Italian avant-garde stage director Carmelo Bene's version of (I guess) the Oscar Wilde play--the text isn't exactly the point here--is one of those movies that would look absolutely amazing if projected without sound in a club, where people in vintage minidresses or body-paint could go-go dance in front of it. If you actually have to listen and pay attention to it, however, it quickly reveals itself as a time capsule of the most pretentious and irritating sort, showy and empty. There are day-glo colors, black-light effects, a general sense of theatrical drag camp (it's kind of like if someone gave Jack Smith a budget and professional crew/equipment), much nudity, editing that runs a short gamut from ADD to "strobe," actors who are variably over-the-top or amateurishly wooden, incongruous soundtrack elements, and so forth.
Mostly there's a whole lot of Carmelo Bene, hamming mercilessly as Herod. The woman who plays Salome was apparently a famous African-American fashion model, and she is used for nothing here but her striking features--she can't act, speaks in stilted phonetic fashion (if that's even her voice), and apparently couldn't dance, because when we're supposed to see the Dance of the Seven Veils, we get shots of a scarf floating in the breeze, and Jesus hammering himself onto the cross. (Why Jesus is here, I dunno. But then, there's also a vampire, and a whole lot of red spanked rear cheeks early on.) John the Baptist is played by a squalling character actor I thought I recognized from B-grade Italian comedies. Veruschka gets special billing, but I'm not sure who she played. (Also Dennis Christopher of "Breaking Away" is apparently in here somewhere, but good luck finding him.)
It's a frenetic, shapeless psychedelic mess that really seems to have no interest in Oscar Wilde, Salome, religion, or anything but a pretty silly level of costumed camp spectacle. Would this have been more effective onstage? Well, at least then one would have been able to appreciate the groovy design aspects without the constant, irksome cutaways.
Bene had a long career, so his work must have evolved and retained some degree of critical appreciation, but from the evidence here he seems terribly trendy in a way that's a theoretically fun but also exhausting and trivial throwback to the most modish 60s excessrd in capital-A Art. Watching it certainly cured me of any desire to see another movie by Carmelo Bene. Even Ken Russell's "Salome" is better--and that's one of Russell's worst films, with great similarities in campy theatricality and juvenile shock value to this enterprise.
