Guerrilla Metropolitana is an Italian-born, London, UK based musician/filmmaker who has made a series of experimentally-edged horror shorts,  Bits (2021), The Baron and the Harpsichord (2021), The Censor-A British Horror Tale of Real Politics and Social Moral-Code (2021), My Special Superhero (2021) and Corporate Torment (it burns like hell).

The Censor is a horror story about moral hypocrisy told in an abstract mixture of mockumentary and experimental found footage. Metropolitana’s long short (44 min.) format film shows remnants of the style he would bring to maturation in Dariuss: no dialogue, hand-held camera movements, expressive color and exaggerated sound design. An elderly politician, who works for the Censorship board, Sir Tangen III is pictured in black & white photographs (director in white wig, bushy mustache and long black coat) with his voice-over recounting his political ideals. He tells his wife (in VO) he is out of pills and is going to the late night pharmacy. Instead he drives his black Rolls Royce to a shady urban sprawl of delapitated bridges and sewage system to cruise a young skateboarder waiting for a friend. The camera spends much time aestheticzing the urban rot, moving in hand held style across old pipes, walls, rickety fences, dark corridors and garbage bins. Sir Tangen III (the Censor) picks up the young skateboarder and proceeds give him fellatio, then knocks him unconscious with chloroform and proceeds to brutally rape him. All the sex is suggested or represented in oblique and sometimes comical manner, with thrusting camera movements, shots of phallic imagery and children’s cartoon inserts acting as sexual innuendo. In the climax we see the wounded skateboarder, blood soaked anus and backside, bludgeon the Censor and slowly walk away into the dark night. A cut to the pink scrolled graffiti ‘Freedom’ on the wall portends a signal of the skateboarder’s victory (of sorts) against moral hypocrisy. The next day a news voice over reports on the missing skateboarder and a run of similar missing young men in the same area, the only clue being the sighting of a black Rolls Royce in the area.

Corporate Torment (it burns like hell) is calmer than Metropolitana’s others films, with a different pace, quieter music, but still carries an angry, blunt message against the hollowness of corporate profit-only companies that treat their employees like flies. Only sometimes the flies come back for justice, because, as an end title card states, “wherever there is shit…there is always a fly or two.” Corporate Torment is more straight forward in theme and story than The Censor and Dariuss. The bulk of the 19 minute run time is a scene where the heartless human resource manager Hillary Rice (played by Juicy X) gives out marching orders to lowly, non-productive employee Rudolph (played by Guerrilla Metropolitana). Metropolitana frames the scene cleverly so Rice is always the dominant figure.

Shot in sepia-tinged black & white and played out in silent film style with subtitles for dialogue, Rice is given more screen time and always framed full frontal, from her large breasts up, looking directly at the camera, while Rudolph’s framing only occupies the upper left quarter of the frame, and from a low angle. Low angles usually denote power, but Rudolph’s quarter frame size and his eye pointing toward the ground strips him of any power. Rudolph’s plea at clemency because he is a single parent of a deformed baby falls on deaf ears. Ms. Rice will hear nothing of it. The excised Rudolph gets some satisfaction from telling Ms. Rice a cautionary tale couched as a threat about an abject, putrid creature made up of liquified excrements of hundreds of managers and directors who suffer eternal pain in the bowels of this avenging creature. The final scene is the “shit creature” (most probably Rudolph’s deformed son) attacking and sodomizing Ms. Rice, depicted in a frantic, wild hyper-fast montage of hard-to-decipher body parts, close-up shots of an anus, flies, subliminal word flashes, shots of a screaming Ms. Rice, and Rudolph, accompanied by Metropolitana’s usual cacophonic sound design composed of dozens of sounds (alarms, baby cries, yells, rings, gargling sounds, vomiting, machines, etc.). Having recently scene The Substance, Metropolitana’s excrement, corporate-fusion monster reminded me of the grotesque monstrous fusion of Elisabeth Sparkle and her young double Sue. Metropolitana’s outsider art status is cemented in a pre-credit scene where we see four side-by-side repeated images of the filmmaker dressed in black S&M leather, his penis exposed in one, preparing the tools of his trade: “Getting set. A filmmaker in action. A camera, tripod, and lubricant!” The scene made me think of a pornographic redux of Dziga Vertov’s classic Man With a Movie Camera!

Dariuss (Guerilla Metropolitana, 2023, UK) falls in the small grouping of experimentally inclined horror films (that are otherwise different from each other) like Melancholie der Angel (Marian Dora Botulino, 2009), Begotten (E. Elias Merhige, 1989), and more recently Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2023). Dariuss started out as a short film about a home invasion and was expanded to hour length by director Guerrilla Metropolitana (the Italian director’s alias) largely by expanding the single home location to include external locations while still keeping the plot opaque and centered on interpersonal familial links (of a very messed up family). The film is heavily weighted on triggering strong emotions over intellectual ideas, balancing its tone between spectacle and repulsion. What little there is of plot consists of an ill functioning middle class family, a husband (played by Archibald Kane, a filmmaker himself who also co-edited the film), his wife, played by Ila Argento, the wife’s mother or mother-in-law, played by Marie Antoinette Robespierre, and a young girl played by Medusa S who appears in the opening and reappears periodically, who may be the daughter, a ghost, or perhaps even the character of the wife as a girl. None of these family links really matter (and are as intentionally deceiving as the actor names, which seem to be all alias’s) because the film is a highly stylized, very mannered mood piece which sucks the viewer in through meticulously designed imagery (color filters, overexposed black & white, hand-held camera movements, bizarre framings) and an equally worked over soundtrack of varied sounds (baby sounds and dripping water a constant throughout), human voices (there is no dialogue) and emotive music.

The skeletal plot concerns a serial killer/maniac whose presence is first felt through subjective POV shots framed with an iris effect who may be stalking the girl in the forest. He eventually invades the family home, murders the family (and house cat) and then leaves in search of other victims. Visually the film experiments around color, with multiple tonal shifts that alter according to mood or intent between red, green, pink, and blue tints, film de-aging effects which add scratches and dirt marks to a digital image, edge frames and grain texture, light flares and solarization imagery. Film speed is also manipulated to varying degrees, mainly fast motion which abstracts human movement and even renders a silent film style to the murders. The silent film effect is underscored by the frequent use of iris shots and carnival music and sets which recall The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. While the film is largely aggressive in its frenetic camera movements and fast editing, the rhythm is often tempered with scenes that surprisingly sign off with calming slow fades to black.

The opening scenes establish a girl (framed only from behind) playing in a forested area and then a nearby urban street, London as suggested by the red telephone booth. The montage of urban night street shots is rhythmically cut to loud sounds of water drops (perhaps a nod to Maria Bava’s masterpiece story “La giocca d’acqua” from I Tre Volti della Paura). A pregnant woman on a park bench appears next, her relationship to the characters in the house is unclear (though she is played by the same actress as the wife). A flash edit of a slimy black membrane tossed onto the grass is in hindsight a retroactive edit to a later scene of sexual violence, perhaps an abortion-styled violence. An ambiguous scene of what looks like a carnival (perhaps a nod to Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) with appropriate music and baby sounds follows the pregnant woman scene. An unsettling POV iris shot of a hand held camera with a single dark mark in its centre moving across a forest appears with a giallo-esque lullaby hymn (the first of several times we hear this lullaby tune).  Is this the ‘maniac’s’ POV? In a scene that echoes (unintentionally no doubt) Skinamarink, a night time shot of an red sofa chair is the ‘stage’ of a children’s style puppet show featuring two stuffed animals (which we will later see in the home's bedroom). This gives way to an overexposed shot of a house cat which, at 11 minutes, takes us into the main location, the inside of a home, filmed in canted angles, colored gels and deep Gothic-styled shadows. A bespectacled elderly lady (grandmother) surprisingly still lactating fills bottles with her breast milk. The husband is parked outside the house (Archibald Kane) drinking and eating candy. A new location appears, filmed with the same iris shaped hand held camera, exploring an empty, dilapidated home (like a scene out of Blair Witch Project). Is this the maniac staking out potential victims?

In an odd moment of domesticity in a household where normalcy is a stranger, the wife is in the kitchen cutting vegetables. The sound of a coughing child triggers a fast-paced montage of the girl in the park and a stunning portrait painting of a beautiful young adolescent girl. I wonder whether this young portrait painting is a reference to the painting in Kill Baby Kill! (aka Operazione Paura ) of Melissa Graps, and the works of Mario Bava in general? In a later scene the husband masturbates vigorously to this painting. A POV shot from outside the front of the house is suggestive of the classic opening shot of Halloween and Black Christmas, as if Metropolitana is tempting us to expect a classic stalker movie. The wife stands nude, looking at herself in the mirror with a look of horror. The image is lit in super high contrast black and white. The sound track augments the frenetic cutting and zoom ins and rotating superimpositions of the wife, a voice trill adding to the sense of delirium. Call back shots to the young girl in the forest triggers a prolonged red filtered scene of the wife masturbating (close-up shots of her open legs and slurpy sounds make the action unmistakable). A tender moment between the wife and her mother turns uncomfortably incestuous as the mother’s caresses and kisses turn decidedly sexual. Then as the wife lies down, her arms flaying like a butterfly (the image of which briefly superimposed over her flapping arms), the mother (below frame) pleasures her daughter orally (moaning sounds of sexual joy leave no ambiguity). The macabre family shares an interest in incestuous sex and liberating masturbation. Similar slurpy sounds accompany the husband’s masturbating to the young girl in the painting, and later the grandmother masturbating after sexually servicing her daughter.

At around the halfway point in the film there is indication that the maniac killer (played with brave gusto by the director) has entered the home. A child’s bedroom is one of the first spaces he invades, a bed filled with plush toys. A sticker on the wall reads “RIP: Little Angel”, which may be a reference to the girl from the opening. What follows at 40 minutes is the first intensely violent moment in the film. Although some members of the audience might be ‘pleased’ to finally feel like they are at a horror film, the tone is no different from what we’ve been experiencing thus far. It has been a horror film all along, only the audience hasn’t realized it.

The murder set pieces are visceral, graphic and at times comic in their silent film mannerism. The killer attacks the wife in her bed and is framed from behind thrusting a knife downwards repeatedly in hyper fast motion (echoed by sounds of baby screams and a knife cutting flesh). After this first kill we see the grinning killer in black wig and leather coat caressing the decapitated head of the wife (framed in a high angle red tinted shot). The mother opens her bedroom door and is quickly accosted by the killer who forces her back onto her bed, leading to the most violent moment of the film. The first part of the attack is comical in the way the killer’s body is framed over the woman, blocking all but her flaying legs, and the thrusting movements are exaggeratedly sped up like a twisted out take from the Benny Hill show. Then the violence becomes excessively grotesque. In a static long take we see the maniac pull out the mother’s insides through her vagina. A profile shot of her flabby, lifeless body jittering like a vat of Jell-O is the most unsettling image of the film: body as pure abjection. As a viewer we don’t know whether to feel pity or disgust.

The aftermath of the kill scene is equally unsettling in the way the killer, full frontal exposure through his open leather coat, turns to sneer mockingly at the camera as he frantically rubs blood off a wall. The killer moves into the kitchen where he drinks the now dead mother’s breast milk. The killer’s attention is broken by the off-screen sound of a front door closing. His next victim, the husband, has returned home. The husband polishes off the rest of the breast milk then masturbates to the portrait painting. He is jumped from behind by the killer who stuns him with a knife stab to the neck, and then follows this up with more frenetically placed jabs. Subliminal flashes of the words “Who is Dariuss?” are superimposed over the husband’s face. The maniac disembowels the husband and in silent film style iris-in close-ups, tosses the husband's innards from one hand to the next, grinning like a mad fool. He finishes off the household by placing the cat in the microwave.

In a wonderfully evocative shot (54:30), the girl from the opening forest scenes is framed through a mirror which also reflects the portrait painting of the adolescent girl. The image is red, the girl, whose face we see for the first time, seems sad, shaking her head while holding her arm up in the air in a form of supplication. Her movement is exaggerated by the fast motion. Is she a ghost? Or is this a flashback to the wife as a girl? The camera zooms in to the portrait’s bleeding eye. With no one left to destroy, the killer leaves, leading to a final series of moving hand held POV shots. The camera settles on a wall and fades out, with baby laughs continuing as if to suggest the nightmare we have just witnessed is not quite ready to end. At the end of Dario Argento's seminal Suspiria (1977) the end credits remind us, “you have been watching Suspiria.” At the end of Dariuss we get similarly red blood dripping lettering spelling Dariuss. As if to shove the experience of the film back in our faces, a white on black title card reads, “Madness and Syphilis Have Never Been So Good!” A few seconds of black silence before we hear the sound of broken glass. Followed by the sound of heavy, frightened breathing. More sounds of a baby crying, screams, the sound of a knife violating flesh, inhuman groans and crackling sounds. In pure blackness, the maniac invades another house. The nightmare is set to repeat.

Director-writer, cinematographer and producer Guerilla Metropolitana plays the maniac and co-edited the film with actor Archibald Kane. Ila Argento plays the wife, Marie Antoinette Robespierre plays the grandmother, Sarah Isabél is credited as the pregnant woman, but this is a pseudonym since she is played by the same actress as the wife, Ila Argento. Medusa S is credited as the little girl, music by Metropolitana and Monoxide, a band headed by Metropolitana (except for one song by Luis Berra, ‘the hidden portrait’). Special effects are by Metropolitana & Stella Rose. The film is in memory of Ruggero Deodato (1939-2022). And is dedicated to "my American ‘angel’ Carol Droge Parks".

Volume 28, Issue 11-12 / December 2024 Film Reviews   art horror   experimental cinema   horror   italian cinema