Page 121 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

a 'horsey type - patrician, gay and hedonistic - in Lamberto Bava's Body Puzzle (1991) and most
famously he appears as naive, neurotic pervert Bob in Lucio Fulci's Paura nel Citta del Morti Viventi
(City of the Living Dead, 1980).
This chapter is an experiment utilising the many varied deaths of Giovanni Lombardo Radice to
suggest viewing Italian horror film as a corporeal, non-dialectic experience - horrific but pleasurable
nonetheless. I have chosen Radice because his gender resists the arguments that need to be addressed in
thinking the aesthetics of violence when viewing women as victims, hence subvetting the conventional
positioning of the gaze as heterosexual and male. But his deaths are visually engaging in a way that goes
beyond the gender of the viewer, thus the practice of viewing itself, beyond chatacter identification is
what solicits desire, launching the viewer upon a line of flight through the intensity of the film. This
pleasure beyond the gender and sexuality of the viewer, the pleasure of cinema for cinema's sake, is a
mode of sexuality purely of and for cinematic images. I have termed this cinesexuality.

A RESUME OF DISGUST

Between 1980 and 1992 Radice appears in ten horror films and is violently killed in seven. He
is wounded seriously, mocked and beaten in one other. In Cannibal Ferox Radice gets his hand
chopped off, his penis and testicles cut away and eaten and the top of his skull sliced open and his
brains eaten. In Cannibal Apocalypse he gets a hole blown through his abdomen through which the
camera frames the action behind. He is burned alive in Murders in the Etruscan Cemetery, stabbed,
beaten, taunted and humiliated in The House at the Edge of the Park. In Deliria he is kidnapped,
bound, gagged and dismembered, he 'disappears' viscerally in The Church and in The Sect he shoots
himself fatally in the mouth.
Radices most famous extreme death occurs in City of the Living Dead, where he is the victim of a
long, delirious death scene. As the town scapegoat Radices character Bob is laid against an impossibly
enormous drill by the town's paternal figure Mr Ross (Venantino Venantini). The camera oscillates
between closing-up on Radices terrified face and the oncoming drill for a painfully extended period
of time. Against all expectation the camera does not turn away at the point whete it is expected to.
Instead, we see in loving close-up the drill bit enter, traverse and exit Radices head, followed by a
frame of his head pierced with the still rotating drill. This image achieves its intensity through the
force of the action, the tension of temple against rotating tip, the polyphony of screeching drill and
cries, the glisten of rolling eye and the merging of audience conviction that the drill will not (cannot)
go in with the drill's actual penetration. The reorientation of function of this image away from the
plateau of screen (what the image means within the narrative) toward the viewer (what the image does
to us) extends and exceeds the immediate signification of a 'drill through the head'. Horror fans are,
in Jean Francois Lyotard's words, the 'disciples of its affect'.1

CINEMASEXUALITY: FROM STEELE TO RADICE

In this particular representation of horror, the traditional proclivity to a sadistic gaze is renegotiated.
As a result, cinesexual viewers transform into cinemasochists - those who watch for the particular

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