delirium tremens Herbert Lutak is a two-faced man, a master of masks and mimicry, for the big world he is an attractive police psychologist, and for the world of a small, confined within the slums and the most fervent, fetid and dangerous places, the city of Italian - he is an insidious serial killer who regularly sends the Second Rome - The World of Death of young sexy girls who do not mind dusting off their hot and fiery bodies. Long before cute Dexter appeared in the Miami neighborhood with his correct code, Signor Lutak lived the double dishonest life of a cop by day and a violent maniac by wet dark nights. But not all the cat carnival, and the executioner gallows, and our home-grown Chikatilo suddenly appeared even more depraved competitor.
In the Italian cinema of the 60s and 70s of the twentieth century, recreated by the demiurges of neorealism, there were only three truly famous directors who put in their creations of different genres and forms of author’s self-expression carnal in opposition to spiritual, and perversion over progressiveness. They were the triple P, that is, Pierre Paolo Pasolini, who gave a tangible creative impetus to Bertolucci and Breuille, and as less well-known to the general public (especially today), who did not join anyone and from anyone who did not spun off, the authors “in themselves”. Alberto Cavallone and Renato Polzelli, who succeeded in the field of sculpting extreme and underground cinema, in which these directors both reinvented and re-imagine many familiar genres, growing on a very standardized cinematic skeleton the flesh of radicalism and uncompromising, sometimes at the expense of quality, but for the sake of the author’s desire for shock and chic. Quite according to the precepts of the ever-memorable Elder Herostratus.
The picture, thanks to which Renato Polzelli reopened to the audience after his most famous vampire horror of 1960, “Vampire’s Beloved”, was probably one of the bloodiest and electrified by perverse eroticism of the Jallo in the entire history of this genre – the film “Hot” in 1972, which only at first glance seems very typical and even archetypal creation, in which everything is predictable from beginning to end. Reading faithfully and faithfully the laws of the first virginity and the second freshness of the laws of the yellow-and-glass genre, in which there should be a lot of sex and even more murders, cheerful and bloody, intriguing no less than the matron of clients in an expensive brothel, exposing the white bodies of the girls of the most difficult and oldest profession in the world after the Partigenosse of propaganda, and hiding black cash in the same lace of the forbidden variety, Polzelli nevertheless prefers to put the audience in the most uncomfortable poses and inhuman positions, creating in his tape a dramatic conflict between the evil and the big evil. Polzelli is not looking for easy ways, does not want to follow all the traditions of the giallo without exception, since he is interested with medical meticulousness in the nature of the monster, and in this case - two monsters for whom killing a person is like sniffing coke, having enjoyed the act itself, without repenting. Polzelli explores in his picture the nature of insanity, pushing an ordinary at first glance inhabitant of the stone jungle to unthinkable and inexplicable cruelties, falling ill instantly, but in fact for a very long time and up to the development of pathology, an incurable fever of violence that intoxicates and drives mad.
Confusing all the stained cards of the traditional detective with unconventional surrealism and ditional hypernaturalism, Polzelli in the “Horrible” achieves that the viewer begins to empathize with Lutaka in his sports competition on the “weak”, consisting in who will pull more on the guts of virgins, and gradually replaces reality with a dream, and the truth, no matter how bitter, monstrous and insignificant, is fiction. In the end, the final twist seems no more than a homage to the genre than a monolith of the author’s thought that governs with Duce’s authoritarianism the whole structure of the picture, in which any question seems unanswered and any answer is deceptive. The fever devours the flesh and destroys the soul, small details acquire high importance. The masks are torn off, but there is no face, because the true Evil is faceless and many-faced, and the incurable sinister disease of the wounded soul is transmitted by genes. Father to son, mother to daughter.