Mania (1974)

Directed by:

"Ralph Brown" (Renato Polselli)

By using radiation to target nervous systems, the intense Professor Brecht (Brad Euston) can stop a bee in mid-air, which somehow convinces him he can use it on all other living beings. He slaves away in his basement lab hoping to eventually use his invention to cure any illness in the human body. While he's preoccupied with that, his neglected wife Lisa (Eva Spadaro) has been keeping busy getting busy with Brecht's identical twin brother, Germano (also Euston). And she hasn't an ounce of guilt over it. In fact, she openly admits to getting off on other people's misery, pitting people against one another and even makes an aside that watching people die turns her on. What a charming lady she is!

While Lisa and Germano mess around on the patio, Erina the maid (Mirella Rossi) tries to stop Brecht from coming upstairs and seeing them. He repays her for her kindness by suffocating her with a plastic bag until she's spitting up blood. Though Erina survives, she's now been "reduced to a deaf and dumb mute" and proves to be dumb in more ways than one as she just continues to live with these nutbags! While Brecht feels a little guilty about attacking Erina he's completely indifferent to Lisa's affair, which infuriates her. To get back at him for his lack of outrage, she locks him in the lab when a fire breaks out. Germano manages to break inside but is only able to pull out his brother's burning corpse while he gets part of his face burnt off.

The above tale is told via flashback by a frantic, paranoid and constantly screaming Lisa, who's convinced her dead husband is still after her. Her new lover / fiancé, Lailo (Isarco Ravaioli), who was one of the husband's students, tries to talk sense into her but she's not having it. The two are pursued down a country road by a white car that appears to have no driver and tries to make them crash. They even find the car pulled off to the side at one point, go to investigate and find there's no one driving. It then suddenly starts up and tries to run them over. Lailo only seems mildly concerned and I'm not sure why he keeps letting Lisa drive either. She's hysterical, speeding and swerving all over the place to the point where she keeps running off the road, hitting guardrails and almost even sends them over a cliff. She never uses her fucking brakes and keeps shrieking the entire time. It's so damn irritating!

The two finally make it to a house where Lisa continues flipping her shit and then tries to strangle her live-in nurse Katia (Ivana Giordan) because she accepted a package someone left there (?!) Lisa is taken to see a psychiatrist (Max Dorian), who fails at his job when he doesn't immediately lock her up and throw away the key. Instead, he recommends she return to the villa where her husband died and is now entombed (in the basement!) to overcome her mental issues. Katia decides to accompany her unhinged pal there, presumably because she has a death wish. The fire-scarred Germano (who has a withered arm and is now in a wheelchair) and Erina (who runs around the grounds wearing nothing but a dress shirt) are still around. Lailo shows up but Lisa, wanting to overcome her fears all by herself, demands he leave. The two make an agreement: He'll go but she's to call him daily with updates.

Footprints appear and then disappear and then reappear again on the terrace. The phone stops working and then starts working again and then becomes electrified. The power goes out and comes back on randomly. Lisa has visions of a hanging corpse, a face in the fire, a laughing, gray-painted ghost face and a burnt hand reaching for her. No one else seems to be seeing what she is... at least not at first. Not only would Brecht's ghost have a bone to pick with her but so would Germano. He'd been her lover for three years before she split and now that he's disfigured she wants nothing to do with him. She also has it in the back of her mind that her nurse and fiancé are possibly conspiring against her. Or is she merely insane?

Thrown into the works are a maggoty corpse, a random electric eel attack (?!), a neck slashed with a broken bottle, a head bashed in with a candelabra, a hilariously cheap looking death trap that threatens to crush two of the women between a thin sheet of aluminum siding and Erina getting run over by the wheelchair. Twice. There's also a moronic twist at the end and, as per the director's usual, such sleazy accompaniments as a naked cat fight, mild lesbianism, whipping and one of the girls running around the entire time wearing an unbuttoned shirt but no pants, underwear or bra, which put this out of contention for a Best Costume Design Oscar nomination.

After its brief theatrical run in 1974, this disappeared for decades and wasn't even released on video in its home country. Many thought it was lost until a censored print (which is missing some of the more graphic sex scenes and runs about 82 minutes) turned up in 2007. Shame then that this is so tedious and mostly takes place at a single boring location. There are lots of zoom shots, eyeball close-ups and camera tilts, plus about a hundred cutaway shots to tall trees swaying in the breeze. The constant hysterics and bug-eyed overacting get to be a bit much and the characters are all extremely unlikable, especially the leading lady we have to deal with the entire time.

Polselli directed a number of other genre films like THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA (1960), The Monster of the Opera (1964), DELIRIUM (1972), The Truth According to Satan (1972), The Reincarnation of Isabel (1973) and House of Love... The Police Intervene (1978). His movies got progressively sleazier as he went along, culminating in him shooting hardcore films, including several bestiality pornos. Claudio Fragasso (Troll 2) was the assistant director.

★1/2

Shocking Dark (1989)

... aka: Alienators
... aka: Aliens 2
... aka: Contaminator
... aka: Shocking dark - Spectres à Venise (Shocking Dark – Specters of Venice)
... aka: Terminator II
... aka: Terminator 2
... aka: Terminator 2: Shocking Dark

Directed by:
"Vincent Dawn" (Bruno Mattei)

What's to be said about Bruno Mattei that hasn't already been said? The man was simply one of the biggest rip-off artists exploitation cinema has ever known but he did know how to sell a picture, even if that meant he had to plagiarize, confuse or deceive to do so. Mattei first entered the film industry through his father's editing studio, which kept him busy for a number of years. By the early 70s, he'd moved up to directing and proceeded to hop on every single hot exploitation trend that was going on at the time. He made Nazi camp movies, nunsploitation movies, women-in-prison movies, soft-core porn movies, hardcore porno movies, mondo movies, gore movies, zombie movies, monster movies, sword-and-sorcery movies, post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies, westerns... You name it and he probably did it, and he probably did it after someone else had done it first and had success with it. Among the more notable films that “inspired” his work over the years were The Magnificent Seven (1960), Jaws (1975), DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Caligula (1979), Mad Max (1979), Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Conan the Barbarian (1982), First Blood (1982) and the 1985 Rambo sequel, PREDATOR (1987) and RoboCop (1987). Not content to just borrow ideas from these films, Mattei often tried to emulate exact scenes, even going so far as to try to shoot and edit them exactly the same way.

I'm listing this Mattei film under the title Shocking Dark simply because that's the title I saw it under. This was actually first released as Terminator II in 1989, despite the fact it has nothing at all to do with James Cameron's 1984 hit. While Cameron was waiting for computer technology to catch up to his ideas before filming Terminator 2: Judgment Day (which would become the #1 box office draw of 1991), Mattei took it upon himself to make a sequel for him. That was then ushered out on video in a box ripping off the poster for The Terminator, right down to the half-robot face and the sunglasses. What makes this even more confusing is that the film itself is actually more of a rip-off of another of Cameron's big hits: ALIENS (1986). Because the filmmakers knew they'd get their pants sued off if they even attempted to try to pass this off as a Terminator sequel here in America, it was released pretty much everywhere else but here. Instead, it found its way onto the bootleg circuit under the name Aliens 2. In Japan it was titled Alienators, which then pretty much forced Fred Olen Ray's Alienator (1989) to become a bogus sequel (Alienators 2) itself.

Because of the high tide and “seaweed killing the oxygen in the waters,” the foundations of the city of Venice corrode and a toxic cloud settles overhead that kills off most forms of life there. (Huh?) By the year 2000, the last survivors are evacuated and Venice is marked a disaster area. A group of patrol guards and scientists stationed in a research facility and tunnels underneath the city end up getting slaughtered but a professor gets out a warning message to others first before all of the cameras go haywire. Colonel Pearson (Bruce McFarland) then has Captain Dalton Bond (Mark Steinborn) put together a mission called “Operation Delta Venice” to investigate matters. Tapped for the mission are scientist Dr. Sara Drumbull (Haven Tyler) and steel-jawed marine Samuel Fuller (Christopher Ahrens), who's now working as a representative for the Tubular Corporation; who built the tunnels in the first place in an effort to try to help purify the waters. Or so they say...

And what would a movie like this be without a bunch of brainless gung ho grunts to help up the corpse count? Here we get five noisy soldiers with big guns who make up something called the “Mega Force.” That consists of a foul-mouthed tough chick named Koster (Geretta Giancarlo from Demons), hot-blooded Latino Franzini (Italian actor “Tony” / Fausto Lombardi), dim bulb blonde surfer dude Caine (Cortland Reilly), “dumb fuck” Price (Richard Ross) and some guy named Kowalsky (Paul Norman Allen) because every movie like this needs someone named Kowalsky in it. We don't learn much about any of these people except they're all loud and Koster (“Sit on this grease ball!”) doesn't like the Latino (“Sit on this, black beauty!”). They're all given dumb lines like “Alright ya bunch of pussies, I'm back and I'm kicking ass!” and “Let's get out the KY so we can shaft 'em real good!” that manage to make them even more annoying than they already are. These characters are pretty much the equivalent of the “Space Marines” from Aliens, which is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the blatant plagiarism is concerned.

As the group venture on through the tunnels, they stumble upon deranged scientist Paul Drake (Clive Riche) who shoots at them and then lets out an ear-piercing scream (?) that disables the soldiers long enough to allow him to snatch Price and run away with him. Everyone splits up to find him and he's finally located wrapped in a cocoon-like substance (a la Aliens) before something bursts out of his chest (a la any Alien film). One of the men barely survives an attack by a big mutant creature and everyone continues on until their radar picks up something else moving. That turns out to be a dirty little girl dressed in rags named Newt. Uh, I mean Samantha (Dominica Coulson). Samantha bites a guy when he tries to reach for her (a la Aliens) and then runs off, but they manage to catch her and then take her with them. Making a pit stop at a lab, the hysterical girl is given a sedative so she can sleep. All of this manages to awaken the protective maternal instincts inside of Ripley. Uh, I mean Sara.

Snooping around the lab they discover the scientists were working on genetic mutation experiments and applying cybernetics to molecular biology, thus creating an enzyme similar to DNA in the process . The Tubular Corporation were also responsible for destroying Venice and then launching a profitable “reclaim” project... and they did it over a decade before Halliburton! Many scenes to follow are direct copies of how things went down in Aliens, with Sara having to save the shrieking little girl ("Saaaaaaaara!") numerous times, including during a scene where they become locked in a room with several of the creatures. The other two primary characters in Aliens; Bishop and Burke, have been combined here into one character, who's both a scumbag representative of the corporation and a “replicant” / robot, though this time the latter is pretty much exactly like Ash in the original ALIEN (1979). Scenes toward the end of the “immortal” robot pursuing Sara and Samantha are about all this really has in common with The Terminator.

Knowing Mattei is at the helm and he's working with a script from “Clayde Anderson” / Claudio (Troll 2) Fragasso, it should come as no surprise that this is bad. Really bad. Aside from ripping off other, much-better films at every turn (including stealing entire passages of dialogue), this suffers mostly from horrendous acting. It was common for Italian productions from this time to be shot in English and tap American actors to play the lead roles to broaden their distribution reach, but where on Earth did they find all of these untalented, inexperienced nobodies at? Was there some kind of third rate talent or modeling agency that hooked foreign producers up with these people at a bargain rate or something? Of course, if you're a struggling actor, who wouldn't want a part in this film? If it were me, I'd be running to every casting agent in Hollywood afterward saying “Hey, I just starred in Terminator 2... now hook me up!”

I'm sure having an Italian director and a mostly English-speaking cast is at least partially to blame but when nearly every single line of dialogue is awkward and stilted and lines are being flubbed you're left with the impression that no one really cared. The aforementioned Troll 2 became legendary for that same exact reason, only this isn't nearly as funny.

To be fair, this isn't the absolute worst thing you'll ever see. If you're able to find a decent quality print, the lighting (heavy on the blue-greens and reds) and photography are both decent enough. Though this appears to have been shot at some large power plant, the settings are reasonably efficient given the plot. There's no real gore and it's surprisingly tame violence-wise, though they were smart enough to keep the undoubtedly cheesy-looking man-in-a-suit creatures shrouded in enough darkness to where you could see them but not really make out many details. This also throws in a twist at the very end involving time travel, which is ridiculous and random but at least it's unexpected... unlike nearly every other aspect of the film.

★1/2