Delirium (3 Stars)

Lamberto Bava's DELIRIUM (1987, aka PHOTOS OF GIOIA) is not a classic, but it is a darn good giallo which for some reason has a worse reputation than it deserves. Genre stalwarts and DELIRIUM co-stars Daria Nicolordi and George Eastman (the legendary Luigi Montefiori) have never had much to say about it, she denigrating it as an uninteresting commercial thriller and he insisting that he only did it for the money. And while it's true that neither one of them is given very much to do in the film except provide distraction as the possible killer, they contribute nicely to its overall milieu of uncertainty; and perhaps their limited involvement has blinded them to a work which deserves more credit than it has previously received.

On the surface, it's a fairly typical giallo with the requisite eccentric characters, each with mysteries from their past that they are wrestling to conceal or nursing a possible murderous motive, but bubbling beneath the surface of this one is a complex and self-referential subtext about women and their relationship to the way in which they are looked upon by men. Here, the women are either high-powered magazine executives or models (interestingly, magazine owner Gioia was once a model herself), while the men are either photographers, ineffectual policemen, lying actors or a wheelchair bound pervert who is Gioia's neighbour. All the erotic photo sessions are viewed through the cold eye of a camera or the neighbour's telescope; the murderer photographs the dead bodies before a huge backdrop of the nude Gioia, explicitly linking sex and death in a blunt but effective way. The photographers are either impotent or gay, unable to physically service the women's desires until the killer arrives to complete the penetrating act; the only exception is Ms. Grandi as Gioia and Eastman as an ex-lover shooting a film in Italy, who are saved from this repressed world by their healthy lust. Voluptuous lead actress Serena Grandi is full-figured and fearless in displaying her body. In a genre where female sexuality is usually punished, Ms. Grandi is a liberating breath of fresh air whose brazenly overt eroticism makes her a rarity in the world of giallo cinema. The killer may be torturing her for acting on her desires (an idea that gets turned on its head in the climax), but the filmmaker is most definitely not. In fact, Bava seems to be revelling in her beauty, and takes every opportunity to present her as a creature both sexual and smart; she is a character unique in his filmic works.

Bava is a stylist who tries to imbue his images with a subtext that goes beyond just presenting flashy imagery, and although his ear for dialogue sometimes fails his higher purposes, he definitely possesses a sense of humour that is often lacking in the work of his contemporaries. The killer's point-of-view shots, for example, fell like a shockingly honest representation of what a deranged mind might do to dehumanise their next victim, but at the same time the image of a nude woman with a bee head is absurd, and brilliantly so! It creates Kafkaesque detachment from the proceedings without over-intellectualising it, unlike the classic image from the original THE FLY (1958), but with a sexual discomfort that was only implied, and impossible to articulate, in the 1950's classic. Also, there is no denying that there are some great examples in his work of images that have entered the lexicon of filmic horror, like the nightmarish devils that rip themselves out from the other side of the screen in DEMONS (1985), a woman whose lover is a disembodied head in MACABRE (1980), and in DELIRIUM we get a glimpse into the flashing colour-saturated mind of a killer that reduces female murder victims to a speechless cyclopean freak and the aforementioned bee-headed insect woman, obliterating the faces but not the arousingly exposed body parts.

Having expressed in print his dislike of killers running around with knives, Bava also withholds the weapon throughout the film, instead finding other unique ways for the killer to dispose of the victims. And after saving the blade until the film's wacko ending, Bava bestows upon it the ultimate expression of a phallic substitute, using it as a perverse shiny phallus that traces its outline over Ms. Grandi's body in a grotesque parody of foreplay, ripping through her undergarments and reflecting her face right back at her, teasing her and the audience in a shockingly pornographic dance of desire and horror that leads to a moment of bloody ejaculation that would have made even Sigmund Freud blush with embarrassment.

On a technical level, the film is well served by cinematographer Gian Lorenzo Battaglia, who had previously shot Bava's BLADE IN THE DARK (1983) and DEMONS 2 (1986), but this is his best work for the director, and he provides DELIRIUM with a slickness that defies its low budget origins.

(Review by Scooter McCrae).

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