Italian filmmakers Manlio Gomarasca and Massimiliano Zanin present Red Inferno: Joe D’Amato on the Road of Excess, their feature documentary that pays tribute to the life and filmography of Aristide Massaccesi, better known as Joe D’Amato.
Over the course of his career, D’Amato made almost two hundred films of various genres under a plethora of pseudonyms. D’Amato started out as a cinematographer before moving into directing, but self-identified as a craftsman of cinema, a jack of all trades. In Red Inferno, his daughter and peers describe him as the kind of person who was intent on evolving and pushing the limits, both for himself and his audiences. He continuously challenged himself to tackle new roles, new stories, and new genres. His modus operandi became ‘Surprise, Shock, Scandalize.’ In that, he certainly succeeded.
While the documentary mentions that D’Amato’s array of genres include such ones as spaghetti westerns, action, and Boccaccio-esque films, it mostly focuses on the areas which came to define D’Amato films: porn, horror, and a deliberate combination of the two. Jean-François Rauger, a journalist and programmer at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, explains that D’Amato’s style is “the product of an era when viewers wanted to see on screen what had been forbidden for years.” In many ways, D’Amato’s career is demonstrative of a decades-long shifting cinematic tide in Italy, France, and even further abroad, as D’Amato was quick to tackle emerging trends.
The numerous contributors in the film speak very highly of D’Amato and his films, and it is evident that he generated a cult following; his films were often not well received by critics or the Italian public according to D’Amato himself. His film peers in the documentary applaud his everlasting commitment to cinema, remarking on how he would work on multiple films simultaneously. He lived for the set, and as a result was a rather absentee figure to his family. Nevertheless, his daughter Francesca beams non-stop when talking about her father and his work, speaking reverently of him despite acknowledging his absence in her family’s life. While we only hear work-oriented anecdotes in place of any personal family memories, Massaccesi’s ability to leave his daughter with such a positive, memorable impression in spite of his absence speaks to his charismatic character.
Archival footage and interviews of D’Amato present a charming and mild-tempered man, belying the inner horrors of his imagination. Indeed, viewers should approach the film with caution due to the extreme gore depicted via clips from his various movies. As a viewer unfamiliar with the extremity of D’Amato’s horror and erotic horror, it certainly shocked and disturbed. I won’t relay the gory details, suffice to say that I am still attempting to wipe from my memory certain brutally graphic violent images (including horrific, gory sexual violence). Eli Roth, one of the contributors to the documentary, lauds D’Amato for his technical vision and production design, but the chosen clips didn’t provide much of an opportunity to focus on that aspect.
Red Inferno chronicles Massaccesi’s career from the early days when he was an extremely sought-after cinematographer making movies with passion, through to his final years in which he became stuck reluctantly directing porn movies. He was no stranger to the genre, having directed porn movies in his early career, but as a filmmaker constantly in search of change, Massaccesi had long since left porn behind and had zero interest in returning to it. However, massive debt forced him back into the genre later in his career, and unfortunately his legacy as the “king of porn” in Italy solidified after his untimely death. Francesca tears up explaining that her father would hate to be remembered this way.
Gomarasca and Zanin set out to pay homage to a great filmmaker, and although they don’t dispel Massaccesi’s unwanted legacy, they instead create a larger one that incorporates Massaccesi’s other films, his dedication to his work and cinema as a whole, and most of all the legacy left through his friends, colleagues and his daughter, which is the most important of them all.
Red Inferno: Joe D’Amato on the Road of Excess premieres at this year’s Venice Film Festival in the Special Screenings category.
Score: B