Page 128 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

CORPOREAL PERFORMANCES
In a film like City of the Living Dead the image of Radices drill-penetrated skull can affect in
any number of ways. The surface of skin and metal inflects into a new configuration and it is all
incomprehensibly too much but not enough to mean anything - not a sign but force. Ironically this
scene, unlike many others, does not show us any secret layers of the flesh. There is no profane plateau
of the flesh exposed in the drill scene, the site of Radices death.
Yet, later in the film, Radices flesh does peel away to expose nondescript flaps of skin and flesh,
but the excavation of his flesh also heralds the overturning of his death. Radice has returned to the
living, albeit the living dead. His body has returned differently as his life has differentiated itself from
his character to a form of autonomania. He looks different and the audience looks at him differently.
Transformation punctuates any investment the audience risks by investing in a Radice character.
In Cannibal Apocalypse he scares us as an unhinged Vietnam vet but not as much as when we
realise he has transferred his sexuality to consumption when his 'seduction' of a woman in a movie
theatre expresses itself as cannibalism (see interview, following chapter). Pleasure, sex, repulsion
and horror return in Cannibal Ferox. Radices character, despicable to a pantomime level, affords
enormous pleasure to us, not when we see him naked in his sex scenes but semi-naked when he is
castrated. Although a rudimentary reading of this scene could see it as 'just desserts' there is something
tersely and curiously erotic about seeing a male rather than a female being punished in a clearly and
traditionally masochistic performance. Here, he is tied to a tree and corporeally described through a
direct connection of genitality to suffering rather than sexuality. Even though Cannibal Ferox is the
seediest of Radices films - racist, misogynistic and unethical in its real-life killing of animals - Radices
death is anchored entirely on the perversion (rather than reversion) of traditional power binaries. By
comparison, the infamous scene of a male sucking a woman's brains directly from her head through a
straw in Bloodsucking Freaks (Joel M. Reed, 1976) is repulsive not because of its extreme gore but its
simplistic and repetitive re-establishment of traditional power relations.
In essence, the above example it is not very different to the idea of a vampire sucking the neck
of a victim. However, usually in vampire cinema the female victim is willingly seduced, while in
Bloodsucking Freaks the meanness of the scene comes from the forceful, childish expression of male
power borne of nothing more complex than masculine anxiety. In Cannibal Ferox Radices Mike is
established as another of these hyper-masculine figures, but his seat of masculinity - his penis - is
removed. Traditional symbols of technological advance and logic are graphically destroyed as his hand
is lopped off and his skull sliced open so the brains can be eaten by Amazonian natives. Unfortunately
Radices death is the only one that renegotiates power relations. (The death of Pat (Zora Kerowa) is
predictably oriented around her being sexualised - she is pierced through the breasts 'man-called-horse'
sun-dance style.) Reading this death through its symbolic referents, however, reduces the scenes to
simplistic catharsis. Describing Radices death purely through symbols and racial signs brings theorising
the power of the scenes to an equivalently predictable 'male' (logocentric, Lacanian) level. The risk is
not in reading the images but confessing their power goes beyond their immediate meaning. Watching
Radices body in a state of extremity, folding with our viewing body into modulations of viewing
enjoyment, suffering and ex-stasis produces material changes and temporal becomings. Cinesexuality

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