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The cerebellum is Lucio Fulci's, the camera descends on the maestro's dome and dissolves from his feverish brainstorm of cinematic punishments ("hacked to death... drowned in boiling water... sawed in half") to the actual gray matter, which is here a pulsating red. (A kitty leaps in to feast greedily on it.) Cinecittà is the backdrop for the filming of a misogynistic cannibal opus, the director steps out for lunch only to be plagued by visions of the gore he's orchestrated. He takes a hatchet to cans of crimson paint at home and mistakes a German documentary crew for the Nazisploitation orgy he had been shooting, he can't turn on a faucet without precipitating images of dismemberment. "A kind of identity crisis." The psychiatrist (David L. Thompson) has clogged-id issues of his own and uses the hypnotized cinéaste on the divan to go on a merry slaying spree. Fulci's meta-splatter comedy is founded equally on sardonic censor-baiting ("Doesn't that stupid theory say that seeing violence onscreen provokes violence?") and the true confessions of a conflicted auteur ("If only I could find a reason in any of these stories..."). The zooms into his own face are like slaps as he mimes dismay at clips from his gruesome productions, a directness more striking than Fellini's. Still, his ultimate horror is losing control of the mise en scène—you get lost in the studio and end up on location, so says Powell's inspector in Peeping Tom. Very much an "autoportrait de décembre" (JLG/JLG), closer to Baudelaire's flowers (Paysage) than to Poe's felines. The joke told, Fulci sails away with babe by his side on a vessel named "Perversion," cf. Ferreri's Dillinger Is Dead. Ciao, critics. With Jeoffrey Kennedy, Malisa Longo, and Paola Cozzo.
--- Fernando F. Croce |