Exploito All’Italiana: Black Magic Rites (Renato Polselli, 1973)

 So, having managed to maintain this blog for the better part of fifteen years, it feels remiss of me not have dedicated at least a few paragraphs to discussing the indescribable cinematic singularity which is Renato Polselli’s ‘Riti, Magie Nere e Segrete Orge nel Trecento’ [‘Rites, Black Magic and Secret Orgies of the Fourteenth Century’], aka ‘The Reincarnation of Isobel’, allegedly aka ‘The Ghastly Orgies of Count Dracula’… but known to most of us (for the sake of brevity, if nothing else) simply as ‘Black Magic Rites’.

So, what with it being October, and having just spent some time luxuriating in the glow of Indicator’s never-thought-I’d-see-the-day 4k restoration… now would seem to be the time to take a deep breath and get on with it.

It must be admitted from the outset that this is a very difficult movie to try to review in any conventional sense, as those who have seen it will surely appreciate.

It is not only the film’s almost total lack of narrative which causes difficulties for the potential critic, but the seeming lack of any unifying pattern or purpose whatsoever. Faced with the onslaught of audio-visual anarchy found herein, the idea of understanding what Polselli’s intentions were in creating this thing, or of positing any framework against which his success may be assessed, seems nigh on impossible.

‘Black Magic Rites’ is, essentially, about as close as a piece of ostensibly commercial cinema has ever come to a state of utter, formless chaos, a celluloid equivalent of the mad piping of the servitors of Lovecraft’s blind idiot god crouching vacantly at the centre of the uncaring universe.

If you go in with enough determination, and pay close enough attention, you can identify discrete scenes and sections within the film, albeit generally interrupting and overlapping with each other to no clearly defined purpose. (This time around for instance, I was particularly taken by the whole funeral / premature burial sequence).

But, basically, this is a 100-minute hypnotic drone of a movie - no form, no progression. Most of the characters here are doing exactly the same thing at the end that they were doing at the start. The intermittent fragments of narrative which do creep in from time to time feel a bit like a heavy psychedelic rock band half-heartedly trying to add lyrics and song structure to their music, only for it to be totally drowned out by the roar of their amplifiers.

And what exactly, the uninitiated may ask, might that metaphorical roar consist of?

Well, you know - fire, screaming, gurning faces, crimson gore, kaleidoscopic psychedelic hoo-hah, awkwardly framed tableaux of female and male bodies squeezed into all kinds of outré costumes (both 14th and 20th century vintage), frantic time-and-space shredding jump cuts and cross-edits, lurid red and green disco lighting, erotic torture, breath-taking scenery and groovy castles, anonymous, drooling creeps lurking in shadows, more fire, more screaming faces, hypnotism, witch burnings, widescreen vistas of ritual depravity, pitchfork wielding mobs, chintzy birthday parties, frantic, awkward softcore sex, outbursts of alarming, screechy comic relief, and Count Dracula (apparently). 

The usual, basically - just a whole lot more of it. An all-you-can-eat buffet of all purpose, fumetti-style gothic horror/sleaze.

Within the pantheon of Italian genre directors who have become admired and/or infamous amongst the fans who have painstakingly unearthed their work over the decades, Polselli stands out as the kind of figure who, if he didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent him.

I mean, he had to be out there somewhere on the margins, didn’t he? The guy whose films were more extreme, more hysterical, more chaotic and senseless than anyone else’s, and who was stricken by censorship, public indifference and critical bafflement to such an extent that many of his films were barely even released at all, languishing in unfathomable obscurity for decades, and in some cases remaining almost impossible to see to this day.

And yet, despite these catastrophic set-backs, he kept dusting himself off and coming back to make more of the damned things, driven on by who knows what unfathomable personal demons. Certainly, the few public comments he made during his lifetime shed little light on why he persisted in ploughing his long-suffering financiers’ money into such grotesque, bizarre and (crucially) unprofitable productions. Indeed, reading the sparse interviews conducted with Polselli whilst he was still with us, his attempts to explain himself seem alternately gnomic, cynical and entirely irrelevant to the work at hand.

Suffice to say that, if you were putting together some ‘Berberian Sound Studio’-styled fiction based around the world of Italian cult cinema, you could scarcely hope to create such a fascinating, baffling and hilarious character - and yet, here he is, large as life, with ‘Black Magic Rites’ standing as his defining artistic statement.

Enthusiasts such as myself often tend to praise Euro-horror films for achieving passages of surrealistic delirium. In ‘Black Magic Rites’ though, Polselli begins in a state of surrealistic delirium and keeps his foot down hard on the accelerator right through to the closing ‘FINE’.

As a result, it stands as an example of a piece of pulpy, cynical exploitation assembled with such fevered intensity that it goes full circle on the artistic spectrum, swallowing its own tail and emerging as an experimental art piece; an overwhelming sensory experience that would probably sit better on a double bill next to ‘Flaming Creatures’ or ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’ than with a Paul Naschy or Sergio Martino movie.

To return to my earlier music metaphor, watching ‘Black Magic Rites’ for the first time as a fan of Euro-horror feels a bit like growing up listening to canonical ‘60s rock, loving the occasional moments of dissonance and feedback... then suddenly discovering Les Rallizes Denudes or Mainliner. Whoa. Too much, man.

Before we get too carried away though, it’s worth splashing our faces with cold water and remembering that, of the individual elements which make up the totality of ‘Black Magic Rites’, none are entirely unique within the Italio-cult context.

The voluminous output of that nation’s cinema during the early ‘70s did, after all, include low budget horror films which, whether by accident or design, were almost entirely incoherent (Angelo Pannacciò’s ‘Sex of the Witch’), or formally and tonally inexplicable (Francesco Mazzei’s The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive). 

There were films which simply pushed WAY TOO FAR to ever see widespread, uncut distribution at the time of their production (Fernando Di Leo’s ‘Slaughter Hotel’ aka ‘Cold Blooded Beast’), and other entries in the “sexy gothic” sub-genre which knowingly plunged over the precipice into full-blown parody and deliberately disjointed, rambling nonsense (Luigi Batzella’s ‘Nude For Satan’) - all trends redolent of a pre-porno film culture which routinely allowed questionably committed filmmakers to essentially go out and shoot whatever the hell they felt like, so long the requisite nudity and softcore groping was delivered on time.

‘Black Magic Rites’ though is the only film I’m aware of which managed to simultaneously cash in on ALL of these crazy possibilities, creating a maximalist overload of ‘70s witch-smut insanity which has never been equalled.

Trying to account for all this on a rational basis, I’m tempted to consider the suggestion floated by Stephen Thrower in his supplement to the Indicator release, that, perhaps, Polselli had intended to make a somewhat more structured, narrative film but (as per the Pannacciò film cited above) simply lost control of the production, discovering after the money had run out and the actors fled the set that he was missing whatever footage he needed to pull the whole thing together.

Hitting the editing room therefore, perhaps with only a few days to spare before delivering a rough cut, he simply panicked, resorting to the only tool available to a director of crazy horror movies in such circumstances - Art! Or, more specifically - jump cuts, and dreams-within-flashbacks-within-dreams, special / temporal disorientation, overlapping images and audio tracks and hypnotic repetition of footage - all cut to the beat of Franco Reverberi’s freaky, ritualistic score. Yeah!

In other circumstances, such an endeavour could have emerged as simply unwatchable (and many would no doubt claim ‘Black Magic Rites’ is just that), but, even for the less fanatical viewer, the film’s aesthetic pleasures and unexpected outbursts of beauty certainly help to sweeten the pill.

‘Black Magic Rites’ was shot in Italian weirdo horror’s home-from-home, the 15th century Castello Piccolomini in Balsorano, previously home to everyone from The Crimson Executioner to Lady Frankenstein, and it must be said, Polselli uses the castello’s potential quite brilliantly in places, especially when he breaks away from the suffocating, colour-saturated gloom of the interiors to stage scenes on the castle battlements, showcasing the astonishing vistas of snow-capped mountains which form the backdrop to the valley in which the castle stands. (1)

A necessary refresher amid all the madness going on down in the ballrooms and dungeons, you can almost smell the fresh air during these sequences, and a similar chill wind of melancholic atmos can also be felt during the funeral / burial sequence I mentioned above, which is really beautifully put together, acting both as a reference to the best scene in Polselli’s earlier The Vampire and the Ballerina, and indeed to its original inspiration, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr.  

Though I prefer to avoid going into ‘consumer guide’ mode in these reviews, it must be said that the new transfer of the film really helps to highlight the beauty of some of the individual images Polselli and his collaborators conjured up here amidst all the carnage and peek-a-boo nudity and cheap special effects, perhaps helping to lend the whole thing a bit more of a sense of artistry than was really evident in earlier editions. God knows the travails Director of Photography Ugo Brunelli probably had to go through whilst shooting all this stuff, but he certainly delivered the goods in technical terms.

His work, together with Reverberi’s appropriately wigged out yet infernally catchy score (heavy on hand percussion, primitive electronics and reversed/echoed vocal weirdness), work to ensure the film remains an aesthetically intoxicating experience, as well as a simply overpowering one - with this intention often succeeding in spite of Polselli’s feverish, ADHD-afflicted editing and obsession with rubbing our noses in the most unpleasant imagery he can conjure up at any given point.

By far the funniest thing about the new transfer though is that it retains the grandly ornate interval cards from the movie’s original Italian cinema screenings, which I don't recall seeing before. What a hoot! I mean, can you imagine the poor, unsuspecting audience, staggering out into the sunlight for a smoke after 45 minutes of this shit? (“Say pal, whatcha think's gonna happen next?”) 

Simply amazing - as indeed is every aspect of this astounding, unrepeatable film’s genesis, existence and continued survival.

Check it out, please, before the thousand-faced messengers of Azathoth think better of letting it out in the wild, and pull remaining copies through some black trans-dimensional vortex, leaving no trace but a lingering, half-forgotten memory, ready to be shaken off with tomorrow morning’s much needed coffee.

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(1) As I believe I noted in my ‘Lady Frankenstein’ review a few years ago, I’m intrigued by the fact that, of the four noteworthy Italian horror film Mickey Hargitay appeared in, three were shot in the Castello Piccolomini! I mean, was this just a coincidence, or did he live nearby, or know the owners of the castle or something..? Sadly the man himself is no longer with us to provide an answer, but - any insight welcomed.

Exploito All’Italiana: The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive (Francesco Mazzei, 1972)

Although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from reading this weblog, I spend a lot of my time watching Italian gialli. Why I’ve so rarely written about them over the years, I’m not quite sure, as there is undoubtedly still a lot to be said about this feverishly creative and endlessly rewarding genre, even beyond the efforts made by the multitude of English language critics and commentators who’ve taken a crack at it over the years.

It feels fittingly perverse therefore that I should break the fast of giallo content in these pages, not by looking at any of the more celebrated or representative examples of the genre, but by instead turning my attention to what is, by anyone’s standards, an extremely marginal entry in the canon. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that one-shot director Francesco Mazzei’s 1972 magnum opus ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ languished in near total obscurity until Arrow saw fit to reissue it as part of a blu-ray box set last year. (1)

Suffice to say, even now that it’s easily obtainable, ‘L’arma..’ is unlikely to make it onto many giallo fanatics’ top ten lists. To be honest, I’m not even sure it would even make my top fifty at this point. But, it is at least incredibly strange, which counts for a lot around these parts - especially when it comes to inspiring me to hit the keyboard and begin trying to figure out what the bloody hell I just watched.

Of course, we all know there are a lot of very strange gialli out there, and seasoned fans of Italian genre cinema will have long since learned delight in these films’ refusal to abide by the dreary rules of narrative logic which American (and indeed British) culture have hammered into most of us from birth. But… ‘L’arma..’ is not really one of those films, if you know what I mean.

In fact, for much of its run time, it’s a perfectly linear murder mystery / police procedural kind of joint, doggedly moving from A to B…. except when it suddenly decides it would rather spend some time hanging around in Q or X instead, which is where the fascination begins. Returning to the jigsaw metaphor I was utilising just last month, it’s a film full of bulbous, misshapen pieces which stubbornly fail to coalesce into any kind of coherent whole, no matter how long you spend trying to force them into place.

So, let’s get down to cases. Basically our setting here seems to be a convent, located somewhere in rural southern Italy. Our characters are the strange gaggle of people who either live at the convent, work there, or just inexplicably hang around, enjoying the suspiciously boozy and indulgent meals which seem to be frequently served in the institution’s bucolic gardens.

Central to this social milieu is Don Giorgio (Maurizio Bonuglia), an attractive, blonde-haired young priest, who is soon revealed to be having affairs with not one, but two, married women. In fact, he is currently in the process of ditching teacher and wife-of-rich-businessman Orchidea (Bedy Moratti) in order to devote more of his time to tarot card reader and alleged ‘witch’ Giulia (Eva Czemerys). In addition, he has also attracted the steadfast devotion of almond-eyed nun Sister Tarquinia (played by the magnificently named Claudia Gravy), who insists with barely-concealed lust that Don Giorgio is “..a saint”. (1)

In a certain sense, perhaps Don Giorgio’s enthusiastic embrace of the ways of the flesh could be seen to reflect a devotion to the same kind of transcendent, non-denominational spirituality practiced by Oliver Reed’s character in Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’, carrying with it the same implied critique of papal dogma and clerical celibacy… but, as with so many things, Mazzei’s film never really gets its ducks in line sufficiently well to express this idea very clearly.

Meanwhile, much screen time is also devoted to the travails of a small boy named Ferruccio (Arturo Trina), who appears to live at the convent. Late in the film, a throwaway line of dialogue belatedly informs us that he is an orphan whom the nuns have unofficially adopted, but I don’t think we’re ever offered an explanation as to why they keep him confined to his bedroom, or why the aforementioned Orchidea visits him each day to administer some kind of injection.

Anyway, before long, Don Giorgio is found dead - stabbed in the back whilst seated at the organ in the convent’s chapel - and down-at-heel, motorcycle-riding Commissario Bioto (veteran comedy actor Renzo Montagnani) is soon on the scene, determined to crack the case in his best bumbling Maigret / Columbo type manner.

Soon though, the Commissario also finds himself smitten by Orchidea, instigating a romantic relationship which takes him way beyond the realm of professionalism, given that she is both a prime suspect in the murder case, and, lest we forget, already married.

So far then, a pretty standard issue whodunit, seasoned with a heady mix of religion, rural Southern superstition, sexual intrigue and implied child abuse which will inevitably remind genre fans of Lucio Fulci’s classic ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’, even as Mazzei immediately steers things in an entirely different direction.

Because, really, it is the extraordinary series of non-sequiturs which accumulate on the fringes of this central plotline which make ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ stand out.

We’ve already mentioned the strangeness of poor Ferruccio’s situation, which in most films would surely be treated as an immediate red flag that something nefarious is going on at the convent. But here, everybody - the police included - just seems to take it for granted that the nuns keep a drugged orphan locked in his bedroom.

Meanwhile, we’re also treated to what I can only describe as several one-off outbursts of gratuitous nunsploitation (an addition which is certainly in keeping with director Mazzei’s history as the producer of several mondo and sexploitation titles during the ‘60s).

At one point, the nuns strip off and begin indulging in an extended bout of topless self-flagellation, working themselves up into a state of orgasmic frenzy as a gliding camera tracks them against a black background; a scene which, again, invites comparison to ‘The Devils’, but, beyond its value as pure exploitation, it has no wider significance to anything else which happens in the film in thematic/narrative terms.

Even stranger is a subsequent scene, in which the nuns all take a shower together (still wearing their bloomers and gym slips), and appear entirely unconcerned when the heretofore unmentioned leering, snaggle-toothed ex-con gardener character suddenly wanders in to invade their privacy. The “joke”, I suppose, is that they then all lose their shit in predictably comedic fashion when the Commissario’s bungling sidekick Moriconi (Salvatore Puntilo) inadvertently intrudes on them, but… so many unanswered questions here. Rather than the sexy comic interlude which was presumably intended, it basically all just seems - at the risk of repeating myself - really strange.

The incongruous antics of the nuns pale into insignificance though once we get deeper into the film and find ourselves assaulted with several full strength descents into - albeit potentially unintentional - surrealism.

One of these occurs when young Ferruccio, fleeing from Orchidea as she pursues him wielding a syringe, descends to the cellars beneath the convent, where, incredibly, he enters a chamber full of cobweb-covered skeletons, arranged in some kind of morbid diorama, clad in moth-eaten regal vestments and bearing bejewelled medieval goblets!

Up to this point, I should clarify, the film has featured no hint of overt gothic horror imagery whatsoever, and yet here we are suddenly in the midst of an extraordinary feat of production design, straight out of Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda’s darkest nightmares.

Of course, neither Ferruccio nor Orchidea seem at all perturbed by this. It’s never mentioned in dialogue, never explained, and the set is never returned to. The characters simply run straight through it all as if it weren’t there.

So, what in the absolute hell is going on here?! Has something crucial been lost in translation, perhaps? Do convents in southern Italy routinely keep ancient skeletons posed in elaborate tableaus in their basements? Would domestic audiences have recognised this as an accepted phenomenon and taken it in their stride? I have no idea. (A more likely explanation perhaps is that the film’s crew just stumbled upon the set for a gothic horror movie shooting on a adjacent sound stage and decided, “eh, why not”?)

Either way though, this merely amplifies the confusion for those of us earnestly trying to figure out where in the hell ‘L’Arma..’ is coming from. I mean - murdered horny priests, sexually frenzied nuns with very strange showering arrangements, imprisoned orphans, skeleton dioramas in the basement… not to mention the fact there’s a ‘witch’ hanging around the place, and boozy dinners for sleazy local benefactors regularly going on in the gardens. In any - ahem - ‘normal’ film, a picture would surely be being painted here of a corrupt/decadent institution in which something very, very bad indeed is going on - but, nope.

Somehow, ‘L’arma..’s narrative never draws any connection between these isolated events. Outside of those directly suspected of Don Giorgio’s murder, no one at the convent is ever accused of conspiracy or foul play by the screenplay. Seemingly, day-to-day life in this whacko nunnery is going just fine so far as Mazzei and his co-writers are concerned, give or take perhaps some broad criticism of Catholic dogma and its attendant hypocrisies.

Weirder still though is the segment of the film which I will simply refer to as, “all that business with the restaurant”.

Long story short: in the throes of their new love, Orchidea and Commissario Bioto at one point go motoring off into the countryside, and stop on a whim at a restaurant located within an idyllic country villa. Therein, things take on an almost fantastical / fairy tale quality, as they are seated at a grand table in the centre of an otherwise empty palatial living room, and presented with a ridiculously extravagant bill of fare (bowls piled high with fruit, entire cakes, decanters of wine, etc.).

Suddenly though, it’s ‘David Lynch directs’, as Orchidea disappears, and the restaurant’s proprietors (an older lady and - we presume - her daughter) lurk around in the corners of the room, staring menacingly at their remaining guest.

“I have a son in Haiti,” the older lady announces. 

“Tahiti..?” ventures Bioto, confused. 

“No, Haiti.” 

The conversation ends there.

Bioto then rises, and POV camerawork takes us on a tour through the labyrinthine corridors of the building, until he eventually finds Orchidea reclining in a bedroom, ready to receive him in her arms for a bout of off-screen passion.

Again, I feel there may be a certain element of cross-cultural confusion playing out here. Would this whole set-up have been something contemporary Italian viewers would have recognised? Was this restaurant, say, the kind of place where rich folk in rural areas might have routinely gone to enjoy illicit liaisons of one kind or another? Was there some some element of the food or decor which may have explained the elderly lady’s strange conversation?

Anyway. Back at the convent, Commissario Bioto receives an anonymous note, advising him to investigate the restaurant he just visited in connection with Don Giorgio’s death. Returning, he finds a workman taking down the restaurant’s shingle. This man casually informs him that the joint has closed down because, “the proprietors have been murdered(!)”

Entering the building, Bioto engages in a brief chase and scuffle with an initially unseen intruder, who is soon revealed to be his own colleague Moriconi, who also saw the note and got there before him. After a bit of mutual backslapping and exasperation, the pair leave, and the whole business with the restaurant is never mentioned again.

So, let me get this straight. Our protagonist here is a homicide detective. When visiting a restaurant to follow up a lead on the case he’s investigating, he’s told that the people he wishes to question have been murdered, and, after mooching around for a few minutes, his reaction is basically, “eh, never mind then, none of my business”..?

And from a commercial filmmaking POV meanwhile…. wouldn’t a scene in which a pair of women are stalked and killed within a beautiful old villa have been just this ticket to boost this film’s (otherwise rather scant) giallo / horror credentials..? We know from events elsewhere in the film that Mazzei wasn’t averse to a bit of totally gratuitous exploitation, so why just report this potentially shocking and exciting occurrence second-hand via a throwaway line of dialogue?

I can’t claim any insight into what might have been going on behind the scenes on ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’, but - to repeat myself once again - some of the decisions taken here seem very strange.

Speaking of giallo / horror credentials meanwhile, based on what I’ve written so far, readers might be forgiven for questioning the extent to which ‘L’arma..’ even qualifies as a giallo at all, at least in the Argento/Bava-derived sense usually employed in the English-speaking world.

Indeed, I was wondering the same thing myself up until the exact halfway point of the film, when somebody seems to have suddenly woken up and remembered the conventions of the then-extremely popular genre the film’s financing and eventual marketing was clearly geared toward [see the poster at the top of this review]. So, without further ado, a female character is murdered by a scissor-wielding POV camera, in a startling and technically well-executed scene as shocking, fetishistic and borderline misogynistic as anything you’d find in a contemporary Sergio Martino or Umberto Lenzi picture.

This scene is brief, only loosely motivated by the plot, and - you will probably not be surprised to hear by this point - nothing remotely similar happens at any other point in the film. But, it earns it its “Hi! I’m a giallo” badge, which was presumably the point of the exercise.

Now, dedicated genre fans will be aware of course that there is a distinct sub-set of lower tier Italian movies (often by first-time / one-time directors) which are disjointed to the point of being almost entirely incoherent. (Angelo Pannacciò’s lamentable ‘Sex of the Witch’ (1973) immediately springs to mind as an example.)

The difference though is that those films tend to be cheap, obviously amateurish affairs, whereas ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ is actually quite a lavish production by comparison. The staging and camerawork is generally very good, executed with a certain amount of stylistic flair. The locations and production design are excellent, and most of the performances are entirely credible. Somebody clearly spent some money on this thing, and put some thought into it.

And, as I outlined towards the start of this review, neither is this one of those Italian horror movies which seek to evoke a flat-out crazy or disorientating atmosphere, revelling in delirium and oneiric weirdness for its own sake. Outside of the assorted oddities I’ve outlined above, the setting of ‘L’arma..’ is broadly realistic, and the tone is measured, assured and, if not exactly ‘serious’, at least fairly sincere in its intent - a fact which makes all the head-scratching diversions feel even stranger.

In trying to make sense of the succession of non-sequiturs which comprises so much of ‘L’arma..’s run time therefore, I found myself turning to some of the ideas explored by the critic Mikel J. Koven in his 2006 book La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film.

Therein, amongst other things, Koven seeks to draw attention to the context in which these movies were consumed and experienced by domestic audiences at the time of their release, and how this may in turn have fed into the development of subsequent films within the genre - an aspect of their existence which is all too easy to overlook in an era when we are far more likely to view them in an isolated, epicurean manner in our own homes.

In a review of Koven’s book published by Senses of Cinema, Alexia Kannas concisely summarises his arguments on this point as follows:

“..Koven draws on Wagstaff’s analysis of prima, seconda and terza visione (first, second and third run) cinemas. Both writers liken the giallo’s terza visione audience to that of a televisual (rather than cinematic) audience who talk, drink, smoke and are mobile during the screening. This is certainly useful for both indicating to and reminding the reader that, with gialli, we are not necessarily looking at classical narratives of cohesion or linear construction, but to something else of cinematic value.”

It is probably worth noting at this point that, unlike many higher profile Italian exploitation films, ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ was clearly not made with foreign distribution in mind. Aside from the cultural specificities discussed above, no English dub ever seems to have been created for the film, suggesting that Mazzei and his collaborators were not under pressure to consider the expectations of an overseas (for which read: American) audience when assembling their final cut.

Reframed through this lens, and via the context of the terza visione screening experience which Koven helpfully reminds us of, a film like ‘L’arma..’ suddenly, miraculous, starts to make sense.

What might our hypothetical terza visione patron - say, a working joe in some provincial town - have taken away from a movie like this, assuming he took it in which one eye on the screen, in between heading out to the lobby for a few smokes, buying a lollypop, chatting to a local shop owner about business, and yelling at so-and-so’s son for trying to feel up such-and-such’s daughter in the back row..?

Well, I reckon our man probably have broadly followed the drift of Commissario Bioto’s murder investigation and been satisfied with its mildly ingenious conclusion, much in the same way we might get the gist of an episode of a TV detective show whilst absent-mindedly flipping between channels.

He might have enjoyed Renzo Montagnani’s eminently likeable performance as the Commissario, and might even have been touched by his ill-fated romance with the leading lady, or his burgeoning paternal relationship with the young orphan.

Beyond that though, he would totally have remembered a few of the way-out images which might have forcibly drawn his attention back to the screen every now and then. Freaky nuns! Skeletons! A chick in a mini-skirt getting slashed across her tits!

For better or for worse, these are the kind of things that tend to make an impression on an inattentive audience, then as now. And, whether our man was exhilarated or appalled by such spectacles, maybe, just perhaps, they might have inspired him to start telling his co-workers about the film the next day, prompting them to get down to the cinema in turn to check this shit out for themselves.

As to why all these things happen in the film, how they all fit together, the jarring shifts in tone they create, and all the other things which are liable to torment us 21st century cinephiles as we sit down in our darkened screening rooms paying close attention to ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ from beginning to end…. well, that’s just so much water under the bridge, so long as it kind of feels like a proper movie from a distance, and so long as our man’s pals turned out the next night and coughed up a few lira for their tickets.

Francesco Mazzei’s brief filmography as a producer suggests he’d had a hard scrabble through the lower depths of the Italian film industry in the decade or so before he finally stepped up to make ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’. Contrary to what we self-styled giallo connoisseurs might think as we try to puzzle our way through his oblique intentions today, I’m sure he knew his business well enough to understand exactly what he doing back in 1972 - and there’s a fair chance it paid off for him too. 

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(1) Also including Giuseppe Bennati’s excellent gothic giallo ‘The Killer Reserved Nine Seats’ and Silvio Amadio’s enjoyably frivolous, Rosalba Neri-starring trifle ‘Smile Before Death’, safe to say Giallo Essentials: Black gets a big thumbs up from these quarters, even though I’d question the deeply misleading “essentials” tag assigned to these sets.

(2) To save clogging up the main text with an extended round of who-was-in-what, let’s get it all out of the way here instead. Maurizio Bonuglia has prime giallo cred, having appeared as Mimsy Farmer’s arsehole boyfriend in ‘The Perfume of The Lady in Black’, and Franco Nero’s pal in ‘The Fifth Cord’. Eva Czemerys is probably best remembered for meeting with a memorably sadistic end as one half of the ill-fated lesbian couple in the aforementioned ‘The Killer Reserved Nine Seats’. Claudio Gravy became something of a minor sexploitation star during the ‘70s, with appearances in the likes of ‘Byleth: The Demon of Incest’, ‘The Nun and the Devil’ and ‘La Llamada de Sexo’, as well the expected avalanche of largely forgotten sex comedies; she continued to work prolifically in film and TV right through the ‘90s and ‘00s. Despite being effectively second billed, Bedy Moratti is probably the least recognisable face in the central cast here; though she played small roles in a handful of noteworthy films between 1968 and 1975, her career never seems to have really taken off.

Gothic Originals / Exploito All’Italiana: Murder Obsession (Riccardo Freda, 1981)

An odd duck within the canon of Italian genre/exploitation directors by any measure, Riccardo Freda can often be a difficult character to really get an angle on.

On the one hand, he turned in two of the pre-eminent classics of ‘60s Italian gothic horror (The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock (1962), ‘The Ghost’ (1963)), and his extensive background in swashbucklers and historical epics ensured that his films always carry a dramatic, painterly visual flair and a rich sense of atmosphere. (Born in 1909, he had already been directing for nearly twenty years when he instigated his nation’s gothic horror cycle with ‘I Vampiri’ in 1957.)

At the same time though, he was also a slap-dash, inconsistent and self-sabotaging filmmaker with a highly divisive personality, as is evidenced by both long periods of inactivity his later years and the multitude of productions he walked away from or left unfinished (famously passing some of them on to his friend/protégé Mario Bava).

From the mid-‘60s onward in fact, even the work he did complete and sign off on is characterised by a woozy, rather incoherent/unfinished quality which makes it difficult to fully engage with.

All of these contrasting traits can be seen in spades in Freda’s swan-song, ‘Murder Obsession’ [‘Follia Omicida’], an intriguing but chronically uneven melange of classical gothic, giallo, supernatural horror and even slasher DNA first unleashed to bamboozle Italian audiences in February 1981.

Allegedly set in the UK, our tale here concerns movie actor Michael (Stefano Patrizi) who, along with his girlfriend Debora (Silvia Dionisio), travels to Surrey’s finest shadow-haunted Italianate palazzo to reunite with his mother Glenda (giallo veteran Anita Strindberg, who scarcely looks much older than Patrizi to be honest, but never mind) after many years of separation.

As per gothic tradition, Michael’s family pile turns out to be a decrepit, dust-enshrouded stone edifice with an intermittent electricity supply, presided over by deeply sinister man-servant (Oliver, played John Richardson from ‘Black Sunday’) who is expected to saw logs, tinker with fuse boxes, cook and serve all the food and prepare guest bedrooms at a moment’s notice whilst still finding time to lurk around every corner looking menacing.

Far more worryingly though, it also soon becomes clear that this is Michael’s first visit home since he inexplicably murdered his father (a celebrated musician and conductor, referred to by all and sundry as ‘il maestro’) whilst still a child, leaving his mother heartbroken and intermittently bed-ridden. Awkward.

And as if that weren’t uncomfortable enough, Debora is also forced to pretend to be Michael’s ‘secretary’ and is instructed to sleep alone in a pokey attic room, whilst the moody and reclusive lady of the house meanwhile fawns over her returned son as if he were a lost lover, repeatedly noting how much he resembles his long dead father.

In view of all this, it’s safe to say that a fun weekend in the countryside is not really on the cards for anyone, although a note of relative normality is at least sounded when a carload of victi -- I mean, uh, Michael and Debora’s glamorous film-making friends -- arrives on the scene, amongst their number such welcome Euro-cult faces as Martine Brochard and Laura Gemser.

Sad to say though that, despite all this, ‘Murder Obsession’s opening act feels like a bit of a bust (and not the kind that Gemser and Dionisio are frequently called upon to thrust in the general direction of the camera in an attempt to keep the presumed hetero-male audience engaged, either).

On the plus side, the film certainly inherits some of the grand, aristocratic sweep of Freda’s earlier horror classics, successfully adapted here for a lower budget production shot primarily on location. Some of the photography (by Cristiano Pogany) is painstakingly gorgeous, whilst the atmospheric potential of the echoing footsteps, vast, empty spaces and flickering candlelight of the palazzo are all expertly utilised.

That aside though… sigh. The pacing is leaden, the gossamer-thin plotting is both vague and boring, and the acting (particularly from Patrizi) is stilted and disengaged.

Most dreary of all though is the musical score, credited to the usually reliable Franco Mannino, who had frequently worked with Freda during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Largely consisting of indifferently recorded renditions of Bach and Liszt solo piano pieces, it really got on my wick.

Of course, Freda had gone to solo piano route before, with 1969’s ‘Double Face’ [‘A Doppia Faccia’]. On that film though, he’d had a haunting theme and sympathetic playing from the great Nora Orlandi to help him out. Here by contrast, we have to put up with hearing some of the film’s wildest and most intense sequences accompanied by (as Jonathan Rigby notes in Euro Gothic) a school assembly-level recitation of ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. Not to rag on J.S. Bach or anything, but it’s a drag, man.

A more propulsive, contemporary horror score could really have given this film a welcome shot in the arm, especially through the rather lugubrious first half, during which Freda seems entirely uninterested in furnishing his public with any of the exploitation goodies a horror crowd in the early 1980s might reasonably have expected.

But, fear not. ‘Murder Obsession’ does at least get a lot better - by which I mean crazier, basically - as it goes along.

Mirroring the unusual ‘massive halfway point freak-out’ structure utilised in Freda’s penultimate horror film ‘Tragic Ceremony’ (originally released as - deep breath - ‘Estratto Dagli Archivi Segreti della Polizia di Una Capitale Europea’ (phew) in 1972), we’re suddenly roused from our languor when - ironically - we’re plunged into Debora’s head as she recounts the mother of all nightmares to Michael in the cold light of morning.

The ensuing dream sequence constitutes a ten minute(!) explosion of absolutely all the bat-shit / brilliant horror imagery a Euro-horror fan could possibly wish for, and which ‘Murder Obsession’ has so conspicuously failed to provide to this point.

This includes (but is not limited to) a black-gloved killer, pus-drooling zombie cultists, a ridiculous ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’ style giant spider, a rubber bat attack, a wall of skulls with bleeding eye sockets, a lengthy sequence in which Dionisio runs through fog-drenched, swampy undergrowth with her breasts hanging out of her flimsy nightie, getting sliced up by loose branches, and, finally, a scene in which she is tied to one of those classic X-shaped wooden frames and forced to drink the blood of a black cockerel as part of a black mass.

Good grief! It’s as if Freda had made a list of every kind of clichéd horror situation he’d quite like to include in his film… and then just threw them all together randomly to get it all out of the way in one go. (In a nice nod to Italio-horror heritage, this sequence also features prominent usage of a variation on the Bava family’s patented ‘wobbly glass’.)

After this, the second half of ‘Murder Obsession’ is more liberally dosed with good ol’ fashioned Italio-horror delirium (and indeed, murder, and obsession), as we get to enjoy flashbacks to a number of ‘Rashomon’-like variations on the ‘Deep Red’-esque primal scene which may or may not have precipitated the death of Michael’s father, prompting Michael to start to lose his grip on reality, as the film’s assigned cannon fo -- I mean, uh, glamorous friends -- simultaneously begin to be meet their inevitable, gory demise.

Most memorably, Michael finds Laura Gemser slaughtered next to him when he awakens following an adulterous, lake-side tryst, whilst meanwhile, Oliver the handyman has taken to conspicuously lugging a chainsaw up and down the palazzo’s crumbling staircases, and we also need to deal with the belated revelation that Michael’s mother is in fact a freakin’ SATANIST.

In the context of all this irrational, oneiric goodness, ‘Murder Obsession’ totally abandons the glum, self-serious air which dragged down some of its early scenes, even allowing the film’s astonishing parade of continuity blunders and production design SNAFUs to become rather endearing, instead of merely infuriating.

Chief amongst these is probably Gemser’s role as the most egregious ‘breathing corpse’ in cinema history. Which is not just nit-picking on my part, I’d like to make clear; I mean, she is not just breathing a bit when she is supposed to be playing dead - it’s as if she’d just finishing running a couple of laps around the castle’s grounds when Freda commanded her to lie down and act still and lifeless!

Elsewhere, the traditional gothic horror reveal of a hidden portrait of Michael’s father is rather spoiled by the fact that it seems to consist of a xeroxed photo of Patrizi pasted onto a background of random colours, and you’d need to be a pretty tolerant viewer not to remark on the tendency of John Richardson’s costume to change from a formal white uniform to a flamboyant red shirt between shots as he serves dinner to the palazzo’s guests.

Clearly, these are the kind of clangers which no remotely committed director would ever send to the lab for printing - much less a filmmaker like Freda, who had spent nearly four decades behind the camera at this point. Which leads us to speculate on what the hell he was up to here. Was he sending a message to his producers, letting them know that he was done with this stupid film? Or, was he just signalling to his audience that nothing here was meant to be taken remotely seriously?

Either way, such moments of amateurishness clash markedly with other parts of the film, which were clearly crafted with great care and attention, not least Debora’s discovery of Martine Brochard’s character’s body, and her subsequent flight through a thunder storm, which recalls the vibrancy of Bava’s ‘Blood & Black Lace’, and the breathtaking tableau towards the end of the film wherein a shot of the prone Michael reclining across his mother’s knees is staged to recreate the majesty of Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Pietà (1498-99), an image enhanced here by almost Caravaggio-like use of subdued colours and shadow.

As with the film’s anachronistic musical score, could such classical allusions represent attempts on the part of an elderly filmmaker to smuggle elements of the culture he really loved and valued into an example of the popular genre cinema in which he’d make his name decades earlier, but which he had subsequently come to despise..?

If so, it was likely a doomed effort, given how thoroughly such gestures are overwhelmed by the film’s deranged smorgasbord of gratuitous nudity, bloody violence and jarring tonal and narrative inconsistencies.

Though hugely enjoyable for fans of the more eccentric and outlandish end of Italian horror, ‘Murder Obsession’ is ultimately a dishevelled and confused refugee, not just from the austere gothic horrors of the 1960s, but also from the ‘Erotic Castle Movie’ cycle of the ‘70s, finding itself staring down the barrel of a notably unsympathetic new decade with no plan in mind except panic, flight and desperate self-immolation.

In all likelihood, we’ll never know just what was going through Riccardo Freda’s mind as he called ‘action’ and ‘cut’ on his set for the final time in his long career. But then, he always was a bit of an odd duck… which I think is where we came in.

Exploito All’Italiana: Poliziotto Sprint / ‘Highway Racer’ (Stelvio Massi, 1977)

Stelvio Massi’s appealingly titled ‘Poliziotto Sprint’ [less attractively/ accurately released as ‘Highway Racer’ in English-speaking territories] stands out as a real oddity in the canon of late ‘70s poliziottesci.

Entirely bypassing the mean-spirited narratives of violent crime, institutional corruption and bloody vengeance which usually define the sub-genre, this weirdly ambitious tilt toward the ‘car action’ dollar is instead built around the framework of an uplifting martial arts/sports movie in the ‘Rocky’/‘Karate Kid’ mould… only with driving cars around Rome in place of fighting.

Euro-crime fans will recognise that something is up with this one the moment Maurizio Merli turns up for business without his trademark moustache. I know - WTF, right? As far as sartorial faux pas in the world of screen tough guys goes, this one takes some getting used to.

In fairness however, it soon becomes evident that the two-fisted star of Violent Rome (1975) and ‘Rome Armed to the Teeth’ (1976) has resorted to the razor with clear purpose here - specifically, to signal a clean break from the indefatigable “iron commissioner” archetype he embodied in pretty much all of his other crime films. Indeed, perhaps uniquely in his catalogue, Merli is actually called upon to do some acting here, playing Inspector Marco Palma, a feckless young hothead who dreams of one day becoming the champion interceptor driver of Rome’s equivalent of the Flying Squad.

Always first to hit the asphalt when one of the those pesky, balaclava-clad bank robbery gangs are making a getaway, the single-minded Palma soon proves himself to be utterly incapable of realising his ambitions, disregarding orders, endangering his colleagues, wrecking cars and letting the baddies get away at every screeching turn - much to the chagrin of the hard-bitten Commissario Tagliaferri (Giancarlo Sbragia - scruffy, balding, cardigan), who stubbornly refuses to allow him access to the faster, souped up roadster he repeatedly demands to better compete with the crooks.

The relationship between Palma and Tagliaferri is complicated by the fact that, before retreating to a desk job, the latter actually was the previous generation’s equivalent of the the legendary, super-star police driver Palma aspires to become, lauded by the popular press for running down villains in his special issue Ferrari. As such, Palma (whose bedroom is still decked out with grand prix posters and model cars, as if he were a 13-year-old boy) hero worships his commanding officer to a frankly embarrassing degree, even as Tagliaferri wearily plods through the familiar routine of telling him yet again to shut up, obey orders and pay attention to the bloody road signs.

Before long, Palma (and we along with him) suffers a blunt moment of pathos when his latest high speed antics result in the death of his mild-mannered partner (Orazio Orlando) - an incident which understandably leads him to offer his resignation from the force in conventionally dramatic Merli fashion following a climactic bust up with Tagliaferri.

But, after being given a dressing down by his own superior officer vis-à-vis the need to apprehend the robbery gang led by charismatic Italio-French wheelman ‘Il Nazzardo’ (Angelo Infanti), Tagliaferri decides that planting an undercover man posing as a crack driver in the gang is the way to go…. and wouldn’t you know it, he knows a certain disgraced young petrol-head who’d be just perfect for the job. Heck, he’ll even dig up his old Ferrari for the occasion and give it new paint job and some go-faster stripes. Do you feel a training montage coming on, readers..? To the race track!

Simple-minded to the point of idiocy though its story may be, taken on its own terms, within the context of its genre and era, ‘Poliziotto Sprint’ soon becomes a rather enjoyable and refreshing prospect.

An underrated cinematic stylist, crime movie specialist Stelvio Massi tackles the material with pace, polish and, well, style, keeping things fast-moving and visually interesting at all times. (Like Joseph H. Lewis before him, Massi clearly never met a shot he couldn’t improve by moving the camera to really low angle and sticking some picturesque obstruction in the foreground.)

A low key, alternately hard-driving and wistful, score from Stelvio Cipriani helps matters too, whilst Massi & co clearly worked closely with acclaimed stunt co-ordinator Rémy Julienne to ensure that the obligatory chase and stunt sequences which make up much of the run time, if not always world-beating, are never less than thoroughly satisfactory.

Delivering all the hair-raising screeching through heavy traffic on open / non-permitted streets you could possibly ask for, the film incorporates some daring, hold-on-for-dear-life camera placements which seem to anticipate the innovations of George Miller’s ‘Mad Max’ by several years, with safety and good sense clearly slipping way down the priority list.

(Very much the highlight in this regard is a frankly jaw-dropping slo-mo sequence - framed as a flashback to Tagliaferri’s adventures of yesteryear - which clearly shows two cars careening at full pelt down Rome’s Spanish Steps, colliding and spinning mid-way down, with zero fucks apparently given for the famed historical landmarks which surround them on all sides; an effect only slightly marred by the fact we can see in the new blu-ray transfer that the totalled car is empty as it crashes down the steps.)

More surprising however is how well the film works as a character piece. Merli’s screen persona always had a vain, preening side to it, with sits well with the more vulnerable, self-conscious character he plays here, allowing Palma to emerge as a surprisingly sympathetic presence, in spite of his oft knuckleheaded behaviour. (By way of Characterisation 101, we learn that he grew up in an orphanage, lending a degree of heart string-tugging empathy to his otherwise rather crazed desire to prove himself a Big Man by excelling in his chosen field.)

A stalwart TV and theatre actor whose sparse genre credits include ‘The Blood-Stained Butterfly’ (1971), Sbragia meanwhile manages to bring real gravitas to his potentially clichéd role here, whilst Infanti (an Italio-exploitation regular, perhaps best known for appearing in the Sicilian segment of ‘The Godfather’) is charismatic as hell as our louche antagonist. If the ability to care, at least distantly, about the fate of our characters is key to success within the “triumph against all odds” framework within which ‘Poliziotto Sprint’ positions itself, then safe to say, Massi and his cast pass the test with aplomb.

What sets ‘Poliziotto Sprint’ apart above all though is its spirted rejection of the all-consuming cynicism which defined the polizziotesci sub-genre. Entirely devoid of sleaze or sexual content, the film also features remarkably little violence, to the point where it could almost count as family friendly viewing - a circumstance which perhaps accounts for its low standing amongst Euro-crime fans.

Indeed, not only do we get to marvel here at the unique-within-the-genre sight of a machine gun-toting bank robbery gang NOT flipping out and massacring civilians, but I believe that the only death which occurs prior to the film’s conclusion is actually that of Merli’s aforementioned partner, killed solely as a result of our hero’s stupidity!

As startling as this avoidance of bloodshed may seem however, there is of course narrative purpose behind the film’s restraint. In stark contrast to the slavering, animalistic bastards who usually serve as the villains in these movies, Infanti’s Il Nazzardo, rocking a series of variations on ‘70s coke dealer chic, cuts a suave, even attractive, figure. A stylish, morally equivocal rogue, he has that whole “honour among thieves” thing down pat, even reprimanding his gang members at one point for showing insufficient respect to the Police Commissioner by calling him rude names. (“He too is a man… he’s just on the other side from us,” Il Nazzardo insists.)

By ensuring that Infanti and his gang never do anything really bad, the filmmakers allow him to retain a degree of sympathy, allowing his inevitable confrontation with Merli at the film’s conclusion to play out as a sporting contest between mutually respectful equals, rather than as the desperate, self-destructive fight for survival more commonly encountered in the final feel of a poliziottesco.

A notion which owes more to tales of Arthurian chivalry, or to traditional judai geki samurai films, than to anything you’d expect to find in a modern crime drama, it is this very yearning for a more old-fashioned, good-natured approach to cinematic masculinity - perversely crow-barred into the middle of one of the most nihilistic sub-genres known to man - which ultimately makes ‘Poliziotto Sprint’ so memorable, and, in its own weird way, so infinitely charming. Oh, and, yeah - nice car chases too.

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Gothic Originals / Exploito All’Italiana: Nosferatu in Venice (Augusto Caminito et al, 1988)

 The tragedy of ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ is that, under more favourable circumstances, it could so easily have been great.

The character of Nosferatu - first seen of course in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece and resurrected in the form of Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake - remains a potent, genuinely terrifying and comparatively underused figure in the horror pantheon, whilst the city of Venice meanwhile remains one of the best places on earth in which to set a horror movie, its atmosphere of decaying, historical grandeur seeming to elevate the quality of pretty much any film project lucky enough to shoot there.

Just imagine, the grand spectacle of the Doge’s winter carnival, the bridges and alleyways thronging with depraved revellers vainly clinging on to the remnants of Italy’s moribund aristocracy, whilst below the water level, in the ancient sewers and catacombs, Nosferatu lurks, rat-like, spreading fear and death through the blood-lines of their errant daughters and abused servants... amazing. The damned thing writes itself.

Given that producer, screenwriter (and eventual director) Augusto Caminito wrangled a fairly lavish budget for the production (bankrolled at least in part by future despot Silvio Berlusconi), as well as gaining a remarkable level of access to some of the city’s most evocative shooting locations, ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ should by rights have been a sure thing - a last gasp triumph of Italian horror cinema’s twilight years. Needless to say though, that’s not exactly the way things turned out.

It would be all to easy to blame the project’s collapse into infamy and disaster entirely upon the mayhem perpetrated by Klaus Kinski (of which more shortly), but in truth things seem to have been going awry before he even arrived on set. By that point, Caminito had already hired and fired two directors (Maurizio Lucidi and Pasquale Squitieri), and - if the version of the film which was eventually released is anything to go by - the wafer thin narrative and bamboozling morass of expositional blather which comprise his screenplay are not exactly suggestive of a lost masterpiece.

Suffice to say though, if Caminito didn’t exactly have his ducks in line here, it was blood and feathers as far as the eye could see as soon as Kinski made the scene. Tales of the actor’s outrageous conduct during the 1980s are, of course, legion, but, clearly aware that ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ lived or died on the basis of his participation, this particular shoot seems to have found the actor scaling ever greater heights of maniacal narcissism.

This was made immediately evident upon his arrival, when, infamously, he refused point blank refused to wear the Nosferatu make-up which had been prepared for him, declaring instead that he would play the vampire, sans prosthetics, as a more ‘romantic’ figure, complete with his own long, thinning blonde hair.

Not only did this make a mockery of evoking the Nosferatu name in the first place (and indeed of hiring Kinski specifically to reprise his role from Herzog’s film), but even more gallingly for the producers, the crew had already shot and edited twenty minutes of footage - filmed at great expense during Venice’s winter carnival - featuring a double wearing the full Nosferatu make-up.

Consulting the sketchy contract Kinski had signed for his appearance in the film, it was determined that there was nothing in place to actually compel him to wear the make-up… and woe-betide anyone who cared to try. With a substantial chunk of the budget already in the truculent star’s pocket, there was nothing to be done but surrender to his whims, ditch the pre-shot footage, re-jig the script and try to find something else to inexpensively fill all that empty screen time.

The next disaster was quick to arrive when the film’s third director, “safe pair of hands” industry veteran Mario Caiano (best known to horror fans for 1965’s Nightmare Castle) quit after less than a day on set, walking out after a violent altercation with Kinski. Thereafter, Caminito took the reins himself, with significant (uncredited) assistance from second unit director / special effects supervisor Luigi Cozzi [also see: Paganini Horror].

We could continue discussing the difficulty Kinski provoked on set at some length here, but one anecdote related by Cozzi will hopefully prove sufficient. At one point it seems, he and Caminito left the set for ten minutes, to make a phone call and buy some cigarettes. Returning, they found Kinski sitting alone in an empty room, the entire crew having apparently packed up their equipment and left with the intention of boarding the next plane back to Rome, so heinously had the star managed to offend them during the producer/director’s brief absence.

All of this though pales into insignificance compared to the rumours surrounding Kinski’s abuse of his female co-stars, which cast an ugly pall over whatever enjoyment may still be gleaned from ‘Nosferatu in Venice’. Again, we don’t need to labour the point here - the grisly details are easily google-able, and, if true, they’re pretty horrendous.

In summary though, it seems that actress Elvire Audray (who plays the wife of the movie’s supposedly heroic doctor character, woodenly played by Yorgo Voyagis) left the film with immediate effect when - as per Cozzi’s recollections once again - Kinski disregarded an instruction to bite her on the neck during filming, and instead subjected her to what can only be described as a violent and sustained sexual assault.

Even taking into account the progress which has been made on such matters since the dark days of the 1980s, it seems extraordinary to me that Kinski was not behind bars within hours of this incident, having apparently assaulted a woman in front of multiple witnesses and a rolling camera, but… who am I to speculate on the whys and wherefores of the situation?

Be that as it may, Kinski remained on the loose, and tried the same tactics on the film’s ostensible leading lady, Barbara De Rossi, allegedly molesting her off-camera whilst shooting close ups for a scene in which Nosferatu seduces her character in her bedroom. Reportedly, De Rossi only agreed to continue work on the film after receiving a promise that she would never again be placed in close proximity to Kinski… thus necessitating further rewrites. (1)

Meanwhile, the star seems to have found what we must assume was slightly more willing recipient of his attentions in the shape of a young woman named Anne Knecht, who apparently caught his eye when she visited the set as Voyagis’s girlfriend. Despite Knecht having no prior acting experience, Kinski insisted she was cast as a hastily-scripted new character. (No wonder the female characters in the finished film are so ill-defined and interchangeable.)

Presumably to the great relief of the other cast members, Knecht went on to dutifully provide the bulk of the film’s requisite nudity, most prominently during the lengthy ‘love scene’ (I use the term loosely) which comprises the film’s the finale. Therein, we see a shockingly haggard looking Kinski groping and clambering around on Knecht’s impassive naked body for what feels like hours, whilst, in a particularly grim irony, the footage is intercut with shots of her real life boyfriend Voyagis grumpily stomping about in ineffectual ‘vampire hunter’ mode.

And so the chaos went on, until - thankfully for all concerned, I can only imagine - Caminito called principal photography to a close after six weeks, despite having only acquired around two thirds of the footage he needed to complete the scripted film - in addition that is to ten solid hours of material ‘directed’ by Kinski himself, featuring his character stalking alone through Venice’s pre-dawn streets. (Ironically, these shots actually comprise some of the best stuff in the finished film.)

In view all the palaver outlined above, it’s hardly surprising that ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ emerged as an extraordinarily disjointed mess. Unreleased for several years after shooting was completed, the film’s editing (credited to Claudio Cutry) comprises the cutting room equivalent of a dazzling high wire act, splicing together pieces of mismatched, discontinuous footage into some semblance of narrative order, with… mixed results, in spite of what I take to have been herculean efforts on Cutry’s part.

The tragedy of it all is though, there are bits of the film - sequences of shots here and there, or even entire scenes during the first half - which are genuinely excellent. 

The deep shadows and subdued, Gordon Willis-esque lighting favoured by DP Tonino Nardi lend a pungent, foreboding atmosphere to the Venetian location footage, whilst interior scenes featuring the film’s better actors (Christopher Plummer, Donald Pleasence, and Maria Cumani Quasimodo as ‘the princess’), apparently filmed in a genuine, suitably palatial Venetian villa, achieve a sense of brooding menace, reminiscent of such art-house horror staples as Borowczyk’s ‘Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes’ or Tony Scott’s The Hunger. “Terrible things happened in these chambers two hundred years ago,” we are repeatedly told, and for a moment there, we can believe it.

Even the disjointed / discontinuous editing rhythms sometimes work in the film’s favour, bringing a murky, opiated haze to proceedings, suggestive of some incorporeal, space/time warping evil which feels entirely in keeping with the symbolic/metaphysical aspect of the Nosferatu character, whilst the thinly sketched, comic book weirdness of the, uh, ‘plot line’ invests everything with a haphazard surrealism which surpasses even the ‘80s output of directors like Cozzi or Lucio Fulci for sheer bewilderment.

So, speaking of the plot, let’s try to get this straight, shall we?

A perpetually silk-clad young woman, who lives alongside several other young women in a crumbling Venetian villa belonging to an elderly princess afflicted by a cursed bloodline, invites a Van Helsing surrogate vampire expert to come and see her, because she has found an iron-bound coffin in the villa’s basement which she believes, for some reason, must be the resting place of the dread Nosferatu, who (it is apparently well known) was last seen in Venice exactly two hundred years earlier.

But, this cannot be so, the vampire expert (Professor Catalano, played by Plummer) insists, because Nosferatu actually perished in a shipwreck somewhere far away, and now rests at the bottom of the ocean. But, everyone at the villa still feels some kind of psychic ‘connection’ to the bad ol’ vampire (reflecting both the cursed bloodline business, and the fact that he committed assorted atrocities in the villa back in 1786). So, what else do do but call in a medium and hold a séance with the intention of contacting the spirit of Nosferatu, thus prompting him to awaken from his slumber and bust out of his dusty coffin way over yonder in… some other place. (Not the bottom of the ocean, at any rate.)

After taking time out to engage in some lusty dancing with a group of gypsies who - in an interesting, if politically questionable, throwback to Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ - appear to hold him in high reverence, the revived Nosferatu employs a rather vague supernatural methodology to transport himself back to Venice, where, needless to say, he sets about biting necks, leching over ladies and indulging his inexplicable passion for throwing people out of windows.

Brilliant! All makes perfect sense, right? Italian horror movie logic, god how I love it.

Also hitting that late-era Italio-horror sweet-spot, consistently undermining the film’s intermittent attempts to achieve a more ‘classy’ feel, is Luigi Ceccarelli’s score, which - perhaps reflecting the lack of funds/enthusiasm which remained for this project during post-production - sounds as it was recorded on the cheapest synthesizer available, and transferred to the film via a warped cassette tape left for too long in direct sunlight. Whether the fact that I still enjoy the music speaks to Ceccarelli’s talents or just my personal fondness for such lo-fi aesthetics, I’ll leave readers to judge for themselves.

So, for my purposes at least, this is all pretty amazing as far as it goes - but, each time we’re ready to settle back and surrender to the intoxicating, oneiric groove of the whole thing, something completely stupid happens, crashing us straight back to reality. Again and again, the film catapults us from the sublime to the ridiculous in a matter of seconds, which proves a real buzz-kill.

Nosferatu’s aforementioned return to Venice proves a good case in point. A disconnected series of images sees him gliding across unguessed at landscapes before he is seen stalking recognisable Venetian landmarks in the eerie glow of the rising/setting sun, temporarily imbuing him with an ethereal, nameless menace matching the baleful rhetoric which has previously spouted about him in the film’s heavy-handed dialogue.

When he appears, silently, in the bedroom of the elderly princess, grinning like some imp of the perverse - or like Robert Blake’s white-faced man in Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’ perhaps - the effect is truly horrific. Utterly malevolent, Kinski is all too convincing here as the personification of death, pestilence and misfortune, come to wreak cold, impersonal suffering upon all who cross his path.

We can only savour this exquisite dread for a few seconds though, because… then he jumps up and throws the old lady out of the window! An unconvincing dummy goes SPLAT on the inevitable spiked railings which surround a small patch if garden below, and we cut to an unedifying insert shot of the 78-year-old Maria Cumani Quasimodo - evidently not impaled upon the railings - with some stage blood dribbling down her chin.

Unbelievably, this exact same defenestration gag - a ridiculous way for a supposed master vampire to deal with his prey, aside from anything else - is repeated, equally unconvincingly, several more times during the film, as if someone on the production was convinced that a few good railing impalements was all it would take to win over a post-‘Omen’ horror crowd.

Even in terms of its gory horror business though, ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ is wildly inconsistent - consider for instance a frankly incredible shot elsewhere, when Nosferatu is hit point-blank in the chest by a shotgun blast. In what was apparently a green-screen effect orchestrated by Cozzi, we see Kinski raise his arms in a mocking, Christ-like posture, revealing a perfectly spherical hole in his chest, through which we can see traffic slowly passing on the canal behind him. It’s a pretty great moment.

Essentially anchoring the first half of the film, Christopher Plummer initially seems determined to bring his A game to a frankly dreadful script, lending an admirable amount of gravitas to the rambling passages of cod-vampiric lore he is called upon to recite. As the film goes on though, and the situations get sillier, we can almost see him disengaging, his patented “ah, I see now - this is a load of shit” expression becoming increasingly difficult to hide.

And indeed, his facial muscles have a point. Entirely dismissing the accepted ‘rules’ for vampirism, Caminito’s script instead opts to just, well… make up a bunch of random shit, as Plummer’s dulcet tones are employed to inform us that, amongst other things, the illegitimate children of illegitimate parents (and/or plague victims) will inevitably become vampires, that the only surefire way to destroy a vampire is to use bullets filled with liquid mercury, and that - rather like Waldemar Daninsky - a vampire’s spirit can only achieve true death after receiving the pure love of a virgin. (Boy, I bet Kinski must’ve loved that last one!) 

I wouldn’t mind so much, only… none of these novel innovations actually seem to have much of an impact on the film’s storyline?

Back in the real world meanwhile, I’m guessing that Plummer must have also left the production before shooting concluded - having presumably completed his contractually obligated number of days, or whatever - meaning that his all-too-noticeable absence from the film’s final act is rationalised by means of a hurriedly slapped together montage of unconnected shots, which attempt to visually convey the idea that, having despaired of his ability to defeat Nosferatu following a heated argument with Donald Pleasence’s priest character, Professor Catalano has committed suicide by jumping from a bridge into the canal!

Largely avoiding such indignities meanwhile, Pleasence (who seemed to have been specialising in bringing a touch of class to creaky gothic horror movies starring hell-raising sex-pests at this point in his career) here provides good value for money as usual, playing a weak-willed, gluttonous priest who attends the elderly princess.

As has been mentioned, Maria Cumani Quasimodo (who may be recognisiable to euro-cult fans for small roles in ‘Femina Ridens’ and ‘All The Colors of the Dark’), does fine work here too, as does Clara Colosimo (a wife, mother & maid specialist in Italian movies since the early ‘60s) as the medium. It’s interesting in fact to find two such strong roles for older women in a project which otherwise seems awash with misogyny on both sides of the camera. (One shot of Colosimo cruising through the canals in her private gondola, hair defying gravity, proves particularly memorable.)

So where, ultimately, does ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ sit within the cultural hinterlands of late ‘80s Italian horror? Even assuming we can temporarily put aside the legends arising its nightmarish production, is the weird, beached husk of a movie which remains ultimately worth our time?

Well, as difficult as it may be to defend from any objective standpoint, what can I say? We still watch ‘The Lady From Shanghai’ and ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’, don’t we? We still listen to Big Star’s ‘Third/Sister Lovers’ and The Beach Boys’ ‘Smiley Smile’. So why not ‘Nosferatu in Venice’?

The difference, I suppose, is that each of those works had the hand of a legitimate creative genius behind them, and seeing that hand slip or fail or tear itself apart carries a fascination which can sometimes even surpass that engendered by the greatest of artistic triumphs.

By contrast, ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ provides us with an equally fascinating example of a creative work which reached completion (in a manner of speaking) with no one at the wheel. Cruising into harbour like the empty, cursed ship which carries Nosferatu to shore in Murnau’s original film, there is a black hole at the centre of this movie - a void where the vision or direction provided by even a mediocre guiding light would normally be found.

Kinski may have established himself as the dominant presence on set through sheer force of will, but at the same time he was clearly happy to see the film crash and burn, interested solely in the opportunities it provided for him to pamper his ego and indulge his demonical lusts. Caminito meanwhile was obviously way out of his depth with regard to all aspects of on-set filmmaking, whilst everyone else simply kept their heads down and prayed for the damn thing to end.

Nardi’s lighting, Cutry’s editing, and the steadfast presence of Plummer, Pleasence and Quasimodo - these things came through to deliver 86 minutes of tangible celluloid which we can watch today without physical pain, but beyond that… the closest thing the movie gets to an auteur is probably Venice itself, the riches of its architecture and atmosphere infusing nearly every shot, pretty much cementing my long-held suspicion that literally anything shot in this extraordinary city will to some extent be worth watching.

 

 

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(1) Widely repeated around the internet, the film’s Wikipedia page sources the accusations concerning Kinski’s abusive behaviour on set back to both Roberto Curti’s book ‘Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1980-1989’ (2019) and Matthew Edwards’ ‘Klaus Kinski: Beast of Cinema’ (2016), whilst the stories are also reiterated to some extent by both Cozzi and soundman Luciano Muratori in the excellent documentary ‘Creation is Violent: Anecdotes from Kinski’s Final Years’, which accompanies Severin’s recent blu-ray edition of ‘Nosferatu in Venice’. We here at BITR can of course make no claims either way regarding the accuracy of these tales, especially if there are any legal professionals in the room.