Joe d'Amato films have a reputation for sleaziness; they have a beady little eye for the right stone to lift up for bugs. I am a little suspicious of horror films which use suggestion, which prefer shadows and light-tricks to blunt presentation. As somebody's sensible grandmother said, "If it's there in the dark, it'll be just as much there when the light's on". Restraint can be a way of smugly avoiding the question, under the guise of artistic tact. D'Amato lets everything show, and if there is more banality on display than horror, so much the better. Or if there is horror, there it is, warm by your side; or it walks in and stands before you, matter-of-fact and indifferent. And the outrage and the pain come from you, they're not faked by the film; the films work, most often, very simply by switching all the lights on, and following things through to their logical conclusion. In Orgasmo Nero 2, d'Amato marks out a stretch of sand for a childish play, a horror-porn-environmental fable with the production values of a piece of street-theatre. A film completely without dignity. But a film made as if it were the last that were ever made, with no eye on posterity; regressing to childhood honesty, and doing merely what it wants to do, saying merely what it feels like saying, in the short time left to it.
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