The Chocolate Man (1974)

D. Antonio Falucci
Colour


A seminal Italian horror film and one of my favourite movies ever made. A film which takes childhood innocence, guileless delight, the places youthful imagination runs to, and makes something incredibly creepy and horrible out of them. Lots of film trade in on childhood horrors, but this takes the whole of childhood, all desires – good and bad – and pushes them to their outer limits. ‘The Chocolate Man’ gives our inner child a fairy godmother, one whose wishes will taste sweet at first bite but are destined to stick hard and jagged in the throat.


Imagine if you received a hand made of chocolate. It’s the life-size hand of an adult human and is sculpted of the finest chocolate so that when you bite into it, it tastes like heaven. A hand is a large amount of chocolate, but you know you will eat it all even if it makes you feel sick. Before long a slender arm arrives, also made of chocolate. You devour that too. Not long after a chocolate sculpture of the bottom half of a female torso goes on display in a local gallery. It’s beautiful and slim and so well carved, and the whole thing is just deliciously edible. Then a chocolate head shows up and it looks just like an ex of yours. She used to be a model so perhaps she has modelled for this. But then you begin to realise that you haven’t seen your ex for a while, and suddenly all these life-like body parts you’ve been eating are curdling in your stomach.


Of course when the story starts to open out, a wild and over the top mad scientist living in the catacombs of Rome is involved, played with lip-licking aplomb by Gian Maria Volonté. This is the mad scientist to end all, the apex of mad scientists, the kind of loopy test-tube pusher who would make James Bond pee his pants. His rationale is based on the standard tropes of revenge, thwarted ambition, egomania, broken love, vindictiveness, irrational hatreds and a derailed academic career. (It’s possible he also has a small penis.) But Volonté’s performance is so excessively bonkers as to be operatic. The film starts with childhood fantasies about everything made of chocolate, and ends with a man who is the epitome of a childhood monster. And that’s before we get to the final part of Volonté’s plan, where he intends to release a gas into the world which will turn every single living creature into chocolate. Yes, it will end all life, but at least everything will go out tasting sweet.


None of this makes much sense. How could you remove a human foot and turn it into a piece of confectionary which is so smooth and sweet throughout? Surely a severed foot dipped in chocolate is going to be the equivalent of crunchy frog. But the film is presented in such a wild, grand-guignol style, that all quibbles and questions of that nature are swiftly rolled aside in the powerful sweep of drama and tension. It’s all building to a conclusion of madness and confectionary where nothing is off the table, no plot twist is impossible and even if it will probably end with the villain drowned in chocolate, we know that it’s going to be an eye-popping journey to get there.