Hell of the Living Dead (1980)

This is one hell (no pun intended) of a strange movie, but it's actually even stranger that I never reviewed Bruno Mattei's masterpiece before here on Ninja Dixon. I might just have fooled myself over the years, thinking I sometime in the past took the time to write down a few wise words about Hell of the Living Dead. I first watched this at Katja and Linus place. I was young and handsome and Linus (rest in peace, buddy...) recommended me to watch his bootleg-tape of this one, second or third generation - so the quality it was crap. "It's way better than Dawn of the Dead" Linus told me. I didn't agree on that then and I'm not doing it now either, but it's a movie that's getting better and more absurd for each year and I've grown to love it like a mother loves her bastard retarded son.

A experiment gone wrong unleashes a deadly gas on the world... a gas the transforms dead bodies to the living dead! A SWAT team (dressed like the team in Dawn of the Dead) goes out on their own adventure during the zombie breakout and hooks up with some souls on the way. Surrounded by stock footage they continue on their way to their destiny...

Hell of the Living Dead is something unique, a movie so stupid - but yet heart-warming - that it's still the Mattei-flick with the highest EQ in his whole filmography. The sloppily written script by Claudio Fragasso is demented fun and it never lets down, even during the boring scenes - because when a scene is boring there's always a fucked-up line to make everyone happy again. One of the best things with it is the high quota of stock footage - and the jungles of New Guinea is filled with everything from African elephants, owls, monkeys and this, THE best stock footage material ever used in a movie, in slow motion of course:

Who shot this footage from the beginning? The one who gives the answers gets a kiss.

It's easy to make fun of Hell of the Living Dead, and yes: it's worth making fun of. But like most other movies by Mattei it's also packed with action, gore - just pure, clean good old-fashioned fun the Italian way. There's gore-galore (always more than I remember), an "original" score by Goblin (Maestro Mattei, to his death, claimed Goblin wrote the Dawn of the Dead score for this movie and not for... Dawn of the Dead - bless that crazy old man!) and acting like this:

"Can you... act a little bit more?"

Most of the story is a mix of Dawn of the Dead and everything else Mattei found at the local cinema at the time, which not is a bad thing. It's a good collection of random scenes of carnage and absurdity and a surprisingly huge amount of cynical humour. No one is safe here, NO one, and even if - for example - Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters is a heavier zombie film with an even darker ending it feels even more here how hopeless the situation is. Everyone is fucked and they know it.

The gore? Yeah, it's shocking and very cheap - often with slabs of meat put on top of the actors and extras and blue-faced zombies ripping the flesh apart. There's also head-crushings, nasty bites, lots of squibs, head-shots and entrail-ripping for the whole family - and of course the famous eye-gouging at the end. It looks okay for being a low budget Italian zombie film shot in Spain (doubling for New Guinea) and still packs a punch with nasty violence and bloodshed.

The only thing I actually don't like with this film is the footage from Thierry Zéno's Des morts (1979), the documentary about death that includes a lot of very gross stuff with rotten and swollen bodies - and some of the worst stuff is of course used in Hell of the Living Dead. I must admit I always fast forward during that sequence - which actually ends well, with a fun and corny zombie attack on a tribal village in a Spanish forest somewhere. That's good. That's fine. Makes me feel good.

Another thing that makes me feel good is why these three zombies wears green body stockings?

It's with a slight hesitation I now will say that Hell of the Living Dead is a masterpiece in its own little way, but it is. It's a trasherpiece and it's one helluva trasherpiece - but there together with Burial Ground and Zombie Holocaust.

Thanks Bruno. You always make my day a little bit happier. 

A treasure in my collection, a signed poster by Mattei - to Kit by the way, as in my dear friend Kit Gavin.

Snuff Trap (2003)

When I first heard of Bruno Mattei's "comeback" into the old style of exploitation, Snuff Trap (aka Snuff Killer) was the first production I heard about. But I stayed away from it through the years, mostly because it seemed like a normal soft-porn film and I'm not interested in that genre. Then Mattei started to make movies with cannibals, zombies, WIP and demons and suddenly I understood what he was doing: restarting the old tradition of true Italian exploitation. So my interested turned back to Snuff Trap and especially after I realized it was partly inspired my Joel Schumacher's underrated 8MM (starting Mr Hair himself, Nicolas Cage) and just wasn't another boring skin flick.

Carla Solaro (a veteran from several Tinto Brass productions) plays Michelle, a rich French woman living with a esteemed politician. She has a daughter from a previous relationship, Lauren (Federica Garuti, I think...) who one night disappears after living la dolce vita at a fancy night club. Michelle's husband does not want her to contact the police because his political ambitions and Michelle starts her own investigation and decides to go undercover in the seedy pornographic underworld to find the kidnappers - and it leads to a downward spiral of sex, torture and... snuff!

At the first glance Snuff Trap looks like a porn movie. The digital material is not processed in any special way and the pre-credits looks as cheap and primitive as they can get. The lighting is flat and the acting suffers from being dubbed by other actors. But Mattei gets things going, and even if it's a boring mission to rip-off 8MM with a DV camera and a very low budget, he's doing a very fine job with giving the movie a nice pace and even if it's filled with a lot of footage of people walking, it's not boring. It lives it's own life and handles that well.

The basic premise is taken from 8MM, but only one or two scenes are directly taken from that movie. The rest is an "original" story that works quite well, better than it should. While it's hard to say something about the actors because of the somewhat cartoonish dubbing, their presence is not bad and in true Mattei-tradition we're treated to some gratuitous over-acting in the best possible way. My favorite actors are Anita Auer as Dr. Hades and Albert Ruocco as Roy, her slightly effeminate assistant and manservant. Here we have some over-the-top performances in a good way, from people who probably knew that they had nothing to loose and that this was a good movie to have some fun with their characters. If was a filmmaker I would make a movie only with these two sleazing around in Hamburg!

One thing that surprised me with Snuff Trap was that it wasn't as graphic as I imagined beforehand! Sure, it has tons and tons of nudity (and even some real hardcore and nasty S/M on TV-monitors) and a few deaths, but it stays far away from the worst things. I can't say it's classy product (...and it would probably offend notorious Swedish morality-protector Janne Ahlgren a LOT) but it's enough serious to be seen as a "real" thriller and not a soft porn masterpiece.

Snuff Trap is another fun exploitation movie from the fantastic mind of the late master Bruno Mattei. Oh, I wish he could have stayed well and alive and worked for another lifetime. But shit happens, so even to filmmakers we hold dear...

SS Girls (1977)

This is how I see it: Gabriele Carrara woke up one ordinary boring morning. The phone rang and an intensive voice asked him if he was interested in doing a movie. "Yeah, fuck yeah!" screamed Gabriele to the unknown caller and asked for time and place for casting. No need for casting, the voice replied. We've seen you at the local theatre, and you fits perfect in this movie. Could this be a dream, could this really be happening? Our newly discovered movie star was happier than ever. He would show the world what a magnificent actor he was, finally!

A couple of weeks later and Gabriele was on location, a nice villa outside Rome. The script wasn't half bad, but he sensed that the director - a newbie named Bruno Mattei, an excellent editor but beginner as a director - didn't know what he was doing. Time for our hero's first big scene and Gabriele did, what he thought, a perfect take. But Mattei wanted "more", "bigger", "energy". So he did the scene again, this time with some extra "schwung". But that wasn't enough. "You have to act like this is your last day alive!", Bruno almost screamed at his actor. "Remember, your character is doomed and I want to see that in your performance!".

So Gabriele Carrara gave all he got, and the rest is history.

Basically a rip-off on Tinto Brass masterpiece Salon Kitty, but in a way it's maybe more entertaining, more shocking and more spectacular - but with a budget not even close to the catering budget on Tinto's movie. I don't know if this movie came first, or if Women's Camp 119 was Mattei's first big break into exploitation cinema, but SS Girls is almost a perfect nazisploitation movie, made by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

I mean, we real fans always knew that Mattei was a master. He was a talented director and a good storyteller, but with (often) trashy scripts and bargain bin actor ensembles (nothing bad with that, just a detail). Mattei fully understood the magic of exploitation, of making a quick buck. He understood that if he took the best from other movies, tossed in more sleaze and violence, and he would have a success. But he also realized that for an exploitation movie to sell, to be appreciated by the audience, it need to be told professionally and with a story people could follow - even if the story was stolen from a big budget Hollywood movie with aliens.

SS Girls is, in-between the sleaze and nudity, an almost dreamlike experience with a lot of fascinating and beautiful scenes. Most of the don't hang together, but each scene is like a provocative piece of sleazy art with more ambition than I think the ordinary eurocult-Joe on the screen could imagine. It runs for ninety minutes and it feels like, at the most, forty minutes of well-paced melodrama. So it's a good movie, really. If you don't agree with me, give it another shot and watch it from my viewpoint.

But the main reason for watching SS Girls is the presence of Gabriele Carrara, an actor who chews the scenery, spits it out and eats it again with some extra Italian cheese on the top. I think we all can agree that this is over-acting, pure classic over-acting done the correct way. Gabriele steals every scene he's in (and he's in most of them) and plays the character totally straight - but with some excessive acting as a bonus. He loves what he's doing and it shines through to us in the audience, and that's why Mattei have him on camera almost the whole movie - because the camera loves him and he loves the camera.

SS Girls is probably the best sleaze movie I've seen. It's also, so far, the only nazisplotation I liked to 100 percent. It's out now from Njuta Films and this is something you need to own and enjoy for the rest of your lives.

Ciao Bruno, the last zombies of Mattei

The death of Bruno Mattei was also the death of Italian exploitation. Many of our old favorites, the maestro’s of sleaze and mayhem are still alive, but retired or working with something else. But not good old Bruno! He died on the top, still churning out exploitative masterpieces, with cheap crews and cheap actors. Not cheap because there are bad, but because they had to be cheap to be able to work for Mattei and the company producing the movies, La Perla Nera. The budgets was low, around 50000 dollars per movie and the cast was made up by local talents like the cool Alvin Anson and Yvette Yzon (Pinoy actors obviously like alliteration) and ex-pats like legendary Jim Gaines, Mike Monty and others we’ve seen in tons of older Filipino action classics. I’m sure that Mattei knew what he was doing. There’s a reason for still using his old alias Vincent Dawn. He was making cheap exploitation, some people would even call it “crap”.

The thing is that it’s far from crap. It might be cheap and exploitative, but that do not mean its crap. Quite the opposite I would say. Making cheap movies are an artform by itself and Mattei surely was the master of this. Give 50000 bucks to Michael Bay and he wouldn’t even know how to film himself out of his VIP luxury trailer. Mattei used that budget carefully, and when he didn’t have the money he used an explosion or two from another bigger-budgeted movie. Sometime even more, as long it worked in his movie. In the last two movies he made he once again explored the zombie-myth, like he did in the excellent and bat-shit nuts Hell of the Living Dead in 1980.

Island of the Living Dead is more ambitious that it’s first given credit for. The story, while hardly original, still stands on its own legs with a few nods here and there to other movies. A team of treasure hunters are forced to go shore on a mysterious island. What they find there is a lot of zombies, old fuckers by the way – conquistadors, slaves and other relics from the past. At first they only find skeletons, but soon zombies and something I would like to call ghosts, show up and start to eat their way thru our team (Jim Gaines, Yvette Yzon, Alvin Anson, Gaetano Russo etc). Honestly, of the two later zombie-movies Mattei directed this is the weakest. It has a lot of good stuff, and the old-fashioned zombies are fun – but it really lacks a good pace and the gore and action is very low compared to what would come next. It also has a lot of very unintentional comedy, for example, did you know that fishing boats had their own self-destruction mechanism? Probably the funniest scene I’ve seen. But they needed it to make the story move along nicely, so why not?

In the sequel, oddly named Zombies: The Beginning, Yvette Yzon are back as the only survivor (which is a bit odd, because she actually becomes a zombie in the end of the first movie!). And here it becomes really interesting, because the “original story” by producer Giovanni Paolucci and script by Antonio Tentori, is only James Cameron’s Aliens but with the aliens changed to zombies! Yes, it’s almost scene for scene – but with some small changes. For example, here they skipped the always irritating finding little girl-storyline which I always felt stopped the action in Aliens – and instead of a big mother of an Alien they used a talking brain in the end! I like that. Somehow it seems the budget was slightly higher here, or they spent the money more wise. The gore and blood is a lot more with tons of exploding heads and very big and gory squibs. The zombies are plenty and aggressive and we’re also treated to a stock footage-werewolf/monkey/bigfoot/yeti-thingie that’s never explained. The end also gives us the creepiest thing I’ve seen in a long while: mutated zombie-children, almost buck naked with pingpong-eyes and very eerie choreographed slow-motion movements! This is disturbing, in a good way. I mean, wtf?

This was the perfect last movie for Mattei. He once show that he can tell a story like no one else, probably because he was best telling others stories than his own. And what better than just to steal ‘em and do it your own way? But I sense that if he didn't day, there would have been one final last chapter in his zombie-saga. So sad he never got a chance to finish it...

Island of the Living Dead is dedicated to Mike Monty and Zombies: The Beginning ends with touching video footage of a frail Bruno Mattei and the sign “Ciao Bruno…”.

Like I said so many times before, Bruno Mattei will be missed. A true talent, a true maverick.

The Tomb (2004)

Under the alias of David Hunt, Maestro Bruno Mattei gives us another of his crazy exploitation-movies which rips of everything that happens to be in his way. The Tomb is shot in the Philippines and Mexico and though the budget probably was lower than my yearly salary, they manage to make it looks quite good and at least gave the set designer some money to build a temple!

The movie starts with a human sacrifice, an ancient Maya-king wants to have eternal life or something... but in the last minute he has to sacrifice himself to be able to resurrect next time some one happens to walk by the temple and decides to stir up a mess there. Well, he had to wait one thousand year or something like that, until our team of stupid university students, led by Robert Madison (who kinda reminds me of Wings Hauser in some angles). These are a bunch of absurdly stupid people, and the lines they utter are so bad that it's impossible to understand how anyone could write them. But we don't watch a movie like The Tomb for the dialogue, but for the horror. It kinda works. It's still very, very, very, very, very silly - but it's fun to watch because of the cheap but impressive sets and jungle exteriors.

Mattei was a great craftsman and this movie is no exception. It's well-shot and Mattei tells the weak story like a pro. When he seem to miss footage, he (or his editor or producers) just steals some footage from Army of Darkness, some jungle movie and maybe The Mummy (the one with Brendan Fraser) too! It's not that much, and it's incorporate in the new footage quite well - but we, as the movie experts we are - will recognize every single stolen frame. The temple is masonit and plastic, but has that wonderful b-movie quality that I prefer than no temple at all. There's a big sacrifical hall, some tombs and corridors - and of course everything falls apart in the end, just like in a good old Indiana Jones-movie.

Most of the actors are mediocre, David Brass who behaves like an old queer even when tries to hook up with young women, is good but has as usual very little to do. Robert Madison is quite okey, and so the bad guys - but the rest, the university students are among the worst actors I've seen in quite a long while. We have rolling eyes, facial expressions from hell, awkward movements and most of the time they just don't know what to do with their bodies when they are in front of the camera.

Gore and tits then? There's very little nudity, and the gore-quota was far less then I thought it would be. It's not completely dry, and has some nice after the fact-make up, a graphic slith throat, some decomposing bodies and a couple of very cool make-up effects when the bad guys are showing their demon-faces. But it should have been a lot more! Maybe they spent everything on the sets? I guess you can't afford everything all the time...

The official US DVD is easy and very cheap to find on ebay. I bought mine for one dollar and of course it's worth that for us Matteiophiles. It's also in widescreen and good quality.

The Jail: The Women's Hell (2006)

It's been three years since Bruno Mattei left us to go to that hell of the living dead where we all long to be after death. And yes, I miss him and if you don't, I will force you to miss him. There was a lot of love for him today at Facebook-discussion, and here's some the things written about him: "Whatever crap the writers gave him, he still shot it like a professional", "He did anything they threw at him and never was ashamed of it", "Regarding Mattei, he makes fun, silly, and entertaining movies. I'll take that over some dogcrap like JUNO any day of the week", "He was the last of the mohicans! He was like a punk who wouldn't accept it when everyone told him the movement was over" and so on...So what suits this evening better than write a few words about The Jail: The Women's Hell?

Yvette Yzon plays some chick being imprisoned in women's jail out in the jungle. It's run by an evil lesbian and her small army of rape-happy male guards and also a bunch of sadistic hose-waving female guards. The usual staff ya know. Yvette gets to know how the prison is run, and decided to escape together with some of her newfound friends there. But what they don't know is that the prison director has planned something very special for them...

There's really not much to tell about the story. It has a lot of sleaze and nudity, rape and corny dialogue. Like all WIP-movies. We get to know characters that dies terrible deaths, and also some very juicy and fleshy flashbacks from a nightclub. So from that point of view it's a quite crappy movie - BUT, remember. This is Mattei directing and he does it with such excellence that you soon forget the retared screenplay. It's shot with digital cameras, and I was afraid it would look like porn - but it don't. The photography looks very good, and the atmospheric locations helps a lot. Mattei keeps up the energy through the whole movie and never forgets that a movie like this never becomes worth watching if it's not entertaining. That's why there's something happening all the time, from rapes and torture, to gore and shoot-outs. And in between entertaining dialogue and (actually) some nice performances.

Yvette Yzon works fine as the hero and has the charisma to carry a movie. Around her is a couple of nice performances, especially the older woman that becomes her friend in the prison and b-movie veterans like Jim Gaines, Mike Monty (in a wonderful cameo) and David Brass makes their characters fun and interesting. It's just a darn good modern exploitation movie that is proud over it's heritage and is not ashamed of being sleazy, violent and crazy.

Violent? Yes, because Mattei and his crew gives us a finale which has some very brutal gore effects. Maybe a bit primitive, but old-school and damn gory. Cut off breast, knife up the... yeah, you know, big bloody squibs, stabbings, decapitation and other blood-spurting surprises. It's the cherry on the cake, one final chance to give the genre-audience value for it's money. And sure, Mattei knows his work and gives us one of his most solid movies in many, many years.

Mattei seemed to get busier and busier for each year. Maybe he felt that his time was running out and he wanted to film and film and film and film, just to leave even more classics behind him. I'm very grateful for this productivity, because now I have tons of movies to find and watch, and everything will feel like the golden exploitation era of Italy and the Philippines! Life can't get better than that!