Double Deathblog.

Daria Nicolodi 

(1950-2020)

Like all euro-horror fans I’m assuming, I was very sad to hear last week that the great Daria Nicolodi has passed away at the age of 70.

Personally, I've always subscribed to the belief that Nicolodi played a big part in the writing and conception of Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’ and ‘Inferno’; not that there seems to be much hard evidence for this, but I just really want it to be true. The former masterpiece in particular seems to herald the introduction of a distinct, new voice into Argento’s cinema, and, be it coincidence or otherwise, the sharp nosedive in the quality of the director’s work after the estranged couple ceased working together at the end of the 1980s speaks for itself.

Always a bold and outspoken figure, Nicolodi’s own account of her subsequent career seems, sadly, to have revolved around the notion of her creative input being ignored or misinterpreted by male filmmakers - first by Luigi Cozzi on Paganini Horror and the disasterous ‘De Profundis’/ ‘The Black Cat’/ ‘Demons 6’ (both 1989), and then latterly when her proposed script for the concluding chapter of the ‘Three Mothers’ trilogy was again disregarded by Argento as he set to work on what eventually became 2007’s ‘Mother of Tears’.

In all likelihood, we’ll never know the true extent of her behind the scenes contribution to the films she was involved with, but for her acting roles alone, she was one of the greats - eccentric, charismatic and super-cool in pretty much everything she appeared in, from her breakthrough in Elio Petri’s ‘Property is No Longer Theft’ (1973) to her defining role playing opposite David Hemmings in ‘Profundo Rosso’/’Deep Red’ (1975), to Mario Bava’s ‘Shock’ (1977) and beyond. 

Now and forever, Daria rules. RIP. 

 

Sandy Harbutt 

(1941-2020)

And meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, we must also say farewell to another guy whose creative artistry never really got its due, Sandy Harbutt, pioneer of independent Australian cinema and writer/producer/director/star of the greatest biker (sorry, bikie) movie ever made, 1974’s ‘Stone’, which I reviewed on this blog way back in 2010.

A landmark of outsider/psychedelic cinema, positively overflowing with talent, energy and raw craziness, ‘Stone’ remains an absolute blast, and the fact that Harbutt managed to single-handedly pull it all together in a country that basically didn’t have a film industry at that point remains an incredible achievement.

Subsequent leading lights of the livelier end of Australian filmmaking, from Peter Weir to Brian Trenchard Smith, and most particularly George Miller, owe Harbutt a huge debt of gratitude from essentially clearing the ground and establishing the parameters of the nation’s highly specific genre cinema aesthetic, and the fact he was never allowed the opportunity to follow up his debut feature or make a living from his film work is little short of criminal, given the phenomenal promise shown by ‘Stone’.

If you’re unfamiliar with the film, just watch the trailer here, and I’m pretty sure you’ll want to rectify that ASAP.

Raising a glass to you Undertaker - RIP.

Exploito All’Italiana: Paganini Horror (Luigi Cozzi, 1989)

You don’t need a PhD in Italian cinema to realise that the nation’s commercial film industry was in pretty dire straits by the tail end of the 1980s. Simply watching a few of the increasingly cynical and poverty-stricken horror and action films which continued to trickle out as the decade drew to a close, all seemingly designed solely to try to claw back some easy dough from the overseas video rental market, should get the point across well enough.

In terms in horror, Luigi Cozzi’s ‘Paganini Horror’ and its even more bizarrely conceived companion piece ‘The Black Cat’ (aka ‘De Profundis’, aka ‘Demons 6’, aka ‘Suspiria 2’, 1989) were not technically the end of the line. After all, directors like Fulci, Lenzi and Fragasso all kept pluggin’ away into the early ‘90s, Argento was still making films (albeit with overseas financing at this point), and Michele Soavi even pulled off a late era triumph with 1994’s ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’.

But, on an emotional level, Cozzi’s ’89 films still seem very much like the end of something. On some level, I can’t help but feel that that particular strain of stylised Mediterranean gothic first kicked off in earnest by Mario Bava’s ‘La Maschera del Demonio’ in 1960, reaches it’s eventual, ragged conclusion right here.

All of which may sound a bit maudlin, but, thankfully, there are two things you can always rely on Luigo Cozzi to provide, however daft his films may be – earnest enthusiasm and utter weirdness. True to form, ‘Paganini Horror’ delivers both in spades.

As you might have expected, the genesis of this film seems to have been pretty convoluted, but insofar as I can establish, the series of events which led to its creation went as follows. Earlier in the ‘80s, Cozzi claims that he wrote a script for a film which he envisioned as a serious period drama, exploring the life of the legendary Venetian composer and violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840), and the diabolical rumours which swirled around him.

Unsurprisingly, this project didn’t get anywhere near being made, but a few years later, Cozzi found himself working in some capacity on the nightmarish production of the thrice-doomed Klaus Kinski vanity project ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ (1988). Word on the canals was that Kinski planned to follow up this misbegotten venture with a self-directed film about Paganini – and indeed he did, although the result was reportedly such a car crash that it barely even saw release upon completion.

Prior to that however, there was apparently a sufficient buzz surrounding the project for low budget producer extraordinaire Fabrizio De Angelis (who seems to have almost single-handedly kept Italian b-movie industry afloat through these lean years) to smell the opportunity for a quick cash-in.

(If you’re wondering by the way why Enzo Sciotti’s incredible poster artwork for ‘Paganini Horror’ – reproduced at the top of this post – features a monster design, characters and a building which bear no resemblance to the finished film… well, I believe that’s simply because, in true grindhouse style, De Angelis commissioned him to paint it before the movie had even been scripted.)

Presumably remembering Cozzi’s earlier Paganini script, and aware that he was already working on the Kinski film, De Angelis must have given our man a call, and after getting the kind of hearty “HELL YES” that producers are naturally liable to receive when calling up struggling directors about their unrealised dream projects, he proceeded to lay down some pretty harsh caveats.

Firstly, he wanted the film to be a contemporary, American-style slasher movie with a rock soundtrack. Secondly, he wanted it made super-quick for pretty much no money whatsoever. (In an interview included on the blu-ray release of the film, Cozzi claims that De Angelis’s contribution as producer consisted of handing him a faulty 16mm camera, pointing him in the direction of the ruined villa which serves as the film’s primary location, and telling him to get on with it.)

So, you can probably see where this is all headed. Yes, that’s right - somewhere AWESOME, particularly once the great Daria Nicolodi (permanently estranged from Dario by this point, I believe) somehow also got involved with writing the script.

Perhaps this last point might help explain why ‘Paganini Horror’ kicks off with an initially perplexing, ‘Deep Red’ style childhood trauma prologue in which a small girl carrying a violin case travels home via gondola and electrocutes her mother in the bath. Or perhaps not, who knows. Either way though, once that’s out of the way, the story proper kicks off in a recording studio, where an unnamed, primarily female rock band are demoing their latest song - a shameless rip off of Bon Jovi’s ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’.

The band’s manager Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) is unimpressed. “If you ask me, your creativity has fallen on it’s ass – you keep doing the same stupid things again and again,” she tells singer/band leader Kate (Jasmine Maimone), not unreasonably under the circumstances. “Find something new, something mind-blowing and sensational,” Lavinia commands. “That’s what people expect from you! Another hit, not rehashed bullshit!” Ouch.

In an attempt to overcome this creative impasse, the band’s drummer and sole male member Daniel (Pascal Persiano) decides the time has come for them to considerably raise the stakes on their plagiarism, and as such he arranges a clandestine rendezvous with the sinister Mr. Pickett, a dishevelled, Mephistophelean type figure played by Donald Pleasence (who clearly wasn’t above jumping on a plane every now and then to lend his talents to this sort of thing, nearly a decade after the humiliation of ‘Pumaman’).

In exchange for a big wad of lire, Mr Pickett hands over a dusty suitcase containing – what else - a long lost, unpublished composition by Paganini himself! (In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, we later see Pleasence climbing to the top of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice and throwing piles of bank notes into the wind above St Mark’s Square; “little demons, little demons,” he cackles.) (1)

Back at the shack meanwhile, drummer-boy sits at the piano and plays his new acquisition for his band-mates (naturally it sounds like daytime soap opera music with a few baroque flourishes thrown in), and verily, they are inspired. Not just to rework some the 200-year-old tune into a solid gold hit, but also to use the music’s allegedly foreboding atmosphere as the jumping off point for an epic, horror-themed video project, which will no doubt clean up on MTV!

“No one has done anything remotely like it before… except for Michael Jackson, with ‘Thriller’, and his fantastic video clip,” declares Kate - and no, that’s not just me being facetious, it’s a direct quote from the film’s English dub, which, as you will have noted, is an absolute thing of beauty. “WE COULD DO THE SAME,” Daniel immediately responds, clearly still struggling with the essential concept of creating something ‘new’ and ‘sensational’.

And so, the band and their bitchy manager set out to make their dreams come true, hiring a renowned horror movie director (Pietro Genuardi, apparently playing a close cousin of ‘The Black Cat’s Dario Argento stand-in character) along the way, and decamping to a genuinely ominous looking derelict palazzo on the edge of town (actually a location in Rome), in which Paganini allegedly spent his final years.

These days however, the place is owned by none other than Daria Nicolodi! And so naturally she hangs around during the filming too, because hey, who wouldn’t? It all looks like a lot of fun, as the shadows loom and the elegantly-hued drapes billow through the dusty, candelabra-and-skull filled rooms, whilst the spandex-clad band dodge their way past armies of creepy mannequins, enthusiastically miming their way through their new, Paganini-derived smash hit (which my wife, who has a better ear than I for these things, assures me is a shameless rip off of a song by ELO). Good times indeed.

But, of course, all is not well. Before you know it, there’s a guy in a big, floppy hat and ‘Phantom of the Opera’ rubber mask (looking not unlike the killer from Bava’s ‘Baron Blood’ (1971)), stalking the band and their entourage, disposing of a few of ‘em with a switchblade embedded in the body of a violin, and, well, you know the drill.

More than anything, ‘Paganini Horror’ (especially when viewed in its English dub) strikes me as having tapped into the same rare and special brand of straight-faced absurdity which has helped make Juan Piquer Simón’s ‘Pieces’ (1982) into such a fan favourite. But, as much as I may have enjoyed taking the piss out of it in the paragraphs above, it’s worth stressing that Cozzi and his collaborators still manage to bring a sense of craft and style to proceedings which fans of older Italian horror are liable to find extremely endearing (if not a little heart-breaking, in view of the reduced circumstances they find themselves here).

Although much of the film is shot on roving, handheld 16mm, Cozzi’s footage retains a certain amount of elegance and compositional flair (more than can be found in his earlier, more generously budgeted films, some may argue), reflecting perhaps the years he spent peering over the shoulders of Argento, Bava and other celebrated maestros of the Italian gothic.

Lighting is consistently, uh, interesting (bright, infernal neon reds and blue-filtered day-for-night), whilst the editing (courtesy of industry veteran Sergio Montanari) is particularly strong, lending an Argento/Soavi-esque vitality to the film’s central stalking / murder set pieces which momentarily transcends the inherent silliness of the characters and storyline.(2)

The abandoned building in which much of the action takes place makes for a great, authentically ancient and creepy location, with elaborate (albeit budget conscious) set dressing helping to recapture a bit of that ineffable Italio-gothic feeling, whilst the Venetian location work is likewise as atmospheric as you could wish for, aided by an icy, surprisingly sombre electronic score from Vince Tempera.

This being a Cozzi film though of course, there is still plenty of room for outright, inexplicable goofiness, particularly during the movie’s second half, as the director seems to begin throwing in any wacky idea he can come up with to try to keep audience interest from flagging, even managing to indulge his long-standing preference for fantasy and science fiction to a certain extent.

It turns out, for instance, that there is an invisible ‘energy field’ preventing our characters from leaving the grounds of the palazzo – as we discover when the movie director character drives his car into it and somehow ends up roasting upon his flaming windshield.

Furthermore, the house has a cursed room, with for some reason boasts E=MC2 graffiti, esoteric equations, giant glowing egg-timers and a portrait of Einstein(?!), its flimsy floor concealing a system of time-and-space defying caves, in which Lavinia gets lost… or something..?

Elsewhere meanwhile, we get billowing green smoke, scratched-in blue lightning crackles, deafening synthesizer squalls, Andy Milligan-esque camera swirl, putrid, multi-coloured goo (“it looks like blood… mixed with some other thing”), dialogue about “a special fungus which only existed during the eighteenth century”, lots of senseless screaming and shouting and… laser beams? Could there be laser beams at some point? I don’t entirely recall to be honest, but signs point to ‘yes’.

It’s a good ol’ descent into complete delirium in other words, rendered all the more enjoyable by the sight of Daria and Donald (once he reappears) hamming it up in appropriately eye-rolling fashion, in stark contrast to the younger cast members, who seem largely bamboozled by the experience, staring blankly into the middle distance whilst looking faintly aggrieved, whenever they’re not being asked to run around screaming each other’s names.

So, what exactly does all this have to do with the simple tale of an undead Paganini returning from the grave to ice a bunch of galoots who have had the audacity to steal his music? And, given that we’re clearly very much in supernatural territory here, how the hell is that giallo-esque matricide prologue going to factor into things? And what about all the Mr Pickett, deal-with-the-devil stuff, for that matter?

I wish I could to tell you that all this is tied up satisfactorily at the film’s conclusion, but… well, instead of fretting about it, let’s just put it this way – excluding those directed by Argento or Soavi, when was the last time you watched a late ‘80s Italian genre movie which suffered from having TOO MANY ideas? Count your blessings, readers.

Cheap, tawdry and nonsensical as it may be in fact, I can put hand on heart and say that there is not a single element of ‘Paganini Horror’ which I did not enjoy. By cross-breeding poorly dubbed comic book mayhem and last gasp slasher hangover vibes with adorable Luigi Cozzi brain-wrongs and genuine gothic flair, it actually stands as pretty much perfect comfort viewing for someone of my particular inclinations.

Unlike the majority of his increasingly grizzled contemporaries, Cozzi’s heart was clearly still full of love for what he was doing at this late stage in the game, and even when talent, resources and opportunity all faltered, that love still shines through brightly in ‘Paganini Horror’, as if this were the work of some Italio-horror Daniel Johnson. Which, perhaps in a sense, it is? Don’t worry friends, ‘Paganini Horror’ will find you in the end.

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(1)Given that Pleasence was also a veteran of ‘Nosferatu in Venice’, and given that most of his footage here was shot on Venetian locations, it’s tempting to speculate that Cozzi might have actually grabbed these shots during downtime on the Kinski film, subsequently crow-barring them into ‘Paganini Horror’? The fact that Pleasence also appears in scenes in which he interacts with the rest of the ‘Paganini Horror’ cast, in addition to the film’s Venice-shot prologue, suggest that this may not actually have been the case, but who knows.

(2) For those who are unaware of his background, Cozzi began his film career as the Italian correspondent for ‘Famous Monsters of Filmland’, filing set reports from assorted horror productions during the ‘60s, before he befriended Dario Argento and began to work as his assistant through the ‘70s, branching out to make his own directorial debut with the giallo ‘The Killer Must Kill Again’ in 1975.

Exploito All’Italiana: Delirium: The Photos of Gioia (Lamberto Bava, 1987)

As a lover of the irrational in cinema, it saddens me to report that one of the most delirious things about this late period giallo opus from Lamberto Bava is probably its name. First off, this ‘Delirium’ should definitely not to be confused with Renato Polselli’s more comprehensively delirious 1972 ‘Delirium’, nor indeed the 1979 American horror film of the same name. And, if you’re thinking, hang on, pictures of what? Well, ‘Gioia’ is the Italian version of ‘Gloria’, which is the name of the central character in the English dub under review here, so, there you go; it’s not just a poster typo that stuck, although quite why the title wasn’t anglicised to match the dub heard in English territories is anyone’s guess. (1)

So, having got that out of the way, let’s crack on and see what kind of enjoyment we can wring from the younger Bava’s attempt to sew up elements of Argento, De Palma and indeed his father’s own ‘Blood & Black Lace’ (1964) into a kind of crudely assembled Ultimate Giallo, telling the can’t-miss tale of Gloria, the excruciatingly rich and tasteless publisher of a soft porn/fashion magazine named ‘Pussycat’, and of a vengeful killer stalking and murdering the models in her employ.

As you might well have anticipated, ‘Delirium’ is first and foremost a veritable riot of out-of-control ‘80s kitsch. The film’s visuals immediately recall the slick, hyper-real fantasias of Argento and Michele Soavi’s ‘80s films, whilst the fetishised, Helmut Newton-esque fashion / photography milieu that provides much of the local colour seems like a direct homage to ‘The Eyes of Laura Mars’ (1978), executed here with a level of garish, exploitative tackiness that makes Irwin Kirshner’s film look like a model of taste and restraint in comparison.

This aesthetic is carried over wholesale into the movie’s shamelessly prurient stylised murder sequences, and, needless to say, the wardrobe and hair-styling throughout must be seen to be believed, whilst the displays of conspicuous consumption highlighted in the production design are such that the characters may as well be lounging around on furniture made of gold doubloons.

Another thing viewers will soon note is that lead actress Serena Grandi has unsettlingly large breasts. Not the cool, Russ Meyer / Tura Satana kind of large breasts, but the kind that look out of proportion with the rest of her body and tend to make you worry about the terrible back pain she must be suffering.

Realising it is his solemn duty to exploit these assets appropriately, Lamberto does so not just via a ludicrous climax that sees Gloria going one-on-one with the killer whilst wearing Victoria’s Secrets-style lingerie, and also through the means of a sub-plot in which she reignites her love affair with a jobbing actor, aptly played by the ubiquitous George Eastman. In a delightful touch, Eastman is introduced whilst in costume for some kind of barbarian movie his character is appearing in. [I’ll put money on the fact that this actually WAS his costume from Ruggero Deodato’s ‘The Barbarians’, released the same year].

Grandi and Eastman’s passionate-in-inverted-commas jacuzzi love scene is… quite the thing, proving beyond doubt that wherever the younger Bava’s talents lay, it was certainly not in the arena of eroticism.

During ‘Delirium’, I wasn’t overly troubled by the notion that Grandi might be a gifted actress, but, in fairness, IMDB reveals that she has over fifty credits in theatrically released Italian pictures across four decades, so she must be doing something right. Perhaps it was just the combination of a distinctly iffy English dub and general tone of OTT melodrama that torpedoed her here, who knows.

Happily though, Grandi is flanked by a battalion of familiar faces in the supporting cast, including Daria Nicolodi (brilliant as ever, making comical “shifty eyes” faces behind the backs of the cops as they question her about the murders), David Brandon (whom you’ll recall as the outrageously camp English theatre director in Soavi’s ‘Stage Fright’ (1987), here expanding his range to include an outrageously camp English photographer), and ‘60s starlet Capucine, who puts in a great turn as Gloria’s embittered former mentor/rival magazine publisher (red herring much?), retaining about as much dignity as is humanly possible in a movie like this.

In order to differentiate his product from the legions of other “beautiful fashion models get butchered” titles competing for our attention across the decades, Lamberto’s principal gimmick in ‘Delirium’ involves shooting the murder scenes as heavily-tinted subjective sequences giving us the POV of the murderer. Nothing out of the ordinary there, I’ll grant you, BUT it seems that this killer’s ill-defined paranoid schizo tendencies cause him/her to see his/her photogenic victims as rubber-faced monsters of one kind or another, thus instigating ‘Delirium’s sole claim toward delirium.

The first time this happens – with fluorescent gel lighting flashing crazily as a model we just saw leaving a late night soiree in Gloria’s villa suddenly walks on-screen with a giant prosthetic eyeball head, shortly before she is impaled by a pitchfork – is genuinely pretty crazy; an authentic WTF highlight that momentarily justifies the movie’s title.

This is only topped by the second – even more distasteful - murder sequence, in which the killer visualises his showering victim with a compound-eyed aphid head. Overpowering her, s/he subsequently slathers his/her victim in what appears to be honey, before unleashing… a shoebox full of bees! (It was the shoebox that cracked me up.) Presumably an attempt to capitalise on ‘Phenomena’s (far superior) insect effects a few years earlier, this is all utterly inexplicable, and just as grotesquely daft as it sounds. (2)

As if all that weren’t enough to keep us busy, we’ve also got a peculiar sub-plot involving a wheelchair-bound teenager who spends his time spying on the kinky goings-on around Gloria’s pool and making obscene phone calls to her, but hey, it’s ok, he’s a good kid really. Beginning as an obligatory Hitchcock nod, developments here take a pretty weird diversion in the second half of the film, when it is revealed that wheelchair boy’s incapacity is a self-inflicted psychological condition resulting from the guilt he feels for the car crash that killed his fiancée. For a few moments there, ‘Delirium’ seems as if it’s about to turn into some ‘General Hospital’ tearjerker, and… I have no idea why any of this ended up in the movie to be honest, but hey – at least it’s unexpected.

Also worthy of note, we have another reliably banging, synth-drum heavy score from Simon Boswell, and a wonderful ‘Pieces’-esque moment in which a cop investigating the first murder presents his superior officer with a blood-free pitchfork, announcing “I found this in the tool shed” before the latter stares quizzically at him for a few seconds, then orders him to “get it to the lab, for testing!” (Ah, small pleasures).

Now, by this point, you’re probably thinking that ‘Delirium: The Photos of Gioia’ is shaping up to be one of the greatest Euro-trash horror films of the 1980s. How can it not be? Well, I don’t have any easy answer for you, but let’s put it this way: one of the great unsolved mysteries of European genre cinema must be: given the lengths it clearly goes to to please the kind of people who’d want to watch a film like this in the first place, how come ‘Delirium’ is basically just not that much fun to watch?

It’s a puzzler alright, but for Exhibit A I’ll put the following proposition to you. Given that Lamberto Bava’s ‘greatest hits’ as a director (the two ‘Demons’ films) provide a veritable blueprint for dispensing with exposition entirely and making horror movies that go off like rockets, it is ironic that, whenever he ventured into thriller/giallo territory, his films tended to suffer from serious pacing issues.

Essentially I think, whilst Lamberto can handle the action/exploitation stuff like a pro, he has no feel for either building tension or developing believable character interactions, and when doing so becomes necessary, he is apt to flounder.

Furthermore, for a film named ‘Delirium’, plotting here is disappointingly mundane. The nature of the killer’s monster delusions is never really expanded upon (indeed, this whole device is dropped in the movie’s second half), and things culminate with the kind of crushingly inconsequential “oh, it was… that guy” type resolution that has long been the hallmark of inferior gialli.

With no real surprises or innovations, the film’s 95 minute run time feels pretty gruelling, with toe-curlingly awkward, repetitious dialogue, highly variable performances and ill-motivated corridor wandering eventually reducing it to a painful crawl to the finish line, in spite of the myriad bells and whistles I’ve outlined above.

And for Exhibit B meanwhile… again, I’m not entirely sure how to put this, but there is a certain lack of charm to ‘Delirium’ that makes me reluctant to give it the same breaks I’ve accorded many of the other films I’ve reviewed in this Exploito All’Italiana strand.

By 1987, I suppose things were getting pretty far down the line towards po-mo self-awareness and the kind of “so-bad-it’s-good” mentality that led many cult filmmakers to creative penury during the dark days of the ‘90s. In this respect, the scenes of monster-headed weirdness in ‘Delirium’ feel contrived – knowingly silly - where, just a few years earlier, more genuinely unhinged filmmakers like Lenzi or Polselli would likely have thrown them in entirely in earnest.

It feels as if Bava was sufficiently canny to know exactly what he was doing with the various cultural reference points and commercial necessities spliced into this picture, but was not smart enough to really justify them or put them to any interesting use. Instead, the film veers toward a cynical, camp sensibility that never feels entirely satisfactory, light years away from the simple, derivative charm of pictures like Sergio Martino’s ‘Hands of Steel’ (1986) or Bava’s own Blastfighter (1984). It’s a fine line perhaps, but Clever-Stupid can make for a good time - Stupid-Clever not so much.

Just a few months ago, we were looking at a Lamberto Bava film – Graveyard Disturbance – that crashed and burned as a result of its total failure to fulfil audience expectations of a horror movie. It is curious therefore to reflect on the way that ‘Delirium’ ostensibly delivers in spades on everything an inebriated Euro-cult fan could possibly wish for, yet still somehow comes up empty-handed. What can I say - It’s a funny old game, isn’t it?

It’s not that ‘Delirium’ isn’t worth watching at some point if this kind of thing floats yr boat. On the contrary, it’s loaded with stuff to make you grin and chuckle and gasp, right on cue. But, just as in the world of empty ‘80s narcissism that the film purports to critique in some vague, five-degrees-removed type fashion, those grins, chuckles and gasps will feel hollow and fleeting, where once they ran deep and rich.

(1) For the record, IMDB currently lists upward of twenty feature films with the name ‘Delirium’ – mostly indie horror efforts released during the 21st century, although there’s also a Spanish ‘Delirium’ from 1983, a 1997 Filipino one, and most intriguingly, a 1965 Iranian horror movie that also shares the name. Now that I’d like to see!

(2) We need to acknowledge at this point that ‘Delirium’ is about as shamelessly misogynistic as these things get, but c’mon. If you’ve made it past the poster art and plot synopsis, you should be prepared for that. You might as well criticise a bulldog for drooling. Should you wish to mount a defence of the film on these grounds, I suppose you could point to both Nicolodi and Capucine as strong/interesting female characters who are never overtly sexualised, and perhaps even make a tenuous claim that the film’s camp sensibility pushes its leering depictions of eroticised violence into a guilt-free queer/po-mo context. But, I’m not going to make these arguments – in fact I’m going to drop the issue right there. ‘Delirium’ is gloriously indefensible rubbish, and I’m happy to enjoy it as such.