Horror salad. Synopsis: Pianist Sibylla hears a mysterious voice saying that her life is about to change, which will “fuse the flames of two candles together.” Soon a gust of wind in her window brings an invitation to the exhibition of the artist Saint-Simon. At the vernissage, she learns that she is an absolute double of the painter’s wife Christina, who died a year ago. On the way back, Sybilla’s car breaks down in the fog, and she accepts Saint-Simon’s invitation to stay in the old castle, where the artist lives together with the gloomy servant Herman. At night, while in her room, she hears cries for help. Tormented by curiosity, she goes to see what is happening, and makes a terrible discovery.
Sergio Bergonzelli is one of those directors who quietly and discreetly worked in the field of operational cinema, picking up popular themes and trying to squeeze at least a penny out of them without investing a penny. He shot extremely cheap films, as a rule, on his own scripts, without trying to give them at least a bit of individuality (as did Jesus Franco and Jean Rollin), luring the viewer with a lot of nudity, violence and everything else, remaining, however, in the mainstream and never swimming into forbidden territory that could reduce his already not too large audience.
So slowly strolling through the territory of pirated cinema, western, eurospeech, erotic comedy and the like, Signor Bergonzelly suddenly found that the 80s are ending in the courtyard, horror has gained popularity among the public, which are vengeanced by his more masterful colleagues in the workshop of Lenzi, Fulci and Avati, and he remains on the sidelines with his rather outdated exploits. It was necessary to urgently correct the situation, and Bergonzelly, convulsively pushing the slender ranks of his countrymen-horrormakers, appears on the market with his own craft product, without deluding the slylyly called “Bloody Madness”.
Since the genre of horror films by that time had already grown extensively and gave numerous sprouts in the form of subgenres, each of which had its own audience, the Italian treshmaker decided not to petty and beat the squares. Not trying to guess exactly where his efforts could give the maximum result, he, in no doubt, combined several directions of horror in his picture at once. His film in some moments is a Gothic story a-la “The Phantom of the Opera” by Gaston Leroux, in others – a splitter-punk in the spirit of Clive Barker, in the third – a Victorian thriller about the transfer of souls and the relationship of doubles, in the fourth.
Hell, he knows what else this hog can boast of! That’s just not a thoughtful and coherent plot, as well as not good acting work (here, however, not without a happy exception in the person of the legendary Gordon Mitchell). What can we say, if one of the roles Bergonzelly invited porn star Olinka Hardiman, desperately and unsuccessfully trying to follow the example of Brigitte Lae to move from adult films to the normal film industry.
The funny thing is that this movie, Bloody Madness, was not as bad as you might expect. Moreover, if the plot invented by Bergonzelly was in the hands of more talented (or just conscientious) filmmakers, then perhaps today this picture, and not the Seventh Gate of Hell or the Cathedral, was remembered as a cult Italian horror of the 80s. But what has grown has grown. Independently cope with all the bells and whistles of history and lead to a common denominator a hodgepodge of multi-genre ingredients, the director probably could not by definition. It just lacked talent and skill. If splatter-punk thanks to the work of Mitchell turned out to be more or less sane, then Gothic is unlikely to make impressionable ladies cry, and mysticism – anxiously beat the hearts of their gentlemen. The main character at the same time looks extremely asexual, although the director continues to insist on eroticism out of habit, and the artist Saint-Simon looks like an alcoholic who escaped from a mental hospital instead of demonic possession.
Add to this Bergonzelly’s unrestrained desire for “lakshari”: the characters drive a Ferrari, fly their own helicopters, live in an ancient castle, etc., and you will leave a very, very strange impression. In all this aristocratic bedlam with a refined pianist, aristocratic painter, a young millionaire and an aging porn star as one of the victims, only Gordon Mitchell remains an island of sanity. His Satanist cannibal Herman is a real lifeline that prevents him from drowning in the sea of Blood Madness. Oh, what would Hannibal Lecturer be like? At the end of his career, the actor became so used to the image of charismatic villains that it became extremely difficult to identify him with the numerous superheroes he played in his younger years. But thanks to Mitchell, all the inconsistencies of the plot and the grand pianos placed in the bushes acquire meaning and more or less coherent outlines, as much as possible in a frankly thrashy movie, the authors of which, moreover, are not at all interested in what and for whom they shoot.