By MICHAEL GINGOLD
One of the busiest contributors, and one of the few women creatives, on the classic Italian horror scene has passed on.
Severin Films’ David Gregory posted on the company’s Facebook page that longtime Italian horror screenwriter Rossella Drudi has died. Best known for the cult favorite TROLL 2 (on which both she and the director, her husband Claudio Fragasso, are billed as “Drake Floyd”), and the documentary on that film, BEST WORST MOVIE, she scripted or co-scripted–sometimes unbilled or pseudonymously–dozens of genre flicks from the 1980s through this decade. Her credits also include Bruno Mattei’s HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD and RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR (both of which were recently novelized by Brad Carter for Severin and Encyclopocalypse Publications), ROBOWAR and SHOCKING DARK, Fragasso’s MONSTER DOG, ZOMBIE 4: AFTER DEATH and BEYOND DARKNESS and many others.
“The creative and personal relationship between Rossella and Claudio is one of the great love stories in Italian cinema, no joke, spanning close to half a century,” Gregory writes. “Sure they’re best known now for TROLL 2 and their somewhat unflattering representation in BEST WORST MOVIE. They were so humble when I asked them their thoughts on that doc that their principal comment on the matter was that they were happy to see the principals from that movie get some long overdue appreciation for a lot of hard work for small pay.
“Rossella loved horror, sci-fi and fantasy,” he continues, “as evidenced by her cinematic output, often in cahoots with the leader of their mischievous trio: Bruno Mattei. I was just speaking last night on a podcast recording about how their films were considered the ghetto of Italian genre cinema–and that’s by fans and colleagues, they were barely given a look by critics. But what we all know in the Severin-sphere is that these films were produced with absolute minimal resources, intended to be fun and enjoyable and made with a love of cinema. These guys got as much on screen to please their un-picky video store audience as their tiny budgets would allow. And they were resourceful with those budgets, delivering exactly what it says on the tin: Action, gore, mayhem, sex, violence, every juicy exploitation element not just checked off the list but squeezed until the eyes popped out and spectacularly exploded like a straw hut!” RIP, Rossella, and our sympathies to Fragasso at this sad time.
