EDITOR’S NOTE: Frederick Burdsall didn’t like this movie as much as I did. Because I don’t like this movie. I love it. 

Bruno Mattei got hired to make this, being asked by Spanish producers to make something like Dawn of the Dead but happier, if that was possible. He made this under the name Vincent Dawn, which the producers requested. Two scripts were written by Claudio Fragasso* and Rossella Drudi, with the one being picked not being the script Mattei preferred.

I wish I could have seen that script** because what got made is absolutely insane.

The movie starts in a top-secret chemical research facility called Hope Center #1. There, the male workers talk non-stop about sex like this:

Technician #1: She may not know much about chemistry, but in bed, her reactions are terrific.

Technician #2: I’m not surprised with that cute little ass.

Technician #1: I’m a tit man, myself.

In the middle of this locker room talk, a rat causes a chemical leak and comes back to life as a zombified rat*** that eats the face of a worker, turning every single person there — eventually — into the living dead.

Meanwhile, four commandos — Lt. Mike London (José Gras, billed as Robert O’Neal), Osborne (Josep Lluís Fonoll, Wheels on Meals), Zantoro (Franco Garafalo, The Other Hell, billed as Frank Garfield) and Vincent (Selan Karay) — wipe out some eco-terrorists who are demanding that the Hope Centers be revealed to the public.

Now that the Hope Center we’ve seen at the beginning of the movie has lost contact with the world, the commandos go to New Guinea to find out why. There, they encounter journalist Lia Rousseau (Margit Evelyn Newton, The Adventures of Hercules) and her cameraman Max (Gabriel Renom), along with a fighting husband and wife who are soon dispatched by a zombie doctor and their dead son.

Their fight dialogue really needs to be shared:

Josie’s husband: These bright ideas you get… bringing a 7-year-old child through this filth! Only YOU could have thought of it!

Josie: There was absolutely no way of knowing the trouble we’d run into.

Josie’s husband: Dumb broad! The living image of a modern mother! You couldn’t be so mean to leave our boy at a nice safe school for a couple weeks! Not her! “Oh, no! Not to bring our boy along with us would be cruel!” Doesn’t matter if he’s eaten by mosquitoes… or wounded by a native lunatic!

Lia Rousseau: Oh, please! You’re not gonna begin that again!

Josie’s husband: Oh, no! I’m sorry! Naturally, the great Lia Rousseau can’t possibly be disturbed listening to the complaints of a man who’s upset about his boy! No, she’s on a special mission. The idol of a TV audience who doesn’t get enough violence and BLOODSHED!

In case you’re wondering, “Is this a Bruno Mattei movie?” Let me satisfy you: when they go to a native village, footage from the documentary New Guinea, Island of Cannibals gets added into the movie and Rousseau having to strip down and get her body painted up. Of course, the mirth of the native village ends up with a zombie attack and the commandos — and journalists — make their way to the overrun hope center, where they learn that Operation: Sweet Death was made to destroy the world’s population so that overcrowding could be stopped, starting with the poor people, of course.

I love the ending of this, as politicians throw paper at one another while zombies have spread into the major cities.

In case you watch this and think, “This music sounds familiar,” I have the answer. It’s all Goblin, which was licensed instead of getting an original score made. It has songs from their album Roller, as well as their songs for Dawn of the Dead, Beyond the Darkness and Contamination.

Alternate titles include Hell of the Living Dead, Zombie Creeping Flesh, Night of the Zombies, Virus Cannibale, Os Predadores da Noite (The Night Predators) and Zombie Inferno.

I absolutely love the absurd dialogue in this! There’s so much, but this is my favorite back and forth:

Vincent: Patience is the chief virtue for those who have faith. Mahatma Gandhi, New Delhi, 1946.

Lt. Mike London: Up your ass. Lieutenant Mike London, Shit Creek, the year is now.

Also, it has the strange air that the terrorists are right, despite their actions being wrong. Pretty much humanity is doomed in the world of Mattei. Really, for all the bad I’ve heard about this movie, it’s a total success in my eyes.

I mean, it has a scene where a commando puts on a dress, sings a song from Singin’ in the Rain, causes a zombie kitten to leap out of a dead woman’s stomach and then dies while everyone yells, “Bastards! Filthy jackals! Look at them, look at THAT! They’re eatin’ him like PIGS! Goddamned rotten ghouls!”

You can watch this on Tubi.

*In an interview in GoreZone, Fragrasso said this movie was, “designed with lots of love, but in the end it came out a test tube baby, a kind of abortion. But I’m satisfied with the end results.”

**In that script, Fragasso wrote of “an entire Third World made up of an army of zombies, who the armed forces of the industrialized nations would have had to fight.”

**Spoiler warning! I wonder if this rat is the father of the rats we meet at the end of Rats: The Night of Terror?

Snuff Trap feels like Bruno Mattei finally got sick of making all those interchangeable softcore romance movies and said, “You know, I’m at my best when I have no filter.” Welcome back, Bruno. Or Pierre Le Blanc, as you’d like to be known as here.

After her daughter Lauren gets abducted, Michelle (Carlo Solaro, Paprika, Top Girl) must enter the nightmare world of an Italian scum cinema version of a Paul Schrader film. Yet beyond just simple pornography, there’s the danger of snuff films, which seems to make sense when you’re movie is called Snuff Trap. Or Snuff Killer. Or Snuff Killer – Death Live.

Actually, this movie is 8mm, except that no one’s mother thought that the best way to rescue her daughter from a porn ring is to become a prostitute herself. That’s because Michelle’s husband is a politician and he’d rather not have the scandal of a stepdaughter going dietro la porta verde.

Soon, our protagonist finds herself going up against the leader of the pornographer, who has the astounding name of Dr. Hades (Anita Auer) and her henchman Roy.

Oh man, from 2002 to 2007, Mattei was the last Italian filmmaker standing making good old fashion exploitation films. I’m a huge fan of his late career shot on video films, which sure, are total junk, but nearly everything Bruno did was very much the same way. Yet I have such a soft spot in my heart for him, out there in his late 70s making cannibal movies in the jungle and cutting and pasting plots and even big pieces of footage from Hollywood movies. One of those films has the entire budget equal to the total of every movie Bruno ever did and absolutely none of the fun and heart. In a perfect world, we would have figured out how to put the human brain into an eternal robot and I would have paid as much as I had into the Kickstarter to keep Bruno alive, making ripoffs of whatever he could make the most money from at the time.

I mean, who else would make a movie where the password to the snuff empire’s secret inner lair is bondage?

Bruno Mattei forever!

Along with Gatta Alla Pari and Innamorata, Bruno Mattei made three uncredited films for producer Nini Grassia, who claimed himself as the director. This was a mainstream — well, softcore — vehicle for Ileana Carusio, an adult actress who went by the stage names of Malù and Ramba, which was given to her because she constantly posed with guns.

She became so popular that an entire comic book series was created, in which she portrayed a mercenary assassin who not only killed everyone she met, but often slept with them too. This would include other assassins, her targets and even a group of Russian mutants. The only person she ever loved was her cat. If Bruno Mattei’s movies could be comics, these would be those funny books.

Carusio retired around 1990 because of pressure from her Catholic family. For some strange whim of fate, they had no issue with her playing in softcore films. Hence, she did five more movies, including the aforementioned three that Mattei wouldn’t even design to use one of his many pseudonyms on.

I’d say this was only for completists of the director, but I really think we’ve pushed beyond that into the limits of fandom.

Body and Soul is a little-seen Bruno Mattei film in which has a model named Ljuba (Christine Dowell, who only made this movie) getting horizontally involved with a uranium thief.

By 1997, Mattei had realized what most horror directors have learned today about Christmas movies. If a genre sells, make every movie you can within it. The Italian exploitation mindset, already used to the giallo and sex comedies, was easily able to adjust when the world wanted knockoffs of Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction. Mattei made several films in this field like A Shudder on the Skin, Belle de Moirre, Snuff Killer and Legittima Vendetta.

Those who have watched too many Italian genre films — hello friends! — will notice Gianni Franco (Rats: The Night of Terror, Delirium) and Massimo Vanni (Shocking Dark) in this movie.

And for those of you that know Bruno Mattei, you’ll be pleased to know that he completely takes the limo love scene from No Way Out.

Bruno Mattei uses the name Martin Miller here, but come on. The moment we see that this movie is pretty much Cannibal Holocaust with soldiers, we know who is behind this movie. To make sure that we’re completely certain that Bruno is in directing, the fact that footage from Predator is completely stolen and placed within this film is a neon sign saying, “Sam watch this.”

You have to give Bruno credit for naming one soldier Romero and another Vasquez. It’s as if he’s saying, “Guys, I can’t help it. I just like to see how much stealing I can get away with.”

So yeah. These commandos go into the jungle to rescue a senator’s daughter, but she’s gone native and is now part of the tribe. This would be why this movie is also known as Cannibal Holocaust 3: Cannibals vs Commandos.

Shot at the same time as Mondo Cannibal, this may not be as good as that film, but it has refreshingly little real animal violence. Yes, I can watch all manner of people be masticated upon, but cut one turtles head off and I get squeamish.

When the rest of the world makes zombie movies that are either boring or sub-Troma winks at the camera filled with humor that breaks the tension, Bruno Mattei remains single-mindedly devoted to making the kind of undead movies that made me love the genre.

In short, in the sad world we find ourselves in where zombies have become boring, Bruno Mattei alone reminds us that these kinds of movies can remain incredibly fun.

After a team of adventurers loses their gold, they go through a fog bank and end up on an island of the living dead. There, nearly everyone dies as they’re pursued by shambling, blood puking monsters that never stop. Oh yeah, there’s also another higher caste of zombies that act like a cross between the Blind Dead and vampires, hypnotizing unwilling victims into becoming their thralls, even if they have to charm them with flutes!

I’ve come away from Mattei’s late period — he made this movie a year before his death — digital video films with great fondness, particularly for Yvette Yzon, who has taken over for Laura Gemser in his movies, starring in this, Zombies: The Beginning, The Jail: Women’s Hell, A Shudder on the Skin and two Segreti di Donna films for Mattei.

Here, she’s Sharon, not only the final girl but the Lara Croft of this story. The rest of her crew is pretty worthless, except for Snoopy, who gets his name by always wearing a Snoopy t-shirt. This is an astonishing choice for a zombie film and one that I applaud. He’s played by Jim Gaines, who has been in plenty of Mattei films like Robowar, Zombie 4, Strike Commando and even shows up in The One-Armed Executioner.

Want an even better name? The leader of the ship is Captain Kirk (Gaetano Russo, The Killer Reserved Nine Seats and Trhauma, which he wrote)!

Screenwriter Antonio Tentori has been there for the dark night of the soul that aging Italian horror filmmakers must endure, being the scribe for everything from Argento’s Dracula 3D to Fulci’s Cat in the Brain and D’Amato’s Frankenstein 2000.

Only Sharon survives, but it appears that she becomes a zombie. No worry — she comes back perfectly healthy in the sequel, Zombies: The Beginning. Yes, only Mattei would name the second movie — or third, if this is in the same universe as Hell of the Living Dead — with a title like Zombies: The Beginning.

What are we to think of a movie that has not only the Necronomicon but also the De Vermis Mysteriis and the Cask of Amontillado? A film willing to rip off The Fog, Night of the Living Dead, Ghost Ship, Fulci’s eyeball scene in Zombi, the Blind Dead movies and even Mattei’s own Hell of the Living Dead? A movie that outright steals footage from The 13th Warrior, Interview with the Vampire, Deep Rising and House of the Dead?

We are to celebrate it. Thank you, Bruno Mattei, for always making it cheap, gross and upsetting, but never ever boring. The spirit and flame of 1980s Italian horror was kept alive by you longer than anyone.

Nero and Poppea – An Orgy of Power comes from a genre of film that doesn’t exist much anymore. I guess you could call it Romanspolitation or Nerospolitation or Caligulaploitation, films that came in the wake of Tinto Brass’ 1979 Caligula. Movies that took that piece of exploitation and said, “I can do it better.” Those folks who loudly screamed that included Joe D’Amato, whose Caligula… The Untold Story has an uncensored edition with animal/human fondling and unsimulated sex, and our friend Bruno Mattei, who not only made this movie, but also Caligula and Messalina a year before this film was made.

Also known as Caligula Reincarnated As Nero, this is Mattei at the unhinged level you expect from him, throwing copious male and female nudity at you, the viewer, along with Christians being devoured by lions, plenty of torture, incest and, in case you were getting bored, a graphic castration scene which would mark literally the third Mattei movie in a row that I’ve seen where someone’s gherkin gets pickled.

How do you know this is a Bruno Mattei movie? Is it the rampant thievery of peblum footage from  Goliath Against the Giants and The Last Days of Pompeii? Or perhaps it’s hearing the very same voiceover artists who dubbed those movies in the 50’s and 60’s having to say scatological dialogue? Or by having Antonio Passalia — the film’s co-director — play Claudius in his second Mattei opus in a row?

I watched this with some equal parts shame and fascination, but by the end of an entire week of nothing but Bruno’s movies, I really do feel like Max Ren looking for the next video drug to feed into my brain.

Marianna de Leyva y Marino was born on December 4, 1575 in Milan. While she was from a noble family, there were numerous disputes over money after the death of her mother. At the age of 13, her father forced her to become a nun in the Monastery of Saint Margaret and despite claims that she would receive an inheritance, that never happened.

By all accounts, she was a friendly and modest woman, who was praised by community members and even recieved a letter congratulating her choice to go into the sisterhood from writer and historian Bartolomeo Zucchi.

Then, there things got scandalous.

In 1597, while working as a teacher at the convent’s school for girls, Marianna met Count Giovanni Paolo Osio, who had previously been accused of murder.

It’s important to realize just how rich, powerful and influential the nuns of this time were. Sure, they had entered the vow of poverty, but the truth was that Marianne was still wealthy, despite never recieving the money her mother left her. In addition to teaching, her duties included administering the property revenues and justice in Monza, so she was able to freely move through the society of the elite.

Her affair with the count began with letters, but soon grew physical, thanks to  the complicity of the other nuns and even the priest Paolo Arrigone. After two children were born to the couple — one stillborn and the other adopted as an illegitimate child by the count — Virginia went so far as to murder one of the nuns who threatened to expose her. She did this with the full complicity of the other sisters and the count also killed the blacksmith who had made keys to the convent for him.

However, the governor of Milan eventually arrested Oslo for the murder. He escaped and was later killed by a friend, while Archbishop Federico Borromeo ordered a trial of Marianne, whose defense was that she had lost her free will due to the diabolical force of lust. After a lengthy trial that even featured torture, she pleaded guilty and was sentenced to be walled-in for 13 years in the Home of Santa Valeria. She survived this sentence and lived there for nearly three decades before she died in 1650.

The Nun of Monza has been the subject of at least five other movies — including Sergio Corbucci’s Il Monaco di Monza — but never before with the sense of crazy mayhem like Bruno Mattei would bring to the table.

Using his Stefan Oblowsky alter ego and working with a script from Claudio Fragasso, Mattei seems committed to giving those with no attention span exactly what they come to a nunspolitation movie for as much as he possibly can. One wonders if these sisters even went to church what with all the arrdvarkery going on.

Zora Kerova stars as Sister Virginia de Leyva. You may remember her as the tarot card reader in Anthropophagus or as the sex show worker in The New York Ripper or getting hung by hooks in Cannibal Ferox. Her father has sent her to be a bride of Christ to remove her from the temptations of this world, but as we soon learn, all the whippings and ecstatic devotions simply lead to her fantasizing that Christ himself has come off the cross to get her on her knees. Yes, Mattei is never subtle, is he?

That said, she’s not alone in her carnal state. The nuns can’t stop aggressively cuddling and even a priest tries to assault our protagonist inside the confessional. To make matters even weirder, he’s dressed as Satan at the time.

Giampaolo Osio (Mario Cutini, Play Motel) soon falls for Virginia. He’s friends with the evil priest and has been shown killing numerous oppoennts in duels. But before they can get to know one another biblically, Virgina’s father dies, making her the new Lady of Monza. This also allows her to become the new Mother Superior, which worries the evil priest and his lover Benedetta (Paolo Montenero, A Bay of Blood). They set up Virginia by having Osio assault her, but this being a Bruno Mattei movie, she soon falls in love and bears him a child. That stillborn baby is summarily tossed out a window.

Look, if you’re coming to 1980 Italian exploitation cinema for even the slightest hint of good taste, you are not going to find it. Mattei’s other nun movie, The Other Hell, is perhaps even more obsessed with daring the Catholic Church to be upset.

Margherita (Leda Simoneti, Adam and Eve vs. the Cannibals) theatens to exposes the entire sordid mess before she’s killed, which brings in the Inquisitor which ends with our heroine walled up, just like in real life.

While this movie is set in the 1600s, that doesn’t mean that it can’t have a funky soundtrack by Gianni Marchetti, who also scored SS Girls and Emanuelle’s Revenge. There are also appearances by Paola Corazzi (SS Experiment Love Camp, SS Camp 5: Women’s Hell), Annie Carol Edel (Almost Human), Franca Stoppi (Iris from D’Amato’s Beyond the Darkness, as well as appearances in Mattei’s The Other Hell, Violence in a Women’s Prison and Women’s Prison Massacre) and Mario Novelli, who was the engineer in Amok Train/Beyond the Door III, as well as showing up in Eyes Behind the Stars, The Scorpion with Two Tails and Warriors of the Year 2072.

Despite stealing the horses in love opening from The Beast, this is probably as restrained as you’ll get Mattei. That said, this is also a movie about nuns whipping each other, evil priests and infants being launched from windows, so don’t go in expecting Godard.

After The Night Porter and Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS opened the sewer gates of sleaze, the rest of the world’s exploitation auteurs rushed to get their own German ladies of sin pictures into the grubby eyeballs of reprobates brave enough to find a grindhouse of drive-in willing to show these pictures.

Well, Bruno Mattei made two of them. This one and Private House of the SS, which has an absolutely berserk performance by Gabriele Carrara to go for it. This one has, well, a scene where dead soldiers are brought back to life by women rubbing their naked bodies all over them and homosexual soldiers try to get cured by watched naked women, which does not work.

Ivano Staccioli plays the camp commandant who gets things done, joined by Marta (Ria De Simone, who pretty much played the scheming wife in Mattei’s Cuginetta, amore mio!) to lead the women into whatever fresh hell Mattei has in mind.

If you watch one movie where a healthy uterus is transplanted into another one, followed by a scene of a female commandant forcing herself on a prisoner, you know…man, I really have no taste whatsoever, huh?

You have to give Bruno Mattei credit for sheer force of will. At a time when most filmmakers retire — he was 76 when making it and died the very same year — he was hitting. the Philippines and making a zombie movie on digital video when the rest of his Italian exploitation filmmaking contemporaries were dead, retired or no longer relevant.

Dr. Sharon Dimao (Yvette Yzon, who was also put through the Mattei ringer in the first film in Mattei’s zombie saga, Island of the Living Dead, as well as The Jail: The Women’s Hell; she’ll return to play this role again in Dustin Ferguson’s Hell of the Screaming Undead) has already survived one zombie attack and spent years recuperating in Buddhist temple, hiding from the bosses that fired her from the Tyler Corporation.

Oh, you didn’t realize that Mattei was going to turn a zombie movie into Aliens? Let me remind you that this is the very same man who turned an Aliens movie into Terminator 2 with Shocking Dark.

Somehow, a member of the company named Paul Barker convinces her to head back to the island, along with a team of mercenaries who get to use Goldberg’s entrance music when they fight the walking undead. Somehow, there are also zombie little people, which thrilled me to no end, along with a plot stolen from Resident Evil and actual footage lifted from Crimson Tide. As if that wasn’t enough, the poster is an exact Xerox of Fulci’s City of the Living Dead.

Sadly, this was Bruno’s last movie. Everyone has to die some time, but if anyone could have lived forever, making scumtastic movies that cashed in on the latest trend, I wish that it could have been Vincent Dawn.

Many people have been credited with saying “Talent borrows, genius steals.”

They were talking about Bruno.