Page 191 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

Its former Mr Universe star, Steve Reeves, already suggested a transnational dimension to the film,
and other Anglo-American bodybuilders would don loincloths over the next seven or eight years; Reg
Park. Gordon Scott (already a hit as Tarzan) and, of course, Mickey Hargitay.
Peter Bondanella calculates that some 170 peplum were made berween 1957 and 1964, but
largely consigns them to the undistinguished detritus of seconda visione (second-run) cinemas, films
of'artistically inferior quality and limited cultural significance'.22 Of all the productive Italian cycles
of the 1960s, only selected spaghetti westerns broke into the prima visione (first-run) market and
established a 'quality' output. But Christopher Wagstaff provides an illuminating picture of the
seconda and terza visione (third-run) marker, cinemas attended primarily by working-class audiences.
Wagstaff suggests that the mode of viewing elicited by films aimed at the terza visione audience
was closer to the 'distracted' gaze associated with theories of television spectatorship than the more
intensive immersion associated with cinema:

The viewer (generally he) went to the cinema nearest to his house ... after dinner, at around
ten o'clock in the evening. The programme changed daily or every other day. He would not
bother to find out what was showing, nor would he make any particular effort to arrive at the
beginning of the film. He would talk to his friends during the showing whenever he felt like
it, except during the bits of the film that grabbed his (or his friends') attention.23

These attention-grabbing 'moments' are likened by Wagstaff to peaks on an electrocardiogram,
'supplied by the three "physiological" responses [sex, laughter, thrill/suspense] that were as
interchangeable as plot lines'. 24 These 'peaks' appear to be cross-generic — a peplum could have 'sexy'
and horrific moments - which, along with the need to vary repetitive formulas, would explain an
increasing hybridity across Italian exploitation cycles. The peplum had already produced Gothic
variants such as Maciste Contro II Vampiro [Goliath Against the Vampires, Giacomo Gentilimo and
Sergio Corbucci, Italy, 1961), Ercole al Centro Delia Terra {Hercules in the Haunted World, Mario
Bava, Italy, 1962), guest-starring an undead Christopher Lee, and Maciste all'Inferno (The Witch's
Curse, Riccardo Freda, Italy, 1962).
1965, the year of Bloody Pit of Horrors release, was the year that the peplum cycle began to fizzle
out, and the film both references and distances itself from their body-beautiful aesthetics. Richard
Dyer sees the peplum as a complex coming-to-terms with Fascism. If it seems initially overzealous
to find such political subtexts in campy comic strips like the Hercules series (or Bloody Pit of Horror
for that matter), then Dyer reminds us that it was not until the 1970s that Italian cinema felt able to
address the Mussolini era directly.25 Therefore, is it not likely that such a traumatic memory would
impinge, even if only subtextually and unconsciously, during this ostensible twenty to thirty year
'silence'? In any case, all of the 1960s Italian genre directors had lived through, and some (Bava,
Freda) worked during, the Fascist era. Thepepla, Dyer argues, relate ambivalently to Fascism. On the
one hand, they offer images of the 'idealised white man, with his spirit-perfected body and capacity
to sort out the problems of lesser beings'.26 Such an aesthetic was prominent both in the Mussolini
era and, indeed, in Il Duce himself, sometimes referred to as 'the Maciste of Fascist Italy',2, constantly
photographed in 'athletic' poses, often stripped to the waist.

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