In short: Gor (1987)

Wimpy college lecturer Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) finds his weird ideas about the existence of a “counter-Earth” you can visit with the help of a ring he inherited from his father proven very right indeed when he is sucked into the sword and sorcery without sorcery world of Gor.

Freshly arrived, he just barely escapes the clutches of the men henching for evil priest king Sarm (Oliver Reed) and runs into the local good guys. Sarm is on a bit of a rampage through various villages, slaughtering and enslaving their populations and stealing their “home stones”. Sarm’s rural enemies have hoped for a dimension traveller to arrive, apparently, but Tarl isn’t manly enough to pass muster, so has to go through a training montage.

To motivate him into helping out against Sarm, his new buddies – big-haired and big-breasted love interest Talena (Rebecca Ferratti) and characters I dub old guy and grumpy young guy – explain that their home stone is Tarl’s only way to get back home. Why everyone else is so fixated on some red plastic stones, the film never gets around to tell. So off our heroes go through deserts and more desert, visit a barbarian camp and wander through some caves in what appears to be the local equivalent of a quest, just without the adventure.

This is Fritz Kiersch’s Cannon version of the first of John Norman’s Counter-Earth novels. The books start as basically readable Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches but becomes increasingly misogynistic and unpleasant, espousing some pretty notorious nonsense about women’s supposed wish to be dominated, enslaved and violated; the film on its part doesn’t care about any of that stuff, and really just wants to be an Italian Conan rip-off. Alas, it doesn’t manage to achieve this modest goal.

Even the worst Italian sword and sorcery (or in this case sword and planet/scientific romance) movies try to keep their audience awake by throwing regular action scenes and cardboard and latex monsters at their audience. Gor’s action is as unambitious as it is infrequent, with the usual barely dressed guys and gals slowly going through motions Kiersch is either unwilling or unable to make look interesting. Apart from Tarl’s dimension hopping, there’s no fantastic or science fictional element here at all, missing out on quite a bit of what makes Sword and Sorcery or the best stuff by Burroughs (I can’t speak for Norman’s books, for I don’t have the stomach to delve deeper than the first two books there, and my reading of those has been a couple of decades ago) so fun – creatures, magic, and weird science as the base for fun and games.

It would be one thing if Gor had anything else to show its audience, but there’s really little happening here of any interest. Kiersch’s disinterested and unergetic direction doesn’t improve anything.

The most interesting thing about the film is how it manages to get such a bored villain performance out of Oliver Reed. For some reason, Reed mostly mumbles and angrily whispers his lines, with pauses that suggest he has to drag every single line slowly out of the script; from time to time, he laughs pointlessly. Oh, well.

Opera (1987)

When the diva playing Lady Macbeth in a version of Verdi’s Macbeth is injured in an “accident” that makes her unable to play her role, her young understudy Betty (Cristina Marsillach) has the chance of her life with taking over her rule. Betty isn’t completely happy about the opportunity, though. Apart from the typical doubts in her own readiness for one of the most important opera roles for a soprano, this is still a version of Macbeth, after all, and Macbeth, as we all know, is a cursed play, even when it’s the opera version. Add to the problems that the play’s director Marco (Ian Charleson) is a movie director loving gimmicks, and with something of reputation, adding live ravens and modern effects to the play, and giving off a somewhat shifty vibe.

All these troubles will turn out to be the proverbial small stuff, however, for the same masked man responsible for diva number one’s little accident now starts hounding Betty, repeatedly tying her up and forcing her to watch him kill members of the production.

For the longest time, I’ve not been able to get along with Opera, often seen as Dario Argento’s last great movie. I took a very tired and anxious evening for the film to finally click with me, and now, like someone suffering from a religious revelation, I do believe it is one of the man’s best films.

On the surface, the film is very typical Argento, or really, simply a very typical giallo, with a script that makes more sense as a mood made moving pictures than a narrative, full of its director’s habits, tics, and gruesome delights. There is a bit more going on in the script of this one, though, I believe. Argento seems to play very consciously with various things, starting the narrative as a clear variation on the Phantom of the Opera but emphasising the elements of obsession and voyeurism in the source as far as he can go with them; and, given Argento’s love of operatic excess, it’s pretty damn far.

There’s also quite a bit of self-conscious irony on display here most other Argento movies earlier or later lack, Marco partially taking on elements of Argento’s public image as a bit of a cinematic madman, a sadist, the kind of guy who insists that he always shoots is own hands as the hands of the killers in his films, but also turning him into a the least horrible man on screen, even if he is a bit of a voyeur and an obsessive.

But then, practically everyone in Opera is, for voyeurism and obsession over the acts of seeing and witnessing is what the film in nearly every shot of the gliding camera is about. Even quite a bit of its violence demonstrates this focus. It’s not just in the (in)famous eye loss by raven scene in the first climax, or the gunshot through the peephole or the little nasty needle contraptions the killer uses to force Betty to see and witness what he does. Even when there’s no eye violence involved, Argento is particularly focussed on showing us the eyes of the killer’s victims when they struggle and die, pulling the audience in like the killer wants to pull Betty in, trying to turn the witness into an accomplice, only in our case through the seductions of cinematic style instead of rope.

I don’t believe Argento wants to criticize the voyeuristic and obsessive aspects of (horror) filmmaking, but Opera does give the impression of a film violently driven to make its audience conscious of these aspects, so that we can at least admit to ourselves that, yes, indeed, there’s something uncomfortable about finding pleasure in all of this, and even more uncomfortable in admitting to it. Argento for his part is, like the killer, not letting up until we see things his way.

That’s where the movie’s second climax comes in, perhaps. On the surface, it’s throw-away and pretty silly (it’s certainly no surprise the US distributor of the film wanted it gone), ripping off Hitchcock while trying to tack on a bit of an operatic mad scene for Betty. However, I also believe it’s Argento’s – not really successful – attempt at suggesting that the voyeuristic draw to violence and obsession is also a gate to a less dubious kind of beauty that may be madness or purity, depending on one’s perception, a place you can’t reach if you haven’t been drawn in by the horrors.

Past Misdeeds: Il Gatto Nero (1989? 1991? Always?)

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. Though I have to say I have seen even more Cozzi films, and do now expect the insanity rather than the boredom.


Not to be confused with all those other films about black cats, which comes especially easy in this case, because the black cat isn't important here at all.

Plot? Oh right, there was something kinda-sorta plot-like hidden away in here somewhere. Ah, there it is: Director Marc Ravenna (Urbano Barberini) is trying to re-ignite his faltering career by making a semi-sequel to Argento's Suspiria (wouldn't that actually be a semi-sequel to Inferno at this point in time?), based on a witch named Levana from an essay in De Quincey's Suspiria De Profundis. If you just ignore that Levana isn't actually a witch but a goddess and wasn't invented by De Quincey, you'll be as surprised as I was by the realization that someone working on the script for this one might have read the book the film's talking about (and, going by the inclusion of an actual quote from Poe, even more than just a single book; Italy sure ain't Hollywood). You can also be sure someone had seen Suspiria, what with parts of that movie's theme playing on the soundtrack whenever someone mentions it or De Quincey's book.

Anyway, Marc plans on giving Levana's role in his planned movie to his wife Anne (Florence Guerin), a big horror star right now playing in an adaptation of Poe's The Black Cat (this, like everything else, is not going to be important later on). Unfortunately, Levana is real and disagrees with Marc's casting decisions, so she begins to threaten Anne, first by going all green and red light on the couple's house, then by jumping out of a mirror and vomiting green goo in Anne's face, exploding the fridge, materializing a non-threatening fridge repairman and a slightly more threatening pale teenager. She also seems to induce random dream sequences, although - given how the film is structured - I'm at a loss to decide if any given scene is supposed to be a dream sequence.

Levana has plans for Anne's and Marc's baby, too, it seems. Something about possessing it and the end of the world. I think. That might just be a fake plan, though. Or not. Other stuff happens. Caroline Munro in her "big hair, unwilling to act, keep me away from the tanning bed, please" phase plays an actress sleeping with the film's scriptwriter who wants Anne's role. Cozzi lets the movie's camera leer on her legs so often even I'm getting uncomfortable with it. Brett Halsey appears as a producer sitting in a wheel chair, glaring angrily and demanding TOTAL COMMITMENT. Anne talks to the fairy girl that lives in her TV (or in her head; matters are confused, and so am I). Hearts explode. Cartoon lightning is shot from hands. Even weirder shit happens. Shots of something that might be a mouldering plastic doll appear. There's some sort of plot twist about mutants as not seen in the X-Men. And of course, any horror film containing a baby must end with the classic "baby with glowing eyes" shot.

Usually, when I sit down to watch a film directed by Luigi Cozzi, I expect one part shoddy directing and one part refined boredom, so the full-grown, random what-the-hell-is-this-ness of Il Gatto Negro (or whatever the film's title is supposed to be) hit me as a complete surprise. Starting with the insanely ambitious ploy to rip-off Argento's Suspiria and his and Lamberto Bava's Demoni and Poe's Black Cat in a single film without said film having anything to do with its supposed predecessors apart from stealing parts of their soundtracks, Cozzi uses every technique from the handbook  of Italian exploitation cinema: there's the crude yet hilarious dialogue, acting perpetually swinging between sleepwalking and hysteria, the chopped editing that again and again does counterintuitive stuff like intercutting random (and I mean random) shots of houses while people inside those houses are having a conversation for no good reason at all, the special effects of the rubbery yet gooey kind, and plotting so wavering and random one can't help but imagine someone playing scene roulette. Or, as it might be, the film being completely improvised. Obviously, on any sane level, Demons 6 is an abomination barely fit to even be called a feature film. On a less sane level, it's perhaps one of the most successful films I've ever had the honour to experience.

What makes De Profundis such a great success - at least, if you measure a movie's success by the number of times it drives you into fits of giggling and the shouting of "what the fuck!?" - I might also have thought of throwing food at the screen just for the love of it - is how completely it gives itself over to being a structureless mess consisting of one weird-out moment after the other. There's not a single second in the film's running time to suggest Cozzi was trying to tell a story, or make what boring people call "a proper movie", not even an illogical or boring one. Instead, narrative logic gives way to whatever the hell Cozzi ate when he wrote the script (apple pie?). Coherence has left the building long ago; viewers are left in a state of confusion and with a blissed-out feeling only a very few films can produce.


And here I always thought Luigi Cozzi was a bit of a bore; in truth, all the boredom of his other movies was only proof of a director saving his true powers for a magnum opus that would show humanity a) the blind idiot god at the centre of the universe b) what a man can create when he just lets go of all his mental faculties c) the last fanfare for the era of Italian movies that were more dream-like than dreams themselves.

On WTF: Il Gatto Nero/Demons 6/De Profundis (1989? 1991?)

Did you know that La Terza Madre isn't the first third part of Dario Argento's Mothers Trilogy? And that the first third part was directed by Luigi Cozzi and is also a Poe adaptation and the sixth part of the Demons movies? And would you expect that not to be the most insane aspect of the resulting movie? Read my madly excited rambles about the film on WTF-Film!

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