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.

Creepy-Crawl Cinema: The Female Bunch (Al Adamson, 1969)

Of all the material I’ve read (and listened to) over the years concerning The Manson Family, no chroniclers seem to have made mention of the fact that infamous b-movie director Al Adamson was actually shooting footage for several movies on the Spahn Ranch during the height of ‘Helter Skelter’ in the summer of 1969. (1)

In itself, there is nothing terribly surprising about this. After all, Spahn was a movie ranch, and it was still (just about) open for business. Sure, it was in a pretty seedy and dilapidated state, but where else would you expect to find a seedy and dilapidated filmmaker like Adamson plying his trade?

What is more interesting rather is the eerie similarity between the storyline of Adamson’s ‘The Female Bunch’ – in which a gang of outlaw women who deem themselves “rejects” from society live on a remote desert ranch, obeying the orders of a controlling central figure (Grace, played by Jennifer Bishop) who encourages them to torture and kill outsiders – and the actual events which were unfolding in the immediate vicinity of the movie’s shooting location.

Given that ‘The Female Bunch’ was shot more or less back-to-back with Adamson’s better known biker flick ‘Satan’s Sadists’, which seems to have taken inspiration from both the nomenclature and degenerate behaviour of the biker gangs most closely associated with The Manson Family (the ‘Straight Satans’ and ‘Satan’s Slaves’), one can’t help but wonder to what extent Adamson and his collaborators interacted with, or were at least aware of, the whole Manson freak show, months before it became headline news.

Is this something Adamson, or anyone else involved in these productions, ever discussed in interviews? Have any of the cast members talked about their experiences filming on the ranch? I’m sure there must be some stories here. (Perhaps Severin Films’ forthcoming documentary on Adamson might shed some light on things?)

By the early ‘70s of course, just about every horror or exploitation movie being made in the USA was drawing to some extent on the feedback loop of new fears and cultural archetypes arising from the Manson murders, but, just as summer ’69 also found Hollywood hipster Dean Stockwell incorporating some notably Manson-like elements into his portrayal of Wilbur Wheatley in AIP’s adaptation of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (see my review for more on that), the notion that the bad vibes emanating from Manson were making their way into popular culture even before the whole story broke at the end of 1969, is fascinating to me.

So, although I’m certainly no fan of Adamson’s work (see below), I’m afraid I just couldn’t resist the temptation to track this one down and take the plunge. If my motives were impure, well, I’ll just let the lord judge me on that as a matter of heavenly routine, although I suspect that the experience of merely sitting through this damned thing was punishment enough.

To begin by stating the obvious then: anyone approaching this film in the hope of glimpsing some inadvertent verité footage of Manson-y type goings on will be disappointed. No obvious evidence of The Family’s presence made it into the film, no Manson girls were roped in as extras, and you certainly won’t get to see any of your favourite murderous reprobates hanging around in the background, waving to camera.

About the closest Manson-watchers will get to a thrill in fact is the realisation that the horses the “Female Bunch” ride throughout the movie are quite possibly the same ones that the Manson girls cared for and rented out to tourists as part of The Family’s deal with George Spahn (a duty they seem to have performed with surprising diligence, given the lack of concern they displayed for the well-being of their fellow human beings), along with a vague suspicion that the random automobiles which can be seen in the background of some shots may or may not have been Family run-arounds. (There is also a static caravan / trailer home visible in one shot – high excitement!)

The shabby corral buildings, paddock and barns around which much of the ‘action’ takes place are non-descript, bearing no outward sign of hippie witchery. Admittedly, the low light levels and the poor quality of the print makes it difficult to discern much detail, but, if it is possible for buildings themselves to actually look greasy, well, ‘The Female Bunch’ at least achieves this.

Elsewhere, the bar in which the women engage in a frankly disgusting drunken grope-fest with a bunch of sweaty-looking dudes during an excursion into “Mexico”, might perhaps have been shot within the café that formed part of Spahn’s standing sets... but it could equally have taken place elsewhere, perhaps even on a small sound stage. It all looks a bit too neat and tidy, to my eyes, although the footage of the actresses writhing around naked in the sawdust and spilled booze as the men paw them is authentically foul, irrespective of the production circumstances.

Meanwhile, could the film’s totally gratuitous shower scene have actually been filmed in the Spahn Ranch’s (rarely used) bathing facilities…? I think I see some kind of weird, hippie mural in the background in some adjacent shots, but it’s difficult to make out. The mind boggles (or at least kind of shivers and cringes a bit).

Leaving all Manson-related prurience aside however, one thing we can be certain of is that ‘The Female Bunch’ is a not a very good film.

This too, is unsurprising. As much as I wish I could celebrate Al Adamson as some kind of wild exploitation maverick, the truth is that, to date, I’ve never actually managed to enjoy one of his movies. As a cult movie fan, I realise that I’m required to watch them once in a while, but it’s more of a purgatorial rite of passage than anything else.

I appreciate how difficult it is to make a good film, but even so, to be as consistently bad as Adamson takes some singular kind of anti-talent. Even in his most ostensibly entertaining productions (such as 1973’s Jim Kelly vehicle ‘The Black Samurai’, for instance), I find myself frustrated by the wasted potential, as theoretically cool and crazy scenes are ruined by clumsy framing, muffed action/effects shots, amateurish editing and lifeless performances... and then interspersed with interminably drawn out padding sequences of, oh, I dunno, people riding around on horses in the dark, for example.

I realise that the ragged (presumably VHS-era?) transfer of ‘The Female Bunch’ under consideration for this review probably didn’t help matters, but even so, the quality of much of the photography in this film is extremely poor, even by Adamson standards. Much of the footage is handheld, with zooms and wobbly focus pulls used to cut down on set-ups, including a lot of that Doris Wishman type stuff where the camera drifts in close-up across characters’ clothing and boots whilst they’re speaking, but even more problematic are the lengthy day-for-night (or possibly just “shit, it got dark”) scenes, which are pretty much incomprehensible in their current iteration. (2)

It’s possible I suppose that a more sympathetic presentation of the film may save the day here, but I equally suspect that the insufficient light levels in these secenes may be baked into the original footage - providing one explanation perhaps for why ‘The Female Bunch’ sat on the shelf for two years following its completion. (The credited Director of Photography, by the way, was Paul Glickman, who went on to work extensively with both Larry Cohen and Radley Metzger. What gives, Paul?)

Given the wealth of extraordinary sights and sounds offered by the precarious wonderland of Southern California at the end of the 1960s (some of them, I hasten to add, literally round the corner from the sets used here), not to mention the surrounding areas of outstanding natural beauty, it seems extraordinary to me that Adamson could manage to make a movie this drab, featureless and ugly. But, then I recall my recent attempt to sit through 1971’s ‘Brain of Blood’ (I still wake up at night crying tears of pain), and think, well… yeah, of course he could.

On the plus side, the opening and closing segments (actually shot in Utah I believe), in which the film’s lead couple make their getaway in a red convertible whilst somebody in a light aircraft blasts away at them with a shotgun, comprise some pretty decent low budget action stuff, and some of the day-time horse riding footage is competently done, with some bright colours and classic Western-style low angle shots and such. (3)

Oh, and I quite enjoyed the theme song as well – ‘Two Lonely People’, a cool Tom Jones-meets-Lee Hazlewood style country-pop belter, performed by one Bruce Powers. (I did check Youtube to try to share it with you, but no dice.)

I’m guessing that ‘The Female Bunch’s largely undistinguished female cast must have been picked on the basis of their physical attributes, riding ability and willingness to get naked rather than their thespian talent, but nonetheless, The Russ Meyer-esque “hard as nails bitches” plotline at least helps the early scenes detailing the gang’s hierarchy and initiation rituals to remain somewhat entertaining, although the absence of even the slightest iota of Meyer’s talent, wit or bravado is sorely felt.

Notable amongst the assembled “bunch” is the flaming red haired, whip-wielding Aleshia Brevard, a performer who worked extensively as an actress, ‘show girl’ and Marilyn Monroe impersonator during the ‘60s and ‘70s, revealing only later in life that she was actually born as Alfred Brevard in Tennessee in 1937, before undergoing an early version of M to F gender reassignment surgery in 1962. (Thanks, IMDB!) Her character name here? Sadie. (Cue your spooky music cue of choice.)

Adamson’s partner (later wife), the ubiquitous Regina Carrol, also makes an impression here as the man-hating go-go dancer who first lures our naive heroine to the ranch, whilst heroin of another kind is regrettably on the menu elsewhere, as another gang member, “Sharon” (actress unidentified), is revealed to be a conniving junkie.

This leads to one of the most horribly skeevy shooting up scenes I’ve witnessed in ‘60s cinema, as she ties off with what looks like some kind of transparent plastic tubing before – rather unfeasibly - enjoying a rough bit of sapphic sex with another girl as the drug kicks in (cue kaleidoscope effects, and stripper jazz on the soundtrack). Perhaps it was just the fact that the performers look so tired and sweaty that creeped me out, but seriously, this was grim.

Viewers of ‘Satan’s Sadists’ meanwhile will recall that one of the main things which propelled that film toward the giddy heights of watchability was Russ Tamblyn’s startlingly sleazy lead performance as a psychotic biker, and happily he is on similarly fine form in ‘The Female Bunch’, essaying the role of a shiftless desert layabout who defiles the all-female sanctuary of the gang’s ranch after making a covert date with one of the girls.

Although he doesn’t get a great deal of screen time here, Tamblyn embodies the spirit of a leery, Mansonite scuzzball with worrying conviction, especially during the film’s overall creepy-crawliest scene, in which the women hold him down and carve a cross onto his forehead. Later, after vowing revenge, he also has the misfortune to suffer one of the most pathetic, anti-climactic “death” scenes I’ve ever seen in an American b-movie (seriously? “Pitchfork stuffed down the back of his pants, then he falls over, in long shot”? you’re really going to go with that?), but, we’ll take our yukks where we can get them in a movie like this.

Another thing that bugs me about Adamson’s films is his habit of digging up forgotten actors from the golden age of Hollywood b-movies… and then ensuring they remain forgotten by squandering their talents in demeaning, undignified roles that make you wonder why he bothered to track them down in the first place. Fulfilling this role in 1969 was poor old Lon Chaney Jr, who actually had the misfortune of making his final screen appearance in ‘The Female Bunch’. Though Chaney is given a lot more to get his teeth here into than in his mute role in Adamson’s ‘Dracula vs Frankenstein’ (filmed a few months earlier), the poor man was clearly in a sorry state by this point.

Playing an aging ex-stuntman, the only male whose presence is tolerated on the Female Bunch’s ranch, Lon’s character is, strangely enough, the only figure in this movie who is actually given an emotional arc or any kind of depth. He has been lured to the ranch as a result of his infatuation with Grace, but, now that her sexual favours have (understandably) been withdrawn, he has found himself bullied by her and reduced to a mere caretaker and domestic servant for the women.

The perpetual blundering sad-sack, Chaney fits this role like a badly soiled glove, and, though his voice is already ravaged by the throat cancer that would contribute to his death in 1973 and he seems to be having trouble walking, he nonetheless throws himself into the part with gusto. Nice work, Lon.

For better or worse, some of the footage of Chaney that Adamson presents here is unsettlingly candid. There are some lovely (though sadly curtailed) moments which find him regaling the girls with (apparently genuine) memories of his time working as a stuntman on westerns, but elsewhere, seeing him unshaven and watery-eyed, slugging straight from a rapidly emptying bottle of vodka whilst apparently unaware he is being filmed, is absolutely heart-breaking.

I mean… I don’t know, man. I don’t want to sit here passing moral judgement on some film shoot half a century ago, but I think they owed the big guy a bit more respect than that. Against all the odds, Lon was trying here. I wish I could say the same for Al.

Post-script:

Given its shooting location and storyline, one thing I find curious about ‘The Female Bunch’ is the fact that it wasn’t rushed out to cash in on the Manson hysteria in early 1970 -- unlike ‘Satan’s Sadists’, which was soon cleaning up in drive-ins with an especially lurid ad campaign promising “wild hippies on a mad murder spree”, “filmed on the actual locations where the Tate murder suspects lived their wild experiences”.

This is probably a result of the fact that, whereas ‘..Sadists’ was released by Adamson and his long-standing partner Sam Sherman through their fledging Independent International Pictures operation, ‘The Female Bunch’ seems to have been the result of a one-off production deal Adamson inked with Raphael Nussbaum (the director of 1973’s ‘Pets’ and eight other features I’ve never even heard of) and Mardi Rustam (the man who later fired Tobe Hooper from Tourist Trap / Eaten Alive).

Trivia on IMDB states that Adamson shot ‘Satan’s Sadists’ at short notice after “..a more expensive production that he’d been working on collapsed” – this one, presumably. Reading between the lines, I suspect there may have been a falling out between Adamson and his producers, but either way, when ‘The Female Bunch’ eventually appeared in ’71, it was jointly “presented” by Mardi Rustam Films and Dalia Productions (Nussbaum’s company), suggesting that those guys perhaps took control of the film after shooting was completed, preparing it for release at their leisure.

Whether Nussbaum and Rustam had more qualms than Adamson and Sherman did about cashing in on mass murder, who knows (the end credits on the film pointedly mention only Utah as a shooting location), but alternatively, perhaps by ’71 the Manson angle simply seemed like old news and didn’t occur to them. So, they went for the Peckinpah angle instead, I guess..?

I’m equally unsure whether this film did much for them at the box office (I doubt it), but they at least commissioned a great poster for it. Let’s close proceedings by taking a look at it and imagining how much fun this movie might have been, had circumstances been different.

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(1) Some wag has actually added 11th August ’69 – the date of the Cielo Drive murders – as a shooting date on IMDB, but I think this can probably be discounted. Given how extensively the comings and goings at the ranch during that day have been chronicled by authors and investigators, I’m sure they would have found time to mention it if somebody was shooting a movie there with Lon Chaney Jr and Russ Tamblyn!

(2) Regular readers might well cry foul here, recalling that I’ve often praised Jess Franco for precisely this kind of off-piste camerawork, but I dunno, what can I say? If Franco (at his best) wields the camera like a visionary jazz player, Adamson and his operator by contrast feel as if they’re still thumping away in the basement trying to figure out the chords to ‘Louie Louie’. Which… actually sounds quite fun, now that I think about it? Note to self: music / cinematography metaphor needs work.

(3) It should perhaps be noted here that Adamson’s protégé John ‘Bud’ Cardos – future director of such solid b-movie fare as ‘Mutant’ (1984) and ‘Kingdom of the Spiders’ (1977) – is credited with “additional direction of action and continuity footage” on ‘The Female Bunch’. From my admittedly biased point of view, I will take this to mean that he directed the bits which are not terrible.

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.

Exploito All’Italiana: Night Train Murders (Aldo Lado, 1975)

In the course of writing previous reviews for this ‘Exploito All’Italiana’ thread, I’ve made frequent references to “the great Italian rip-off machine” and suchlike, but how are we supposed to respond on occasions when this “machine” upsets our patronising critical notions by delivering a “rip off” that is actually considerably better than the source film it is imitating…?

In qualifying this assertion, I should probably admit straight away that, influential and epochal though it may be, I’m not a fan of Wes Craven’s ‘The Last House On The Left’ (1972). If that means I have to hand in my badge at the front desk and surrender my right to pass judgement on exploitation movies, then so be it, but what can I say? When cinema gets down to the ‘Last House..’ level of nastiness, I’m basically just too nice for this game, and, unless there’s some reassuringly legit good filmic artistry to go along with the sleaze, I’m bailing out.

Which, conveniently, is exactly where Aldo Lado comes in, with his film ‘L'ultimo Treno Della Notte’ (‘Last Stop on the Night Train’, aka ‘Don't Ride on Late Night Trains’, ‘Torture Train’ and ‘Xmas Massacre’, but best known in the English speaking world simply as ‘Night Train Murders’), which hit Italian screens in April 1975.

As you might well expect given the thoughts expressed in the preceding paragraphs, I have previously tended to avoid Italy’s attempts to cash-in on ‘Last House On the Left’ like the proverbial plague, and ‘Late Night Trains’ is, undeniably, an imitation of ‘Last House..’.  In terms of plot synopsis in fact, the two films are virtually identical, with Lado adding little to Craven’s minimal rape/murder/revenge scenario beyond the addition of a train.

(Of course, Lado may well have claimed he was taking his inspiration from Inger Bergman’s ‘Virgin Spring’ (1960) – the original source for ‘Last House..’ – but no prizes for guessing whether it was Bergman or Craven’s box office that the producers had in mind when they took this particular project to market.)(1)

Thank heavens then that Aldo Lado was far from your typical exploito-sleaze merchant. In fact, he is a director I am increasingly inclined to regard as some kind of unheralded savant of Italian genre cinema, at least on the basis of the three films by him I have seen to date. His two gialli (1971’s ‘Short Night of the Glass Dolls’ and 1972’s ‘Who Saw Her Die?’) are among the best, and most unconventional, films that genre has to offer, and as such, it was Lado’s name (along with admiring comments from several critical voices whose opinions I value) that finally convinced me to take a deep breath and press play on ‘Night Train Murders’.

And, without wishing to sound too pompous about it, I’m very glad I did, because, as it turns out, this is a far more challenging and rewarding film than its subject matter, promotional material and unsavoury reputation would ever have led me to expect.

Certainly, there is little in the film’s lengthy opening sequence – a tightly edited montage of footage of the bustling, pre-Christmas shopping streets of Munich, set to Demis Roussos’s exuberantly good-natured pop hit ‘A Flower is All You Need’ – to suggest that we’re about to take a stumble into bleak video nasty territory. Instead, it is happy merely to function as a lively and extremely skillful slice of visual storytelling, ensuring that, by the time they’ve boarded a train bound for Italy (heading back home for a family Christmas), we already feel as if we know our ostensible protagonists Margaret (Irene Miracle, who later appeared in Argento’s ‘Inferno’) and Lisa (Laura D’Angelo, who didn’t) pretty well.

Likewise, quick cutaways to the exploits of the characters we will subsequently know only as ‘Blackie’ (Flavio Bucci, who surprisingly went on to play Daniel the blind pianist in ‘Suspiria’ just two years later) and ‘Curly’ (Gianfranco De Grassi) – two teenage ne’erdowells who duck onto the train sans tickets to avoid pursuit from the local police – make as feel as if we’ve got their number too.

The two boys are live wire juvenile delinquents with a skeevy, junkie-ish look to them, capable of dumb and violent behaviour (rolling a drunken Santa Claus for small change, stealing an elderly lady’s fur coat), but – crucially – they are definitely not cold-blooded killers at this stage.

As the overcrowded commuter train departs from the station and the characters within it begin to interact, it soon becomes clear that, whatever qualms he may have had about helming a ‘Last House..’ rip-off, Lado definitely brought his A-game to this production. His direction here is extremely confident, drawing convincingly naturalistic performances from the young cast. Gábor Pogány’s photography meanwhile demonstrates a keen eye for stylish framing and visual beauty whilst remaining similarly grounded in naturalism, and the film keeps up a punchy, deliberate editing rhythm that ensures we’re soon deeply engrossed in the travails of our various characters, even though, on the surface of it, nothing terribly interesting has even happened to them yet.

In other words, this is basically just a really well made film, hitting a level of dramatic realism and technical acumen far above the norm for a mid-‘70s Italian genre flick… which of course only serves to make the depredations that eventually engulf our characters all the more difficult to swallow.

Needless to say, things soon get a bit unruly in the corridors of the train, as the two juvies beat up a ticket inspector in full view of a shocked family group, and – rather unexpectedly – their adventures get a bit kinky too, as Blackie corners a slightly older woman wearing a funeral veil in the toilet, and - in a moment of madness upon which the fate of all our characters turns - the nameless woman (played by Macha Méril, best known as the ill-fated psychic in ‘Deep Red’) decides to enthusiastically reciprocate his lewd advances, instigating one of the more uncomfortable (in both senses of the word) bouts of consensual sex that the cinema has to offer.

After this, a spirit of anarchy and misrule is very much abroad on the train, and, as strongly as Lado may assert his disgust at bourgeois hypocrisy elsewhere in the film, it is definitely not a nice spirit. It is no surprise that Margaret and Lisa feel pretty relieved when, as the train sits delayed at the next station, they realise they can shorten their journey by hopping across the tracks to take a different, overnight service back to Italy and, perhaps more importantly, can get away from those scary boys in the process.

It is here, as the two girls negotiate the ill-lit, wood-panelled compartments of the largely empty second train, that Lado flips the switch from the naturalism of the preceding scenes to a foreboding, quasi-expressionistic horror movie approach reminiscent of his earlier ‘Short Night of the Glass Dolls’. And of course, it comes as absolutely no surprise when, after settling down in apparent safety to enjoy the contents of their picnic hamper, the girls hear the by-now familiar sound of Curly’s harmonica echoing through the corridors.

What is more surprising – and represents ‘Night Train Murders’ most interesting deviation from the ‘Last House..’ template – is that the woman in the veil has not only accompanied the two boys onto the new train, but has effectively taken charge of their activities, egging her two new droogs on towards more extreme acts than they would likely have ever committed if left to their own devices, having apparently decided to ditch whatever her prior Christmas plans were in favour of some opportunistic sexual sadism.

Though European genre cinema offers more than its fair share of vamps, dominatrixes, sapphic prison warders and assorted other flavours of female predator, the subtlety with which Méril approaches her role here renders her a uniquely ambiguous and unsettling character. Avoiding any melodramatic over-playing or conventionally ‘monstrous’ gestures, she represents an outwardly anonymous, respectable citizen who can turn on a dime as the weight of suppressed desires and frustrations apparently rush to her head, before assuming the mask of innocent respectability once more as soon as it comes time to face the consequences of the crimes she has instigated.

In thematic terms, Lado seems keen here to explore the notion of the middle-class, adult world holding eventual responsibility for the violence and degradation that the younger generation (and, by implication, the more vulnerable/disenfranchised segments of society as a whole) inflicts upon itself. He expresses this idea pretty bluntly by cross-cutting between the terrifying ordeal the girls are experiencing on the train and a Christmas Eve party held by Lisa’s parents back in Verona – a grim affair in which marital infidelity, alcoholism and fatuous pronouncements about the breakdown of law and order seem to be the order of the day.

Arguably however, the director’s point is better made through Méril’s character, the calm, well-spoken adult who oversees the outrages the young people commit upon each other in the locked train compartment just as surely as state power manipulates Alex and his gang in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (clearly another key touchstone for the rapeier end of Italio-exploitation in this era).

Inevitably, it is the extended ordeal in the train compartment that forms the dark heart of ‘Night Train Murders’, and Lado and his collaborators build a suitably nightmarish atmosphere for what transpires, as dim bulbs shining through curtained windows project a sickeningly artificial blue/purple light that gives the compartment the theatrical, otherworldly feel of a space in which anything as possible, and in which conventional morality has entirely ceased to apply.

We won’t dwell here on the details of what transpires, but needless to say, it’s all as excruciating as you might fear, with the girls’ mute terror made horrifyingly palpable as they find themselves trapped in a kind of quasi-public S&M ritual from which no safe word will set them free.

To Lado’s credit however, he entirely avoids the titillating gore/slasher approach that many of his peers in Euro-horror might have favoured, instead ensuring that the indignities inflicted upon the victims remain grotesquely, almost pathetically, mundane – more in keeping, one imagines, with the conduct of an actual sexual assault than the stylised spectacle of some misogynistic Argento / Hitchcock fantasia.

When the first death occurs, it is random, unplanned, quick and nasty. With their latent psychopathy brought to the surface by Méril’s manipulation, the boys simply got carried away, and now everyone is in big trouble.

As viewers, we have borne witness to, and to some extent been carried along with, the flow of these terrible events, and, as the bodies of Lisa and Margaret are eventually ejected from the train window like so much human garbage, their belongings and Christmas shopping scattered alongside them on the bleak, nocturnal hillside, you’ll be liable to feel the shadow of some black spider crawling across your soul. It’s horrible, but it is precisely what the filmmakers intended.

After that, there’s nowhere really that ‘Night Train Murders’ can go, artistically speaking. But still, the final act must play out as promised. The killers must intersect with the waiting parents at the station, the truth must be discovered, and empty, soul-withering revenge must, eventually, be meted out. The “WHO ARE THE REAL MONSTERS HERE?” banner must be raised, and a black curtain of full spectrum misanthropy must be drawn down over proceedings.

As Lado simmers things down more to the level of a competently executed exploito-thriller for this final act, it is all dreadfully unpleasant, but regardless – it is the blue-lit horrors of the train compartment that will live on in your memory as Roussos’s absurdly inappropriate ballad returns to plead for peace and understanding over the end credits.

In the end, there’s not much of a helpful message anyone can take home from this atrocity exhibition, beyond perhaps the practical advice gamely offered by whichever foreign distributor came up with the idea of calling it ‘Don’t Ride on Late Night Trains’. Merry Christmas, everybody.

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(1) By way of further clarifying ‘Night Train..’s status as a ‘Last House..’ rip-off, You will of course note the slight similarity of original release Italian title (‘Last Stop..’), and,  rather more shamelessly, that the film was even foisted upon American viewers at various points in time as both ‘Last House: Part 2’ and ‘The New House on the Left’. Hedging its bets genre-wise, the latter release even featured an (admittedly very cool) poster illustration that appears to depict one of the girls on the train being attacked by ‘Blind Dead’-esque hooded zombies!

Exploito All’Italiana: Blastfighter (Lamberto Bava, 1984)

At some point in this review thread, we had to turn our gaze toward that prodigal son of the Italian exploitation business, Lamberto Bava, and what better place to start than here, as a Commandoed up moustache warrior stares us down through the barrel of a magnificently rendered shooter in what must surely count as one of the most definitive action movie posters of the 1980s (maestro Enzo Sciotti in full effect, of course).

On the basis of its title and poster artwork alone, I had always assumed that ‘Blastfighter’ must be one of those Filipino-shot gonzo war movies that so wantonly proliferated through the final decade of the cold war – you know, exploding huts, chopper stunts, bloody dog-tags, the whole nine yards. So strong in fact was my belief that ‘Blastfighter’ was one of those movies that I somehow managed to read some stuff about it on the internet, buy a copy of it (from a SHOP no less), and put the disc in my player on one of those increasingly rare post-midnight moments when I still have the energy to consider plugging in the headphones and tackling a movie before bed…. all before realising that it is in fact a different kind of movie altogether. Such is the power of Sciotti’s airbrush.

Once I discovered that what “John M. Old Jr” actually had in mind back in ’84 was a comparatively restrained backwoods Americana survival thriller, I felt a tad uneasy, but I ploughed on regardless, and ultimately I’m glad that I did. Maybe it was the woozy early hours time-slot, the accompanying glass of whisky or the complete lack of any particular expectations, but, for reasons I can neither explain nor fully justify, myself and ‘Blastfighter’ had a pretty good time together on that lonesome Saturday night.

Dardano Sacchetti’s script comprises a neatly polished Frankenstein’s monster of parts repurposed from ‘First Blood’, ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Death Wish’, and as such ‘Blastfighter’ begins as disgraced hero-cop Jake ‘Tiger’ Sharp walks out of prison, having served an eight year stretch for blowing away the politically connected scumbag who killed his wife.* (‘Tiger’ is played by Michael Sopkiw, whom you may recall from Sergio Martino’s ‘2019: After The Fall of New York’ (1983), here efficiently embodying a 2nd gen photocopy of ‘70s Franco Nero.)

As inevitably happens in such situations, ‘Tiger’ is reluctantly picked up by a limo containing his former boss in whatever elite, special operations-type police unit he belonged to, who tries to convince him to come back on-board, offering him a prototype of an experimental new super-shotgun that fires every form of projectile under the sun as a token of goodwill. (Whoever this big-wig answers to, he apparently anticipates no “COP GIVES FREE GUN TO CONVICTED MURDERER” headlines looming in his future.)

Much to our disappointment as well as the boss-man’s however, ‘Tiger’ shakes his head and declines the offer of returning to an exciting career of legally-shaky, villain-blasting mayhem, opting instead to make a lonesome new life for himself ruing his past mistakes, nursing his broken heart and espousing the cause of peace and human dignity from the comforts of his cabin in the mountains of rural Georgia. He takes the super-gun with him nonetheless though and stashes it under the floorboards on his porch, because hey – this is America, so who knows when a steadfast, law-abiding citizen will need the help of a laser-guided, pump-action grenade launcher to uphold what is good and right.

To no one’s surprise, the build-up to that day begins almost immediately, as Tiger encounters a posse of perpetually whoopin’ and hollerin’ young rednecks who are in the process of decimating the local deer population, cruelly keeping their wounded prey alive as they sling them in the back of a truck to take home. Naturally, our hero must step up to confront such barbarity, and, as you might expect given his past history, he is far from diplomatic in his approach.

As it transpires, the rednecks are making a living selling the live animals to a Chinese butcher who is hacking them up for medicinal ingredients (the racist language thrown in this guy’s direction by both sides in the film’s drama goes unchallenged, incidentally), and matters are further complicated by the fact the leader of the posse is the younger brother of Tiger’s former hunting buddy and small town rival George Eastman – now a local logging company foreman who grants tacit paternal approval to their unsavoury shenanigans on a “well it give the boys something to do” type basis.

As the antagonism between Tiger and the good ol’ boys swiftly intensifies, the stakes are raised further when his teenaged daughter (Valentina Forte) tracks him down and turns up demanding some fatherly affection. (He had previously abandoned her to an orphanage after her mother was murdered on the self-fulfilling basis that “I was a lousy cop and I’d make a lousy father too” – our hero, ladies & gentlemen.)

Inevitably, the lecherous overtures the rednecks cast in Valentina’s direction add a slight pinch of ‘Straw Dogs’ to the brew, and of course we know it’s only a matter of time before Tiger is going to be pulling up the floorboards to retrieve his mighty gat, his tache bristling with a renewed thirst for vengeance…

Driven on by the kind of inflexible moral certainty that only a truly cynical production can muster, ‘Blastfighter’ happily jettisons the relatively complex issues that weighed upon its aforementioned source texts, instead choosing present its story as an almost pre-modern popular morality tale, in which a character’s courage and martial prowess is entirely dependent upon the righteousness of their cause (as solely determined by the film’s scriptwriters), and in which real world consequences matter not a damn, so long as the cruel baddies are vanquished and the deer can gambol freely across the wooded hillsides as nature intended. (Except of course on rare occasions when some fine, upstanding sandy-haired hunter needs to shoot one of them for food, or to humanely manage the population or whatever, which is wholly acceptable – look, Tiger agrees, and you’re not going to argue with him, are you?)

Legend has it that this movie only exists at all because the budget Lamberto had lined up for a proposed post-nuke science fiction project fell through, and, having already pre-sold it to distributors under the name ‘Blastfighter’, he and his producers had to cobble something cheaper together to fill the gap. Under such  circumstances, I think everyone concerned did extremely well, but, inevitably, quality still comes on something of a sliding scale here, with ‘Blastfighter’s strongest moments (the action and outdoors stuff, chiefly) sitting right at the top end of what you’d expect of mid-‘80s Italian genre product, whilst the weakest sink to an almost Troll 2 level of face-slapping stupefaction.

The latter, it must be said, is almost entirely a result of the appalling English-as-second-language dialogue, and of the especially shoddy post-sync dubbing with which it is delivered. [English is the only language option on my DVD of the film, so I am unable to comment on how the Italian track fares in comparison.]

Regrettably, this serves to reduce many of ‘Blastfighter’s character interactions and tender “back story” conversations to a state of borderline nonsense, as actors’ on-set lip movements are inexpertly matched up with entirely inexplicable pronouncements (“there’s only one way to get pleasure in this life, but one hundred ways to get pain – don’t seem fair does it?”) that one suspects existed only as “LINE NEEDED HERE – ASK ENGLISH DIALOGUE GUY” gaps until long after principal photography was completed. Thus, we must persevere through dozens of instances of semi-meaningless, generic action movie blather whose zen-like opacity will boggle the mind of any viewers actually paying attention.

(That said, I did at least enjoy Sopkiw’s spirited “You want to know who I am? I’M A SON OF A BITCH… who wants to be left alone!” – a minor delight which more traditional line delivery would probably not have provided us with.)

That this state of affairs renders it impossible to connect with any of the film’s events on anything but the very bluntest level is hardly a surprise, but it is a particular shame in this case, given that the film-making here could under other circumstances have easily scaled the dizzy heights of actually-making-us-care.

Indeed, ‘Blastfighter’s technical acumen is actually far greater than its era and background might have led one to expect. Editing, cinematography and action choreography are all slick to a fault, whilst Sacchetti’s script (dialogue aside) is surprisingly coherent and well-paced (quite an achievement in itself from the man who gave us the dog’s dinner un-storytelling of Lucio Fulci’s early ‘80s horrors). In purely visual terms in fact, this could easily pass for a slightly rough-around-the-edges Hollywood studio film - making it all the more unfortunate that the game is up as soon as anyone opens their mouth.

Sadly, such unwarranted professionalism also elevates ‘Blastfighter’ to that particular grey area in which a film proves too well made and po-faced for viewers to simply laugh it off and enjoy it as a brainless thrill ride, whilst at the same time it is nowhere near “good” enough to generate any real emotional involvement or thematic engagement, meaning that, at the end of the day, what remains is just kind of… there.

Less the yummy cinematic junk food promised by its poster and personnel, ‘Blastfighter’ is instead more like a plate of tasteless steak and potatoes served at a quaint rural diner; despite occasional moments of uncouth wildness and genetically ingrained sleaze (could the brief flashback to Sopkiw’s wife’s death be leftover footage from one of Lamberto’s earlier gialli..?) and an absolutely bangin’ synth-rock theme from Fabio Frizzi, those who thrill to the madness and degeneracy of more typical Italian exploito product will be in for a letdown here.

If on the other hand though, you suddenly find yourself with a hankering for a reassuringly one dimensional tale of men with moustaches doing the right thing, attractively shot forest locations, badly dubbed teenage daughters, string-bending lead guitar stings and cars that explode in the slightest breeze – well, dive right into these cool Georgia waters my friend, and you won’t be disappointed.

Watchable, predictable, kind of likeable in a distant, undemanding fashion, ‘Blastfighter’ is, in a profound sense, a MOVIE. It also features a lovely country n’ western song written (though not performed) by The Bee-Gees, which plays three times in its entirety, so that's nice.

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In closing, check out this interesting alternative promotional artwork (also by Sciotti), which I *bet* must have originated back when the film was still being envisioned as an SF-tinged ‘Mad Max’ rip-off:

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* Whilst watching ‘Blastfighter’, I was convinced that Schwarzenegger’s ‘Commando’ also must have been a key influence, but subsequent research informs me that that film actually came out a year later, in ’85. I must have just been picking up on the shared Rambo inheritance common to both projects, I suppose.