Buio Omega

A film by Joe d'Amato, who mostly made horror and porn films, but who recklessly spoke the truth. One can either have nothing to do with the commercial world, and attack and reject it, or, like d'Amato, swim so low in the commercial sink, with so little to play for, that one gains a strange sort of freedom. A freedom, like a child, to see his dreams through to their logical conclusions, without diversions or dishonesty.

This film is about a man in love with his dead wife, who like a lot of men prefers her to be dead. The film is seen through the eyes of that woman, and asks what it means to be desired by a man. Buio Omega has been criticised for lacking poetry, for being cheaply shot, for smothering everything with vulgar blood and entrails, and it is a very vulgar film. But that is a function of its peasant honesty and its materialism - no gauze and dry ice in a d'Amato film to mask what lies underneath desires and dreams: we're made of flesh and bone, not poetry.

There is a lovely satirical scene at the engagement lunch - d'Amato is very fond of his grotesques. Is it well-acted or not? Is it well-paced and structured? It doesn't matter. Joe d'Amato is too honest to care much about such things, and besides he has a child-like love of the forbidden - like shooting a scene with the sun in front of the camera, he never tires of that. His films are not well-made or well-furnished; they are better than that. His Buio Omega and Emanuelle in America together say everything Eyes Wide Shut could not, for all Kubrick's formal ingenuity. The only subject that film has left is its own remoteness and the emptiness of its fantasies.

But as d'Amato knew, sex scenes smell, and there are always suffering, material people beneath the surface sheen. But as a maker of Z-grade films, he speaks from a truly abject artistic position - even the horror fans are a cut above watching a d'Amato pic. His films should have died in the year they were made, but they still persist, and in spite of themselves people still find a reckless, humiliating truth in them which no other films quite provide.