Suffering from the usual faults of these DVD interview extras, this interview with the director and star of DELIRIUM is better than the usual drivel thanks to the candid comments of the late Mickey Hargitay.
The Hungarian personality, whose film career is overall nothing to write home about, recalls his work with honesty, surprising insight, and a refreshing absence of the "rah rah" mentality engendered by these usual experiments in rewriting history. He is glad to see a forgotten programmer of his unearthed (by Bill Lustig & company) for a new generation to evaluate.
On the other hand, the ultra-hack director Renato Polselli idiotically enters the self-praise mode that I have found unendurable, as evidenced by similar "me, me, me" interviews by the likes of Rino Di Silvestri and Sergio Garrone.
I knew the director of this short subject (Gary Hertz) in the 1980s, and don't know why he, and others in the field, have concocted such an idiotic policy of contradiction as content. They show one interviewee saying something and then follow it with the other person completely contradicting what we've just heard, and that's it. There is no interaction or attempt to actually set the record straight. That's what happens here with Hargitay vs. Polselli, and I came away not amused but merely befuddled. The same thing was done on a video for HITCH-HIKE, pitting Franco Nero's memory of events against that of David Hess. I guess the erstwhile video mavens think this structure is cute, but I wish they would cease and desist.
