The Freakpit salutes Bruno Mattei

If you're trapped in a post-nuke future overrun by rats, these are the guys to save you

I didn't quite get round to posting about this when it happened (but then, it's me, so when do I ever?) but Italian movie director Bruno Mattei died a couple of weeks ago.

If asked to name a legendary film director, I'd bet not too many people would pick Mattei. It's not like his name featured on any lists next to Huston, Ford, Leone, Spielberg, Wilder, etc. Not surprising really, given most of his output.

You see, Mattei was a hack. But as hacks go, he was possibly the greatest hack of all. His films were pure, unadulterated trash and yet they trash of the highest calibre.

Mattei often worked under a pseudonym - Vincent Dawn is probably his most well known, but one look at the IMDb reveals a significant list of them - and I'm not entirely sure whether it was to try and fool English speaking audiences (in the same way that many Italian films of the 60s and 70s featured cast and crew with American-sounding aliases) or if it was just to try and throw people off the sent that might have had it in for him.

For Bruno Mattei was more than just an ordinary hack. He was an entirely shameless one. His films were not just knock-offs of whatever was popular, they even stooped as far as using stock library footage or even stealing wholesale from existing films. One more recent example was his film CRUEL JAWS, which I wrote about last year after seeing it at the Horrorthon festival in Dublin. As its title suggests, it's one of those seemingly countless JAWS rip-offs, made long after you'd have thought the genre was dead. Not only was it a giant-shark-on-the-loose movie however, it actually recycled footage from the other movies and even stole some music from STAR WARS. It's difficult to make it any more blatant.

His magnum opus as far as stock footage goes must surely be HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD, which was released to many territories as the wonderfully-titled ZOMBIE CREEPING FLESH. This good old fashioned video nasty was a zany zombie film that took place primarily in a jungle, thus allowing Mattei to squeeze in huge amounts of nature footage and film of jungle tribes. Of course, he made sure that he integrated it in such a way that it was being observed by a topless woman jogging along the road, but that's Mattei for you.

ZOMBI 3, another of Mattei's films, was billed as a sequel to Lucio Fulci's ZOMBI, aka ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS. It was actually partially the work of Fulci (who gets the credit on the film) but Mattei ended up playing a significant part. Once again, the film offers all manner of crazy undead-related antics that just make you stare in disbelief at the screen.

He did turn his hand to plenty of other exploitation genres in his career. THE OTHER HELL was his madcap chicken-murdering entry into the nunsploitation genre - nuns behaving badly, if you will - and he couldn't very well leave the early 80s Italian post-apocalyptic genre alone either. Thus we got RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR, in which an Earth ravaged by nuclear war is overrun by rats. This film is available in both the US and the UK on DVD and I urge all trash movie fans to check it out. Not just because I love the genre or because it's Mattei at his insane best, but primarily because the ending is one of the most gobsmacking moments of ludicrous spectacle ever committed to celluloid. It's certainly one of my faves.

Even in the latter years of his life, Mattei couldn't avoid churning out more straight-to-DVD cheapo flicks from genres long thought to be dead. Cannibals, zombies, women-in-prison... it reads like a list of popular Italian exploitation genres of the 70s but no, it's a summary of Mattei's last few movies.

I'm going to guess that you won't be seeing a special Bruno Mattei tribute montage at next year's Oscars - particularly since it would be made up of several pieces of footage that he probably stole from others - but within the realms of cult cinema his status as legend is secure. His films were trash and he was a indeed a shameless hack. But movies will be slightly saner and a lot less fun in his absence.