“Your body is a labyrinth that only I can penetrate.”

It’s pretty arch and baroque as far as come-ons go, but if you’re indie film maker Joe Zaso, it’s likely to make you stiffen with anticipation below the belt.

New York-born Zaso is a devote of the sexy, violent horror movies produced in Italy during the 60s and 70s and a whispered, vaguely threatening line like that is just the type of florid dialogue you’d expect in movies with erotically macabre titles like Your Hands On My Body, The Corpse Bears Traces of Carnal Violence, and Strip Nude For Your Killer.

This is the twilight world Zaso dreams of — a place where beautiful people in mod fashions die operatically, everyone lives in an opulent Italian villa, sex is kinky and scored to lush Ennio Morricone-style music, and there’s always a trench-coated, fedora-wearing maniac with a razor lurking about.

Joe Zaso was born too late to have the movie career he craves or deserves. Had he arrived decades earlier, he’d be playing an assortment of shirtless Frankenstein Monster sex toys, Eurospy heavies, drop-dead gorgeous Spaghetti Western anti-heroes, and macho explorers in Italian cannibal epics.

With all his telegenic brawn, it’s not hard to picture him assaying Hercules or Maciste in toga pictures, getting roles as sand-kicking bullies in sugary beach party movies, or being plucked right off the streets of New York to star in Andy Warhol Factory films.

Alas, the world has changed. The Hollywood studio system collapsed and has left many a beautiful hopeful to fend for themselves. Broadway and Soap Opera inner circles are just as closed off. The European Horror and Sexploitation market dwindled by the close of the 80s. Gone are the drive-ins and grind house scenes of yesteryear.

So what’s a handsome, ambitious young actor to do?

Go underground, start your own production company, and produce your own micro-budget fright films cast with a motley crew of Off-Broadway players, regional talent, intrepid friends, and soft-core sex starlets.

Like a pumped-up Ed Wood, Zaso is a movie making maverick whose projects inspire a word-of-mouth grassroots enthusiasm. Privation necessitates resourcefulness and Zaso — a Jack of All Trades — has taken on the mantle of actor, director, producer, writer, editor, and cinematographer.

He started out as an ingenue in the Super 8-lensed 5 Dead On The Crimson Canvas, but with his frostbite-blue eyes and naturally evil arched eyebrows, goodness seems too tame.

As the Cult of Zaso grows, his fame extends beyond stateside to nations across the pond. In the cartoonishly gory Nikos The Impaler, he’s the world’s most babe-like college professor of your dreams. He’s the I Married A Monster From Outer Space-inspired extraterrestrial boyfriend from Alien Agenda and bad boy werewolf from Rage of The Werewolf.

Demonium features him as a sleazy Russian with a Van Dyke and Barricade has him under assault from a family of rural killers. In his Z-movie niche, Joe Zaso is king.

Of course being 6′3″, hot enough to give a rod to anyone within a ten mile perimeter, and frequently nude for all to see has helped Zaso win a collective of fans. At heart, he knows he’s swooningly beautiful and isn’t ashamed to show it off in photo shoots that have become much-prized via the Net.

There’s an approachability to being a hungry, driven male starlet.

Well-known male stars often give away little in the way of nudity. They shift into PR overdrive if footage from their ill-advised sex tapes unearth or if telescopic photos captured by paparazzi show them frolicking naked with the girlfriend-of-the-moment. They want big bucks just to flash a brief glimpse of their asses and even the few who agree to go full frontal have to deal with censorship in a movie industry that too often regards male nudity as verboten.

Zaso is instead blissfully willing to bare it all complete with an erection and his firm ass proudly arched high.

There’s a lot to love about him: his perfectly formed shaved pate, granite-defined square jaw, broad pecs, massive delts, rippling arms, and colossal 13 EEEE shoe size are enough.

But there’s more.

Zaso’s an enigma, a man with the body of a Colt Model and the mind of an aesthete.

For the cognoscenti who worship him, he’s the perfect date we all wish we had; a guy who reads Psychotronic or Scarlet Street instead of Maxim, is well-dressed without being too corporate, soft-spoken and articulate, unpretentious about his looks, and someone you can make out with while watching The Omen or Evil Dead.

And if at some point he should fulfill all of our fantasies by taking his love of nakedness to the next level and/or opting to subsidize his next project by starring in Blue Blake’s Muscleman Chain Gang or Bodybuilder Reform Academy, none of us would take him any less seriously.