director: Alberto Cavallone
starring: Ivano Staccioli · Maria Pia Luzi (as Jane Auril) ·
Kara Donati · Andrea Truglio · Debebe Eshepetu
Insane
cinema from Alberto-Cavallone, the filmmaker who spent a lifetime making
a parade of outrageous, erratic movie for two decades (until his collapse
in 1984). This one opens with the discovery of a woman, shot to death
in an Ethiopian hotel room. It turns out that she is actually
a male, and an inquest begins to unravel an ugly mystery. The result
is an uneasy mix of exploitation and pseudo-psychologically hijinks
set in a savage African landscape. The twirling story begins with a
soldier at a roadside checkpoint mutilating a woman's breasts before
shooting her in the groin with a machine gun. Professor Philip Stone
had been stopped and ignores the brutal attack. He is on his way to
a rendezvous with a woman who was once his male secretary Frank. Professor
Stone is also married to Jeanne (played by Maria Pia Luzi, Cavallone's
real life wife) but she is equally obsessed with gender/bender Frank
while conducting a masochistic romance with her husband. Meanwhile,
the boy's sister arranges for him to be raped by a gang of thugs after
her mom disowns him.
Director
Cavallone allows a racist tone to surface in this film. One of the characters
says: "Africa's black because it's dirty" and - later - another
character muses that a breast-feeding native mom is providing cappuccino
to her baby. It's also obvious through the various plot-twists that
Alberto Cavallone has little empathy for the homosexual cause here.
He was later quoted as saying that if he had known Ivano Staccioli was
homosexual beforehand, he never would have used him. Mr Staccioli had
a long career in genre movies (usually as the villain), starring in
100 films since the early '60s. Initially, he made peplums (WAR
OF THE ZOMBIES) and then a variety of Spaghetti Westerns under
the pseudonym John Hester, some quality horror projects including DEVIL
WALKS AT MIDNIGHTand the jungle actioner SAMOA
QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE. However, he is best known for his outrageous
SS Commandant roles in PRIVATE
HOUSE OF THE SS and WOMENS'
CAMP 119. Ivano Staccioli died from lung cancer, July 1995,
at age 68.
An
Italian film with English subtitles; widescreen format (small CSC Anti-Copy
logo, bottom right throughout), uncut version (89 min.), DVD encoded for
ALL REGION NTSC, playable on any American machine.
Extras include
selected trailers.
Nudity/Sexual
Brutality/Homosexuality/Transsexual Theme/Racism/Graphic Violence
For Mature Audiences
