The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (1983)

Original title: I sette magnifici gladiatori

The narrative takes place in what I believe is supposed to be a fantasy version of Ancient Rome, though it could of course also be a very low effort secondary world. Evil bandit leader Nicerote (Dan Vadis) is making regularly raids on a small village, using the physical invulnerability somehow bestowed on him by his mother (whom he blinded as a thanks) with astonishingly little ambition and imagination. By now, the village is only populated by women, children, and the elderly. Fortunately, there’s a helpful prophecy concerning the village’s favourite relic, a magic sword only the true hero meant to save the place will be able to hold going around. So the rest populace put the sword in keeping of their most attractive women. They go to Rome and proceed to ask every random passers-by they meet to grab that sword. They do eschew any warnings that the weapons rather likes to burn the hands of the unworthy, because that’s village morality for you. Still, eventually, the blade ends up in the hands of gladiator-on-the run Han (Lou Ferrigno) who is apparently a proper hero and not burnable by sword. After some business with the crazy bug-eyes making emperor (Yehuda Efroni) I only mention because his performance is so spectacularly hammy, Han goes off to do some village rescuing, picking up enough gladiators, Sybil Dannings and rogues to make for the full titular complement of seven.

You really know the rest.

If you’re like me, you probably expect something mind-blowing and weird when going into an Italian 80s sword and sorcery movie that also wants to be a gladiator movie and Magnificent Seven rip-off, particularly one made by the terrifying/awe-inspiring duo of Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso. Even better, one made on Cannon money, which must have felt like Marvel money to an indie filmmaker of today.

Alas, this is by far not as crack-brained as one would hope it to be. Sure, Fragasso’s script is as awkwardly structured as was his wont, and a lot of what happens is somewhat nonsensical, but there are only a few moments in the script that don’t feel comparatively competent and sane, at least for the kind of movie this is.

Mattei for his part even manages to create a series of perfectly okay looking scenes, though he is of course completely incapable of giving any of the copious character deaths any emotional weight, something certainly not helped by Fragasso’s messing up of the Magnificent formula by simply not spending enough time on creating characters with at least one discernible character trait. These Seven seem to consists of Sybil Danning, four beefcakes and three rogues, and that’s it. In general, one can’t help but think that Fragasso didn’t quite get why certain scenes like the training of the villagers are in practically all movies of this sort, including them just in case but trying to get through them as quickly as possible. This does rob the film of any of the emotional resonance it should have.

From time to time, the old, loveable, idiocy of the Mattei/Fragasso pairing does come through. I’m particularly fond of the fact that the magic sword isn’t actually, as you would think, magically able to get through Nicerote’s invulnerability the normal way when wielded by the proper hero, but really only kills him when he grips it himself. Which rather suggests that the whole rigmarole with finding the proper hero could have been avoided by simply presenting the sword to the guy as a treasure. But hey, what do I understand of these things?

Because many of the actors here are rather experienced in fake-hitting stuntmen with swords, most of the fights look rather more competent than you’d expect of a Mattei joint; I wouldn’t go so far as to call them exciting but they are certainly surprisingly watchable in a straightforward movie matinee way. The wagon race looks a bit as if Michael Bay had fashioned his car chases after it, though.

All of this makes for the more than a little confusing experience of watching a Mattei/Fragasso film that feels mostly competent – by the standards of Italian sword and sorcery fare - instead of insane. If you know the body of work of this duo, you’ll realize how mind-blowing the concept of competence is when applied to these filmmakers. Which does bring up the question who or what might have been responsible for this particular kind of insanity never before or after beheld in these men’s works. I, for one, blame Golan and Globus.

Past Misdeeds: Island of the Living Dead (2006)

Original title: L'isola Dei Morti Viventi

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


After accidentally depositing the treasure they were trying to take from the bottom of the sea deeper on it, a hapless yet heavily armed gang of treasure hunters lead by a certain Captain Kirk (Gaetano Russo) gets into even more trouble. While piloting their ship through a thick fog, our heroes (cough) collide with rocks where there shouldn't be any, and will have to do a few repairs before they can get anywhere else again.

Fortunately there's an uncharted island nearby where the crew will try to scavenge provisions and do a bit of treasure hunting while one lone idiot stays behind to do the repairs. Little do they expect that the island has been populated by the undead for a long time now. Soon enough, our heroes by default find themselves under attack. Oh, and the treasure hunters' boat explodes when repair guy pushes its self destruct button once he is attacked and surrounded by zombies.

At first, our now well and truly stranded heroes have only minor problems surviving the attentions of the zombies who may have been running around since the 17th century but still look pretty good for their age. Later on, scriptwriter Antonio Tentori decides that normal zombies are boring, and so the undead start getting pretty darn talkative, trying to drive the characters to kill each other by playing dumb mind games. Or something. From your standard zombies we then go to skeleton monks, hallucinations, a curse, and what might be vampires, too. How will designated final girl Sharon (Yvette Yzon) survive?

After a pause of half a decade, Italian movie god Bruno Mattei resumed his work of blowing minds and keeping under budget with the beginning of the 21st century, shooting as many movies until his death in 2007 as the direct to DVD market would allow. Even though late period Mattei isn't quite as mind-blowingly crazy as he was when he was still working with Claudio Fragasso, Island of the Living Dead (shot in the Philippines like in the good old times of AIP) has much to recommend it, at least to an audience consciously seeking out Bruno Mattei films; in short, people like me.

Instead of ripping off plot, structure and dialogue of his movie wholesale from a single, artistically slightly more successful source - that technique will have to wait for the sequel - this ripe effort sees Mattei stealing bits and pieces from other movies in a way that could be construed as homages by an alien unsure of how homages work. Apart from a translation of the early graveyard scene from Night of the Living Dead into scenery-chewerish and dumb, there are scenes and set-ups lifted from Zombi and really everything else with a zombie in it, as well as the Demoni movies. John Carpenter's The Fog is the source for the backstory to the whole undead invasion, with the little difference that Carpenter's curse makes a certain degree of sense where Mattei's doesn't. Instead of making sense, Island's curse produces a tinted sea-to-land battle that I suspect to be stolen from a much older feature.

In his many years of experience as a director of crap, Mattei has mastered some impressive techniques. I especially admire the anti-dynamic editing that seems to be designed to create a structure for the film that consciously destroys any tension. Zombie attacks are intercut with hot Latin reading action, and scenes of "characterisation" are broken up by shots of zombies crawling around somewhere else for no good reason whatsoever, as if the whole affair had been directed by a highly distractible child.

The film's action scenes are nearly as great as the editing, seeing as they are clearly staged to suggest that most of the characters have the ability to teleport (which fits in nicely with the film's utterly random day and night cycle which for its parts suggests that the whole film takes place over either one day or five, possibly just four - it's difficult to say when day and night are this random). Alas, the characters are always teleporting towards the zombies instead of away from them, but usually only get killed once they've decided to sacrifice themselves for their friends in situations that don't afford this kind of suicide at all. But hey, somehow the ridiculous action movie one-liners need to get on screen, right? (It CAN be done). It's pretty awesome, really.

Equally awesome and/or awe-inspiring is the collective inability of the cast to emote even in the slightest like normal humans beings do. Dialogue is mangled as if the speakers were trying to fight off a man in a gorilla suit, and scenery is not chewed, but head-butted until it stops moving. I especially approve of the effort of Ydalia Suarez who plays Victoria. Never has she met a line she does not want to shout in an overenthusiastic fashion. Look Ma, she's in a real movie now! Sort of.

As if all this wasn't enough to kill the few brain cells that survived my encounters with other Mattei films, Island is filled to the brim with compellingly idiotic details. Early on, there's a random martial arts versus zombie scene that doesn't end well for the martial artist because he decides to sacrifice himself for no good reason while kicking one single zombie in the crotch. This is followed by scenes featuring zombie conquistadors wearing plastic conquistador helmets as probably found by the production team in a souvenir shop, zombies that take naps and growl into the camera, characters willing to drink wine from an open cup that must have been standing around thusly for a few centuries, that boat self-destruct button, an eye patch-wearing head rotating inside of a treasure chest, really religious undead skeleton monks, the all-important Lovecraft shout-outs, a zombie flamenco dancer, and music that often sounds as if somebody were just playing musical cues from other films (even Star Wars for a few seconds) on a cheap synthesizer, which is exactly what's happening.


Island of the Living Dead truly is everything one could hope for in a movie directed by Bruno Mattei: it's dumb, it's inept, it's utterly shameless, it makes no sense at all - it's like a bad photocopy of a crassly commercial movie that is just too stupid to actually know how commercial movies work and nearly becomes experimental filmmaking through sheer wrong-headedness. In any case, Mattei's film is entertaining in a crazy way Italian movies have seldom been in the last decades. It might be great for all the wrong reasons, but as Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham say: if loving a Mattei movie is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Past Misdeeds: Born to Fight (1989)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


TV reporter Maryline Kane (Mary Stavin) walks into a bar in Vietnam to hire war hero Sam Wood (Brent Huff) to relive his escape from a Vietnamese prison camp for the camera. At first, Brent isn't too happy with the idea, but once Maryline has offered him enough money, he decides to take her up on her offer. After a nice little boat trip, Maryline, her two-men camera crew and Sam just happen to witness the execution of an American prisoner escaping from a camp full of prisoners of war. Turns out Maryline knows all about the war prisoner problem in the area, and actually wants Sam's help in rescuing her father, General Weber (John Van Dreelen), from the prison camp, but thought that whole interview business and going to the place unarmed would make Sam more willing to help. Or dead. Or something.

Anyway, given Sam's unarmed and unwilling status, the couple (and you know they'll be one in this sort of movie, because they never agree about anything and hate each other's guts) has to flee first. There's also some stuff about Romano Puppo playing another guy who is supposed to buy the general's way to freedom, but would prefer Kurt (Werner Pochath), the boss of the prison camp who will also turn out to be Sam's arch enemy, to kill the general so they can share the money. Which makes as much sense as Maryline hiring Sam to free her father without telling Sam about it, I guess. Plus, further complications because Sam doesn't like Weber. Let's just say that shooting and exploding huts - many of the latter without a good reason to explode - will result.

After half an hour or so, I just gave up on trying to make sense of the random stuff that makes up Born to Fight's supposed plot. After all, it is a Bruno Mattei film written by Claudio Fragasso, and where these two walk, no sense ever follows. As expected, the movie becomes a much nicer piece of entertainment once one decides to just giggle about its lack of coherence and fling poo at the screen.

Of course, if you're like me and adore the special charms Mattei and Fragasso so often brought to their films, you will be delighted to hear that Born to Fight is an eminently worthy entry into the gentlemen's respective filmographies, full of the desperate idiocy we have come to love. This is, after all, a film whose hero (and I use that term loosely) is first encountered showing off his ability to smoke a cigarillo and snore at the same time, likes to spice his drink with cobra venom and has a catchphrase that fluctuates between "It CAN be done. It can be done." and "It CAN be done. Can do.", or various combinations thereof, even when nobody ever questions the possibility of things being done. I should also add that Wood's catchphrase is - improbably - still better than his other one-liners. But as Werner Pochath's character explains, Sam was "BORN TO FIGHT", to which I might very well add "and not to talk".

This - and my inability to make sense of the plot - should make quite clear that Fragasso was in top form in the twenty minutes it took him to write the script; seldom has a scriptwriter's complete divorce from reality been more adorable.

It looks like Bruno Mattei didn't want to be left out when his friend and partner was having so much fun showing off his talents (or "talents"), and so decided that what Fragasso's script really needed to shine was the extensive application of slow motion to each and every scene. People not familiar with Mattei's genius might think the heavy use of slow motion in an action movie like this to be nothing special, or even stylistically justified and possibly cool. Well, some uses of slow motion are; Mattei however always knows how to use a perfectly normal part of the filmic language like it and twist and turn and overuse it in the most improbable ways until it becomes quite hilarious and grotesque.

The high point of Mattei's very special use of slow motion is surely the film's "emotional" finale, when Sam kills Kurt, who was responsible for the death of all of his prison camp buddies years ago. It begins with some hot slow-motion reloading action. Pochath blubbers (in slow motion, oh yes) "Nooooo!". Sam shoots in slow motion, once. Pochath overacts being shot in slow motion and does some excellent slow-motion whimpering. Then - because what could be more heart-wrenching? - Sam shouts the name of one of his dead friends, still in slow motion, sounding like an elk during rutting season (or so I imagine them to sound). Sam shoots again - still shaking muscles and gun in slow motion, then shouts the next name in elk. This is repeated a few more times - yes yes, in slow motion, still - while Sam walks to the still slow-motion-groaning Pochath, until finally, even Mattei must have thought enough is enough, Sam shouts "Aaaaaaaandddddd aaaaalllll thhhhhheeee ooootthhheeeeerrrssss!", and Werner Pochath is finally allowed to overact dying (die overacting?). I have heard rumours of people rupturing one or the other of their inner organs from laughter while watching this scene, and for once, I do believe a rumour.


The great thing about Born to Fight is that this single (and quite singular) scene is only one of many scenes nearly equal in their power of unbelievable stupidity, all coming to the delighted audience live from the brains of two of greatest purveyors of intensely entertaining crap ever to have come out of Italy. It's enough to make one tear up out of pure joy, really.

Past Misdeeds: Robowar (1988)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A merry mercenary group working under the delightful moniker of BAM (as the film explains, this is an acronym for "Bad-ass motherfuckers"), is hired by shady government types to go on The Mission for them. Now you might ask yourself: "What's this mission about?". The film isn't going to tell you. It is in fact withholding this information for its audience's own good, or at least to spare you wasting too many brain cells, as The Mission will turn out to be not what our heroes believe it to be, so there surely is no need to bother your pretty little heads with it.

All members of BAM have manly codenames like Killzone, Blood, or Diddy Bopper, alas they very seldom use them when talking to each other. The only thing that's important about them is that their leader is played by Reb Brown and that the rest of them might just as well be wearing red shirts instead of army fatigues. Reb ain't too happy when he learns that the team is going to be accompanied by a man of the Man who just might be called Asshole or Fuck You (Mel Davison). But what can a Reb do when he's already somewhere in Central America and on The Mission with his guys?

After the BAMsters have played around with some random guerrillas and picked up a gal named Virgin (Catherine Hickland), they finally meet the problem they were brought in to solve without having been told that they are supposed to solve it - a big bad government cyborg who is running amuck. And IMDB tells me it's played by Claudio Fragasso! Kill that monster, people of BAM!

Of course, it won't be that easy for the mercenaries, and in the end, only Virgin's superior chemistry skills and the fact that Robocop was nearly as successful a film as Predator will conquer the big bad.

And lo! It came to pass that Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso watched Predator. And they saw that it was good. So obviously, they needed to make a terrible, yet glorious version of the material all their own. Dear Fragasso is only taking the responsibility for the story this time, whatever that might mean in a film patently without one, while the writing credit goes to Rossella Drudi, who has certainly fine qualifications in her future work on Troll 2, her past work on Hell of the Living Dead and being married to Fragasso. It's quite the script the couple produced, never giving an explanation when one would probably be a good idea, never having an idea of its own when it can manhandle someone else's, and never satisfied stealing from just one source. Why only rip off Predator, when Robocop is also there, rife for the picking? It's what you expect from real masters of their art.

I'd love to go deeply into the principles of Mattei's direction, his meaningful use of the colour green, the way he uses the adventures of the BAMsters as a metaphor for all human struggle, but unfortunately I'd just be making it all up. If you have seen any Mattei film, you know how it looks; if you haven't, words cannot prepare you for the experience, at least not words I feel comfortable using.

I'd also love to tell you about the acting performances, alas, there aren't any. There certainly are people on screen who are speaking some perfectly bizarre dialogue, and they certainly are actors by trade, but that's all I can tell you about them, at least not without using words I don't feel comfortable using when talking about people I have never met and who could probably still kick my ass in a fight.

Furthermore, I'd love to tell you about the action. Let us just say that there's a lot of shooting and punching on screen, often executed by BAMsters standing in a single line, shooting and screaming and avoiding cover like their Civil War ancestors before them, at other times performed while running and screaming wildly. And yes, of course there are exploding huts.

Finally, I'd love to tell you about the film's awe-inspiring effects, how the cyborg dude is dressed in an Ultraman Halloween costume someone has painted black and makes the same chittering noises a toy robot I once owned makes, but I don't think I'm fit to do it justice.

I'm afraid I can only leave you with questions about Robowar where I should be giving answers, but that is part of the nature of the films of Mattei and Fragasso. I am full of questions about their works myself, starting with the natural - if very unspecific - ones, like "who gave these people money to make movies?" and "can I meet him?".

There are, however, more pertinent questions to ask about Robowar. Why did the script only have five pages? Where did the promised appearance of Alan Collins/Luciano Pigozzi disappear to? Did the authorities of the Philippines (where the film was shot) know whom they let into their country and what terrible consequences their lenience would have for the sanity of mankind? Why is it that Reb Brown screams whenever he shoots his gun? How does the Cyborg manage to hit anyone with his pew-pew laser gun when his point of view shots show clearly that he sees the world as a random conglomerate of orange pixels? What exactly was the government's idea in sending the mercenaries there? Did I really need to see Reb Brown in a belly top?

So many questions, yet so little answers. And that, my friends, is the point of the works of Mattei and Fragasso. They help us understand the importance of asking questions we never even knew we had, and show us that answers about the world that permitted the insane duo to make more than one movie can only be found in the tears of laughter rolling down our cheeks while we are watching them.

Zombies: The Beginning (2007)

Who would call the sequel to a movie "The Beginning"? Bruno Mattei is who, demonstrating the crystal clear sense of logic you expect from his body of work.

Now, you may remember that Island of the Living Dead ended with our last survivor Sharon (Yvette Yzon) being declared dead by her rescuers and rising again as a zombie. Curiously enough, this hasn't actually happened, and Sharon (who turns out to be a doctor of biology, by the way) is alive and well and suffering from regular nightmares. If you're a more generous person than I am, you might read the first movie's ending as one of Sharon's nightmares, but dear Bruno doesn't actually bother to sell it that way. Anyhow, it also turns out that the protagonists of the last movie were lying to us when they repeatedly called themselves treasure hunters and acted that way, for they were in fact working salvage operations for an evil corporation, Tyler Inc.

Obviously, Tyler Inc. doesn't believe Ripley'sSharon's story about alienszombies killing her crew mates and fires her for reasons of mental instability and "the inexplicable explosion" (cough, self-destruct button, cough) of her ship, leaving RipSharon with working at the docksbecoming a Buddhist nun as her only career option. If you know Mattei's films, you'll probably now have flashbacks to the other times when he ripped off James Cameron's Aliens, and verily, he does it again. Only this time around, Mattei keeps even closer to Aliens' narrative structure, leaving Zombies with nary a scene that isn't mirroring another one from what we must imagine to be the Italian's favourite film. Good old Bruno (or his script-writers, returning Antonio Tentori and new guy Giovanni Paolucci) manages to borrow even more of the original's dialogue than he and his buddy Claudio Fragasso did in the best movie ever aka Shocking Dark, though I am a little disappointed he didn't find a way to include anything about nuking the place from orbit. I also decry the sad absence of androids.

Given that everybody really should know the plot of Aliens, there's no need for me to do any further plot synopsising for Zombies. Just imagine Aliens without Newt and Bishop (and of course without anything taking the place of Newt in motivating Ripley/Sharon, because we can't have her act in a way that makes sense, right?) and with mutant zombies and later on conehead mutant zombies replacing the aliens, and an inexplicable and unexplained talking - of course with a British accent, for all brains are British - brain in a glass cage standing in for the alien mother. If much of the plot doesn't seem to make much sense to you after these replacements, hey, it's a Mattei movie, and the man aimed to please. I think.

As a matter of fact, I found myself hard pressed to not be pleased by Zombies while watching it. This reaction to what happened on screen is probably on the same level as the delight of a certain kind of anime fan confronted with scenes of female characters whose breasts make "boink! boink!" noises when they move, but what can a guy like me do when confronted with a guy like Bruno Mattei not having learned a bit about filmmaking in all the years he worked as a director.

All the shoddiness the connoisseur expects from a Mattei movie is there and accounted for: acting on school play level with an especially hysterical performance by the guy standing in for Bill Paxton (Yvette Yzon who was one of the least terrible actors in the first movie also manages to top her performance there and sometimes reaches the levels of overenthusiastic horribleness the film surrounding her deserves); action directed without an eye for the position of the characters taking part in it; dialogue that is borrowed from another movie not exactly known for brilliance of dialogue and then dumbed down until it fits the quality of the acting; a sense for weird, stupid and peculiar details that manifests in things like flame throwers that seem to work without fuel (I imagine they use fire elementals), that brain in a glass cage, or a fascination with mutant foetuses that really shows by comparison how tasteful H.R. Giger's shtick is; sets that include empty brown rooms, empty grey rooms and not much else; a complete lack of sanity. In other words, Zombies: The Beginning is an awesome film that never ever wants to waste a single second boring you or talking sense. After all, there's still a scene from Aliens it hasn't transformed through the magic of its $100 budget it needs to rip off.

Some may find it tragic that Mattei's last film is a shot-on-very- visibly-digital rip-off of a James Cameron movie, without a budget and clearly nobody of talent involved, but if I am honest, I think this is the perfect, honest end point for the man's career. Mattei's talent did after all always lie in his ability to make highly entertaining crap, and in this regard, he couldn't have succeeded more than he did with Zombies: The Beginning.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,horror,bruno mattei,yvette yzon,zombies

On WTF: Island of the Living Dead (2006)

I was very sceptical about Bruno Mattei's return to filmmaking via crap looking direct to DVD features, but I did do the great man wrong.

While Island of the Living Dead isn't quite as brain-damaging as Mattei's films made together with Claudio Fragasso, it still does contain more than enough of the good stuff to cause major hallucinations. My column on WTF-Film will explain - as far as Mattei is explicable - more.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,horror,zombies,reviews,bruno mattei,yvette yzon,gaetano russo,ydalia suarez

Madness (1994)

Original title: Gli occhi dentro

An eye-obsessed serial killer terrorizes Italy. The black-masked murderer seems to have moulded himself after the hero of a comic book, Doctor Death - pagan professor by day, serial killer by night. Parts of the public, incited by the media campaign of journalist Calligari (Fausto Lombardi), seem all too willing to ban the book (in the hope that the killer's so lacking in creativity he's going to stop killing, one suspects).

The book's artist Giovanna Dei (Monica Seller) and her writer and would-be boyfriend Nico Mannelli (Gabriele Gori) are of two minds on how to handle the situation. Giovanna isn't willing to let unproven accusations stop her art, while Nico'd like to end the comic and just forget everything.

Giovanna's situation becomes even more difficult when the cop investigating the serial killings (Antonio Zequila) starts sniffing around her for no reasons he deigns to explain. Soon enough, there's a good reason for the man's interest, though - the killer sends Giovanna rambling answering machine messages, and a pair of eyes, freshly cut out. Is it just a really inappropriate demonstration of love towards his creator, or does the killer have plans for Giovanna's eyes too?

The usual story when people speak of Bruno Mattei's works after the divorce from Claudio Fragasso (I do at least imagine the end of their creative partnership as a divorce, with long and hard discussions about who gets which of the children's heads) is that Mattei's films afterwards fastly lost the peculiar charm of insanity and absurdity his work together with Fragasso had, and became the kind of bad movies that are bad enough to bore, but not bad enough to entertain an audience. For much of Mattei's creative life after Fragasso, this view might even hold true - I frankly haven't seen enough of the director's output of the 90s and 00s to have an honest opinion on that, but a film like Madness suggests a somewhat different story.

Madness is not a film carrying the "all shoddiness, all insanity, all the time" flag of Mattei's co-operations with Fragasso. It is instead a film of two halves. One half - quite sensationally - is a perfectly competent, happily generic giallo that is as good as what was left of Italian genre filmmaking in 1994 allowed, with some reasonably stylish filmmaking, and a sprightly little plot that might make little sense, but hangs together well enough inside the established rules of the film's genre. As someone mostly used to Mattei in his role as purveyor of crap, I was quite surprised to realize that he could be a director willing and able to pull off solid genre entertainment on an obviously miniscule budget when the stars aligned right (though at least his first cooperation with Fragasso, The Other Hell did hint at that from time to time).

The film's other half is quite a bit more like what you'd expect from Mattei at the height of his non-powers, driving actors to ruinous and strange performances that don't just make any sense psychologically, and hardly have anything to do with humanity as we know it from outside Italian movies at all, ignoring even the most basic sense of how things work in reality. When it's time for the film to lose it, it truly loses it completely, with cops acting not just improbable but completely illogical, the worst murder that's supposed to be suicide ever, red herrings that make no sense and still don't confuse the viewers etc. and so on. Some of the actors are giving their all in this respect, too. Especially Antonio Zequila's (with great help from his dubbing actor) cop is a bunch of laughs a minute, frequently rambling complete nonsense, talking to the killer ("you bastard!") when he's alone, and mangling every line he has to deliver with a perfectly strange mixture of long, inconvenient pauses and freakish emphasises, as if it were his job alone to drag down every scene he's in from the realm of the slightly silly into that of the mind-breaking ridiculous. It's quite something to see, really.

Of course, I would have wished for Mattei to decide on one tone for the film, whichever of the two he preferred. However, even in this confused state, Madness makes for an entertaining ninety minutes. At least, it's never boring for even a second.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,giallo,bruno mattei,reviews,horror

On WTF: Born To Fight (1989)

Original title: Nato per combattere

Brent Huff: born to fight!

Bruno Mattei: born to direct!

Claudio Fragasso: born to write!

You: born to read my write-up on WTF-Film!

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,action,bruno mattei,claudio fragasso,brent huff,mary stavin,werner pochath,reviews,wtf,other places

Shocking Dark (1990)

aka Terminator 2

aka Alienators

Gather 'round me, children, for I have a tale to tell! Once upon a time it came to pass that an Italian movie producer realized that he was in the position to legally name one of his films Terminator 2, and bring it into the cinemas way before the (less entertaining) James Cameron film of the same title would hit - at least if he could find someone to make the film right now, in the space of approximately two days of shooting and with no budget except for what petty cash the producer had lying around. Fortunately for the history of the cinematic art - though not the sanity of mankind - our mysterious producer knew just the right candidates for the job, the dynamic duo of Bruno Mattei ("director") and Claudio Fragasso ("writer"), two men completely without professional standards or shame.

But what the producer could not have imagined about the two was that their lack of standards and shame hid a very peculiar sense of humour (or, if you believe some scholars, a very particular kind of insanity). So, while they agreed to make the producer's dream of a cheap Terminator rip-off come true, Bruno and Claudio then proceeded to film a rip-off of that other excellent James Cameron movie, Aliens. Claudio, full of love and respect for Cameron's work, even took it upon himself to quote whole bits of dialogue from his hero's film, although usually in places where they made neither structural nor plain sense.

Yet despite the shared genius of Bruno and Claudio, their work was still plagued with problems. Surely, they could not afford more than one monster costume while still providing for their own meagre livings on the budget the producer had provided them with! But how, oh how, could a whole squad of professional soldiers be conquered by one pitiable rubber suit monster? Claudio, always cleverer than his peers, went back into his chamber with the script, and turned the squad of soldiers into !MegaForce!; now, even a single rubber suit looked like more than enough of a threat for his film's heroes, their shoulder pads and motorcycle helmets.

But when the producer arrived at Claudio's and Bruno's home the next morning to read their script, he was very angry about what Claudio had written. "There is no Terminator in my Terminator movie! What, oh what have you done!?" he shouted. Claudio and Bruno looked at each other, giggled, and explained they would turn their film's most wooden actor into an android by directing him to babble in the most monotonous voice and never to change his facial expression. "It will be just like Schwarzenegger!" Bruno added. The producer, recognizing sheer genius when he saw it, was mightily pleased by this and allowed Bruno and Claudio to begin shooting their masterpiece.

Their casting director was desperate. "Where, oh where will we find actors who will work for food?" he cried. "Nothing easier than that!" Bruno and Claudio answered, and proceeded to lure a group of American tourists onto their "set" - for this is what the artists called the darkened factory and the service tunnel where they made movie magic happen - with promises of cameras made of gold. Before the Americans could realize they had been lied to, Bruno and Claudio dragged them in front of their camera for "a screen test", letting their new-found partners read Claudio's script aloud. Afterwards, the wily Italians sent the tourists home, telling them they'd call them once filming would start. In truth, they knew that they had already filmed all the performances they would ever need.

And so, having found a solution for each of their problems, Bruno and Claudio brought their film into the cinemas, where it was loved and adored by the masses. Even James Cameron was so moved by the boys' love for his work that he decided not to sue them. And because there are no costs to cover when one's film hasn't cost anything to produce in the first place, the producer, Bruno, and Claudio became very rich from their work's earnings. And they all lived happily ever after.

 

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In short: The Other Hell (1981)

Original title: L'altro Inferno

Something is not right in a small Italian nunnery. The embalming specialist of the cloister (yes, every religious institution needs one, didn't you know?) has gone corpse-crotch-mutilatingly mad, a papercraft head with blinking red light bulb eyes pops up now and then, and nuns die in violent ways. Vincenza (Franca Stoppi), the mother superior of the place, tries to sell the deaths and the madness as accidents to the church hierarchy, but this isn't child abuse, so the Church sends the experienced Father Inardo (Andrea Aureli) to investigate.

Inardo witnesses more signs of highly unnatural influences in the cloister in form of a possibly possessed nun with stigmata, strange noises and the smell of secrets all around. For some reason, his bosses very suddenly decide to replace Inardo with the younger, much more sceptical of the supernatural Father Valerio (Carlo De Mejo).

The young sceptic soon learns that there are even stranger things afoot in the cloister than Inardo has experienced. What has all this to do with the masked nun living in the attic, in a room full of naked dolls hanging from the ceiling? The answer lies - as it always does - in a terrible secret in the cloister's past.

The Other Hell is one of the earliest cooperations between Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso, but it already is the expected mix of insane random stuff (hello camera that films the past!), hilariously bad special effects (hello doll-who-stands-in-for-a-baby and fake dogs!), utter tastelessness (hello groin-stabbing one, two and three!), hysterical acting (hello close-ups of sweaty nun faces and loud screeching!), recycled Goblin tracks (hello, soundtrack of Buoi Omega!) and a preposterously earnest subtext that doesn't survive contact with the rest of the film.

Said subtext is especially interesting this time around, as Mattei and Fragrasso seem to want to say something against the repression of female sexuality - unless they are trying to blame everything bad on female sexuality (the uterus is "the labyrinth that leads to hell", it seems). There's a basis for both interpretations in the film, but our heroic directors/writers are a bit too occupied with ripping off Carrie, The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby to give anything but mixed messages about anything.

It comes as a bit of a surprise what the film doesn't include, though, namely the scenes of female nudity - and whippings, oh wait, let's make that nude whippings - any exploitation film taking place in a cloister is by law required to have. Making a film that's thematically all about sexuality (and the devil) that then doesn't include any on-screen sex seems at once a bit perverse and rather clever; the latter isn't a concept I usually use in connection with these two intrepid purveyors of smut. One could nearly come to the conclusion that Mattei and Fragasso at this early point in their partnership still had artistic ambitions. These ambitions also show in a handful of surprisingly well-staged scenes, whose basic ideas might be cribbed from Bava and Argento, but that still can't help and pull The Other Hell more into the direction of serious dream-like horror than I would have expected from these two.

Don't worry, though, The Other Hell is still as immensely entertaining as most of the films Mattei and Fragasso are responsible for; it's just a bit more like an actual movie and less like, well, whatever Robowar is supposed to be.

 

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On WTF: Robowar (1988)

I'll just say this: Mattei/Fragasso. Predator. Reb Brown. Things that can never be unseen.

Learn what I'm talking about on WTF-Film.com.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,bruno mattei,claudio fragasso,action,reb brown,reviews,other places

In short: Rats - Night of Terror (1984)

A post-apocalyptic gypsy punk rocker clan lead by a certain Kurt (Ottaviano Dell'Acqua) comes to a group of deserted houses (or is it supposed to be a city street?). Inside one of the buildings, in an interior that looks pretty much like a cross between an old Spaghetti Western saloon and a SF set too shoddy for Al Brescia, they find a large cache of food, a futuristic looking aquarium, I mean water distiller, and a shabby looking assortment of plants.

There are also a bunch of dead bodies hidden away to make for "shocking" finds, and a whole lot of rats. After a little clean-up, the nomads decide to stay there for a while and enjoy their new vegetable garden.

That was probably not their best idea, for in the first night the rats attack. And oh, these are fiendishly clever rats. Some rat commandos (or is it ninja rats?) sneak up on the group's vehicles and nibble through their wheels, leaving our merry band of heroes without the possibility of escape. Except by walking, of course, but the gang seems to be against just walking away on principle and decide with the sort of logic only the duo of Fragasso and Mattei can provide, after the first of them have been killed by those evil nibblers, to barricade themselves  in the same building where they first met their squeaking enemies. Would you believe that this isn't a very good idea?

Ah, "written by Claudio Fragasso", "directed by Bruno Mattei". Are there words better suited to frighten those familiar with the true depths of horror?

By Mattei/Fragasso standards, Rats isn't all that bad. Sure, the acting is atrocious and the way the characters act makes as little sense as the plot, but it's not as painful as it could be. If you can keep your compassion with the poor rats under control, the film has even some things to recommend it, or rather to point and laugh at.

I did already mention the acting and the plot, but inane dialogue also comes oh so naturally to Fragasso. It is a virtual feast of stupidity that culminates in a very special twist ending stolen from a Twilight Zone script as written by a drunken teenager. Afterwards, said teenager probably went on to write the motorcycle/samurai sword sequence in Demons, so I'm not going to blame him too much.

The most memorable thing about the film are its special effects. Absolute highpoint is probably the "rug o'rats", a plastic or papiermache contraption meant to embody a slow moving mass of rats, yet mostly effective in evoking giggling fits. Other moments of cinematic greatness are the adorable throat jumping rat dolls, an exploding (it's the rats, you know) corpse and lots and lots of footage of rats just going about their business, while our protagonists are panicking and describing the devilish evil of ratdom, without a care about the fact that the rats are just ignoring them. Unless a bunch of the poor animals is just thrown at a character's face - that's what goes under "rat attack" here.

Other moments of Magrasso magic include the wonderful scene in which a handful of rats break a barricaded door down by somehow crawling around in front of it and pushing a hollowed out corpse against it. It's probably rat sorcery.

Rats - Night of Terror truly is one of the great comedies.

 

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