevertheless pushes the appropriate buttons in ratcheting up the suspense and augmenting the shocks.
[A torrent of the film, from which these screen captures are taken, is available from Cinemageddon]
Got my black gloves on, got my ski mask on...
Contrary to what it might look like, this is not Fulci's The New York Ripper
At a press conference organised by comic's publishers, Doctor Dark’s co-author Giovanna Dei comes in for criticism a la Peter Neal in Tenebre, which she deflects in much the same manner as her predecessor, albeit with the responsibilities of “Smith and Wesson” mutating into those of “Black and Decker,” and the foregrounding of media violence and its influence more generally over the specific topic of violence against women. (“How do you reply to the accusation that your comic strip has a negative effect on its readers?”)
Just in case you forget which type of film you are watching
Though she resolves to keep writing the popular, profitable fumetti, and persuades her collaborator to likewise continue, Giovanna also agrees that it would be a good idea to get away from the city and work for a bit. And not a moment too soon, since upon returning to her studio she finds some evidence of the killer’s having paid a visit, including eyeballs floating in a jar…
Contrary to what it might look like, this is not Lenzi's Eyeball
Surprisingly, however, the black clad, masked figure presumably responsible for the crimes then proves comparatively easy to apprehend – albeit after a few more victims and ‘presents’ for the increasingly terrified Giovanna.
The police, however, are not convinced that the man – a reporter, named Caligari no less, who had earlier attended the press conference called by Giovanna’s publisher – is anything but a crank who tried to take advantage of the murders to further his own moralistic agenda…
And, given that we are less than half the way into the narrative nor are we likely to be, nor surprised when the killings continue – especially when the Tenebre intertext and that the fact the film was made too early to be Se7te – i.e. Se7en, Italian style – are also taken into consideration.
I mention the latter film in relation to Gli Occhi dentro / Eyes Without a Face / Madness’s three greatest surprises.
First, that it was directed by notorious hack Bruno Mattei, albeit under the pseudonym Herik Montgomery.
Second, that it was released in 1994 rather than 1974 or 84, Mattei otherwise being the sort of filmmaker who could be pretty much relied upon to cash in on a trend – or even likely-seeming trend – as soon as possible in the time-honoured manner of the filone filmmaker.
Third, that it is actually rather good, making one wish that he had turned his attentions to the giallo sooner and made more films within it, keeping one engaged throughout and delivering the requisite suspense, shocks and generic tropes.
“I thought you’d gotten used to these things!”
“In the movies, doctor, that happens only in the movies!”
“Hmm”
Yes, there are a few moments of ‘gratuitous’ nudity and violence, but to be honest one wouldn’t expect anything else given the giallo and fumetti pedigree, with these in any case forcing us to bracket the notion of gratuitous somewhat: what is an exploitation movie if it doesn’t contain exploitative elements?
In case you had the film and Doctor Dark confused with Sexy Cat...
Fundamentally, however, Gli occhi dentro is harmless fun rather than the kind of thing you might find yourself having to justify enjoying, more a Strip Nude for Your Killer or Eyeball style romp than a New York Ripper scuzzfest.
This is not, it must be understood, a criticism of Fulci’s film. Rather it is about trying to understand each film in its own terms, recognizing that a one size fits all approach does not work.
The more stylized approach Mattei takes, flooding the screen with blocks of bright primary colours, with contrasting yellows and blues predominating, introduces that degree of distance from reality missing from Fulci’s more problematic masterwork.
But then, as Opera and Madness alike remind us, it also “all depends on what you mean by reality”
The actors aren’t the greatest, but have the right looks for their roles, especially the attractive, vaguely Cristina Marsillach like Monica Seller / Carol Farres, who also displays a nice line in Fenech-style hysteria.
Where is she now – another victim of the death of the Italian popular cinema?
The scoring, if hardly giving the best of Morricone or Nicolai’s work two decades earlier a run for the money, nevertheless pushes the appropriate buttons in ratcheting up the suspense and augmenting the shocks.
[A torrent of the film, from which these screen captures are taken, is available from Cinemageddon]
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