Directed by Sergio Bergonzelli
Written by Sergio Bergonzelli
Starring:
- John Phillip Law as Saint Simon
- Gordon Mitchell as Hermann (the butler)
- Brigitte Christensen as Sybille / Christine
- Marco Di Stefano as Gérard
- Olinka Hardiman (credited as Olga Hardiman) as Corinne
Rating: 
This Italian shocker bewitched me with its florid parapsychological vision of reincarnation, only to ensnare me further with its relentless, almost bestial stylistic fury—an exploitation ritual driven by theological unrest. Bergonzelli, that eclectic conjurer of Eurotrash curios, spins one of his most baroque fables of artistic hysteria and romantic doom, each becoming indistinguishable from the other in their fevered intensity. John Phillip Law channels this derangement with mournful elegance as a painter haunted by a woman who is the uncanny double of his departed wife. Sybille (Brigitte Christensen) emerges as his latest intoxicating muse, equal parts temptation and torment.
With its cocky, split-level storytelling, Bergonzelli’s brazen freakshow kicks off a full-on doppelganger revelation and lays out a supernatural parade oozing with fatalistic grime—an omen of the unnameable insanity waiting to detonate. And trust me: nothing, absolutely nothing, can brace you for the explosive haymaker this madness swings your way. We’re talking necrophiliac porn, blood-splattered canvases, rapist killers, and gothic mysticism colliding into a woozy sermon about death’s cosmology and the slippery immortality of art outliving its doomed creator. Thematically, it’s killer stuff. But genre-wise, Bergonzelli cranks his Euro-sleaze instincts into gorgeously filthy, no-apologies exploitation filth—so extreme it ends up smothering the intellectual pulse beneath its ghoulish allegories.
Fortunately, the film’s nauseating sleaze finds its anchor in the spectral presence of Gordon Mitchell, that prolific American B-cinema titan, who here embodies the painter’s necrophiliac, cannibalistic servant. His performance is unearthly in its creepiness, a near-literal manifestation of Satan wandering the mortal plane. The character may be a familiar type of depraved sycophant, yet Mitchell infuses him with such eccentric ferocity that his malevolent tour de force becomes essential to the film’s hypnotic power. Blood Delirium stands as an uncanny outlier within European exploitation—typically divided between grimy schlock and artistic perversity—but this one fuses every strain of sleaze and ambition into a single monstrous hybrid, executed with unnerving, almost terrifying bravado.
