Delirium (1987)
This is another one of those giallo movies from Italy. My Italian is about as rusty as my recall of this movie, but roughly translated, giallo means "Italian slasher movie with noxiously bad heavy metal music substituting for suspense." This time it's directed by Lamberto Bava (Demons, A Blade In The Dark) and if this film is any indication, he managed to inherit only his last name from his famous father.
This stalk and slash flick stars a woman that some genius dubbed the "Dolly Parton of Italy." Having seen some of Straight Talk, I can assure each and every one of you that the woman in this movie (Serena Grandi ) is just like an Italian Dolly Parton because she can't act either. During the course of the in-depth ten minute interview with Lamberto on this disc, he readily admits that she wasn't the seasoned actress of say co-star Daria Nicolodi, but I think any of us that saw her performance in the lingerie-clad "my brother is trying to rape me scene" will tell you that she more than filled the requirements of that particular sequence. (I am not going to be making any lame comments about her brassiere getting an award for "best supporting of an actress.")
Serena plays Gioia, the well-endowed owner of classy men's magazine Pussycat. If there is any doubt as to where the focus of this movie is going to be, it's put to rest when the opening credits play over a series of topless photos of the star! Before becoming a female Larry Flynt, Serena was part of the meat market, a centerfold who used to model while her brother, Tony, played her agent/pimp. She met and married some rich fellow who died tragically in one of those speedboat accidents that rich dummies with young, sexy wives always seem to be having and somehow she ends up owning Pussycat.
Since this is 1987 and way before the Internet killed the skin mag industry, this Pussycat magazine is quite popular with rich broads because Serena has a competitor that wants to purchase it from her. There is some type of past with these two and I guess that Serena worked for her once before as a model because this woman drops all these "I made you" and "If it wasn't for me you'd be in bad Italian horror movies or a hooker or something" takes on her and demands that Serena sell her the magazine.
The old hag that wants to buy the Pussycat is just one of many potential killers in the film. There's Gioia's brother, Tony. There's the photographer named Mark. There's this crippled pervert neighbor. There's also the no-account boyfriend of Gioia's named Alex. George Eastman (2019: After The Fall Of New York, The New Barbarians) plays him and his character is some type of actor that appears in movies about as bad as the one that George is appearing in right now.
Okay, now that we have all our suspects lined up, we need to start killing topless models. Lamberto likes to think that he was doing something different with this movie because we see things with the killer's mind whenever the killer is stalking some Pussycat model. This means that the lighting turns to some funky color and that the head of the woman he's after turns into some type of monster head. One time it was a woman with one gigantic eye attached to her face and another time he saw the woman as having the head of fly.
There's never any real significance attached to the fact that the killer sees these women as different than they truly are and it doesn't happen often enough to be integral to the plot. Lamberto would just like to write it off to the fact that the killer is crazy, but it smacks of a just being a stunt for stunt's sake. If you're trying to say that this guy has dehumanized them in his mind and that's why he can kill them or that his involvement in the pornography biz has warped his view of women, that might provide some interesting motivation and round out his character, but none of that is ever addressed. In fact when the killer reveals himself and his motivations to Gioia, it's all rather lame and nonsensical stuff that wasn't set up terribly well earlier in the film.
The first girl gets killed with a pitchfork and dumped in Gioia's pool. The crippled neighbor boy sees some of this and calls Gioia on the phone to let her know that dang model has gone and crapped up her big fancy pool. He tells her this and says the killer had blonde hair. Usually, you would believe a crippled boy when he tells you something like this, but she doesn't!
Why? Maybe because this crippled boy spends most of his time spying on Gioia and calling her up and saying crude and vulgar things to her. We also learn that this kid isn't really crippled but that it is all in his mind. This has nothing to do with the plot and he's still cruising around in his wheelchair at the end of the movie so I'm not sure if it was mentioned to throw suspicion on him or what.
Later at the Pussycat offices, they get a picture in the mail of a dead model posed in front of a blown up picture of Gioia. Once the news gets out that the centerfold is dead, sales of that issue shoot right up and Gioia's assistant Evelyn orders that they go back to press for another printing to meet demand. Daria Nicolodi plays Evelyn and from her ugly blonde hairdo, you suspect that she's either a lesbian or the killer. After all, when the police showed up and said that the killer had blonde hair, she made a face like, "I hope they don't notice my bad blonde hairdo, they'll think I'm either a lesbian or the killer."
Soon another model turns up dead and she is also posed in front of a blown up photo of Gioia. Could the killer be the weirdo photographer? He knows how to take pictures you know. Plus the police break into his studio and find a big blown up photo of Gioia. The police immediately phone Gioia with the good news that it is her photographer that is killing off all the models and not to let him in if he shows up to kill her. As soon as she hangs up, there's a banging at the door and someone is demanding to be let in! Is it the photographer? The killer? The crippled pervert wanting his wheelchair tires rotated?
This movie is about as thin as the flimsy dresses that Gioia lounges around her house in. As far as giallos go it doesn't manage to accomplish anything but provide a vehicle for Lamberto to show that he has mastered virtually none of his father's technique. Inexplicably, in his interview, Lamberto brags that the soundtrack for the movie was one of the first true stereo soundtracks in an Italian movie. Oh, so that's why the music sounded so bad.
Nothing goes on here in this movie other than some models getting killed. When Lamberto points out that having the murder victims have insect heads on is one of the big attributes of the movie (along with Serena's big attributes of course), it really puts in perspective how little this film has going for it. The movie also fails to muster up much in the way of scares. People we don't know or care about are killed as distracting guitar riffs are playing and there isn't any imaginatively staged violence that you would find in something like in Dario Argento's Deep Red. Perhaps understandably, Lamberto would drift into directing four straight TV movies following this project.