Since discovering a little niche rental place down in Kirkwood, I've been catching up on some low budget Italian horror flicks. Those I've been watching fall into two categories: Dario Argento films and trash. Dario deserves his own post (plus I've yet to watch Suspiria again, so I'll hold off until I do that), so I thought I'd write about some of the trashier ones. These trashier films feature some strikingly common traits.
Aguirre, the Wrath of Colonialism - The main action of these flicks follows a group of Italians/Americans in some tropical area. Sailing to and from small islands, hacking through dense foliage, interacting with with half naked aboriginal tribes, these are staples of these fuckers. Although it's American and takes place in the Florida, George Romero's Day of the Dead follows the same formula, replacing the bare assed indians with crazy army officers.
New York Style - Not only do these flicks all end up in some tropical location, they all fucking start in New York City, which is shot in the most non-descript manner possible. That's actually refreshing, because we've seen New York look the same in so many movies, it's nice to see it done in a real, documentary style. Also, I guess New York is the only American city worth shooting in if you're Italian and want to make a movie marketable in the US.
Less Talk, Gore Rocks - Unabashed, these films are, in large part, death porn. A little plot and a lot of unique gashes, whacks, and general lack of respect for bodily integrity. The violence is gross and explicit, body parts being removed and so forth. Watching these, you're almost certain to see some bloody brains and intestines.
Love, Cannibal Style - Couples abound in the films, there's usually one or two in the main party lost in the jungle. Sometimes the heartwarming adventure through cannibalism and zombies brings the couple together. It's sweet. I guess this is the influence of the American horror films, starting with Chainsaw, which had small groups of couples like this as the protagonists. The couples in the Italian films, though, aren't teenagers.
Titties - Unlike recent American horror film, these films fucking deliver the naked bosoms we all want. You go rent Wrong Turn, you'll certainly have a good time with the flick, but since Eliza Dushku never sheds her shirt to let fall free her chestal glory, there's a certain sense of disappointment. Which is a shame. However, the Italian horror flicks give you plenty of nice tittage. Less than an Andy Sedaris Cinemax film, but enough for satisfaction.
OK, so let's examine three films in detail.
Zombi - Lucio Fulci's zombie picture. A good one, too. Features an amazing sequence in which a zombie fights a shark underwater. Fo ril! It's an actual dude underwater, wrestling with a real shark. No puppets or cgi or any of that crap. It's not shot to hide anything, no quick cuts to stock footage of a real shark munching on a pubescent surfer girl's arm or anything like that, just a full, dead on look at this dude in a zombie outfit wrestling with a shark, opening up blood packs to make it look like the zombie's eating the shark. This is just amazingly inventive. Underwater Zombies? Cool! Zombies attacking sharks! Whoa, man! In addition to this deep blue action, the flick has a great scene in which a zombie breaks through a door, grabs its victim and pulls her to the door, impaling her on a giant splinter which gouges her eye.
Ever since reading Apuleius' The Golden Ass, I've been a great fan of impalements which immobilize people. It's a trick that's used far too infrequently. In the Ass, a dude reaches into a window to unlock a door and another dude stabs his hand with a dagger, sticking it to the door so that he can't get away. In Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, a pussy Dustin Hoffman does a similar trick with some copper wire on the guys pulling a home invasion. In the Godfather, that one fat fuck gets his hand stabbed to a bar and then axed. It's a great piece of visual storytelling, tells a scary visual story with no words.
In Zombi's New York opening, a couple goes on a previously zombie-infested boat to do some investigamating, and end up hooking up to fool a cop who's guarding the thing into thinking they're just horny kids and not snoopers. Of course, this then leads to them really hooking up and c.
Zombi also has a silly ending tacked on, in which zombies are seen marching on New York. This was added to tie in to the then-successful Dawn of the Dead, the second in George Romero's holy trilogy of zombie films. Of course, the city under siege in Dawn is Pittsburgh, but I guess an Italian seeing an American metropolis sees only New York.
Cannibal Ferox - A NYU grad student is finishing up her thesis which disproves the existence of cannibalism in any culture. So she goes to the Amazon with a dude and his hot-and-soon-to-be-topless girlfriend to investigate a primitive culture. There, they accidentally hook up with two thugs from, you guessed it, New York who are on the run from the cops and claim to have been attacked by cannibal natives who castrated one of their buddies. This castration is shown in flashback, but all you really see is groin-centric bloodiness. Turns out, in a nice critique of colonialism, that these guys were the real butchers and the indians are just out for revenge.
Sexy gore is the order of the day. In addition to *that* on screen castration, there's yet another in which the bloody bits are eaten by the savages. In another sequence, the bad guy and hottie hook up, and he suggests that they get a native girl to add to their fun. So they go kidnap one at knifepoint, killing another indian. Perhaps the most jarring display of violence against humans on screen comes at the end, where two women have giant fishhooks stabbed into their tits and are then mammarily hung. Pretty sadistic stuff, in the de Sade sense of the word. I guess I would count that as an immobilizing impalement, but it's not really elegant like the others. I mean, it's not so much viciously clever as it is violently salacious.
Yet for all this nastiness, the most unsettling footage in the film, by far, comes from the real violence shown against animals. In one scene, a weasel-type animal is tied to a post and a snake comes up and crushes the poor thing. It's totally real, and so rather unsettling. Much more so than the obviously fake castration scenes or the tit hanging.
The film ends with the grad student getting her PhD. It seems that she has denied the existence of cannibalism. Which is a nice touch, I think.
This is just one film in a whole genre of cannibal films. Another film in the genre is Cannibal Holocaust, which I haven't yet seen, but which features the earliest use (that I know of) of Blair Witch-styled faux recovered footage.
Zombie Holocaust - Terrible piece of shit film. It's a mix of zombie film with cannibal film, so there's plenty of natives-snacking-on-fresh-disembowellment action. I saw this fucker mostly because of the title, which is the title of my own unrealized zombie epic. The film also got a release in the US as "Dr. Butcher, MD (Medical Deviate)." Now, even though the MD in that title doesn't really refer to his being a doctor, I'm offended by the redundant use of "Dr." and "MD."
Anyway, the story's about a doctor who's revived the practice of cannibalism in this local tribe. Some of these guys apparently escape to become nurses at a hospital in Jersey. Ha ha, just kidding, they're in New York, noshing on the corpses of the freshly-departed. Anyway, this doctor is performing brain transplants on the natives. The film develops a clear scary pecking order. The cannibal tribe is less scary than the zombies, who obey the doctor's commands. It's nice in that the corruption is colonial in nature, and that there's a whole evil organizational scheme. The film's still shit, but that part of it is nice.
As for the tits in this film, they belong to an attractive blonde who disrobes a lot. At one point, for no apparent reason, she's going to be sacrificed by the tribe. In order to prepare her for this ritual, she's stripped naked and a tribeswoman paints pretty blue flowers on her, Laugh-In style. It makes no sense, but hey, it's kinda hot, and she has a nice, full rack, so it's got that going for it. She also escapes this fate in a way that's never shown or explained, so that makes little sense, as well. But, I must emphasize, her tits are quite nice.
And that's what it's all about, really.
Posted by mattb at November 13, 2003 08:48 PM