Come visit the wild wild planet of retro Italian genre films with the seminal documentary Life As A B-Movie: Piero Vivarelli, written and directed by Fabrizio Laurenti and Niccolo Vivarelli. It is the long overdue portrait of one of the most important Italian film directors that you probably have never heard of. Piero Vivarelli was an Italian film director who made B-movies in several different genres throughout the 60s and 70s.
He started off as an assistant to Lucio Fulci on The Juke Box Kids, which pioneered the Italian rock n’ roll film. It starred the rock singer Adriano, a.k.a. the Pelvic Thruster, who is described in an interview as an electrical spring. Vivarelli also wrote Fulci’s scooter rebel movie Howlers of the Dock, which starred famous American jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. Throughout the movie, Baker is seen falling asleep—a reflection of his real-life behavior on set, attributed to his constant heroin use.
Vivarelli was also a journalist who wrote editorials for the Italian youth magazine Big. Later, he played a pivotal role as the first promoter to bring Led Zeppelin to Italy. He even wrote a hit pop song, “35,000 Kisses,” that transcended its original film to become a chart success. With his superhero film, Mister X, Vivarelli got in early on Italian comic book adaptations.
“Anyone will find themselves fascinated by a director who literally lived a B-movie in the flesh.”
He also invented the erotic exotic sub-genre in the 70s, with his movie Black Decameron opening the door to other Italian films featuring leads of color. Meanwhile, Vivarelli partied every night until dawn and had countless affairs amid his multiple marriages. It’s a constant race between which is wilder: the sexy content of his movies or the director’s life.
So, I know a thing or two about Italian cinema, particularly horror, but I had to look up Vivarelli as the name wasn’t familiar. That’s when I discovered he was the director of Satanik, a film I have a very strange personal connection to. I played in a stoner doom metal band for years called Hippie Crippler (the US one, not the Canadian band), and we had a song called “Satanik.”
The film Satanik is a 1968 female Jekyll and Hyde tale that’s light on horror but heavy on sexy style. The key scene is a striptease featuring the title character wearing a Diabolik face mask. Hippie Crippler plastered this masked Satanik imagery on the cover of our EP, Murder On The Lungs, so boy, was I interested.
"…an endless feast for hardcore Italian film fans but also a great introduction for the untouched..."
