When Eli Roth was doing press in Europe for Hostel or Hostel: Part II—he can’t remember which—he walked into a video store in Rome and found a bin full of Italian sex comedies. He’d never heard of any of them, despite having an interest in the country’s genre film industry: giallo murder spectacles, crime thrillers, horror movies, even westerns. He became obsessed with these strange comedies, which all followed the same plot—comically unattractive guy tries and fails to have sex with beautiful young women. “Whenever I would do press in Italy, I would always bring them up,” says Roth. “I did an Italian press conference for Inglourious Basterds, and they couldn’t believe that this weird American was so obsessed with these movies.”
As ridiculous as they might be, sex comedies like L’erotomane and Taxi Girl followed the formula with style. They had cool clothes, cool cars, cool furniture, and especially cool music. Roth recognized some of the same composers who scored landmark giallo films—including Ennio Morricone, Stelvio Cipriani, Bruno Nicolai, and Don Powell—but their work in comedy was lighter but no less sophisticated. They were rooted in soundtrack composition, but with flourishes of disco, heavy rock, and the blips and beeps that sounded like the future back in the 1970s.
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All of those composers originally worked for the CAM Music Library, the catalog company that owned and licensed most of Italy’s film music starting in 1959. Today it’s a trove of leftfield music, not just a mirrorworld of Hollywood music but a strange ecosystem unto itself, full of wild sounds and weird ideas. Much of it has never been released in the United States, or at most has a cult audience. But the label CAM Sugar has gradually been compiling and reissuing its massive catalog (Check out the recent Paura and Piombo collections, which gather music from giallo and crime flicks, respectively).
Roth himself has curated the company’s latest compilation, Red Light Disco, a survey of sex comedy scores. He picked songs with an eye for the bizarre (“Sexy Night”) as well as the unclassifiable (“I’m Number One”) and the undeniable (“Servizio fotographico”). It’s some of his favorite music, the kind of stuff he listens to when he’s writing his own scripts, and he hopes it might generate some interest in CAM Sugar’s catalog and more specifically in these Italian sex comedies. “It’s a way of keeping the music alive, and if there’s enough interest, then maybe we can start bringing some of these movies over here.
As he ramps up for the launch of his new studio called the Horror Section, Roth sat down with Spin to discuss CAM’s remarkable catalog, his favorites from Red Light Disco, and a “cocaine-fueled alien invasion movie” he can’t wait for you to see.
Most of these sex comedies aren’t available in the United States. What are they like?
They’re all basically the same movie over and over again. There’s a buffoonish man usually played by Alvaro Vitali or Lino Banfi or this guy I particularly love called Bombolo—whose real name is Franco Lechner. And there are all these beautiful young girls like Edwige Fenech, Lory Del Santo, Nadia Cassini, Anna Maria Rizzoli, and Gloria Guida, who I’m obsessed with. And it is always these guys trying to have sex with the girls and falling all over themselves. But the films have this incredible style to them. These were movies that were resoundingly dismissed by critics and regarded the way we regard ’90s Pauly Shore movies or Jim Varney films. I love Son-In-Law and Ernest Saves Christmas, but they’re not exactly Chariots of Fire or The English Patient. I think the sex comedies are all kind of a precursor to Porky’s. It’s a pretty niche genre, but if you dive in, they’re ridiculous and fun and totally stupid, but some incredible style.
Why do you think these films aren’t better known outside of Italy?
One of the reasons is that they weren’t released in the U.S. Italian horror has made its way over here because it was sold for international audiences. But comedy is one of those genres that doesn’t really travel. Humor is about making fun of a culture at a specific moment. Even movies that are comedy classics don’t always age well because they’re referencing things that are happening at the time. Comedy matters to the generation that it’s making fun of. If you’re a cinephile and you’re interested in a particular culture at a particular moment in time, then you can enjoy it. Otherwise, you watch it and go, What the fuck is this? My wife’s Italian, so I’ll watch a movie and she’ll explain all the different references.
You mentioned their “incredible style” and music seems to fall into that category.
There’s a lot of amazing stuff in those movies, like The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and All the Colors of the Dark. The apartment in Strip Nude for Your Killer is so insane. My wife’s a fashion designer so she’s really interested in the clothes and all the styles. They’re in Gucci clothes. They’re in Saint Laurent. They’re driving the coolest Karmann Ghia cars. The music’s amazing. Everyone’s smoking. Man, it peaked. I don’t know what happened.
The soundtracks were innovative, too. When we think of Morricone, we think of the whistling, but his big innovation was the use of electric guitar, which was not done in American movies. When you heard an electric guitar in a spaghetti western, suddenly everything feels old in America. But those films were marketed to America. If you watch The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, it says, “Directed by Bob Robertson.” Sergio Leone, Sergio Martino, Ruggero Deodata, Lamberto Bava—everybody had to take American names in order for their films to be shown overseas. Except for Dario Argento, because he was legitimately a star. The actors would speak English and then overdub it. In some cases, they would add hardcore sex to the film.
But the sex comedies were purely Italian. They stayed in Italy. One of the things I love about them is the style, the clothes, the cars. They authentically capture this period that we’re desperately trying to recapture now in vintage culture. I’ve really started to see these movies explode on TikTok and Instagram reels. Suddenly you’re seeing scenes from these films and girls are imitating the eye makeup of Edwige Fenech, who they know from the giallo films like All the Colors of the Dark. And the music in these films is unbelievable. It’s unmatched. There are so many great composers that I really love, like Bruno Nicolai, Stelvio Cipriani, Nico Fidenco, Don Powell, and Riz Ortolani, who did the score for Cannibal Holocaust.
I appreciate that you break your own criteria by including a few tracks from giallo soundtracks, like Bruno Nicolai’s “Servizio fotografico” from La dama rossa uccide sette volte.
I love that Bruno Nicolai track. I got greedy. I was like, fuck it, I want it on vinyl. I want it on my album. It’s from a giallo film, but it’s such a beautiful track and I didn’t care if people bust me on it. And I know Daniele Patucchi’s “Runnin’ Around” from Pieces, which is a great junk-food slasher from 1982 that I absolutely adore. It’s about a guy running around a college campus with a chainsaw making a human jigsaw puzzle. There’s this aerobics scene, and if you’re a horror nerd, you’ve been looking for the song from that scene forever. Everyone’s like, what is this? In the credits, it just says Music by CAM. That’s it. So I knew it was part of the CAM Sugar library, but nobody I knew could identify it. When Andrea Fabrizii, the CAM archivist, sent me a drive full of tracks to listen to, that was actually the first one. Oh my god, I’ve been obsessed with this song since I was 12 years old! The music is a Stelvio Cipriani score from 1979, and it was also used in a comedy called Bionda Fragola. So it’s a song from an Italian sex comedy in 1979 that was repurposed in a Spanish horror film. If you were making a movie, you could just go to CAM and license a bunch of songs, but they were often created by other composers for other movies.
It speaks to the range of music coming out of this scene. You have the same composers doing classical, funk, disco, rock, go-go, and everything else for comedies, horror films, crime thrillers, everything.
Then there are songs like “Sexy Night” from an unclassifiable film called Porno Holocaust. Because it’s one of the great what-the-fuck movies. I have a giant three-sheet, but my wife made me put it in the garage. I’m obsessed with this movie, not because it’s a good movie. It was shot by Joe D’Amato, who made something like 200 movies. He and Luigi Montefiori would go and write a movie in six days and then they’d shoot it in a week. He was constantly working. For international markets, they wanted these hardcore scenes. So he’d be making a horror movie about a mutated zombie killing people on an island, and then it just cuts to crazy hardcore sex with full-on zombie penetration. You’re like, who is this movie even for?
But “Sexy Night” has this characteristic of these songs that I particularly love, which is the Italian song trying to pass itself off as an American disco song. It’s written with English lyrics, but it’s sung by an Italian who obviously doesn’t speak English. So everything’s just a little off. The lyrics are like, “Sexy sexy night. She is the lady of a sexy night. She moves like a tiger, look how she moves… the flanks.” Did he just say “the flanks”? There are a few other songs like that on the album. I really wanted people to get into the weirdness of some of these songs, like the Don Powell track from Escape from Galaxy Three. It’s by Luigi Cozzi, who also did a film called Starcrash. It’s not a sequel, but it looks like they used the same miniatures and the same sets, and they even have extra footage from Starcrash. Don Powell even stars in the movie, and he’s got that Christopher Atkins/Roger Daltrey early ’80s leading man look. He’s going around to different planets and having sex with different beautiful alien women who look like European models. And his score sounds like the early ’80s trying to sound like it’s from the future, so lots of laser noises.
You can even hear echoes of popular American songs. “Runnin’ Around” seems to rip off Lipps Inc.’s “Funky Town,” and there’s one that nicks the bassline from “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida.” That’s some range.
“Runnin’ Around” couldn’t be a closer ripoff of “Funky Town,” and it’s amazing. And Stelvio Cipriani’s “Il sesso del diavolo – Finale” takes that Iron Butterfly bassline and somehow makes it just a little darker. The Italians were doing stuff like that. There’s a movie called Alien 2: On Earth that I have the soundtrack for. It came out after Alien, and it has these facehugger-type creatures. It’s basically The Descent, where people go into a cave and these monsters attack them. They were just hoping that nobody noticed that they called their movie Alien 2: On Earth, but Fox sued them and got it pulled. It’s one of my favorite scores.
How did you get involved with CAM? Did you approach them with this idea?
CAM Sugar came to me and said, “Do you want to curate a collection of these songs?” To me it was a dream, because things like that Cipriani soundtrack or “La musica è” aren’t available on vinyl. If you found them on YouTube, it was ripped from a DVD or VHS tape. So, to get access to the original master recordings and hear them pristine, that’s such a treat to someone who’s a cinephile and an audiophile and someone who loves Italian soundtracks. I had tried to get clearance for a lot of these films, but I was never able to track down the rights. Now that I have this relationship with CAM Sugar, I can just go to their archives and get any song I want. So that was for selfish reasons. To have access to 8,000 unreleased tracks was overwhelming. When I was curating this, it was just hours and hours and hours of listening just to get through all the songs.
How did you go through them all?
It was definitely a process. Thankfully I had Andrea to help me narrow it down to about 300 or 400 tracks before we settled on these. Ultimately I just wanted everyone to have a nice sampler of the different types of music from that period, and I wanted to introduce people to some composers that maybe they’ve never heard of. These are some of my favorite composers, and I listen to them a lot, certainly when I’m writing and making my own films. I wanted to use the album as a way to introduce people to stuff that sounds very modern, very cool, very funky.
You mentioned listening to this music while you’re working on your own movies. How has this world impacted your filmmaking?
I like to listen to scores when I write. I have certain scores that I enjoy writing to. It depends on what mood I want to get myself into, what headspace I want to be in. Obviously, I like to think very visually. So I’ll just put on a soundtrack and write to it. It’s also a good way to build your playlist for your movie as you go. I have different playlists for different films, even when they’re not written yet.
So when I’m writing, I have very specific songs that I want to choreograph a movie to. But it also depends on how much money you have. Sometimes you have absolutely no money. I had $1,500 in Cabin Fever, so I called David Hess and got those songs from Last House on the Left. And Jordan Ladd’s ex-husband Conor O’Neill was in a band, so I got songs from him. And there was a local band called Scrappy Hamilton. We got a song from them. We have no money, but it’ll be in a movie—that’s all I could promise. As long as you’re upfront and open about that stuff, they were cool with it.
Even in Thanksgiving, I was trying to clear stuff up to the last minute, and we pulled a favor from Glenn Danzig. I wanted “Where Eagles Dare” to end on that fun ’80s rock vibe. I wanted teenagers to go, what is this song?! And also the Waitresses. I love the way The Last American Virgin used “I Know What Boys Like” when they’re introducing the party. Thanksgiving is very influenced by The Wicker Man, so I knew I had to have the Sneaker Pimps’ cover of “Willow’s Song,” which is called “How Do.” They were great and let me use it. Sometimes it’s so important that you just beg for favors.
I imagine that might get a little easier with the Horror Section.
I’ve always wanted to have my own studio where I can make movies the way I want to make movies. But the barrier has always been distribution. To get it to the theaters, you have to sell it to a distributor who often wants to change things. Or they’re going to test it. But then I saw what Damien Leone did with Terrifier 3 and Iconic Events. Okay, we’re at a point where he can spend $2 million making the movie and half a million in advertising. I understand that it was years of buildup and good will, but it showed me that the audience is there. If you can reach horror fans, you don’t need to spend $20 million in advertising. That’s all you need to go after.
And they prefer it when your film’s unrated. They don’t want the R-rated stuff. They’ve grown up with enough horror that everyone’s in on the joke that it’s all fake. They love the gore and want as much insanity as possible. We said, what if we offer 10 percent of the company to the public? What if you’re a horror fan and you can spend a hundred bucks and own shares in the company? It’s a cool idea. When the movie’s a hit, your investment goes up, and there are different ways to liquidate it. You’re buying into the intellectual property. This summer I’m going to shoot two or three movies back to back and put them out. I’m doing the horror movies I’ve always wanted to do—the ones people have said were too fucking crazy.
But it’s not just your own films, right?
Yeah. Ti West called me up and said, “Have you seen Joe Begos’ movie Jimmy and Stiggs?” It’s like a cocaine-fueled alien invasion movie. It played at Beyond Fest and brought the house down, but he hadn’t sold it to anyone because he was waiting for a better offer. I finally saw it and it’s great. Totally fucking crazy, like Evil Dead or Bad Taste. It sticks the landing on the last shot, which is the hardest thing to do in a horror film. So fuck it, let’s just make this our first release? We’re putting it into wide release unrated. If I saw this movie when I was 15, I would have walked out saying, “Best movie of the summer!” It’s unhinged, which is my favorite kind of movie. And we didn’t change a frame of it. I’m not tampering with perfection.
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