Massacro (1989)

"Dirty Blood" is a horror movie that's being shot outside the city, in and around an hotel. It's a low-budget production with spoiled actors and really bad looking sets and production values. One night, to save the crap movie they're making, the producer decides to invite everyone to a real séance. The medium, a woman with two ping-pong balls in her mouth...

...wants to make contact with Gabor, a friendly spirit, but instead invites Rack - a guy that's obviously was a sadistic killer in his former life. Soon Rack is taking possession of one of the characters and starts stabbing himself through the mediocre acting-flesh!

Between 1968 and 1985 a serial killer roamed the countryside outside Florence, Il Mostro di Firenze - The Monster of Florence. This is still more or less an ongoing case and inspired several movies (I mean, it's more less a "real" giallo" if you see it the cynical way), books and caused more scandals than the Swedish royal court. Several men has been arrested, convicted and then acquitted - and even if there's tons and tons of ideas tossed around no one knows for sure who Il Mostro was. It's safe to say that a secret Satanic sect is NOT the guilty ones, one of several conspiracy theories and even leading experts on the case - journalists - has been accused of being the killer. I guess we will never now the truth.

...and that's why we should thank Andrea Bianchi, the genius behind Strip Nude for Your Killer, Burial Ground and Commando Mengele, who in Massacro takes more than one cue from the real life mystery and introduces the nasty demon of Rack who takes possession of someone in the cast and starts killing prostitutes, film crew and lovers out in the countryside with knifes and other sharp objects! By 1989 the investigators was stomping around like mad elephants around and in the Il Mostro case and even here they have no damn clue what they're doing, which is especially visible in the last scene which mocks the police quite hard.

The inclusion of a very Il Mostro-esque murder scene where someone is stabbing two lovers to death in their car, far out in the forest, maybe doesn't mean anything (a similar scene is in Torso, the 1973 giallo, but that was when no one knew there was a serial killer loose around Florence), but there's an aura of grittiness here, it's just too close to the real deal and the right time for not being a reference to the real case.

But enough with reality. This is mainly a movie directed by Andrea Bianchi who's famous for being very trashy, very sleazy and - according to some actors - a real-life sadist, or at least very fond if seeing actors being killed and raped in front of the camera. It could be the truth, because he's always a little bit dirtier, a little bit more perverse - and even if Massacro isn't the most violence movie he's made it show some really sadistic stuff, for example a spear that obviously is going up through the... yeah... and through the head of a female victim. He also packed the film with bloody stabbings, a chopped off hand and head and of course nudity and very stereotypical gay- and lesbian characters. Just the way it should be in a late, Italian exploitation movie.

Every line said here is stupid and every character is obviously retarded. The script is fun and not too boring, but the mystery - because I would count it as a supernatural giallo - isn't so much of a mystery because I think the existing DVD from EC Entertainment is in open matte and might reveal an important detail during an important scene. But it could just be bad writing and directing and maybe one super-geeks like me will notice.

Massacro is fun, cheap, bloody and trashy trash by the master of trash: Andrea "Trash" Bianchi. But maybe something for us, the most desperate of eurocult fans.