A Long Line of Crosses: Sergio Garrone's HANGING FOR DJANGO

While he never gained the notoriety of many of his peers, director Sergio Garrone carved out a most interesting place in Italian Cinema history with just over a dozen films that spanned the late part of the sixties up into the early eighties.  A more prolific writer than director, Garrone's career behind the camera didn't begin until he was already in his forties.  He established himself, almost immediately, as both a filmmaker to watch and as a unapologetic trend-hopper in 1966 with his directorial debut, the Italian Western "Se vuoi vivere... spara" (If You Want to Live...Shoot). 

From the get-go, Garrone's films had an strangely surreal and oddly oppressive feel about them.  His filmmaking touches were wonderfully rough around the edges but there were striking signs of finesse and style.  In his best films, such as 1969's "Django il bastardo" (Django the Bastard), 1974's "Le amanti del mostro" (Lover of the Monster) and his infamous S.S. Camp movies of the late seventies, Garrone created  frenzied hallucinatory works that still sets him apart from more recognizable genre giants.  Simultaneously jarring and oddly poetic, Garrone's best moments behind the camera had an urgency that stood with some of the finest Italian exploitation works of the seventies.  One of Garrone's key, if little-seen works, 1969's Una lunga fila di croci (Hanging for Django) is getting ready to make its Blu-Ray premiere here in the states via a fine edition from Raro Video and Kino Lorber. 
Operating as both a seriously sympathetic portrait to the plight of Mexican Immigrants in the old west as well as a deliriously violent exploitation picture with an absolutely dizzying number of gunfights throughout, Hanging for Django is one of Sergio Garrone's more striking and, relatively speaking, sedate works.  While not as nightmarish as the more well-known Django the Bastard, nor as off the chain as his later Naziploitation films, Hanging for Django still casts its own very distinctive spell.  Featuring a number of beloved genre icons, including Anthony Steffen, Nicoletta Machiavelli, Mariangela Giordano and a terrific William Berger (who delivers one of his best screen-performances as a bounty hunter preacher named Murdoch) Hanging for Django might not stand with the best European Westerns ever made but it has a number of great moments that will surely delight fans of the genre. 
While the cast alone would have assured that Hanging for Django was a fully-loaded production the real stars of the show are editors Cesare Bianchini and Marcello Malvestito, whose superlative cutting work here is unbelievably creative and consistently surprising.  The duo's wildly audacious editing services Garrone's off-kilter, and often unexpected, angles and framing incredibly well.  Hanging for Django suffers at times, due to a rather pedestrian script from Garrone (centered an admittedly intriguing premise) and a clearly lower than needed budget that hampers a number of interior sequences, but it is a good film and its return is very welcome. 
Bianchini and Malvestito aren't the only great behind the scenes artistic duo fuelling Hanging for Django as strong words of praise must go to cinematographer Franco Villa (who would shoot a number of the seventies great Italian genre films) and the legendary Aristide Massaccesi (Joe D'Amato) whose work here as a camera operator is extraordinarily ballsy (check the incredible mid-film gunfight where D'Amato expertly (and literally) flips the camera to match the action creating one of the most exhilarating moments I have seen in some time. 
Hanging for Django is ultimately a good film made up of a number of truly great moments (Berger's eerie introduction is particularly mesmerizing) but it never quite reaches the excellence of the finest European westerns of the period.  The pros far outweigh the cons though and I would recommend it without reservation to even casual fans of the genre.
Raro's new Blu-ray is absolutely beautiful.  The print is immaculate and both the English Dub and Italian language track are wonderfully preserved and presented.  The excellent quality of the disc perhaps, at times, makes the films low-budget a bit more transparent than it needs to be but Raro and Kino have done an impressive job here.  Two extras are available with the first being a small unattributed booklet and the second being a featurette entitled "Bounty Killer for a Massacre", which is in reality a 2007 fifteen minute chat with author and film historian Manlio Gomarasca.  The disc will be released later this month and can be ordered at the links above, at Amazon or at any number of your preferred retailers. 

-Jeremy Richey, 2013-

The Moseby Confidential Files (Laura Gemser in the Seventies) Eva nera (1976)

A quick glance at the cast and crew of the 1976 Italian production Eva nera would probably send even the most jaded cult film lover into a bit of a frenzy. The cast, which features the inspired pairing of Jack Palance and Laura Gemser, would probably be enough to do the trick, but when you factor in the fact that it was directed by Joe D'Amato, edited by Bruno Mattei and features a score from Piero Umiliani then Eva nera would fall into the category of must see for most exploitation film lovers. If the final film isn't the crazed powerhouse of cinematic mayhem one might hope for it is a very entertaining, if surprisingly subdued film, from the unstoppable team of D'Amato and Gemser and is deserving of better treatment than it has gotten on Region 1 Disc so far (as it is only available on a disappointing full-frame DVD under the title Black Cobra Woman).

Written and photographed by D'Amato, Eva nera focuses on an eccentric and rather bored wealthy man named Judas, living in Homg Kong, who dabbles in womanizing and snake collecting. Judas thinks he finds shangra la when he meets an impossibly beautiful young dancer named Eva, who happens to have an act featuring the slithering creatures he is so obsessed by.










Eva nera was the final of three whopping features D'Amato released in 1976, following Vow of Chasity and the stunning Emanuelle in Bangkok, an powerful entry in the Black Emanuelle saga starring the Eva nera players Gemser and Gabriele Tinti. While it isn't the dizzying cinematic experience that Emanuelle in Bangkok, or especially the follow-up Emanuelle in America, is Eva nera has its pleasures even though it finally feels a little too laid-back for its own good. D'Amato would have never been what one would refer to as a subtle filmmaker, but Eva nera feels positively tame when compared with the other films the great man was making in this period.









The chief pleasures of Eva nera are easy to spot. D'Amato's picturesque photography is typically striking and his camera gazes at Gemser, who was in her absolute prime in 1976, like a lover attempting to come to terms with what has become an obsession. The dance sequences are both erotic and playful and Umiliani's score keeps the material incredibly engaging, even during the moments where D'Amato's direction feels a bit lethargic (one imagines a certain creative and physical exhaustion might have been setting it.








Perhaps the biggest strike against Eva nera is the surprisingly muted performance delivered by Palance, who looks a little too bored at various points throughout the film. Watching Eva nera today, one wishes Palance would have perhaps had a little more fun with the material but more often than not he is overshadowed by both Genser and Tinti.








Eva nera is ultimately not among the essential D'Amato-Gemser collaborations but its charms finally outweighs its flaws and I would love to see a better quality-copy hit a Region 1 release on par with Severin's remarkable Black Emanuelle collections.

After.Life

Logic is one of fantastique cinema's greatest enemies, but for whatever reason that’s something that the majority of English language horror films can’t grasp. Take for example the visually striking and at times haunting After.Life, a film totally derailed by its tired attempt to explain away all of its built-in inconsistencies with a ‘logical’ conclusion. Hell, the DVD even has a featurette where director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo attempts to explain all the clues in the film to help her audience ‘understand’ what the film was about. Here are some suggestions for English Language Horror film directors…forget logic, embrace ambiguity, and forget attempting to explain everything and tying up all your loose ends. Let your film exist on its own deranged and haunted plateau and don’t let common sense come into play. Let us get lost in the supernatural world you have built up for us and don’t let us wake up from the nightmare until the end credits begin to role.
After.life is especially frustrating as it is, at times, so in line with classic Italian works like Joe D’Amato’s Buio Omega, Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead and Michele Soavi’s Cemetary Man (not to mention older English language works that got it right like Carnival of Souls), but it ultimately turns into just another bland modern horror film spoiled by a final act that attempts to erase all of the mystery the film has tried so hard to build up. The great thing about those works by D’Amato, Fulci and Soavi is that they understood that they didn’t have to ground their imaginative films with reason. Those films forcefully ask from the first frame on that we, as an audience, abandon common sense and welcome the fact that we finally only get more questions than answers.
Director Wojtowicz-Vosloo seems aware of these past works, and she has a keen visual sense, but After.Life implodes in on itself by wanting to pander to an audience that needs a film to make sense. Had she gone full-force with this work it could have been a truly disturbing and surreal experience but, instead, it’s a depressing wreck of a film only salvaged by several memorable moments and a beautiful performance by Christina Ricci, who has become one of our great actors even though her films are rarely as good as she is.
I wanted very much to like After.Life and it gets so many things right, (Ricci’s performance, the score, the fall setting), that I am tempted to give it another chance eventually but the film’s inability to come to terms with its natural illogical state frustrated the hell out of me. I really don’t have much else to say about the film. I almost wish it hadn’t had moments that were so captivating so I could dismiss it outright. In fact, had After.Life been half as mesmerizing and brilliant as Christina Ricci’s performance then it would have been one of the best films of the year. Sadly, that’s not the case and Ricci (and horror fans) deserve much, much better.

Lady Grinning Soul: Joe D'Amato's Death Smiled at Murder (1973)

The career of Aristide Massaccesi (a.k.a Joe D'Amato) is in some ways one of the most disappointing in Italian film history. D'Amato was arguably one of the best cinematographers that came out of the golden age of Italian cinema in the fifties and sixties, so his eventual decision to finally just start churning out adult films for profit in the mid eighties made him in a way a near tragic character. Still, despite where his career ended up, D'Amato was clearly gifted and a handful of his films as a director show these gifts clearly. One of his best is his first foray into the horror genre, 1973's LA MORTE HA SORRISO ALL'ASSASSINO, or as it is more commonly known, Death Smiled at Murder.






Death Smiled at Murder is, in many ways, a total mess. Taken from a, nonsensical at best, script credited to D'Amato, Claudio Bernabei and Romano Scandariato, Death Smiled at Murder makes little to no sense, and D'Amato as a director seems at times downright confused about exactly what kind of film he is making. Still, despite its problems, Death Smiled at Murder is a totally captivating and haunting work. It is the kind of film that could have only come out of Italy in this period, and the problems with the story and tone of the film finally help give it a weird dislocated aura that becomes one of its saving graces.





D'Amato was already in his mid thirties when he directed his first horror film on a shoestring budget and tight schedule back in 1973. Tim Lucas points out in his recent Mario Bava book, ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, that D'Amato had started out as an assistant camera man with not only Mario, but also his father Eugenio Bava, and that Death Smiled at Murder was in many ways a tip of the hat to both of them.
D'Amato began getting regular work as a cinematographer, after working as a cameraman, throughout the late fifties and early sixties. Most of his early photography credits appear to be Spaghetti Westerns, but it was 1972's WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO SOLANGE that would truly mark him as a man with unique and striking eye (especially for horror). D'Amato would start shooting Death Smiled at Murder shortly after completing work on WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO SOLANGE. Dallamano's great giallo must have been fresh in D'Amato's mind when he wrote the story for his film, as they both center on the murder of a young girl.
Shooting on location on a beautiful old Italian estate, D'Amato and his crew assembled with one of the best casts he ever got on one of his films. Starring in the film is the lovely Ewa Aulin, a former Miss Sweden who is best known for her work in 1968's Terry Southern adaptation CANDY. Aulin is an interesting actress and despite appearing in only a handful of films she remains a genre favorite. She does fine work for D'Amato here, giving the most eerie and captivating performance of her career.






Joining Aulin is the striking Angela Bo, who only appeared in a handful of films herself, and Sergio Doria who had just appeared in Riccardo Freda's fierce IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE (1971). Appearing in smaller roles are three genre favorites; Luciano Rossi, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart and a reasonably calm Klaus Kinski as a doctor who makes house calls and then some.
D'Amato himself provides the film with its dreamlike photography, and pushing the film even further into the near surreal is the beautiful hypnotic score credited to Berto Pisano. The score is quite remarkable and it is, along with Aulin's performance and D'Amato's photography, the thing that is consistently great throughout the films brief running time. The three are so good in fact, that they make it seem easy to forgive the films numerous problems.






Death Smiled at Murder is a hugely important film in D'Amato's canon. Many of its main themes would pop up on later films of his including most notably his masterpiece, 1979's BUIO OMEGA, but perhaps more importantly it would introduce D'Amato as a director who liked to mix multiple genres together, like he was creating some sort of exotic stew with something in it to please everybody. D'Amato would improve on this kitchen sink technique and whereas Death Smiled at Murder just feels confused at times, later works like his BLACK EMANUELLE films and EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD would mix genres with much more ease. Perhaps those films aren't as ambitious as Death Smiled at Murder but D'Amato later became a smarter director than he was in 1973.





D'Amato himself seemed a bit confused as to what to make of the film. Tim Lucas points to a quote from that D'Amato gave to Peter Blumenstock where he calls the film his most personal, but he would be quoted in the book SPAGHETTI NIGHTMARES as saying it was 'pandering and mechanical'. Whatever his final thoughts were on the film, it remains one of the most frustratingly great works he ever committed to celluloid. It's a unfocused but poetic work, and its best moments show that Aristide Massaccesi was much more than just the 'businessman' he later referred to himself as.
The film would play briefly in the United States under the title DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER (which has a very different meaning than its better known title)and it is now out on a so-so Region 1 DVD. My copy is an import on the Italian Shock label and it features a nice widescreen presentation of the film, along with its trailer. Berto Pisano's achingly beautiful score is available on a cd with two of his other works, and it can be found through some of the better online vendors.




Aristide Massaccesi, or Joe D'Amato if you like, wouldn't direct another notable film until he met Laura Gemser in 1975 and they began their very memorable collaboration together. He would rack up well over 200 features before passing away in the early part of 1999. Despite a slightly notorious reputation, D'Amato seemed to be a very well spoken and nice gentleman whose biggest mistake seemed to be undervaluing himself. Death Smiled at Murder is one of the most memorable films he ever shot, and one worth seeking out. Despite its flaws, or in a way thanks to them, it is one of the most oddly poetic horror films to come out of Italy in the seventies.





***Edited from an earlier piece here.***