Page 188 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

drive'.11 The Aururn Film Encyclopedia's review discerns in Bloody Pit of Horror a classic example of
repressed homosexuality transformed into sadistic aggression towards women', 12 but it does not really
take a crash course in psychoanalysis to notice 'the prominence accorded to [Hargitay's] well-oiled,
hairless torso'.13 One of Amazon.corn's customer reviews wonders whether 'Mickey running around
half-naked throughout in his red tights' meant that 'they [were] also going for a gay audience',
while Frank Heinenlotter describes Hargitay as looking 'like a gay icon gone berserk and babbling
narcissistic, Nietzschean rants'.14 One perhaps has to ask whether 'The Most Perfectly Built Man in
the World' could be anything but camp - this is, after all, the man who shared Jayne Mansfield's 'Pink
Palace' and compared chests with her in Gli Amori Di Ercole (The Loves ofHercides, Carlo Ludovico
Bragaglia, Italy, 1960). But it is worth pondering the relationship between bodybuilding, sadistic
spectacle and male narcissism. To do so, however, we need to put trash aesthetics on one side for a
moment and think about cultural and generic context. Put simply, however deliriously out-or-this-
world trash 'classics' may seem, they do come from somewhere.
A scroll unravels, revealing a 'quote' from Sade, or rather the 'Sade' of pop culture ('the evil,
depraved Marquis de Sade' as the trailer describes him) - ' M y vengeance needs blood!' - a line later
uttered by Travis as he is 'possessed' by the Crimson Executioner. This is not necessarily the Sade who
wrote Justine and 120 Days of Sodom, not even the libertine Sade of Marat/Sade or the mischievous
roue of the more recent Quills. If anything, he is closer to the Sade whose skull menaces Peter Cushing
in The Skull (Freddie Francis, U K , 1965), the Sade who stands in for all manner of evils, but who,
above all, promises depravity and perversion, ingenious tortures visited on female flesh. The film
opens in 1648 as the Crimson Executioner is dispatched in his own Iron Maiden and then sealed
within it as punishment for sadistic tortures motivated by 'hatred and self-gratification'.
Three centuries later his castle is occupied by Travis Anderson, a former actor who 'used to be
a muscleman in costume pictures'. Travis has withdrawn from the world and, significantly, from
his engagement to Edith (Luisa Baratto). He now lives alone but for his muscular henchmen, clad
in tight T-shirts and chinos. Travis has two all-consuming obsessions; the Crimson Executioner,
'a man of extraordinary physical strength, obsessed by an ideal of perfection', and his own 'perfect
body', the latter modelled on the ideal of the former. His isolation is rudely interrupted by a group
of photographers and models in search of a suitable locale for hortor-giallo book covers. The group
includes horror writer Rick (Walter Brandi in his customary comatose state) and, more importantly,
Edith, now dowdied down as a wardrobe girl. Travis is initially inhospitable until he sees Edith,
whereupon he invites them to stay. The bodycount soon begins, and the film dispatches its male
victims as quickly as possible. One has his neck broken, another falls victim to a spiked pendulum
when a rope is mysteriously severed during a photo shoot, a would-be-escape car performs circles
as its driver's neck is pierced by a crossbow arrow, a greedy publisher is burned alive. The 'Cover
Girls', on the other hand, as in most gialli, receive rather more lascivious treatment. Suzy (Barbara
Nelli) ends up in the Iron Maiden. In the film's most bizarre sequence, Kinujo (Moa-Tahi) is tied
to a gigantic spider web as a grotesque (mechanical?), poisonous spider closes in. Nancy (Rita
Klein) and Annie (Femi Benussi) are strapped to a revolving pylon as a column of knives is pushed
ever closer by Travis - in a series of close-ups, the knives scrape their cleavages and tear off slivers
of black brassiere.

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