Looking back at the curious career of one of Italy’s most interesting – but lesser-known – film directors.
Unless you are a fan of Italian cult cinema, there is a fair chance that you won’t have heard of Aldo Lado, who died on November 25th 2023. It’s entirely possible that many of those who are fans of Italian cult cinema might be unfamiliar with his work, given that he had a short horror film career and so has rarely been mentioned in the same breath as the big – or even the middling – names of the scene. His work was never quite genre-specific or extensive enough, it seemed, for him to be seen as one of the greats even though his three horror films are all highly regarded and much better than many of those made by many of his better-known rivals.
Lado didn’t make that many films – at a time when other directors in Italy were grinding movies out, he made just fifteen films as director, with a few more stories and screenplays – and a handful of TV films and series from the 1980s onwards. These were quite a mixed bag – gialli, science fiction, comedy, thrillers – without enough of anything for him to really establish a reputation in any particular genre. While directors like Lucio Fulci also flitted between many genres, they generally found themselves eventually connected to one in particular (usually horror, sometimes sexploitation or westerns) or else were so prolific that their output included enough films of one particular style that they built a cult following through those films and then, as fans began to explore their wider filmography and Italian genre fandom expanded beyond horror and into the other genres of Italian exploitation cinema, became known for other types of films that they had specialised or excelled in between the 1960s and the 1980s.
Lado didn’t do enough of anything to really have that sort of reputation. Still, he really should’ve done – his horror films in particular are extraordinary and amongst the most interesting of the 1970s. Who Saw Her Die? is a remarkably bleak giallo starring George Lazenby that shows how the former James Bond really should’ve been a bigger star, while his directorial debut Short Night of the Glass Dolls is a tense collision of murder, occultism and politics that feels like Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut fed through the prism of giallo. Night Train Murders is a glossy retread of Last House on the Left, with the earlier film’s plot holes tightened up and its sadism refined and made more horrific. These three movies alone are the basis for whatever cult following Lado has and should’ve pushed him into the big leagues of Italian horror cinema. But at the time, he was just one of many filmmakers floating between genres, and while making these films he was also shooting domestic comedy films that diluted his reputation. In 1979, he made the hugely entertaining – but also very trashy – Star Wars-influenced sci-fi epic The Humanoid and after that tended to focus on mildly sexy dramas (including an erotic film rather dubiously inspired by the case of Japanese cannibal killer Issei Sagawa) and crime thrillers, most of which either failed to find international release or slipped unnoticed onto VHS with Lado’s name often hidden behind the pseudonym ‘George B. Lewis’. While Night Train Murders quickly developed a strong reputation in the early days of home video, his other films were harder to see for many years and his entire catalogue didn’t seem substantial enough for him to be mentioned in the same breath even as Sergio Martino or Umberto Lenzi, who were churning crime and horror films out well into the heyday of home video, ensuring an immediate fan base. Fans who did catch up with all three horror movies back when doing so was hard work certainly wondered if there was more out there waiting to be discovered – and were baffled to finally discover that no, that was the lot.
Looking at his films now, it’s admittedly hard to see a particular style in Lado’s work – his 1970s horror movies certainly have a downbeat melancholy and darkness to them that makes them stand out from many of their rivals, but The Humanoid is ludicrous fun that you would never connect to the same director and his mildly sexy comedies are all throwaway. Interestingly, he wrote almost all of these movies as well as directed them (and also contributed the story to psycho-drama The Designated Victim), so they all came from the same mind, yet have nothing in common. Perhaps his horror films were a fluke, or maybe he had unwittingly stumbled upon his specialist genre without even being aware of it. Perhaps they brought something out of him that he didn’t feel comfortable in continuing to explore. Whatever the reason, it seems a shame that he didn’t make more of his intense psycho-horror movies. He is something of a footnote in Italian horror film history – admired by fans but not productive enough to ever be an important player. But quantity isn’t everything – those three movies are amongst the best of 1970s Italian horror and for that alone, he deserves to be remembered as one of the greats of the genre.
DAVID FLINT
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