Vices Italiens 1 & 2

Though infamous Italian director Mario Salieri may have acquired a reputation over time for directing elegantly debauched movies shot with great style and attention to detail, this was not always the case, as Vices Italiens (a re-packaging of Sex Camorra, which I’d suggest is possibly even older than the 1992 original release quoted by EGAFD) readily proves. This tawdry tale is a rough and ready melodrama, a latter day morality tale trawling the Neapolitan underworld, laden with hammy acting, poorly staged shoot-outs and terribly static camerawork that gives the whole movie the look and feel of a particularly cheap soap opera.

Vices Italiens stars Roberto Malone as a degenerate low-level mob boss who, over the course of the two parts and several sleazy scenes, plumbs increasingly desperate depths of depravity. His dissolute behaviour runs the gamut from treating his own wife (Joy Karin’s) as a mere sex object to be wanked over while he guzzles wine and peruses a porn mag, and later to be sodomised against her wishes, to taking full physical recompense from the mother who asks for his intervention in her daughter’s impending marriage to another unsuitable suitor. It only gets worse from there, and let me assure you that I give nothing away by saying that there’s no happy ending as Salieri shows little compassion for the characters he creates.

While the common Salieri theme of the sexual humiliation and exploitation of needy women is present and correct, several scenes along these lines outstay their welcome to such an extent, long after any point has been made, that the only conclusion can be that the moral to the story (such as it is) is there as a mere sop to the conscience - too much time is spent revelling in perverse situations that gradually descend from voyeurism to non-consensual sex and even rape. In the heartless world of Vices Italiens, everyone uses sex as a weapon and most scenes end with the female protagonists left in tears.

What I find interesting about this inescapably mediocre pair of movies is not just that they lack the sophistication and the eerie, voyeuristic feel of many of Salieri’s best movies – often created via the use of painstakingly lit and decorated sets accompanied by ominous music, rather than the shoddy set-ups and tacky library soundtrack used here – but also that, despite depicting some particularly nasty dramatic situations, the sex is actually quite tame by 2006 standards. The actual physical performances are restrained by the demands of the drama (unwilling or bored women don’t lash around in fake orgasmic ecstasy), in stark comparison to much contemporary porn that offers more casual brutality with no dramatic context to excuse it.

Beyond Malone and Karin’s, another unfathomable Salieri cast list presents a potentially misleading minefield that I will sadly have to leave you to decode – suffice to say that my interest was in Joy, but the horny brunette I presume is Emmanuelle Muller turns in a good scene or two, and the rest make little impression sexually as their performances are largely sacrificed to the demands of the situation.

DVD Comments
Colmax generally show no hesitation in supplying Salieri’s multipart tales, no matter how short the constituent episodes may be, on money-spinning individual discs, so I wonder if the two-movies on one disc format has been chosen here as a tacit acknowledgment of the generally so-so quality of the footage – not just showing its age but also including some blips that make it look like a transfer from a lesser source than the original masters. I could be wrong. Dubbed in French, original sound or additional languages would have been a more useful extra than the handful of photos and trailers. It’s hardly been packaged with much care or attention.