Page 120 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

C H A P T E R 8
M A S O C H I S T I C C I N E S E X U A L I T Y : T H E M A N Y D E A T H S O F
GIOVANNI L O M B A R D O R A D I C E

Patricia MacCormack

Giovanni Lombardo Radice is an Italian actor who appeared in many low-budget Italian horror films
from 1980 to the early 1990s. To English-speaking audiences he is more familiar as 'John Morghen'.
Far from being typecast as villain or victim, Radices characters in these films ranged from the
imbecille to the ecclesiastic. He began his film career in Ruggero Deodato's La Casa Sperduta nel Parco
(The House at the Edge of the Park, 1980), playing a mildly retarded outsider assisting David Hess'
brutal Alex in tormenting and torturing Italian bourgeois youths. He appears in the films of many
Italian horror greats - as the coke-snorting sadistic Mike in Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox (1980)
and the crazed but sympathetic cannibal Vietnam vet Charles Bukowski (!) in Antonio Margheriti's
Apocalypse Domani (CannibalApocalypse, 1980). He is a village idiot scapegoat in Sergio Martino's //
Mistero Degli Etruschi (Murders in the Etruscan Cemetery, 1982). Radice appears in the first three of
Michele Soavi's films; as gay ballet dancer Brett in Deliria (1986), as a priest in La Chiesa (The Church,
1988) and a suicidal cult member in La Setta (The Sect, 1990). He is what can only be described as

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