Directed by Andrea Bianchi
Written by Andrea Bianchi
Starring:
- Gino Concari as Walter
- Patrizia Falcone as Jennifer
- Silvia Conti as Liza
- Pier Maria Cecchini as Robert
- Egon Jean as Danny Degli Espositi
- Marcello Furgiele as Gordon
Rating: 
Lucio Fulci presents Andrea Bianchi’s late sleazoid giallo about a hard-pressed horror movie shoot that stumbles into paranormal mayhem when a séance accidentally rouses a murderer from the past. Along the way the movie dishes out a streetwalker-slaughtering maniac, necrophiliac shadings, sapphic insinuations, romantic complications, and the backstage headaches of filmmaking. If Lucio Fulci had truly been involved in the production—and the credit wasn’t just a convenient marketing hook—Massacre might have erupted into a delirious bloodbath. Instead it’s Andrea Bianchi running the show, and his version favors bare skin over spilled blood, libido over viscera. With a plainspoken cast, bargain-basement production, limited staging, and briskly functional direction, Bianchi’s Massacre operates as blunt-force exploitation, borrowing giallo ingredients but cooking them with the coarse sensibilities of slasher cinema instead of the ornate theatrics of a traditional whodunit. It may sound like bottom-shelf trash, yet that’s precisely what it is—and precisely what it delivers: greasy European sleaze with a meta narrative that never quite evolves into genre commentary. It doesn’t quite hit the mark, but there’s something wonderfully self-referential about a film where the story revolves around the making of a B-grade horror flick that’s just as grubby as the one unfolding on screen. Throw in a generous body count, plenty of sleaze, and a rousing score by Luigi Ceccarelli, and the film never drifts far from its exploitation roots. If anything, it’s about as late-’80s as old-school Euro-trash gets.
