Plot of Fear (1976)

Original title: E tanta paura

Various, mostly rich and influential, people are killed in gruesome ways. The killer always leaves a page of German old-timey sledgehammer education picture book “Struwwelpeter” at the scene of the crime.

When he isn’t sleeping with his model girlfriend, Inspector Lomenzo (Michele Placido) does some actual, proper, investigative work – and acquires a new model girlfriend in form of Jeanne (Corinne Cléry) during it. From Jeanne, Lomenzo learns that all the victims were involved in the sex and violence parties hunter and dealer in wild animals Hoffmann (John Steiner) held at his estate when he was still alive, and all of them were there the day a prostitute died under highly dubious circumstances.

It’s nearly as if someone were trying to punish the people involved through brutal violence as also happens to be the tradition of old-timey German picture books for kids.

Paolo Cavara’s Plot of Fear is definitely one of the better attempts at mixing elements of the giallo with those of the Italian cop movie, and making pretty successful attempts at subverting both of them while also delivering the genre thrills an audience would expect.

On the giallo side, while this is certainly a stylish and well-shot film, Cavara shows little interest into stylizing the violence as someone like Argento or Martino would (though he does clearly have some heterosexual guy kind of fun with the nudity). Where the often sexually non-binary identities of the killers in your typical giallo can suggest a rather conservative world view (if these aspects are meant that way is a very different question), the killer here comes out of a thematic concern about vigilantism, the misuse of surveillance and the misuse of power that reads very directly left-wing to me.

Police film-wise, Lomenzo is a very different proposition to the two-fisted – depending on your view point fascistically coded (though I would often not read them this way) – action copper as exemplified in someone like the great Maurizio Merli. While he does get into a couple of scraps (the genre demands, and Cavara is clever enough to accede), Lomenzo approaches the case with his head instead of his fists, though he is no Sherlock Holmes, either. He’s a softer, more thoughtful proposition, easily flustered but just as determined and uncorrupted as his more brutal antipodes – he just clearly does believe in due process and proper procedure as the basis of actual justice.

All of which is nice and interesting on paper, but wouldn’t be worth much if Plot of Fear weren’t an engaging genre mix. Fortunately it is, providing the expected genre beats with verve and enough style to keep my sleazier nature happy while pushing two genres into directions they not often go. Hell, Cavara even manages to add humorous interludes that are actually drily funny, which is not a sentence you’ll find me writing about many giallos.

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The Corruption of Chris Miller aka La corrupción de Chris Miller (1973): This Spanish giallo directed by Juan Antonio Bardem is about as close to Sergio Martino in his most erotic/sleazy mode as you can imagine, carrying the same sense of actual decadence. Bardem isn’t quite the stylist his Italian peer is, but then, late Franco era Spain isn’t exactly an easy place to do eroticised, violent glamour and glamourous violence in, and given the context, this is beautifully done.

Plus, Jean Seberg and Marisol are fantastic as the film’s core psychosexually messed up duo taking in a drifter who may very well be a serial killer but is most definitely a 70s kind of guy in all other ways.

Carnival of Sinners aka La main du diable (1943): Vichy era France wasn’t a great place to make films in that weren’t running with the Nazi party line – though quite a few French filmmakers managed – so there was a tendency to retreat into more fantastical material, as this tale of a talentless painter who buys a talisman in form of a hand – sometimes moving – that turns him very talented indeed. Of course, this also means he’s made a pact with the devil – here a small bureaucrat without a bit of Milton in him – and thus his talent doesn’t actually buy him the happiness he craves.

All of which isn’t exactly easy escapist material, and one can’t help but read rather obvious political points into Maurice Tourneur’s film. The film has its lengths – particularly in its middle part – but there’s the poetic power of dark legend in its scenes more often than not, typically intercut with surrealist imagery and a bit of humour.

Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl aka Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken (2009): Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu, this belongs to that school of often pleasantly insane, cheap, gore comedies a small group of Japanese directors tuned out in the early 2000s. These aren’t movies making promises they can’t keep, so the title is definitely program, the humour is broad, and blood – curiously digital and practical – is as copious as a sense of crazy, often very funny and grotesque body-shifting fun (personal favourite: Frankenstein Girl using her legs as a propeller to fly).

This does take some time to get going and tests the audience’s patience early on with what amount to not terribly funny comedy skits about high school subcultures, but the film’s second half is a series of increasingly bizarre and inspired bloody nonsense that’s bound to put a smile on the face of anyone watching a movie with this title on purpose.

Death Carries A Cane (1973)

Amateur photographer Kitty (Susan Scott) witnesses the brutal murder of a naked woman by a someone dressed all in black – of course wearing the mandated black leather gloves - through a telescope. This isn’t going to be the last murder committed by this particular killer, who takes care of witnesses as much as of his core victims.

Curiously, the murders seem somehow connected to Kitty’s social circle, and soon, the investigating Comissario (Jorge Martín) seems so interested in Kitty’s boyfriend, the not the least bit suspicious and shifty Alberto (Robert Hoffmann), Alberto feels motivated to do some amateur sleuthing to save his own skin.

If ever you wanted to see a “typical”, made completely out of tropes, middle of the road, giallo, Maurizio Pradeaux’s Death Carries A Cane has your back. It is fair to say the film has no ideas of its own, but it has studied its giallo contemporaries and forebears well enough, it is able to apply the ideas it has borrowed from them consistently and coherently (as far as any giallo ever aspires to coherence). Thus this base-line giallo is also a very satisfying watch that gets what the genre is all about and what an audience likes about it.

The film’s only nearly original element is that it can’t quite decide who its central amateur detective is going to be – first it’s Kitty, then Alberto, then it’s back to Kitty again – which does hamper its narrative focus from time to time yet also keeps the audience on their toes.

On the level of style, this isn’t up to par with Argento, Bava or Martino, but Pradeaux does make great use of the contrast between run-down looking exteriors and the fully fashioned up interiors all giallo characters are bound by law to inhabit. The killings are also rather well done, often very effectively using dark blues and deep shadows before we get to the artificial red of cut throats. The climactic stalking – with a Kitty who has by now descended into hysteria – is particularly fine and again makes great use of locations and all the colours of the dark.

There’s little of substance here, of course, but some October nights, you just want to see a tale of pretty people of dubious moral fibre, a killer with a great fashion sense, and brutal murders. Well, make that most nights.

Dagger Eyes (1983)

Original title: Mystère

High class call girl Mystère (Carole Bouquet) keeps up the style and posture of a high fashion model at all times, projecting an aura of impossibly perfect beauty presented with total emotional detachment. Her mantra appears to be that nothing ever surprises her. Indeed, Mystère’s perfect surface hardly shows the tiniest cracks even when a mysterious figure starts stalking her with ambitions on murder.

The killer is not a random maniac, as you’d expect, however. Rather, a long-fingered colleague has more or less accidentally hidden a lighter in Mystère’s stylish handbag she has stolen from a client. In the lighter is a microfilm, and on that microfilm are photos that show the assassin (John Steiner) who shot a politician during a motorcade. The brutally disposed people behind the assassination are in the espionage business, and certainly not to be trifled with.

However, neither is in Mystère, even less so once she teams up with the deeply misogynistic, very subtly named, Inspector Colt (Phil Coccioletti).

The giallo genre hit a rather big snag during the 80s. In part, this was only natural in the somewhat fad and fashion based world of Italian genre movies where yesterday’s hit genre is today’s box-office death knell. Italian filmmaking as a whole started suffering from fewer opportunities and ever lower budgets, with rather a lot of talent making their way to the aesthetically less pleasing but more secure feeding troughs of TV production.

However, I believe the giallo had another problem in trying to update its style to that of the new decade. Visually, the genre had always been deeply informed by pop culture and fashion, but there aren’t that many directors involved in the genre who appeared interested in updating this element of their films as much as it was needed to keep giallos contemporary.

Carlo Vanzina, mostly specialized in directing comedies, demonstrates no problems in that regard here (nor in his later giallo Nothing Underneath) – if there is any film that breathes the idea of the giallo as a version of the thriller and horror genres informed by violence and sex but also by fashion, it is Mystère. Its titular heroine – really embodied by Bouquet more than strictly acted – is presented as the impossible ideal of its time: an always perfectly made-up, cool kind of femininity. Bouquet always looks as if she’s just stepped out of a magazine cover, even when surrounded by people who look perfectly normal, always in control, Hitchock’s everyman protagonist inverted into something new and deeply contemporary - as it will turn out morally as well as stylishly, as befits the decade.

She strides through a plot that enlivens giallo standards by combining them with the conspiracy thriller – also reimagined into something more fashionable and more amoral – through often rather wonderful suspense sequences, shots of great, artificial beauty, and those sudden outbreaks of illogic and goofiness which were always part of this arm of the genre. Indeed, if you ask me, its the inherent strangeness and the disinterest in presenting the world of the film as working like the real world does that always bring the giallo into the folds of horror, or at the very least the cinema of the fantastic, as a sibling of the film noir that’s even more stylized and even less interested in real-world logic.

From this perspective, even the pretty damn silly epilogue of Mystère makes sense as part of the aesthetic package of the film; that it also doesn’t even seem to understand, and certainly not share, the moral outrage of the conspiracy thrillers it also borrows from makes sense: this is a complete product of the 80s.

The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971)

Original title: La coda dello scorpione

Warning: I’m going to spoil an early twist!

The plane the businessman husband of Lisa Baumer (Evelyn Stewart) is on is destroyed by a bomb while the good lady is having a bit of fun with her lover. Hubby had insured his life for a nice million dollars, and the insurance company seems perfectly willing to pay out at once, without any investigation into the matter. Lisa only has to come to Greece to get the money, for reasons. In truth, the company isn’t really as happy to oblige Lisa as it pretends to be, and has put sexy investigator Peter Lynch (George Hilton) on her trail.

He doesn’t seem to be the only one interested in Lisa, though, for a shadowy figure in classical giallo killer get-up is following her around. For some reason, Lisa wants to take the money due her in cash; and once she has it in her hands, the killer loses little time in dispatching her and absconding with the money.

After Lisa’s death, the female protagonist role shifts to journalist Cléo Dupont (Anita Strindberg), who is rather too nosy for staying healthy in a giallo environment. Of course, there are further murders and curious plot twists coming.

I am quite the admirer of the giallos of director Sergio Martino, and The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail is no exception here. This is certainly one of the more conventional of Martino’s giallos, seeing as it follows a properly constructed, if overconstructed (it is a giallo after all), thriller plot that even borrows its early protagonist death from Psycho as if this were a Jimmy Sangster script for one of Hammer’s thrillers of the 60s. This is not a complaint, mind you, for Martino, as was his wont at this stage of his career, puts out all the visual stops: hand camera, POV shots, dramatic close-ups, wonderfully artificial light, unconventional camera angles are all part of his toolkit, as are picture postcard beautiful shots of Greece, and a good bit of bloody business.

Because Martino at this point was one of the masters of this sort of thing, this intense stylishness isn’t just a way to distract the director and his audience from implausible plotting, and the tedium of straightforwardly shot dialogue, or to make his beautiful cast look even more glamorous, but also creates the flow and energy of the film, the tension and release quality so important for thrillers and horror films. As is often the case in the giallo, the director’s style takes on the function of the choreography in a martial arts film or a musical, turning what could be a dry presentation of twists into a sort of dance. Style becomes substance.

In short: Macabre (1980)

Original title: Macabro

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Bad luck apparently comes in twos to Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers). After her lover is decapitated in a car accident and her little son is drowned by his sister Lucy (Veronica Zinny) in the bathtub – though everyone believes that to be an accident as well – Jane spends some time in a mental institution.

When she is released, she moves into a room in the mansion of blind Robert Duval (Stanko Molnar). Robert is attracted to his new tenant, though, surprisingly enough, only in a mildly creepy way. Jane seems to come on to him regularly as well, but generally in ways that suggest she doesn’t understand the concept of “blindness”. However, whenever intimacy seems to threaten, Lucy is visited by a mysterious man who invokes the loudest sex noises imaginable from her. Of course, we the audience have also witnessed her masturbating with the same wattage, so we will not be quite as surprised as Robert when we eventually learn the mysterious lover is actually the head of her dead lover she keeps in her icebox.

Things come to a head (tee-hee) because Lucy can’t stop torturing her mother.

Lamberto Bava’s first effort as a feature director after years of experience as an assistant director for his father, the great Mario Bava, and the great Dario Argento, is a bit of a mixed bag. It is certainly an at times stylish giallo, but not stylish enough to cover up how little is actually happening in much of its first acts. Everything and everyone seems to at least be established twice, so that things move at the slowest possible pace at any given moment.

The final act is a different thing: here, Bava junior very suddenly loses all inhibition. Not only is the narrative suddenly moving like a freight train crashing down a cliff, the film now leaves sense and good taste so far behind, they are somewhere in another dimension. It’s impressive, so much so I can’t even fault the first two acts too much anymore. Their slowness still isn’t necessary, mind you, but the contrast between them and the final act feels like one of those Insidious ghosts suddenly jumping out and screaming in your face turned into a movie.

To skew my critical faculties even more in Macabre’s favour, it ends on a final shot so ludicrous and awesome its existence could be justified by it alone.

In short: The Skin Under the Claws (1975)

Original title: La pelle sotto gli artigli

A murderer not just wearing black gloves but also a black stocking over his head stalks the streets of an Italian city. He seems predominantly interested in murdering prostitutes, but there’s something really strange going on with the killings. The state of the corpses, and the time of death never seem quite to match, and the forensics experts “help” Comissario Rinaldi (Ettore Ribotta), the man tasked with getting to the bottom of the case, with results like “the victim must have hugged a corpse shortly before her death”. Which is only of little help to an ongoing investigation, one has to admit.

Does this have anything to do with the nice discussions between physicians Professor Helmut (Gordon Mitchell), Dr Gianni Dani (Tino Boriani) and Dr Silvia Pieri (Geneviève Audry) about all kinds of mad science philosophy we pop into from time to time? Is it a good idea for Pieri to fall for Dani? And can you hypnotize a corpse?

Nobody will ever confuse Alessandro Santini’s The Skin Under the Claws with one of the great giallos. Santini’s direction is just too bland and the script too unfocussed even for a genre not known for its focus or internal logic. The film meanders between scenes for often only the vaguest of reasons, and even once you’ve learned what’s going on (which makes little sense, obviously, but no matter), it is often unclear why Santini decided to show us certain scenes at all. Usually in a giallo, scenes of dubious narrative worth are in because they look cool, or moody, to the director’s eye, or because they are an excuse to get some more nudity into the movie. Here, there’s really not enough style on screen to make this proposition believable, apart from the nudity bit.

Having said this, I also have to admit that I had a perfectly good time with the film. While there’s really very little of actual quality in it, it does try its damndest to deliver all the giallo and all the mad science tropes it can squeeze into its allotted ninety minutes. For the longstanding fan of the genre like me, this sort of thing has a certain draw. So much so, I’d call the somewhat bonkers last twenty minutes or so actually worth watching despite their complete lack of artistic merit, simply for their perfectly misguided attempts at bringing the traditional mad scientist into the giallo.

Crystal Eyes (2017)

Original title: Mirada de cristal

Unpleasant and unstable supermodel Alexis Carpenter (Camila Pizzo) causes an accident that gets her burned alive during a fashion show in 80s Buenos Aires. A year later, the fashion magazine queen who produced the whole debacle (Silvia Montanari) decides to run a deeply cynical tribute thread in her magazine, featuring two models Alexis hated, and made with parts of the crew who were also part of the deadly fashion show.

Before the shoot for the project can even start, someone wearing a mannequin version of Alexis’s face as a mask begins murdering their way through the cast, leaving no trace of their victims, who are apparently not missed by anyone either. The unsuspecting survivors eventually gather in a creepy, absurdly labyrinthine mansion for the shoot, or rather to be murdered as well.

There have been quite a few attempts at committing pastiches of the Italian giallo over the decades, but few of these films are quite so specific as Ezequiel Endelman’s and Leandro Montejano’s Mirada de Cristal. The film at hand isn’t just a giallo pastiche, but one of that very particular group of 80s giallos that were influenced by the slasher genre (which itself was of course heavily influenced by earlier giallos) and typically concerned the murders of models.

The film hits the tone and style of these films perfectly. Even its particular flaws are those of the model slasher giallos (or however one wants to dub the sub-genre, if one feels the need to do so at all): to wit, the acting is generally atrocious in a spectacularly stilted and unnatural way that still manages to be overly melodramatic with an extra 80s plastic sheen on top, which adds to the whole affair’s air of unreality rather than distract from any supposed believability. The script is awkwardly structured, full of characters whose only reason to be in the movie at all are their death scenes, and who are all utter bastards. The budget can’t keep up with the film’s ambitions at all, so expect huge fashion events that take place in what looks like a damp cellar in front of an audience of at least ten people.

All of this is utterly in keeping with Crystal Eyes’ filmmaking models, obviously, as is the delight the directors find in using all the aesthetic tricks and traits of the 80s giallo. So here are the peculiar high fashion costumes, the lighting that spits on your naturalism when it can use any strange combination of neon colours instead, the lingering, creeping/creepy quality of most of the shots, the complete disinterest in things looking real when they can look like the wet dream of a cocaine-fuelled 80s set designer instead. It’s really absolutely glorious, or at least, it is if you do enjoy the aesthetic copied here so carefully and wonderfully as much as I and apparently the filmmakers do.

Now, one could complain about Crystal Eyes’ complete unwillingness to make any kind of postmodern comment about the 80s fashion giallo, deconstructing its gender representation, and so on, and so forth, but to me, it seems perfectly in keeping with the soul of a genre where style always was the main substance to not do any of these things, and instead just wallow in the joys of a very specific set of aesthetics.

Three Films Make A Post: How to fail in the music business and succeed as a legend.

Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah (2011): I’m not completely sold on the jumping about Kevin Triplett’s Duct Tape Messiah does in the chronology of legendary – and legendarily unlucky – Texas songwriter Blaze Foley’s life; it doesn’t really add anything, and seems to obfuscate things rather than make them clearer. On the other hand, the film is such a labour of love about a figure at once intensely influential and obscure, full of interviews with friends, lovers, family and peers, as well as some incredibly valuable archive material of the man itself, I can’t find it in me to pick formal nits for too long. Particularly not in a film that’s also not pretending the bad, self-destructive elements of its subject’s character didn’t exist; it just knows this changes nothing about the love (or the great songs).

Travelling for a Living (1966): For the British folk revival and folk rock, the subjects of this short documentary, The Watersons, as well as the work they did afterwards, were an incredibly important and influential group. Here, in Derrick Knight’s grainy verité footage, you can witness the group as working musicians, at the cusp of reaching something new via the traditional, following a very personal idea of freedom and individual expression. If you’ve listened to music by or influenced by the Watersons and their peers for a few decades like I have, you’ll probably be shocked/delighted by how young and hopeful they were here, how very much of their time in the very best way; how much these people feel like their voices, coming from more years away than I’ve been alive.

Tenebrae (1982): These are just a couple of thoughts after a recent re-watch of this Argento giallo. I don’t need to reiterate my love for the man’s visual powers as a director, or how much he manages to turn an absolutely improbable plot believable in so far as it seems to fit the visual world he creates so perfectly. Rather, what was going through my head this time around is how much Argento must have been bothered by the accusations of misogyny and idolation of violence thrown at him regularly, seeing as they are mirrored rather exactly in what his writer protagonist Peter Neal here has to hear. Like Neal, Argento’s not terribly good at defending himself here; but then, given that Neal is also an insane murderer, he’s probably not supposed to, and may very well be meant as a way for Argento to poke fun at himself (or at least his public image) as well as his detractors.

In short: The Girl in Room 2A (1974)

Original title: La casa della paura

Margaret (Daniela Giordano) has just been released from prison, where she was held a few weeks for some light drug related thing she says she didn’t do. In need of a new place to live, she ends up in the pension of Mrs Grant (Giovanna Galletti). The lady comes with one of those creepy/nice sons (Angelo Infanti) you usually get in movies with this sort of constellation. The good lady does tend to waver between the creepy and nice poles herself. Little does Margaret suspect that young women with a chequered past tend to disappear from the pension, or rather, from room 2A. Which just happens to be her new room. The viewer learns early on that these victims are tortured and killed by the cult of one Mr Dreese (Raf Vallone), whose ideas about Christianity make “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” look downright progressive. There’s also someone in a fetching red, hooded torturer outfit involved in this business.

Of course our heroine soon finds herself threatened by the cult; her only allies are the brilliantly named Alicia Songbird (Rosalba Neri) and the brother of one of her predecessors, Jack Whitman (John Scanlon).

I have no idea how occasional American sexploitation director William Rose (also billed as Warner Rose or Werner Rose, or as Bill Rose as a bit part actor) came to make this giallo in Italy, but I do congratulate him for adapting to the language of the genre very well. So there’s some comparatively stylish – this is still a lower rung giallo, so don’t expect Sergio Martino, and certainly not Argento – camera work and editing (though the latter can become a bit disjointed as often as it is inventive), with a couple of good if weirdly constructed suspense scene, as well as the expected dollop of sleaze and violence. Keeping to the same tradition, the plot only barely makes sense and is populated by a cast of characters who act shifty for no discernible reason, as if all of this took place in a world with slightly different – and more exciting – rules and values than those of our own. Brad Harris also pops in for a couple of scenes to hit some cultists in the face and break down a huge door, which probably goes to show that one should take care whose girlfriends one kidnaps, tortures and murders.

The Girl in Room 2A is certainly not a classic of the giallo, not even a minor one, but does belong to that part of the genre that’s fun to visit after one has spent time with the genuine classics, the semi-classics, and the outsider classics. It’s a comfy experience, if you’re of the proper mindset for it.

Three Films Make A Post: Norman Bates is back home with Mother again!

Psycho III (1986): At the time when this was made, critics inexplicably saw this second Psycho sequel as clearly superior to the actually brilliant second one (about which I’ll hopefully write someday). I simply can’t see it: Anthony Perkins’s direction is bland and often aims for a sub-Ken Russell style of camp he’s simply not good enough a director to reach, the script is obvious and not very interesting, and even Perkins’s performance is lacking the element of humanity he found in the Hitchcock original and even more so in the second movie.

Otherwise, this repeats a couple of the least interesting plot beats of film number two and has scenes that “nod” to the original in a way only Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot reshoot managed to surpass in pointlessness.

Watcher (2022): On paper, Chloe Okuno’s thriller about an American woman either becoming paranoid or becoming the future victim of a killer in Bucharest is yet another “Girl/Woman in the Whatever” thriller, this time with quite a few direct homages to Hitchcock (that guy again). But Okuno manages to actually recontextualize the Hitchcockian elements and use them to build a female perspective that runs parallel as well as against Hitchcock’s often creepily male one, enriching a genre while clearly following most of its rules. The film’s visual style and feel also very pleasantly reminded me of the best giallos as well as a little of Don’t Look Now. Add to this highly focussed and effective performances, particularly by genre stalwarts Maika Monroe and Burn Gorman, and you have quite the film.

Patience (After Sebald) (2012): Ending on an equally high note, there’s this hypnotic documentary by Grant Gee that follows the traces of W.G. Sebald and his great book “The Rings of Saturn” in a manner as digressive and complicated as its subject.

Most of what would usually be talking heads in this kind of film comes from the off, which leaves space for longer thoughts and sentences and enables Gee to strengthen and deepen, or counterpoint, ideas via his successful attempts at recreating the mood and style of Sebald’s photography. The film’s understanding of how important mood is for its subject is rather impressive anyway; it also explains why this needs to be a movie instead of a monograph.

Dark Glasses (2022)

aka Black Glasses

Original title: Occhiali neri

As if two-fisted prostitute Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) didn’t have enough trouble with fighting off horrible costumers, she becomes the next target of a serial killer murdering sex workers. Diana manages to escape a first murder attempt via a car chase, but ends up crashing into a car of a Chinese family. The parents of the family are killed or lethally wounded, and only a little boy we will later learn to be named Chin (Andrea Zhang) survives. Diana herself is blinded in the crash, while the killer gets away unscathed and unidentified.

Being a rather tough cookie, our heroine only falls into depression over her new disability for a very short time, and becomes independent again very quickly indeed with the help of public service lady Rita (Asia Argento) and her very own seeing eye/attack dog. Diana feels guilty about the accident and visits little Chin in his orphanage. During this, she impresses him so greatly, he soon turns up at her doorstep, asking her for shelter until his mother gets out of the coma she’s clearly never going to get out of. Diana has no problem harbouring an escaped orphan, and the duo buddy up quite nicely.

Alas, the killer – remember him? – still has his mind set upon murdering Diana. Surely, now that she’s blind and taking care of a little boy, she’s going to be easier to kill…

Most viewers seem to loathe this late entry into the career of the once great Dario Argento with a passion, so much so I found myself somewhat surprised by actually being entertained by it, sometimes even charmed by its wackier elements. But then, if I remember correctly, I did even find quite a few things to enjoy about Argento’s Dracula.

This giallo is certainly a technically and formally much superior proposition to that movie. Argento doesn’t seem to be in as wildly and trashy an experimental mood as he was there, but he has not returned to the blandness of Giallo or The Card Player either. Though this is still far from the style and beauty of Argento’s classic movies, he does seem to attempt to return to some of the aesthetic pleasures of his past. So here, you can at the very least witness some technically accomplished stalk and suspense sequences, quite a handful of carefully framed shots, and a film that has a degree of visual flow and drive again. Compared to the giallos from Argento’s bad phase, this feels not so much like a return to form, but like a return to genuine interest in the aesthetic forms and joys that were always Argento’s great strengths.

Of course, if one really wants to, one should have no problem smacking Dark Glasses down for the often highly peculiar ways its script finds to get Diana and Chin into trouble, ways rather off the trodden paths of plot logic and reason; it’s not so much that no character here ever makes good decisions, it’s that everyone always makes the most bizarre ones imaginable. Also, there are snakes in the weirdest places. The thing is, narrative logic has never been one of Argento’s strengths, and I really can’t bring myself to criticize the man for exactly the dream logic I’ve so often praised about his films. Particularly since the script puts quite a bit of effort into developments becoming increasingly intense-hysterical in a way that may or may not be Argento poking a bit of fun at himself, or just the great old man being himself very much indeed.

There are also some rather new developments in Argento land, namely a streak of friendly sentimentality that comes to the fore in the whole Chin business (which it is best to simply accept as the film delivers it instead of thinking about it, too hard or at all) as well as in his continued love for murderous animals as seen in the dog business; though there, the sentimentality is obviously spiced with a bit of gore. Argento’s gotten so soft, Asia is only brutally murdered in this one.

That’s what we call “Altersmilde” in Germany.

Three Films Make A Post: Some Live to Climb. They Climb to Live

Sherpa (2015): What starts as a bit of a picture postcard paean to the Sherpas – particularly the nearly record book touching mountain guide Phurba Tashi Sherpa - doing all the hard work for the hordes of hardcore tourists packaged by professional climbing businesses, turns serious after the great avalanche of 2014 kills sixteen Sherpas. Growing anger and frustration with the danger and exploitation inherent in the work lead to what’s really a strike movement. Director Jennifer Peedom raises to the unplanned occasion and turns out to be just as good at getting people who really aren’t into sharing their inner feelings to talk and to explain, showing how capitalism ruins everything – even the ability for some decent people to be honest to themselves - as she is at filming spectacular climbing scenes. Much of the film suggests the filmmakers truly care about the Sherpas and their situation.

The only element of it I’d criticize is its overuse of a clichéd and treacly emotionally manipulative score by Antony Partos that’s so over the top, it sometimes sounded like satire to my ears.

Slash/Back (2022): Nyla Innuksuk’s Inuktitut teen horror movie is a little wonder. Wearing some of its influences proudly on its sleeve – or rather, it feels like on its heart – it uses these influences to make the kind of horror film that has all the good qualities of local/regional horror filmmaking of decades ago. So expect the local applied to genre tropes, on one hand, to make both strange and new, on the other to be able to talk about things – here the lives and feelings and divisions between young Inuktitut girls living in the kind of small town at the polar circle where a solstice dance is pretty much the most exciting thing their parents generation experiences in a year.

Innuksuk touches her scenes with a light hand, never letting them getting swallowed by the horror tropes, but also never going the other way either. So things stay fun but never dumb, unless dumbness is point of the fun.

Alta tensione: Il gioko aka School of Fear (1999): The late 90s were not a good time to make horror or giallo in Italy. Still, Lamberto Bava did from time to time manage to get some money for a mini series anthology or two from Italian TV, like the series this fine TV movie is part of. It is often cleverly written (by Roberto Gandus and of course Dardano Sacchetti), using creepy kids tropes as well as a discomfort with conservative institutions to great effect, finishing ambiguous and dark, and surprisingly coherent.

Bava’s direction often creates genuinely suspenseful and creepy moods, usually finding some way to make every scene more interesting and effective. There’s also some fine locations work, which you don’t always get in TV work.

Veneciafrenia (2021)

A rather loud and somewhat obnoxious group of Spaniards arrives at Venice for a bit of partying and general mayhem as a sort of send-off before Isa (Ingrid García Jonsson) gets married to her absent fiancée. But don’t call it a hen party, please.

As it goes in these films, the gang gets into trouble soon enough, or really, more than one kind of trouble. There’s a murderous, stinky guy in a harlequin costume going around murdering tourists in silly, brutal ways, for one, but there may also be a greater conspiracy between parts of the Venetians who have had enough of the loud and unpleasant type of tourist arriving on a ecologically problematic cruise ship. Despite their best efforts, our Spanish protagonists actually take some time to get into truly dangerous situations, but once the first member of the group has disappeared, there’s little hope for the rest of them anymore. Particularly since these idiots are rather bad at providing the local police with any worthwhile hints or suggestions. Why, Isa can’t even produce a single photo of her own brother! And no, this isn’t setting up a plot twist.

I have a curious relationship with the body of work of director Álex de la Iglesia. His films are much beloved by many people whose opinions about these things I appreciate, but mostly, his general air of shrillness and crudity, often presented with an added bit of misogyny, does very little for me.

So, ironically as well as logically, those films of his I do enjoy are usually exactly those everybody else seems to have a problem with. This Venice-set modern giallo is a case in point, apparently, and most de la Iglesia fans seem to think this a very minor example of the director’s art and style. I, on the other hand, enjoyed this mix of giallo and somewhat ugly foreigner abroad tropes, with a pinch of conspiracy based on a very real problem. (Though de la Iglesia goes out of its way to not pretend every Venetian anti-cruise ship activist is a lunatic movie murderer).

I found myself particularly fond of the leisurely plotting of the whole affair, where long scenes of our tourists acting out and annoying the locals are used to very slowly build up tension and paranoia. Even though De la Iglesia is not the kind of visual stylist the great giallo masters in whose steps he follows here were, he finds quite a bit of creepy imagery. Carnival masks and cities going to ruin are of course gifts that keep on giving in this regard, but the film is also genuinely good at creating a general air of tension (rather than a more precise feeling of it) through many a shot of pissed-off Venetians, of dark canals and streets, and many a masked person who may or may not be involved in any of the plot(s). This does of course not for a zippy film make. I believe this works to this particular film’s advantage, though, and is most certainly keeping in the spirit of the giallo, as are some rather strained examples of randomness throughout that don’t really make much sense.

The film’s pace is a bit peculiar in other regards, as well. Particularly the climax is placed strangely. The actual dramatic centrepiece of the film happens rather earlier than you’d expect, and what comes after builds up to another big confrontation that then never actually comes to pass. This kind of refusal of gratification only a director of great experience and eccentricity could pull off – or even just be interested in - and de la Iglesia certainly is that, whatever else I may think of him.

Three Films Make A Post: Revenge is a Dirty Business

The Killer is Still Among Us (1986): Criminology PhD student (Mariangela D’Abbraccio) becomes convinced that the serial killer haunting her city now is the same one she has started to write her thesis on, who did his horrible work a decade or so ago. Because the rules of the giallo say so, she starts investigating herself and quickly gets in over her head.

Camillo Teti’s giallo is a pretty uneven effort. About half of it is either stylish, or genuinely clever, interestingly unpleasant or very tense; the other half still looks rather fine, but is the movie version of someone dragging their feet very slowly. It does certainly get up to a very clever (or infuriating, if you’re of that temperament when confronted with the highly eccentric) ending with a healthy dose of meta.

Clean (2020): Paul Solet’s (and Adrian Brody’s, seeing as he co-writes, produces, acts and writes the generic score) movie about a man of violence trying to mend his ways but getting dragged back into his old ways to protect some innocents has exactly one half-way original thought: treating our protagonist’s former violent ways as an addiction like his heroin one. Too bad that thought is also pretty damn stupid, psychologically dubious, and just not getting the movie anywhere more interesting. Otherwise, this is an okay entry into its sub-genre, with one or two pretty effective moments of violence, decent performances, and technically competent filmmaking.

The Eclipse (2009): I’m still not quite sure what to make of this Irish film directed and written by Conor McPherson. At times, it seems to prefigure the most arthouse affine arm of A24-style slow horror, but it also has some of the loudest jump scare ghosts ever annoying you with a VERY LOUD NOISE, and a script that never seems to want to decide on a tone. So the spookiness as metaphor stuff, scenes about grief and loneliness and scenes of a man slowly coming back to life via awkward romance are paired up with the sort of romantic farce you’d expect a local amateur theatre to come up with. All of it is staged in a stately and artful manner (if that fits any given scene or not), acted very well by Ciarán Hinds, Iben Hjejle and Aidan Quinn even in those moments when the material doesn’t deserve their efforts, and never really comes together for me.

Deadly Inheritance (1968)

Original title: Omicidio per vocazione

Somewhere in rural France. The patriarch of a rich family whose members are still somehow involved in the daily running of a train station including signal duty (shades of Charles Dickens for me there, if the filmmakers wanted it or not, and they probably didn’t) dies in what is probably an accident. There’s quite a nice inheritance to be had, but Father has put a rather interesting stipulation into his will: nobody is getting at anything but the interest on the money until mentally unstable Janot (Ernesto Colli) will come of age and turn twenty-one in three years time and can be shoved off into the best mental health care. The fact that the guy playing him is twenty-eight and looks like forty nor the availability of mental health care for people under twenty-one notwithstanding. This isn’t terribly good news for parts of the family: there are bills to be paid, lovers in need of money to pay off their future ex-wives, and so on.

So it comes not completely as a surprise when other family members - of course including Janot who has another unfortunate train accident leaving him quite in pieces – start dying in accidents and things supposedly like it. Because local boss cop Etienne (Virgilio Gazzolo) isn’t deemed enough, the big city sends Inspector Greville (Tom Drake) to take care of business. Eventually, Greville brilliantly deduces that there’s something suspicious about all of these murders and proceeds accordingly.

Vittorio Sindoni’s Deadly Inheritance is a strange example of late 60s giallo filmmaking. For at least the first half of the film, you see some of the standard tropes of the genre, but they are for the most part used like in a standard and pretty boring mystery. There are dirty secrets, but these are neither treated as a doorway to sleaze nor to get snarky about the ways of the decadent rich, but feel more like necessary plot points the film needs to work through. The cast features some well-liked Italian genre actresses – at least heroine Femi Benussi and Valeria Ciangottini should fall under this umbrella – but they aren’t used to much effect, and Tom Drake’s Greville is about as boring as any protagonist of a movie can be imagined to be. Stylistically, everything feels very dry and lacking in punch.

But the longer the film goes on, the more elements of interest begin to emerge: suddenly, there’s a tightly and aesthetically pleasing chase sequence with a bunch of people after the Inspector’s favourite suspect, running through a very geometrically framed countryside; the murders don’t become exactly more bloody, but certainly more elaborately staged and filmed. Sindoni also begins doing clever things. Take for example the film’s best murder scene: the victim is alone locked into her home, with the police outside to protect her. Things start with a – pretty great as composed by one Stefano Torossi – giallo typical female voice singing an appropriately haunting melody on the score. Our heroine hears something, opens a door, finds a record player playing said haunting melody, which she thankfully lets play on to properly accompany the following set piece of stalking and killing. This is staged in such a matter of fact manner by Sindoni, it doesn’t feel too clever by half but delightful, funny and just the right bit macabre.

Once Deadly Inheritance has reached its final half hour, there’s very little that makes this recognizable as the same film of the plodding and naff to look at first act. Every scenes now has something to draw the viewer in, so much so, the film gets away with a last act double twist that’s as improbable as it is awesome. It also suggests that some of the boringness of the first part of the film was actually there on purpose, meant to manipulate its audience into a couple of very specific expectations concerning the roles of detectives, suspects, and victims in any kind of mystery. It’s quite a thing to do in highly commercial genre cinema, expecting a degree of patience from its audience I’m certainly not always willing to spend on a movie. It’s till a pretty great trick that provides Deadly Inheritance with a fantastic ending.

Eye in the Labyrinth (1972)

Original title: L'occhio nel labirinto

Following a dream in which she sees him stabbed to death in somewhat labyrinthine surroundings, Julie (Rosemary Dexter), starts to investigate the disappearance of her psychiatrist and lover Luca (Horst Frank). Nobody else, not even his colleagues, seem all that bothered by his disappearance to places unknown, but then, everything we learn about the guy’s character throughout the movie suggests they are most probably throwing a secret party celebrating his absence when Julie’s not looking.

Something’s really fishy about Luca’s fate, though. For one, an armed guy with a gun appears and attempts to smack Luca’s whereabouts out of Julie, something that only strengthens her resolve to find out what’s going on. Not enough to get her to go to the police, mind you, for she has visa issues. Once our heroine manages to find some curious clues leading to a small coastal town where Luca might have gone to, things turn really strange. There are repeated, awkward, attempts at Julie’s life, while her most helpful contact is a gropy disgraced American gangster (Adolfo Celi) who now lives in the cellar of an orphanage. Every other man she meets is a sleaze and/or a voyeur, too.

Eventually, Julie finds out that Luca stayed for some time at a villa on a nearby island where a group of weird bohemians flock around a female millionaire, but what he did there and where he went are quite different questions.

Internally, I had Eye in the Labyrinth’s director Maria Caiano flagged as the kind of Italian genre director who managed to follow every fad and make decent and entertaining but not spectacular movies in it. This giallo, though, is very special indeed. While it is absolutely fulfilling its genre quota of nudity (Julie does tend to undress at the slightest provocation) and violence, it also really hits a wonderful point of low budget surrealism: everything around our heroine takes on the visual qualities of a labyrinth, be it the run-down building that nearly collapses on her head at the beginning, the orphanage or even the villa; everything is filmed with a sense of slight dislocation. In fact, there’s so much of it, the film doesn’t even have to bother with a trip scene when somebody takes actual LSD.

There’s also a wonderful thread of paranoia running through the film. It’s not just that everyone here is a shit heel with no ethical values (and Luca probably was the worst of them all, turning Julie’s search for him more than just a little ironic and sad even before she finds out the identity of the killer). Motives are shifting and dubious too, as are genders, sexual interests and power structures between people. It’s a world where you can’t be sure of anyone, and where even the strange orphan boy who might be your best witness is also a sleazy little voyeur watching you while you sleep (of course in the nude, because Julie does everything in the nude). Julie is confronted with an astonishing amount of sexual harassment of one kind or the other too. The film’s never quite saying that this sort of pressure on a young woman is one of the shittiest elements of the society it takes place in and may have dire consequences for everyone involved, deforming trust and human connections in the worst possible ways, but it is most certainly suggesting it, at least when you’re watching it today.

Of course, human connection and trust twisted and deformed, and how this twists and deforms the human subject does seem to be the main theme running through Eye in the Labyrinth – apart from nudity and violence, of course – with nearly every scene, sometimes in an underhanded and tricky way you’ll only get later on like the business with a witness and a car, making a practical demonstration of some of these things, until stabbing someone to death seems rather more like a logical reaction to circumstances than madness.

Murder Rock (1984)

aka Murder-Rock: Dancing Death

Original title: Murderock – Uccide a passo di danza

An advanced dancing class of aerobics-style hopping promises the “kids” (that’s what the film calls this group of young women and men in their twenties) getting through the somewhat harsh treatment of former dancing nearly-star Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos getting up to some increasingly phantasmagorical scenery-chewing) a bright future with a big time Broadway company.

Well, as a matter of fact, said company only needs three dancers, a revelation that’s certainly going to lead to a lot of drama once it leaks down to the students. On the plus side, a mysterious killer begins murdering their way through the students, using chloroform and a stylish pin, so someone’s probably gonna end up as default member of the final three, dancing talent or lack thereof notwithstanding.

The investigating police lieutenant, Borges (Cosimo Cinieri) – given director Lucio Fulci’s love for the arts, I’m pretty sure named after the great writer of the weird –, certainly can see the wish to better oneself as a dancer as a murder motive. However, there’s a lot else going on, from a suit sleeping his way through what appears to be basically all of the dancers, to the jealousy of Candice’s predecessor Margie (Geretta Geretta), doomed to be her replacement’s assistant.

Then there’s the series of curious dreams Candice has in which she is followed by a man she has never seen before (Ray Lovelock) and who is trying to kill her with a stylish pin that looks a lot like the murder weapon. Turns out the guy is real, called George Webb, and in showbusiness, though not terribly successful thanks to some shadiness in his past. Obviously, Candice starts on a relationship with him right away. I can’t see how this could go wrong.

Murder Rock is usually not listed among many people’s favourite Lucio Fulci films, and I was certainly included among that number until my recent revisit of the movie. Now, I’m not quite willing to put it up on the pedestal of one of his very best films, but there is actually a lot to like about this giallo.

Of course, very fitting for a Fulci movie, before you can get to the pleasure you have to go through some pain, namely the film’s first third or so featuring a horrifying number of dance numbers in the aerobics inspired style you’d expect from an fad-conscious Italian movie made in 1984. There’s a lot of sweaty, aggressive swinging of body parts towards the camera, and so much crotch work, as well as crotch-level camera work, that a film whose actual nudity consists of some bare breasts feels wildly sleazy in a somewhat unpleasant way. The music, by Keith Emerson in his Italian soundtrack composer phase, gets appropriately painful in these sequences, but it is also immensely catchy in a way which suggests Fulci and Emerson cackling gleefully at the damage they are doing to innocent brains who only came to witness some crotch shaking and murder.

Eventually, the film does get away from the dancing a little, only returning to it for some actually pretty clever throwbacks to earlier scenes, and to ratchet up the intensity of the killer reveal, the filmmakers clearly having come to the conclusion their audience is now singing about paranoia coming their way without any outward help needed anymore. Once Murder Rock has reached that point, it turns into an often dream-like (in the patented Fulci way) giallo that seems genuinely interested in turning the destructive effects of the incessant striving for fame and glory into a horror movie. Quite a bit of what we see and hear from the characters may have little to do with realistic human psychology but works rather well to hammer away at that theme with the help of a cast of characters where not a single non-cop member isn’t in some way, shape or form obsessed with and damaged by becoming successful. Which is quite the thing to witness in a crotch-shake heavy movie called Murder Rock.

Curiously enough for a director and a genre not known for logical consistency but fitting to the rest of the script, even the plotting is not as weird as it first seems. In fact, a lot of what feels like a series of plot holes in the first acts does make perfect sense once we get to the reveal of our killer, the film simply playing fair with its audience like a proper, old-fashioned mystery would. Imagine Agathe Christie with more leotards and aerobics. Of course, the plot makes sense in the melodramatically heightened world the film takes place in rather than by the rules of real world logic, but who watching a Fulci movie would want it any other way?

A final way in which Murder Rock plays against expectations is a choice of murder method that basically completely blocks Fulci from doing any of his at this point in his career patented gloopy gore stuff at all, suggesting a director interested in doing things a bit differently this time around. The quality of the murder scenes demonstrates rather well that Fulci could have gone completely gore-less if he had wanted and still would have been able to make proper horror movies, but clearly, the great man couldn’t resist the lure of a good eye mutilation forever.

Three Films Make A Post: Hard work never killed anyone. Until now.

Boys from County Hell (2020): This Irish horror comedy by Chris Baugh has quite a bit to recommend it: the – really very Irish, going by other Irish comedies I’ve seen – black humour often hits very well indeed, not necessarily being kind to its characters but also not using them as punching bags. I’m also very happy with the surprisingly clever (and creepy) twists it makes to some of the mechanics of vampirism. The cold open is a scene of two elderly people’s blood coming to the vampire instead of the undead coming to suck for a reason.

I – and I know quite a few people disagree with me there – am not always as happy with the way the film’s comedy and its more naturalistic emotional side interact; in fact, the film seems to use its humour to distract from its darker, personal elements, like an awkward guy afraid of his own emotions.

The Wanting Mare (2020): Sometimes, I use these three movies/one braincell posts to mark a film I’m not sure I’ve quite come to terms with as interesting, wonderfully made, or important. Case in point is this multi-generational weird science fiction film by Nicholas Ashe Bateman that tells a story of yearning and hope carried by a dream over three generations, casting it into dream-like yet precise imagery that belies its low budget. I’m not sure I’ve quite been able to penetrate its metaphorical level, so I can only say it’s a fascinating and beautiful film most certainly worth returning to, made by a filmmaker clearly worth watching.

The Bloodstained Butterfly aka Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate (1971): This sort of giallo by the always interesting Duccio Tessari is a very peculiar film. On a plot level, this is more of a police procedural with a sharp, socially critical edge (as nearly always in this kind of film, towards the rich and people in authority positions, and the failures of the older generation bringing the younger to ruin) that focusses on all of those things giallos usually don’t focus on: a systematic police investigation and courtroom shenanigans, with only little time spent on the things you’d expect going in.

However, stylistically, this is absolutely a giallo, using all the visual and acoustic tics and tricks of the genre, but applying them to a narrative space they are not usually applied to, turning the dry and the sober strange through it.

Nothing Underneath (1985)

Original title: Sotto il vestito niente

Wyoming park ranger Bob Crane (Tom Schanley) has a sudden vision of the murder of his sister Jessica (Nicola Perring). Jessica’s working as a model in Milan, but still, Bob jumps into the next plane to Europe to perhaps save her, hoping for the whole deal having been a premonition. Bob and Jessica are twins, you understand, so twin telepathy is a thing between the two, so why not clairvoyance, too.

In Milan, there’s not a trace of his sister to be found. She simply seems to have disappeared, and nobody seems to think more about her disappearance than that she’s a model being a model. That’s not enough for Bob, of course, so he starts an investigation of his own. He also pretty quickly manages to convince police commissioner Danesi (Donald Pleasence) that there’s an actual criminal case to investigate here. And this even before more models of Jessica’s acquaintance get murdered and/or disappear.

A model-based mid-80s giallo shouldn’t really be my cup of tea, threatening the dreaded mix of pure sleaze and boring modelling scenes (nearly as boring as underwater scenes in most movies), but Carlo Vanzina’s Nothing Underneath turns out to be a pretty great giallo from the late phase of the genre I often feel empty of anything deserving even the word “good”.

The film of course isn’t sleaze free, but Vanzina does manage to hit the sweet spot where the titillation doesn’t harm the rest of the movie – some of it is even pretty important to the plot – but there’s enough on screen to sell the film through it. The handful of modelling sequences aren’t superfluous filler either, but indeed part of the plot and so get a pass from me, too.

Of course, not mishandling these aspects doesn’t make a film necessarily a good one, it just provides it with the opportunity to be one. The director does grip this opportunity pretty hard, though, presenting a giallo that is – if you can overlook or better yet enjoy the very silly set-up – actually pretty effective as a mystery, setting up Bob’s investigation so that he is always involved in something fun and interesting that also provides clues to the life and death of his sister.

The climax does of course descend back into classic giallo madness, but it does so with a lot of style, a reveal that probably was pretty surprising in 1985 (and might read as offensive to some today, but then what doesn’t), and the kind of macabre craziness at least I am bound to enjoy.

On the way to the climax, Nothing Underneath (a title meant ironically, by the way, even if it sounds pretty softcore) sets some stylishly staged murders, and quite a few side characters for Bob to interact with. Bob, as is tradition, isn’t a terribly interesting guy, so the film uses him as a foil for the rest of the cast, and in that role, he’s really rather effective. And then there’s the film’s secret weapon: beloved Donald Pleasence in his Italian phase, when he brought class and quite a number of different ironic looks to all kinds of continental European movies that probably should have been below his dignity. Pleasence appears to have a whale of a time with his Italian accent, his smartarse dialogue (yes, the dialogue is often pretty good here, too, quite against the rules of the giallo), even giving Danesi quite a different body language to many of his usual characters, including quite a bit of very un-British touching of shoulders. That the cop is neither unlikeable nor an idiot nor the killer is another interesting change for the genre, but then the script (by the director, his brother Enrico Vanzina and Franco Ferrini) really does seem quite a bit more interested in what’s underneath the surface of its characters than many films of the genre.

In the case of Nothing Underneath, this approach works very well, turning it into a film that’s really good at doing all the things you want and expect from a giallo, but also diverging from them in way that enrich instead of weaken it.