Delirium: Photo of Gioia (1987)

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

After directing several giallo films in a row (Macabre, A Blade in the Dark, You'll Die at Midnight), Lamberto Bava began to dislike the genre and wanted to do more works like Demons. That was the inspiration for this film, where he used the killer's point of view to show fantastic images of the victims, from a woman with a giant eyeball to another that looks like a human insect. He also claimed that this was one of the few times that he had the time and budget he needed to get it right.Gloria (Serena Grandi, the "Dolly Parto" of Italy who also appears in Antropophagus and The Adventures of Hercules) is a former model who has inherited the magazine Pussycat from her dead husband. The magazine takes off once a killer begins murdering whatever model is on that month's cover, starting with Gloria's friend Kim.Her neighbor Mark, who is in a wheelchair due to a mental condition, sees the murder and alerts her, but all she finds are photos of Kim's body. Soon, Kim's body is found in a dumpster.Gloria's brother Tony is a photographer for Pussycat and does a photoshoot with Sabrina (Italian glamour model, singer and songwriter Sabrina Salerno) and tries to have sex with her, but he's impotent. After he leaves, killer bees sting her to death and sends the photos to Gloria.Flora (Capucine, the famous French model and actress), an old friend of Gloria, is trying to buy the magazine and Gloria finally agrees, hoping that the murders will finally end. I wouldn't say that she's a friend actually, as she has all this old footage of Gloria back when she was a model and did porn and horror movies, which keep showing up every time we go back to her office.Tony and Gloria start another photo shoot with Susan in a department store, but Tony ends up dead. The killer taunts them over the loudspeaker and kills Susan. When the police arrive, there are no bodies, but Gloria gets the photos and her friend Evelyn (Daria Nicolodi, ex-wife of Dario Argento, mother of Asia, writer of Suspiria and the star of Shock) finds Susan's body.The police go to question Roberto and discover the backdrops of Gloria that were in every one of the killer's photos. He shows up at her house and she runs, just as a car hits him. The police now consider that the case is closed.The magazine is finally sold and Evelyn quits. Tony's body is floating in the pool and the killer shows up...but it's Tony. He explains that he committed these murders to protect his sister, but he's cutting off her clothes with a butcher knife while he's doing this. So at the last second, Mark shoots him in the groin. He then visits her in the hospital at the end, seemingly recovered from his mental issues.Completely unrelated to the plot, George Eastman shows up as one of her old boyfriends. I'm not complaining - George can be in every movie.I'm not pretending that this movie is any good. You can tell when making a movie like Demons that Bava really cares. Here, things sloppily head toward its ending. A movie about a porn magazine filled with murder, gore and nudity that ends up boring you has to be a total failure. There's just enough here to stay enjoyable, but it's borderline at best.

Lamberto Bava is nowhere near as well-respected a film-maker as his father, having directed some real stinkers in his time (Devouring Waves and La Maschera del Demonio, to name two of his abominations); however, he occasionally rises to the occasion, such as with this enjoyable late '80s giallo that has plenty to recommend it.The plot is a typical convoluted murder mystery in which a mysterious killer targets glamour models working for an adult magazine owned by curvaceous beauty Gloria (Serena Grandi). There are suspects aplenty, making it fun to try and figure out the identity of the killer (good luck with that... as with many a giallo, the killer is someone very unlikely and their motive even harder to guess). While the murders are relatively tame for the genre, two of them are made extremely memorable by the fact that the killer's POV portrays the victims as bizarre mutations: one girl is seen with a giant, veiny eye for a face, while another (played by Italian pop sensation Sabrina Salerno) is depicted with a bee's head (and is stung to death by a swarm of the insects!).In addition to an enjoyably absurd plot and the freakish hallucinations, we also get a ton of gratuitous female nudity (mostly from Grandi, although Sabrina fans will also be happy), making the film a delightfully sleazy affair. Chuck in neat supporting roles for Italian exploitation actor George Eastman and Argento regular Diaria Nicolodi, and what you have is a thoroughly entertaining, occasionally stylish (Gloria being stalked through a department store is a well-handled, suspenseful highlight) and not-at-all-stinky thriller.

Yes, the actress is gorgeous. Great cheesecake if that's all you're looking for. But I expected a lot more from this director, the gratuitous gore and violence he's notorious for. Maybe it was titillating back the pre-internet 80s, but by today's standards it's nothing special whatsoever.*SPOILER* What makes this such a letdown is the buildup to a totally anticlimactic cliché ending you've seen a million times. The villain is just about to get his way, and then Bang, down he goes with one shot. The end.How lame is that?

Delirium is an odd piece of horror, with it's strange "death" symbolisms (I'm guessing thats all part of the giallo style) and it's even stranger characters. I rather enjoyed the death scenes and the different ways the killer decided to off the models (especially a certain scene purtaining to bees), I didn't, however, like the acting of these said models. I found them all to be heavily amateurish and in desperate need of acting classes. Of course, how COULD one possibly act well with a piece of cr@p script. On the other hand, maybe thats what made this movie so horrific, the lacking dialogue between the characters. Overall I gave this film a 4/10. For me, the only things good about it were the creative deaths, the lead female's body (I do have to admit she has a gorgeous body. And no I am not gay, but it's OK to compliment no?) and the ending...with the...well...for those that saw it you know what I am talking about.