Director Serio Martino isn’t spoken of in the same terms as such esteemed Italian contemporaries as Federico Fellini or Michelangelo D’Antonio. He was more grindhouse than art house and while successful in his homeland, his work is mostly obscure elsewhere. And yet—of course!—he has attracted a cult following.
As Kat Ellinger writes in her compact but ample book, All the Colours of Sergio Martino, the director tried his hand in many genres, including westerns, science fiction, horror, crime and comedy. His integrity was softened by pragmatism. He was, she writes, “always the opportunist, ready to embrace any new popular fad.” Martino is quoted as being influenced by Costa-Gavras, Sam Peckinpah and Steven Spielberg. “Our cinema collapsed when our hand crafted effects had to compete with the Hollywood digital special effects,” he added.
Martino made the best of his limitations. Unable to afford constructing an Old West town for A Man Called Blade (19770, she shot much of it in rain and fog, turning the setting into a poetic suggestion of a ghost town. Excessive violence and pornographic sex marred some efforts as Martino struggled to find investors and audiences. Other films were juiced up by foreign distributors trading in sensationalism. They “often made changes without our consent, but we were a minor film industry and we accepted many compromises,” Martino said.
One wonders if Guillermo del Toro saw Martino’s riff on The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Fishmen and their Queen (1995), with its “flashes of dark fairytale and mythology.”
