Delirium Photos of Gioia

A maniac is murdering the models for Pussycat magazine and sending snapshots of his/her handiwork to its editor/proprietor Gioia/Gloria (Italian glamour queen Serena Grandi).

Who could it be? The procession of suspects facing Inspector Corsi (Demons' Lino Salemme, cast against type) is long:

There's Mark (fellow Demons alumnus Karl Zinny), the wheelchair-bound peeping tom who lives opposite Gioia, makes dirty phonecalls and whose paralysis is, according to his doctor, entirely psychosomatic.

There's rival publisher Flora (Capucine), who would seemingly stop at nothing to be top dog – bitch? – once more and quite happily tries to turn the situation to her advantage.

There's Roberto (David Brandon), the gay photographer who has conveniently managed to misplace some compromising photos from Gloria's own modelling career, before her husband's died in a speedboat accident and left her Pussycat.

And then there's Eveline (Daria Nicolodi), the (too?) devoted personal assistant who always seems to be on hand to receive the photos of joy…

As a director Lamberto Bava would seem forever doomed to be compared to his more talented father Mario and mentor Dario Argento and found wanting. While occasionally his work warrants more recognition in its own right, with A Blade in the Dark serving as a textbook example of how to make a low-budget giallo horror-thriller work, this 1987 production is not such a work.

Admittedly some aspects of Delirium: Photos of Gioia cannot be helped. The fashions and technology are one: Whereas 60s and 70s gialli have an inevitable kitsch element for contemporary audiences, their 80s counterparts – big hair, power dressing, pastels etc – are still too close in time and memory for such a detournement to take place. (One has no doubt, however, that this will happen in due course and when it does the tackiness and tawdriness of the Gioia's milieux will be interpreted as an ironic, pomo comment on the same, playing on the alternate meaning of glamour as illusion to make some vague feminist statement…)

Elsewhere, however, the director and his collaborators do themselves few favours in using a setting that cannot but remind one of the vastly superior Blood and Black Lace amongst others nor in lifting liberally from the Suspiria and Tenebre playbook in choreographing murder as spectacle to a propulsive rock soundtrack – Simon Boswell in the Goblin idiom – without ever quite successfully pushing things into the absolute realms of (film) art for art sake.

Worse, when they do try some ideas of their own, as with the horror masks worn by the models/victims during the stalk and slash scenes to show how they look from the killer's warped perspective the results aren't quite what was intended, being more laughable than surreal/absurd.

Shriek Show's Region 0 DVD of Delirium Photos of Gioia opens with a brief introduction by the director, telling how it is one of his favourites. The film itself looks and sounds fine for something of its vintage and budget, with a nice widescreen transfer and clear sound mix. (In his interview Bava comments that it was one of the first Italian films to have a proper stereo mix.)

The extras comprise text biographies of David Brandon, George Eastman, Lamberto Bava, Serena Grandi and Daria Nicolodi; a small stills gallery; a well-written and thought-provoking text essay by Scooter McCrae, addressing what he sees as some of the film's hidden depths; and a trio of broad-ranging and informative to-camera interviews with Bava, Eastman – whose role in the film is, to be honest, little more than a marquee value boosting cameo as an old flame of Gioia's – and Brandon, running 13, 9 and 12 minutes respectively.

A better than average DVD package, then, helping lift Delirium Photos of Gioia up a notch into the 'worthwhile' category.