Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts
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Zombies, vampires, and a song: the Italian film nobody remembers

The VHS era left behind a graveyard of unmarked cassette boxes, and buried in the back rooms of suburban video stores from Parramatta to Preston sat the strangest sort of curios. Italian genre filmmakers spent the late sixties and seventies gleefully smashing together every creature, trope, and cheap effect they could afford, and occasionally a reel would surface that pushed the formula further than anyone thought possible. The film in question is one of those oddities: an Italian production that shoves zombies, vampires, and a full-blown musical number into the same ninety minutes, then vanishes from the collective memory like a vampire caught in a sunbeam.

Mike and Iris had been chasing rumours of this particular title for years before a battered tape finally turned up in a clearance bin at a former Video Ezy in Adelaide's western suburbs. The cover art showed a man in a cape clutching a woman in a torn dress, with green hands reaching up from the bottom corner. It looked like a dozen other Euro horror compilations from the period, but the running time and the studio credit suggested something a little more ambitious. Popping it into the player revealed a film that refuses to be categorised, and that is exactly why it deserves a second look.

Unearthing an Italian oddity from the back of the video shop

Australian genre fans of a certain age remember the ritual of walking into a local video store on a Saturday arvo and scanning the horror section for anything with a lurid cover. Italian productions dominated the lower shelves because local distributors like Columbia Tri-Star and Palace Films had flooded the market with cheap acquisitions throughout the early eighties. Titles got reshuffled, retitled, and re-released with new artwork so often that entire films slipped through the cracks. This particular zombie-vampire-musical hybrid was released locally under three different names, which explains why even seasoned collectors have trouble tracking it down.

The film belongs to a brief window when Italian producers were experimenting with multi-genre packages to maximise export value. By combining a gothic vampire story with contemporary zombie horror and a comedic musical interlude, the makers hoped to attract fans of Mario Bava's atmospheric work, Lucio Fulci's gore epics, and the musical variety shows that filled RAI broadcasts. It is a commercial logic that sounds absurd on paper, but Italian genre cinema operated on a pure, unfiltered opportunism that often produced accidental art.

How a vampire, a zombie horde, and a travelling theatre troupe share the same screen

The plot begins like a traditional gothic horror: a weary traveller takes shelter in a crumbling castle owned by a reclusive count with an unfortunate complexion. The count, as these things go, requires blood to survive, and he has his eyes on the traveller's beautiful travelling companion. Within twenty minutes, however, the script pivots into a different mode entirely. The castle sits on land that conceals a cursed cemetery, and when the local peasants accidentally breach a sealed tomb, the dead rise with a hunger for living flesh. Suddenly the vampire and the zombie horde are competing for the same victims, and the screenplay treats this territorial dispute as the film's central dramatic engine.

The traveller is revealed to be the leader of a touring musical theatre troupe, which provides the third ingredient in this unlikely stew. The troupe has been performing a commedia dell'arte routine through the countryside, and they continue to rehearse their numbers even as the supernatural threat escalates. The musical sequence arrives in the third act as a frantic attempt to distract a swarm of zombies with song and dance, a solution that feels completely in keeping with the delirious logic of Italian exploitation filmmaking. The number is staged with a certain crudeness, but the choreography has a desperate energy that makes it oddly charming.

The three genre threads woven into the plot:

The musical number that stops the dead in their tracks

Italian genre films from this period often included musical interludes, partly because soundstages were cheaper to keep busy and partly because local audiences expected variety. Theatrical traditions like the commedia dell'arte and the travelling troupes of the early twentieth century provided ready-made excuses to break into song. This film leans into that tradition harder than most, treating the musical sequence as a plot device rather than a diversion. The characters argue about whether art has any value in the face of annihilation, then launch into a five-minute routine that doubles as a character study and a survival strategy.

The song itself is an original composition with a melody that borrows heavily from the kind of Euro pop that flooded European charts in the early seventies. The lyrics are nonsense Italian rhymes about love and death, performed with a sincerity that undercuts the absurdity of the situation. The zombies respond to the performance by swaying in place rather than attacking, which suggests the script understood the Pavlovian power of a catchy tune. The sequence has the awkward charm of a community theatre production filmed on a tight schedule, and it remains the single most quoted moment in the film's small but devoted cult following.

Faces from the Italian genre scene

The cast features a roster of performers who spent their careers drifting between peplum, giallo, and horror productions without ever becoming household names. The vampire count is played by a character actor with a gravelly voice and a permanent five o'clock shadow, the kind of face that could sell menace across any genre. The leading lady was a former model who transitioned into genre work after winning a minor beauty contest in Rome, and she handles the dual demands of screaming, singing, and running through fog-shrouded sets with admirable professionalism. Her refusal to perform in the nude became a point of contention with producers, and the story of that principled stand echoes the experience of The Rise of the Female Exploitation Star Who Refused to Do Nude Scenes, a subject the podcast has explored in depth.

The travelling troupe members are populated by journeyman performers who bring a musical theatre background to roles that would have been played by stuntmen in a more conventional production. Their dance training shows in the choreographed fight sequences, which have a rhythm and flow rarely seen in Italian zombie films of the period. The director, a former assistant to several established genre filmmakers, makes the most of limited resources by staging the musical number in a single take, which gives the sequence a raw, unpolished immediacy. The result feels like a slice of genuine creative chaos rather than the product of a committee.

Italian genre traditions and the art of the mashup

The Italian film industry has always operated on the principle that audiences want spectacle above all else, and the country's horror output from 1960 to 1985 reflects that philosophy with a glorious lack of restraint. Producers would greenlight scripts based on whatever international trends were hot at the moment, then hire directors to execute them on the cheapest possible schedule. This industrial model produced the giallo boom, the spaghetti western cycle, the cannibal film craze, and the zombie plague that followed the success of Fulci's breakthrough. A film that combined vampires, zombies, and a musical number was simply the logical next step in a production line that prized variety over coherence.

Italian genre films also had a habit of borrowing from their own heritage. The commedia dell'arte sequence pays tribute to a theatrical tradition that stretches back centuries, and the gothic castle setting nods to the gothic horror cycle that had defined Italian cinema since the silent era. The film functions as a compressed history of Italian popular entertainment, refracted through the lens of a B-movie budget and a writer's room running on fumes. It is the kind of accidental synthesis that only happens when commercial pressures and creative instincts collide without adult supervision.

Other Italian genre mashups from the same fertile period:

A podcast discussion of why it still matters

There is a particular pleasure in watching a film that fails to understand its own absurdity, and that pleasure is at the heart of the appeal of so-bad-it-good cinema. The film never winks at the camera, never acknowledges that it is doing anything unusual, and that commitment to its own ridiculous premise is what makes it work. When the musical number arrives, the performers are giving it everything they have, and the director is staging it with the same seriousness he brings to the zombie attack scenes. That sincerity transforms a potential joke into something genuinely moving, which is exactly the alchemy that the podcast loves to celebrate.

For an Australian audience, the film has an additional layer of nostalgia. Many viewers first encountered Italian genre cinema through SBS broadcasts in the late eighties and early nineties, when multicultural television policy opened the door to European productions that commercial networks had ignored. The late night horror slots introduced a generation to a world of fog machines, fake cobwebs, and earnest musical numbers, and this particular title became a cult favourite among viewers who remembered the broadcast but could never find the tape. Melbourne's long-defunct Astor Theatre programmed revival screenings of obscure Italian horror throughout the nineties, and the film turned up on more than one double bill alongside better-known Fulci and Bava titles. Mark Hartley's documentary about Australian exploitation occasionally references the international productions that shaped local taste, and this film deserves a mention in that lineage.

Where to find it now and why it deserves rediscovery

The film has never received an official home video release in Australia, which is part of its mystique and part of the reason it has been forgotten. Bootleg copies circulate among dedicated collectors, and a restored print surfaced at a European genre festival a few years ago, raising hopes for a proper blu-ray edition. Until then, the podcast's deep dive into this forgotten gem stands as the most comprehensive English-language examination of the production. New viewers approaching the film through modern eyes might find the pacing rough and the effects unconvincing, but they will also encounter a sincerity and a creative freedom that mainstream horror rarely permits.

The combination of zombies, vampires, and a musical number is not a gimmick but a reflection of an industry that saw genres as ingredients to be mixed rather than categories to be respected. That spirit of reckless experimentation is worth celebrating, and this overlooked Italian oddity is a perfect case study. Listeners who want to follow the full discussion can find the episode on the usual streaming platforms, and the show's archive contains nearly two hundred other genre deep dives for anyone who enjoys wandering through the wilder corners of exploitation history.