It seems that by 1978 filmmakers had largely given up on trying to  attract punters by making gialli of a comparable standard to the classics of the previous decade or so; instead they adopted a stripped back approach, both in terms of plot and costume.

Ursula and the sister of Ursula, Dagmar (no wonder she prefers to go by the titular monicker) have grown up in boarding schools, cut off from their parents. After their father dies and leaves them an inheritance, they check in to a swish/rundown (I'm not sure how it's meant to come across) hotel on the coast. It soon becomes apparent that Ursula might not be in the best of mental health, as she seems incapable of basic human interaction, and also claims to be psychic. After a while, she claims that her father is not dead, and has followed them to the hotel. The various hotel guests fuck their worries away only to be dispatched one-by-one by a disembodied pair of eyes who sports, in silhouette form, a suspiciously perpendicularly-angled erection, which seems to double as a weapon (just like mine could, but I'm gentle with it). Is the killer the cuckolded hotel manager? Is it Marc Porel's twitchy drug addict, who is intermittently interested in Dagmar? Or has the girls' father returned from the grave to kill loads of women with his cock for some reason?

This film follows the form and logic of a porno, with the first stripping-to-lounge-music sequence occurring sooner than it would in many of its contemporary x-rated features. It doesn't quite cross the line into hardcore, but the parade of flesh and fucking cums quite close on occasion, not least in a bizarre climactic (in terms of when it occurs in the film) scene in which the hotel's middle-aged manager goes to town on the ass of his singing protégé, Stella Shining. Ms Shining performs the same shitty ballad every night in the lounge of the hotel, and is spoken of in reverential terms which would suggest she's a huge star. You'd have to ask the manager to confirm or deny this rumour though (I apologise for this excellent-but-dirty joke, butt I'm just engaging with the film on its own terms).

This isn't a good giallo, or a good film. It does deliver in the skin-and-sleaze department though, which was definitely the main focus of the filmmakers. The mystery is perfunctory at best (SPOILERS AHEAD), although one could almost view its solution as a weird double-bluff. Boiled down to basics, the plot concerns two sisters, one of whom is mental, arriving in a coastal hotel. Straight away, people start dying. Pretty standard set-up for a giallo, down to the fact that the sisters are from foreign (Austria in this case). Of course, the obvious solution-the crazy newbie is the killer-can't be the actual solution, because that's not how these films work. Except, in this case, that's exactly what's happening!

If we generously allow writer/director Enzo Milioni to claim the end revelation as a double-bluff, the title of the film could also fall into this category. Dagmar, the Sister of Ursula, is the closest thing to an audience identification figure/cipher in the film (she even has a wank halfway through). She seems to have the least to hide of all the characters, and such blandness is usually a sign-to seasoned giallo-watchers, at least-that the filmmakers are attempting to sneak the killer into centre stage right under our noses. Therefore. the way the film's title ultimately refers to Dagmar while more directly highlighting Ursula is actually a neat micro-example of this 'sneaking' in action. 

So, an hour or so into the film, when your appreciation for sex scenes has reached capacity (although be prepared to raise the limit of said capacity once you get to the insane ass-eating scene), your mind might wander towards the environs of the plot. Suddenly, you might realise that you're watching a film which is named after a character who seems least likely to have anything happen to them, or to be responsible for anything bad happening. "Aha," you might think to yourself, "Nice try Enzo! But I am wise to you. I shall citizens arrest Dagmar straight away, so the denizens of this hotel can continue their soulless rutting without fear of being dildoed to death." But you'd be wrong to think that.  If the title was a clever double-bluff by Milioni, designed to get us to overthink things and suspect Dagmar, bravo sir.

And yes, I did say 'dildoed to death'. Well, you did, in your mind, as you read this. That's right-the curiously-angled silhouette is not that of a real-life phallus; it's a huge wooden dildo which reposes fairly blatantly on  the dresser in the sisters' bedroom. I knew about the method of killing before I watched this film for the first time, so I can't comment on whether Milioni did the smuggling trick successfully with regard to weapon. Given that one scene begins with a CU of the dildo, racking onto Dagmar as she enters the room, it's probably fair to say that most semi-attentive viewers would've noticed it (and the weird silhouette shots during the murder scenes doesn't help Enzo's cause either). However, even the shot described above seems to link the dildo to Dagmar, and could again be interpreted by on-the-ball viewers as an attempt to cleverly tell us who the killer is without us realising. Of course, Ol' Clever Viewer is too clever to fall for that, except he's not-he's fallen fair and square for Enzo's entrapment! Bravo sir, again. (I'm almost certain that these 'Bravo sirs' have not been actually earned). But anyway, even if it seems like Dagmar must exist to do more than cue us to wank and walk around frowning (Stefania D'Amario had a fucking lovely frown though; check her out in Zombie Flesh Eaters for more of the same), it turns out that she does not.

I haven't written much on Michael Mackenzie's M-giallo and F-giallo distinctions before*, but I'll briefly outline the defining characteristics of both: M-gialli have male protagonists who drive investigations into a series of murders, whereas F-gialli have passive female protagonists, who are threatened and menaced throughout, before (hopefully) surviving. That's not to say M-giallo protagonists are all about control; Argento's characters, in particular, continually strive to exert a level of control on proceedings, and are continually undercut by external (often feminine) forces. As with any retrofitted categorisation of films, there are multiple examples which straddle the dividing line of the M- and F-. Fortunately, Mackenzie doesn't attempt to brush such examples aside in order to push a reductive theory, as so often happens in film studies; he's much too smart for that, and is most interesting when discussing films which don't neatly fit into his own categories.

This film pretty much does fall neatly into the F-giallo category, with one caveat-there is a male character conducting an investigation. However, he's not the main character, and we don't actually know about the investigation until the film's climax. Still, if the film took a different approach, Marc Porel's undercover narc could've found himself at the heart of a classic M-giallo. Well, he could've if he showed any interest at all in the series of murders which is occurring right under his nose. Instead, he shows admirable focus/reckless indifference to stick to his task of breaking open a drug smuggling ring. Indeed, he seems delighted when he finds the dildoed-to-death corpse of Stella Shining, seeing it as the 'closing of the ring' (I won't make another ass-related joke here; I'm above such base carry-on, and besides, writing this has essentially made the joke for me anyway) needed to box off his case. This despite Stella being a potential key witness as well. Maybe he was actually taking some of the heroins he was pretending to consume to play the role of undercover junkie (Porel certainly was consuming heroins in real life, sadly), and wasn't thinking straight.

He certainly wasn't possessed of the supernatural powers which a doctor (!) tells Dagmar are inherent in all men "to defend themselves against natural events like hunger, fear." Or maybe he was, as he seems reasonably well fed, and doesn't get too frightened at any point. But the real supernatural prowess is displayed by Ursula, with her apparent clairvoyance leading her to predict Dagmar's dating mishaps, and her own death. (She's obviously loathe to alter the path fate has chosen for her, or else she'd surely have not stood in front of an open window at the end of the film.) The supernatural element can be seen as being influenced by the Argento films of the time, or it could merely have been a device used to help introduce the character of the girls' father as a potential killer, even though he's dead. Ursula claims to have seen him, so has he come back as a ghost? Is he not really dead at all? Or is she just a bit nuts?? The accuracy of her (fairly low-key) predictions sets her up as a potential psychic, and means that we may take her word that she's seen her father, against all available and rational evidence. **

The music, including Stella Shining's warbly song, is mostly pretty shit, with a regular heavy porno vibe. The one exception is the driving synth score which leaps into life for the murder scenes, coming across like a mix of the Halloween and Absurd scores (and written before either of those). The seaside scenery is pretty beautiful, leading to a far more visually-pleasing film than the subject matter deserves (I could argue that Milioni deliberately sets such a grittily-themed film in beautiful environs to heighten the contrast between low and high, but I've already cut him more than enough slack). There are a couple of non-sex WTF moments too: an early scene involving a glass of sedatives being passed back and forth between the sisters anticipates the bribe scene in Naked Gun, and a shot of a dog which holds long enough that you know the editor has noticed the same thing as I did-the dog has the face of a man! Mental! But thien again this is a very, very mental film.

*Check out his thesis 'Gender, Genre and Sociocultural Change in the  Giallo: 1970-1975' or his excellent featurettes on most of the recent Arrow giallo releases for more.

**You could argue that the father is the killer, given that Ursula seems to be channelling him for her murderous shenanigans, but you'd pretty much be wrong. It is worth noting that the early reference to a large inheritance seems to set the scene for a potential appearance from the girls' estranged mother, giving two characters a presence in the film despite never actually appearing on-screen. It also sets up the film as taking the classic inheritance-scheme route, when it's actually one of the psycho-killer ones.

Yowza. This is a long, long was from Mario Bava or Dario Argento. Or Sergio Martino. Or anyone who made gialli with a modicum of style and class. Well, that's not entirely fair, as there is a definite stylistic approach here, albeit one designed to generate a maximum of footage on a minimum budget, as I'll discuss presently. But first, here's a brief description of some rapes and murders.

Inspector De Pol, played by a young boy with a fake wig and moustache (/an allegedly 33 year old Jeff Blynn), is trying to solve a double murder. The victims, a young couple called Fabio and Flavia, liked drugs (the only thing we see him write in his police notebook is 'Flavia, Fabio-drugs') and sex. Well, Fabio liked sex, of a peculiarly perverted bent, and Flavia went along with it, for the most part. We know this because lengthy flashbacks of their romantic escapades make up a good proportion of the running time. Anyway, some photos of an orgy which are found in their apartment lead them to one of the participants, Marzia, an old school friend of Flavia's (who must have been kept back several years). She's the subject of threatening phone calls from her ex, who murders a prostitute who also featured in the orgy pics. After a couple more murders, the ex is apprehended. He confesses to the three kills we've witnessed, but claims that he had nothing to do with the Fabio/Flavia killings. This turns out to be accurate when a local nosey parker, who was previously interviewed by the police, suddenly decides to come clean with some vital info which quickly leads young De Pol to the grim truth. Then the film's over, and it's time to take a long, cleansing shower.

Where to start? This is an absolutely insane film, which is clearly an incredibly cynical attempt to attract a cross section of audiences who enjoy the baser things in life. Specifically sex, rape and torture. The mystery aspect is risible, with the attempts of the police to identify suspect numero one, Marzia's ex, being woefully inadequate. They end up IDing him by tracing the sale of a gun he used; why didn't they follow the threatening ex angle more, and get an ID on him that way? Granted, the threatening ex wasn't necessarily the killer, but he was certainly a prime candidate. And, as it turns out, he was the killer. 

Well, he was the killer of three people (and we see him, face and all, during all three, so I'm not spoiling anything here). The initial mystery-who killed the Fs-lasts right throughout the film, until the sudden change of heart from the peeping tom. He has a nerve to greet the Inspector by saying he's been waiting for him to pay him a visit; the police already talked to you you old fool! 

So the plot is stuttering, at best. But the plot is only a minor player in this film; it mostly exists to show tits and torture. The flashbacks to Flavia and Fabio (whose sexual problems may be related to the fact that he looks suspiciously like Barry Manilow) are interminable; we get a sense of their characters within a couple of minutes-he likes drugs* and can't have straightforward sex; she goes along with it, for the most part, because she loves him. Once that's established we remain with them for a long, long time, to little end. Well, we do get to see Leonora Fani masturbating, and then being raped by Barry Fabilow, but is it worth the huge amount of screen time these acts take? (Yes and no, respectively, is my answer.)

The rape turns into a classic Peckinpah Rape, with Flavia seemingly won over by Barry's limp persistence, in the first of several fairly distasteful sequences. It's also not the only Peckinpah Rape, either. When you're crossing your fingers that a late scene remains a straightforward rape, without taking yet another about turn to become a PR, something's deeply wrong. Still, is it Peckinpah Rape if it's with your wife or partner? Of course it is! That was a trick question to weed out the dickheads.  If you answered no, piss off and enlighten yourself. But yeah, the numerous sex scenes cross the line in more ways than one.**

So, the film contains near wall-to-wall sex. Inspector De Pol says that the key to the case is sex (although he says the same re: drugs minutes before), and sex is integral to the plot, if not necessarily smoothly integrated to the film itself, with the fleshy scenes occasionally performing a narrative function, but more often than not grinding everything (except one grinding thing) to a halt, a la porny sex.

Things also grind to a halt for a gruesome torture/gore sequence, which is surprisingly effective. Most of the gore is passable, at best, and the effects in this sequence aren't perfect, but the concept of the scene (naked woman tied to a table's leg is sawed open [her leg, not the table's]) is icky enough, and one or two of the money shots are queasily powerful. The killing of the prostitute, via a scissors to the (UK & Ireland) fanny is also conceptually disgusting, but rather less effectively executed, with the dummy legs looking particularly fake. I hesitate to say it, but a much tighter framing would probably have benefited the scene. The thigh sawing scene actually finishes in a similar manner, but with slightly more restraint (PUN ALERT [the woman's restrained, remember]), which works much better.

Jesus, it's impossible to talk about this film without being infected by its extreme scuzziness. Anyway, to return to the question of style I raised in my introduction; there is a discernible style/approach in most of the scenes, and it's straight from the Jess Franco school of timesaving filmmaking. Time and again we get very long takes, with the camera panning and zooming from a fixed point. That way you get constant movement and (semi-)dynamism from a minimum of set-ups. There are very few shots in the film compared to the average 70s effort (and especially compared to the average modern-day one). This allows you space to contemplate how exactly your love of the filone, which was doubtless ignited by the Bava/Fulci/Argento/Martino classics has led you down this dark, dark alley.

There is something compelling about the film, in that you can't quite believe that something like this was commercially released and competently made (the soundtrack, which does mostly consist of recycled cues from Interrabang!, is impressive, and the camerawork is consistently good, in that the lengthy takes are competently framed and operated). One or two scenes do even approach a Franco-esque level of erotic charge (one of which-a brilliantly-soundtracked sequence of a coupling turning into a threesome in a cinema-features a surprise wanking cock), although there's so much sex and nudity that some of it had to be effective by the law of averages. There are way too many rapes for comfort, and the plot is borderline derisory-why did Marcia open the door to her apartment the night after her rapist/lover has been murdered? And how were there not more witnesses to Barry and Flavia's deaths, given the heavy boat traffic passing through in the background? But still, you don't watch this film for the Christie-esque plotting. And, be honest, you do want to watch it after reading this, don't you? You sick, sick bastard.
​
*He's not great at taking drugs though; his first toot of coke sends most of it dispersing into the air
**They cross the line in two ways; morally and in the ropey adherence to the rules of camera placement

This is the 'A Quiet Place to Kill' Paranoia, rather than the 'Orgasmo' Paranoia. Confused (a la the designer of the above poster)? Don't be-if that means nothing to you then don't worry your pretty little/big/average-sized head about it; just read on...

Maurice has a problem-his wives keep trying to kill him. Three years after her unsuccessful attempt, his ex-wife Helen, now a racing driver, is involved in a big smash during a qualifying event. Maurice's new wife, Constance, invites her to recuperate with them. After mulling over the offer, Helen ditches her middle-aged boyf and drives to Majorca (presumably aided by a boat at some point), where she's welcomed with suspiciously open arms by her ex and his newbie. It's not long before Maurice is attempting to make up for lost time by worming his way into Helen's pants, assassination attempts apparently forgiven. Constance reveals her unhappiness to Helen; she knows Maurice is only interested in her for her money, and the two of them acknowledge that Maurice is their 'vice'. So, another assassination attempt is in order! This one, staged on a yacht, goes pretty drastically wrong, however, ending up with Constance dying. Seconds later, friends of hers pull up alongside in their yacht, necessitating a staged capsizing to dispose of the body. Just when Helen and Maurice think they're in the clear, Constance's daughter Susan turns up, armed with an armful of potentially 'armful suspicions. What's more, Maurice's scopophilic friend Harry turns out to have been filming the yachts at the time of the capsizing, presumably capturing details of the murder. In such circumstances, it's unsurprising that Helen and Maurice fall into the soft, enveloping grip of a big dose of paranoia...

This was one of the last of the main wave of beautiful-rich-people-lazing-in-the-sunshine gialli, a subgenre which was Lenzi's speciality for a couple of years. Argento-y black gloved killers are very much not in evidence; there are two deaths, only one of which is truly pre-meditated. What is in evidence are the usual tropes: sunshine, sea, sex and Sorel.  The decor is fabulously/horrendously 60s, the music is that mix of jaunty numbers, ballads and do-bee-do chanting which is unmistakeably giallo, and some of the characters are not, believe it or not, all that they seem. In short, this is comfortable territory for those of you who are familiar with the genre (which would be those of you who understood what I said above re: orgasms and quiet places).

There's nothing especially outstanding about this film; enjoyment is likely to be derived from the cosy comforts detailed above. The paranoia which grips the murderous couple isn't necessarily going to translate to the audience, as they've dispatched arguably the most sympathetic character.​ Neither Carroll Baker nor Jean Sorel were necessarily titans in the acting department either, although both turn in tolerable performances, Baker especially. It's just hard to really connect with the characters in these films, who inhabit a world vastly different to that in which the majority of us reside. Sorel's Maurice, for example, seems to think that the only way to generate income is to find a woman to bankroll him. Get a job you sexy layabout!

There are some nice directorial flourishes, although Lenzi certainly isn't firing on all cylinders here. The locations are all attractively photographed, and he knows when to linger on a facial close-up and when to cut around things. (Or, at least his editor does.) The red veil which blows in frame-left to obscure Helen's face when she first kisses Maurice is a neat/heavy-handed (depending on your tolerance for symbolism in films) touch, and the frequent zooms don't grate. All in all, it's a competent craftsman crafting a competent product.

 There are some tell-tale signs of Future Lenzi, mostly in the scene at the pigeon shooting venue. Those of us who've been clay pigeon shooting and wondered why the clay discs are referred to as 'pigeons' will find out why here, amid much actual avian carnage. Two of Maurice's friends advise Susan to take up shooting, claiming that killing animals sublimates an apparently innate human desire to murder. If that is indeed the case, Lenzi's filmmaking career must have saved countless lives, especially in the early eighties.

The film ends with evil apparently winning out, as we watch the final pieces of a complex plan fall into place, before a last minute twist confounds the plotters. This was possibly an imposed ending, as a concession to a 'evil-must-pay' strain of morality, but possibly not; it's a neat twist which gives the film an extra punch. SPOILERS FROM HERE The discovery of the corpse of Constance, legs bound by a thick rope, right at the site of Helen's crash* might be a bit too convenient, but fuck it, it makes for a mighty neat resolution. Personally I'd have liked Albert Dalbes' camera-obsessed doctor** to have popped up again, having been filming the scene of the accident. It would've been more incongruous than the body being discovered in that same location, sure, but the idea that he happened to film the yacht shenanigans without actually seeing what happened is pretty ludicrous.*** Even as is, the ending foregrounds the fact that this is a film we're watching, intended as entertainment, and entertainment is what we've gotten. 

*(STILL SPOILERS) Bearing in mind her eventual role in the plot, you have to admire the cojones of Susan to insist that the police renew the search for her mother's body.  She clearly puts such stock in verisimilitude of performance that she's willing to jeopardise the entire plan.

The late 1960s were certainly a time of plenty for anyone who was partial to zany gialli starring Jean Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin. Hot on the heels of the previous year's Deadly Sweet, this effort is similarly stylish, has similarly experimental editing, and has about the same amount of focus on the mystery aspect (which is to say, very, very little). 

Marco and Anna are on the down-slope of a marriage, with he apparently having a proclivity for secretly murdering prostitutes in a swanky hotel, with the cooperation of the staff. She's rich, and together they run a chicken farm on the edge of town, where they've recently sacked all their workers, replacing them with Technology. They live with Gabri, Anna's cousin, who is secretly having an affair with Marco. She's also pretending to spy on him for Anna, and also seems to be rather close to Mondaini, a hip young marketing guru who's been brought in by Big Chicken Inc. to design a new advertising campaign with Marco. Will Marco's predilection for murdering whores come back to haunt him? Will Anna find happiness by going undercover as one of his whores? Will Gabri's true intentions be revealed? And will those shots of chickens being killed and defeathered ever end?

Although this film has much in common stylistically with Deadly Sweet, there are marked differences on a thematic level. Deadly Sweet is a film about films, existing on a superficial-but extremely seductive and fun-level, whereas here Questi ladels on the political subtext. You could probably view this as nothing more than an eccentric arty film which anticipates the 'rich people sleeping around' trope which predominated in late 60s Lenzi-lensed gialli, but sets the action in a chicken farm as opposed to a scenic coastal location. However, that would involve ignoring a lot of the subtle, and not-so-subtle, political elements which Questi liberally sprinkles throughout the film. I should say at this point that arty films with a heavy political subtext aren't exactly my cup of tea generally, but I did find  Death Laid... extremely watchable, and the 104 minutes flew by much faster than I'd been anticipating (not because I watched it on fast forward; they actually went by in 104 minutes. I'm merely referring to my subjective experience of time, don't you know). Right, let's do some thematic diving!

The two main points that Questi is making, as far as I can make out, concern, broadly speaking, vegetarianism and socialism. It might be more correct to say that they are the two causes he's supporting. The sequence showing chickens being killed and cleaned goes on for an uncomfortably long time, which is, of course, entirely the point. Questi is showing us a tiny part of the process by which chicken arrives on our plates ready for consumption. He shows us apparatus which itself 'consumes' the chickens, allowing for their swift execution, and then lingers over the process by which the carcasses are relieved of  their feathers. The scene is shot fairly matter-of-factly, and the power, and message, comes from the fact that we're aware that we're watching real animals being slaughtered and treated. The sound effects and editing do accumulate a sort of weight, though, and anyone who can watch the sequence without feeling even the tiniest bit queasy deserves to be given free chicken dinners for life.

The farm workers, who gather outside the perimeter, occasionally breaching it to issue empty threats against Marco and Anna, represent the Workers  being abandoned by Big Corporations in the race to accumulate wealth. The attitude of the corporation is neatly summed up when Marco's concerns about genetically modifying chickens are dismissed as being "moral," which is outside their wheelhouse of concerns. The machinery which is shown to be more efficient and cost-effective than the workers is also shown to be dangerous, as it consumes people and animals indiscriminately. 

There are parallels drawn between the workers and the chickens, again made rather explicit by the advertising campaign Mondaini presents to Marco, which (hilariously) seeks to anthropomorphise the chicken by presenting him in a variety of everyday human roles.  The corporation exploits the chickens for profit, just as it previously exploited the workers, who have been consumed and spat out by the system much as the mechanised killing apparatus taken in chicks and spits out paste. The final shot of the film, showing a police officer eating a chicken egg, is another heavy-handed depiction of the Powerful Elite consuming those lower than them.

So, Questi is pro-vegetariamism and anti-worker exploitation. One further layer which is worth uncovering concerns the difference between illusion and reality. There are a couple of different ways in which this is interrogated in the film; the most obvious being the use of real footage of chickens being slaughtered versus the illusory murders of humans, achieved using make-up effects. However, there's another layer to this, as (SPOILER) Marco's prostitute killings are revealed to be nothing more than kinky role play, with the prostitutes willingly playing dress-up (and extolling his virtues to the police when they come asking about him). Neither Gabri not Mondaini know that these killings are just pretend; they think Marco genuinely kills the hookers, which forms the cornerstone of their devious plan to take over the family business. You could stretch things a bit and say that Questi's taking aim here at those who object to cinematic violence, or at least conflate it with real life acts. His previous film, Django, Kill!  was certainly violent, but, like this film, it took place in an idiosyncratic world, very much divorced from reality. And Questi, who fought in the resistance during WW2, was very much aware of the realities of actual violence.

'Idiosyncratic' is certainly an apt term to describe the world in which Death Laid takes place (just patting myself on the back there for coming up with it a couple of sentences ago). Real human emotions are on display-the ennui of the ageing rich couple is a constant theme, and Marco and Gabri share one scene in which he articulates an achingly-real desire to escape his life and start again. The fact that we think he's a murderer undercuts the scene's effectiveness somewhat, but it nonetheless achieves a certain level of nostalgic resonance. Marco's perpetually confused friend, who's recovering from electro-shock therapy and searching for a road which sounds suspiciously like the one in Robert Frost's wood, evokes ideas of memory, life decisions and whether we can ever truly begin again.

One of the first American quasi-gialli (I'll leave it to another day to draw up a definitive list and chronology of same), this film is an interesting intersection point-or, more accurately, divergence point-between the giallo and slasher film. Based on a story and script by John Carpenter, and released a couple of months before Halloween, it's a reminder of just how influential the little Italian flicks made by Mario and Dario had become by this time.

Famous, and controversial, fashion photographer Laura Mars specialises in fetishistic images of death. Specifically, dead women. Just as she's launching a big new exhibit and book, women-and men dressed as women-from her inner circle start dropping like flies. What's more, Laura, through some kind of second sight, sees glimpses of the killer's point of view as he stalks and slashes his way through her friends and colleagues. As the police 'investigate' (/ineffectually sit outside people's apartments), the killer turns their sights, and Laura's occasional sights, to Laura herself...

This film deals with a couple of fairly weighty issues: the fetishisation of violence in art, and the victimisation of women in both art and real life. At least, it pays lip service to these issues, but does it really get to grips with either? Before we get to that, I'll say that this isn't a bad film, but it's quite vanilla in giallo terms. There's very little gore, no real investigation, and minimal moments of baroque Argento-esque style. It's worth a look, though, and features some bigger names than you'd normally find in a giallo, if that's your thing (one of whom, Brad Dourif, pops up again fifteen years later in Trauma).

The story lends itself naturally to Layers. Layers of text and subtext; layers of meaning and depth. You have voyeurism and scopophilia, fetishisation and commercialisation of violence against women, and mirrors. Lots and lots of mirrors. This (mirrors) is an example of 'depth' in a film which is fairly redundant to me-seeing characters reflected in a maze of mirrors is an impressive technical achievement, and we can take it as a given that it's the film 'subtly' telling us that one or more characters have a fractured personality. And here, sure enough, the killer seems to be a bit schizo. It's a bit of a cul-de-sac in terms of opening up the film for discussion, though, much like having goodies dress in white and baddies in black in westerns. Sure, we can point out to our less cerebral friends that the director has colour-coded the characters to externalise their inner goodie- or baddie-ness, but there's not a whole lot more to say beyond this.

There's more to chew over elsewhere, though. I'm unsure of just how much Carpenter remains in the final product (allegedly not a whole lot), but the idea of Laura seeing the stalk and slash through the killer's POV did come from him, unsurprisingly given how he utilised first-person shots to such an extent throughout Halloween. Laura doubles as the film's audience during her vision scenes, observing events over which she has no control. This point is explicitly made when she tells Tommy Lee Jones' inspector "I can't see what's in front of me. What I see if that," and points at an image on a screen. And yet, by creating such images in her working life, she also doubles as the filmmakers; commercialising artistic violence. She attempts to explain away her career choice by saying that she seeks to depict "moral, spiritual, emotional murder." She says she can't stop murder, but can "make people look at it."

Does she really want to do this to remind people of how horrible the world is, though? Or is she merely seeking to justify her life choices by hiding behind a smokescreen of spurious and specious reasoning? Why exactly is making people look at murder preferable to the alternative (ie, not making them look art it)? Similarly, John Carpenter, and Irvin Kershner (to a far lesser degree), made money by making horror films. They can claim that they're making people look at murder with altruistic intentions, but are they really trying to convince us, or themselves? For the record, I don't think it's necessary to justify commercialising violence; murder existed before films were invented, after all. Even if a work of art inspires a copycat murder, the killer is obviously mental to begin with and would no doubt have figured out a way to commit heinous acts without artistic inspiration.* This is, nonetheless, something that any person who sends violent images out into the world must grapple with at some stage. Or, at least, should grapple with.

Making Laura a woman is an interesting move. A cynic might argue that it's simply efficient filmmaking, allowing one character to simultaneously open up the dialogue about representations of violence on screen and fill the woman-in-peril role. Similarly, is her second sight indicative of women being more in  tune with the world around them, or is it merely a way to film murder scenes in a disorienting manner while also keeping things relatively studio-friendly and bloodless? (Neither; it's almost certainly to allow for an exploration of the point of view, as suggested above.) 

To return to Laura's dual function as both purveyor and potential victim of violence, why shouldn't she be allowed to be both? People who complain about woman being reduced to the role of disposable victim in films have a (generally) valid complaint, but the fact remains that, in real life, women statistically are far more likely than men to be victims of violent crime.  Female actors generally seem more physically vulnerable on screen than men, so it's easier to create a sense of danger and dread. The fact that Laura fulfils this role while also earning her corn by taking advantage of female vulnerability adds a delicious layer of irony to proceedings. You could argue that she's not a good female role model, but fuck it-why should she be? Non-white males in films tend to be viewed as being representatives of their gender/race/sexuality, which has always sat uneasily with me. In many ways viewing characters in this way has the opposite to the desired effect; the intention is to push for greater representation of and appreciation for 'marginal' groups, yet when confronted with an example of someone from such a group, their individuality is immediately tossed aside, and their personality is viewed as being representative of a whole. This is unfair on both the group and the characters themselves.

That Laura adds a veneer of sex and sexuality to her images is also interesting. Is photographing sexy women, and photographing imaginary acts of violence against sexy women, in any way offensive? Well yes, in that plenty of people in the film express outrage at Laura's work, which would undoubtedly have met the same response in the real world. And just look at the response to slasher films, and to Dario Argento's comments about preferring to kill beautiful actresses in his films. But, then again, the most inane utterance can cause offence (or faux-offence) in the Twitter age. I don't want to get all PC-gone-mad about things, so I'll say that the characters in the film, and IRL, have every right to protest Laura's work. But, at the same time, I don't think she's unequivocally crossed any line. As a woman, she's within her rights to interrogate and present female sexuality as she wishes (again, as long as she doesn't cross any lines). If you don't like it, don't consume her work! Feel free to protest it too. But just don't go calling it offensive; it's offensive and distasteful to you, not objectively offensive, and there's a difference.

The fashion backdrop also works as a reference (intentional or otherwise) to Blood and Black Lace, and the combination of fashion and second sight anticipates Nothing Underneath. The issue of the second sight is an interesting one; initially we're faced with the possibility that what Laura's actually experiencing are flashbacks to murders she herself has committed. This reduces the film to a very basic either/or scenario, so it's made clear reasonably quickly that the visions are real. This, of course, places the film at the edge of the supernatural subgenre, although the second sight is the only such element in the film. Its existence is never really addressed, and it basically functions as either a plot gimmick or subtext gimmick (or both), depending on your outlook.

Aside from the sexuality of the fashion shoots, there's also a slightly cloying post-coital scene, which is very much a Hollywoodised version of a typical giallo sex scene. The emotions expressed within it are fairly over-the-top and sugary, but the Italian gialli weren't immune to such flourishes either. As stated at the outset, there's very little visual style here, despite the possibilities opened up by the fashion shoot-setting and second sight murder scenes. One reasonably atmospheric sequence sees Laura running through a vast empty studio, and the moment when she realises the killer's identity features some classic Eurocult style-a push in on the killer's face followed by a zoom into the Eyes on Mars. 

Regarding the identity of the killer, there's no real investigation to speak of, with the police instead seeming to adopt an approach of waiting to happen upon the killer to presenting themselves 'in the act'. They spend much of the film functioning as ineffectual bodyguards, with two murdered characters meeting their demise while apparently having police protection. SPOILERS This may not necessarily be indicative of poor policing, though, depending on who exactly was providing said protection. END SPOILERS

The Big Reveal, replete with dolly and zoom, is one of those that comes about three minutes after anyone with half a brain would've figured out the identity of the killer for themselves. The film further tips its hat by having one of those classic 'disembodied voice' moments, when one character tells another that everything's OK now and the threat is vanquished. As I've previously noted, when the person doing the reassuring is heard but not seen, you can be reasonably sure that things are very much not OK, and the owner of the voice is, in fact, the threat. Here, there's no reason why they couldn't have shown the voice owner as he speaks the reassuring lines. I'm guessing that it wasn't such a clichéd trope in the 1970s as it is today. In fact, a huge amount of horror movie clichés go back to this time and this year, and this writer (the writer of this film; not me). This isn't the best 1978 John Carpenter-related film; it might not even be the second-best-I haven't seen his TV movie Someone's Watching Me (note the continued theme of eyes and seeing). But it's definitely in the top three.
​

El Fulcerino returns with a film which, while not among his very best work, is nonetheless a fascinating attempt to breathe new life into an increasingly stale filone. Unfortunately, because its innovations were of the cerebral rather than visceral variety, the film was not a success upon release, and left Fulci's career languishing somewhat in the doldrums. The next time he returned to the filone, he did so on the back of a run of gore-soaked epics, and delivered The New York Ripper, which is about as different a giallo from this film as it's possible to be.

Virginia Ducci has a form of second sight, which enables her, walking in the schoolyard of her Florentine convent, to see her mother's Don't Torture a Duckling-esque suicide leap from the cliffs of Dover.  Years later she's freshly-married to an Italian businessman, played suavely by Gianni Garko, but still prone to hallucinations and premonitions. She has one such vision as she's driving through a tunnel, blacking out but somehow managing to navigate the tunnel and pull in neatly to the side of the road. The vision apparently shows a limping, moustachioed man, a fifty-something woman with her skull smashed in, a smashed mirror, a lushly decorated red room and a body apparently being sealed behind an in-construction stone wall. Virginia travels on to one of her husband's properties, which she's never visited before but wants to renovate. Realising that one of the rooms was featured in her vision, she takes a pickaxe to a wall and uncovers the skeletal remains of a 25 year old model. Her husband Francesco, a former lover of the model, is initially suspected and arrested, but is released after evidence comes to light suggesting he was in America at the time of the murder. Meanwhile, Virginia is trying to reconcile the inconsistencies in her vision with the facts as they appear to be-why did she see the victim as being much older than she really was, and why does the moustachioed man, who she tracks down with surprising ease, not walk with a limp?

As I've previously stated, this film plays like an extended riff on the central conceit behind A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, specifically dreams as visions, as opposed to jumbled webs of nonsense and half-memories being spun by our subconscious mind.  It also begins with a reprise of the finale of Don't Torture a Duckling, with a dodge dummy tumbling down a cliff to its doom, albeit there are fewer sparks here when the dummy makes contact with the cliff, and the effect is less spatially disorientating in general. The eerie driving sequence, which manages to imbue a nondescript stretch of road and tunnels with an uncanny menace, may have also spawned future Fulci work, sadly, with Door to Silence featuring interminable stretches of John Savage driving through the American countryside.

In order to better sell the conceit of the dream vision, Fulci makes Virginia a patient of a parapsychologist, played by Marc Porel, who is predisposed to believe her seemingly outlandish claims. Saying that, he does toss the occasional large pinch of salt at her claims, and doesn't just swallow everything willy-nilly. He also hints at the possibility that this film takes place in a Tenebrae-like very, very slight alternate universe, asking Virginia at one point "Who didn't have a relative or friend who had dreamed of someone being run over, then the next day that person is really run over?" Speaking empirically, I'd wager that quite a lot of people would not know anyone to whom that description could be affixed.

Luca, Porel's character, also lays the groundwork for the film's big twist (SPOILAGE AHEAD), by pointing out to Virginia that the mounting inconsistencies between her vision and what apparently happened to the dead model suggest that she may have had a premonition, rather than a flashback. The precise nature of Virginia's second sight is never made clear, but we know from the film's opening she can witness events which are happening elsewhere in the present. She makes references to premonitions and calls herself a 'clairvoyant', both of which would suggest that she primarily does deal in seeing the future, not the past (although clairvoyance can also mean a general ability to experience things 'beyond normal sensory contact').

However, it's a fairly natural assumption to think that she's had an extra-sensory flashback when she recognises the room in Francesco's house from her vision, and finds a walled-in body in the exact spot where she'd had a vision of its having being sealed in. It'd be easy to dismiss the film for dealing in outrageous coincidences when you learn that the vision was indeed a premonition, and had nothing directly to do with the model's death. However, one must bear in mind that the second walling-in can only happen because of the discovery of the first one, which was itself sparked by the vision itself. In this way, the vision becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, and the double-Poe isn't egregious. Plus, if you've already killed and walled in one young woman, why wouldn't you do it again? (I mean, there are lots of reasons, so don't think about Garko's plan for dealing with Virginia too closely. At all.)

There are some clues as to the twist in the cinematic language of the flashback, although it'd be a fool's errand to attempt to guess the twists in films which engage in dreamlike imagery by analysing said imagery with cold logic. Nevertheless, it's worth pointing out that the old woman's face is shown as viewed by another person's (/a camera's) perspective, whereas the shots of the sealing-in are all first-person. What's more, this first-person is clearly still alive. Also, the fact that we can clearly see the woman's dead face suggests that she's not been walled-in (unless the killer fitted the makeshift grave with a light source), or at least couldn't have been the person who's watching themselves being entombed. And, if I had to guess who the person through whose eyes Virginia sees was, I'd have to go out on a limb and say that it was probably herself. However, as I said, it's all well and good to employ such rigour on a third or fourth viewing of the film, but when you're dealing with fractured dream visions it generally wouldn't pay to be so logical in your interpretations when first watching it. Although, as I've just shown, it would pay here. But not always.

Anyway, such a reading of the film's images depends on a correct interpretation of certain images and conventions. And what Fulci is really interrogating here is the inherent truth, or untruth, of images. (Bear with me...) One of the main innovations Dario Argento had brought to the genre was to imbue his films with intellectual concerns,  Bird... being a perfect example, with its questioning of gender roles and interrogation of the reliability of subjective vision. Fulci (for the most part) removes the subjective from his images here, instead presenting them as disembodied fragments. These images do not necessarily mean anything on their own, but can be interpreted by us, and Virginia, to mean certain things. As the film progresses, and we're privvy to more information, the original interpretations are shown to be erroneous. The very nature of the vision, originally assumed to be flashback, is shown to be wrong, but there are also more specific errors.

As an example, we assume that the limping man is Gabriele Ferzetti because he's the only man who appears recognisably in the vision. And Virginia assumes the dead person is the fifty year old woman, again because she 'sees' no-one else. What's crucial here is context; when we're first presented with the images we attempt to construct a coherent straight-line narrative from them, even with a paucity of concrete information. Then, with the accumulation of knowledge, we're able to fill the gaps between the images, allowing us to recontextualise and reinterpret them, and getting one step closer to the 'truth', if such a thing exists (it does here, because it's a mystery genre film, but does it in life?? OK, I'll leave it there). On a purely cinematographic level, the Ferzetti assumption, as an example, displays the suggestive power of editing, and shows how keen we are to make associations and connections between things in order to make sense of them.

Speaking of Ferzetti, he's prominently billed here, but has a very contained, and temporally-short, role in the film. The nature of the plot is such that he's required to assume the role of assumed-killer when he does appear, in a kind of drawn out version of the red herring moment which is afforded most characters in a giallo. This, of course, leads the experienced viewer to discount the likelihood of his actually being the killer, and to look elsewhere for suspects. And, apart from Porel's whiter-than-white character, who could adopt a Julia Durer-esque tactic of taking advantage of having Virginia's confidence by enacting her visions IRL (in real life, you fuddy duddies) but never really gets close to being a suspect, there aren't many other possibilities. Other than the actual killer, of course. 

Having a seemingly obviously guilty character like Ferzetti handy gives said killer, Gianni Garko's Francesco, a clear acting choice (assuming that Fulci didn't drag performances of his choice from his players, which, by all accounts, is a safe assumption to make)-he can try to blend into the background, unobserved by those searching for clues and suspects, or he can play up his sympathetic qualities, the better to highlight the dark and untrustworthy nature of Ferzetti. This latter option can't be too hammy, though, or it'll attract suspicion by virtue of its seeming overabundance of virtue. Anyway, although Ferzetti does bring some nuance and hints that there's more to his character than meets the eye, he-like Garko-is extremely constrained by the general demands of the role, and turns in a performance which isn't too difficult from the classic Jean Sorel or George Hilton.  It's easy to criticise actors for being too bland (which I've done recently with Sorel's reactions to his daughter's death in Lizard), but bear in mind that they're constantly making choices, and sometimes the choice which best serves the film, and plot, is to downplay their reactions, thus keeping their motives obfuscated and obscure.  Obviously.

The final half hour here, once we establish that the vision was a premonition rather than a flashback, is rather too devoted to depicting every single piece of the puzzle slotting into place. I've only watched the English dub, which may well be more sledgehammery than the Italian version, but the running voiceover flashbacks which emphasise how we need to reinterpret previous events and statements are slightly too prevalent. There's no need to show every little part of the puzzle slotting into place; give us a general overview and trust us to complete the final few pieces ourselves. Fulci was likely proud of the visual and plotting complexities, but it shows its hand just a bit too much. On the other hand, the film ends very abruptly, eschewing a happy-ever-after coda, not even showing the moment the killer is properly taken down. Fulci's happy to let us extrapolate here, probably because the extra couple of minutes would've been no different to what we'd seen in a hundred other gialli.

And this film is different to other gialli. It's not necessarily a thrill-a-minute adrenaline ride, but it's a very neatly conceived and executed film, and, as with all his pre-Zombi gialli, would serve as an excellent rebuttal to anyone who dismisses Fulci as a talentless gorehound. Elements of his later work can be seen here, with another example of his fondness for his blown-out crime scene photography, and a hesitant attempt at the zoom-driven pick-axe action which would recur in the Gates of Hell trilogy. But it's the elements which gradually, and sometimes suddenly, disappeared over the years-the plotting, the subtext and the graceful camerawork and editing-which make this film what it is, and leave you wondering what might have been if this had been his global smash instead of (the still excellent) Zombi 2...

This film was Lucio Fulci's third, and probably best, giallo. It's a film where his ever-increasing technical standards were very much in evidence, as was his growing rage against the machine that was Catholic Italy of the 70s.

In Accendura, a small town in Southern Italy which is connected to the rest of the county by a modern motorway, someone is murdering young boys. The local simpleton is initially suspected, after he's found to be behind an attempted blackmailing of one victim's parents. However, it turns out that he merely came across the child's corpse and, sensing a money-making opportunity, buried it before making the call. The town's attention then turns to local witch, La Maciara, who has been missing for over two weeks. The police manage to track her down and she confesses to the crimes. However, it turns out she was merely using voodoo against the three children, and didn't physically kill them. After her release, she's brutally set upon and murdered by the fathers of the deceased. Reporter Andrea Martelli and recovering drug addict Patrizia, meanwhile, form an alliance to try and get to the bottom of the murders, even as the film does its best to push Patrizia as a suspect. Patrizia then sees the decapitated head of a Donald Duck doll which she bought for a deaf and dumb girl placed among the tributes for the killer's latest victim. Using some fine extrapolation skills, she and Andrea concoct an explanation for the girl's proclivity for dismembering dolls which also points the finger at a suspect for the murders. They're not quite right, but enough in the ballpark that the real killer is outed, just in time to fall to their death in a shower of sparks and crushed papier maché.

If you haven't seen this film, you should probably stop reading here, as most of what I'll be discussing will be spoilerific. Starting now. The main concerns of the film on a thematic level are the superstition and insularity of small-town Italy, and the power, and abuse thereof, of Italian institutions, especially the church. This is, as far as I can make out, the second giallo in  which the killer is revealed to have been a priest, after Who Saw Her Die?, which opened after principal photography had begun on this film. It seemed to open the floodgates, with many, many more religious killers appearing in future films, suggesting that Fulci (and Aldo Lado) was articulating what a lot of artistic types were thinking.

It's difficult to discern who bears more of Fulci's scorn, the townsfolk or the authority figures. It's difficult to even know if he sympathises with Patrizia, one of the nominal leads, given that she's trying to extricate herself from a world of drugs and partying, and enters the film lounging naked and (mostly) jokingly trying to seduce a child. She's certainly shown in general as possessing, for the most part, good intentions, but, then again, she's also highly foregrounded as a suspect. This could be Fulci's way of admonishing her for her licentiousness. Likewise, Andrea isn't exactly the most driven investigator; he's motivated as least as much by the thoughts of getting a scoop as by any need for justice to prevail.

And is it even justice? (Yes, it is, but I'm asking a rhetorical question here.) The children who are murdered aren't exactly cherubic innocents. They smoke, they spy on people having sex, they slag off the local simpleton for doing exactly the same thing, and they generally seem like Normal Kids. It's actually refreshing to see such a portrayal of children, which is far removed from their troubling representation in Dallamano gialli, for example. And, unless I'm very much mistaken, I believe that Fulci intended to present the children in such a realistic manner, the better to act as a mirror to highlight the flaws and vices of the grown-up characters.

What I mean by this is that the way the adult characters view, and treat, the (normal) children tells us everything about their own personae. Patrizia sees the kids as burgeoning sexual beings, and is clearly something of a sex-fiend herself. The local priest, who steadfastly ignores Patrizia's flirting, sees the kids as loci of purity and innocence, at risk of corruption from the wider, wilder world. He proudly boasts to Andrea of banning certain publications from the local newsagents, as part of a fight to protect the town from said wider world. La Maciara believed that her deceased child was the spawn of the devil, and seems to hold a similar opinion of most adolescents, showing her general superstition.

The witchcraft practised by La Maciara and her 'mentor' Francesco is apparently closely related to religion (even though the local priest doesn't seem to have any real relationship with them). This seems reflective of Fulci's wider view of religion, which he saw as hypocritical and nothing but dressed up superstition. And, even though the murdered boys haven't been sexually abused,  the film does seem to be quite prescient about the misuse of power in the church which would be exposed over the following decades. La Maciara is one such (tangential) victim of this power, having been brought to the saint-obsessed Francesco for an exorcism as a youngster. She became pregnant as a result of his rituals, eventually losing her child (whom she considered to be the spawn of Satan). Everything in her world goes back to children-she's murdered because of her supposed role in the local murders of children (the fact that the townspeople still consider her guilty because of her witchcraft also showing their own superstition and small-mindedness), she became a witch after the exorcism incident in her childhood, which led to her own deceased child. The last thing she sees is a car full of children driving by on the new motorway, a symbol of familial unity which is forever out of her reach.

​The authorities, represented by a local and regional police force who combine to tackle the murders, don't exactly come out of the film in credit either. The local policemen, while possibly being less superstitious than the average townie, are very much complicit in having allowed the insular nature of the area to flourish. They seem extremely tolerant of the mob mentality which prevails in the town, and ultimately prove clueless when attempting to solve the crime. Even the out-of-towners fare little better, being reduced to ciphers through which we get to see the strange ways of the locals.* For the first two thirds of the film the police do play a prominent role in proceedings, partly to give us an insight into the ways of the town, and partly (I reckon) because the investigative plot wasn't beefy enough to sustain more than a few minutes of Andrea and Patrizia poking around late on, so instead we're presented with the repeated failures of the po-po.

To return to Patrizia, her opening scene is worth discussing in further detail. Her behaviour towards young Bruno is certainly predatory and paedophilic in nature, but she seems to be acting more to amuse herself than possessing any designs towards actually seducing the child. It's still undeniably creepy (and a bit sexy, when it's just her on screen), and possibly does give some weight to Don Alberto's views of the wider world being corrupting; Patrizia having been born locally but reared in a big city, where she came into contact with drugs and sex and rock and/or roll. Either way, although Bruno spent his last night on earth drawing naked women on his copybook, it's not as if he wasn't a horny little kid before meeting her, so Patrizia has merely given him food/fodder for thought; she hasn't changed the course of his life irrevocably. Not like a certain religious nut does.**

The mystery is serviceable, although it clearly wasn't Fulci's main concern, with the end deductive process being hurried and stretching credulity somewhat. The fact that this is  (again, to the best of my knowledge) the second giallo to feature a priest killer would certainly have given the end reveal added punch for contemporary audiences. The film's cinematography is extremely stylish, albeit with one or two clunkily-shot dialogue scenes, but for the most part it looks gorgeous.   Fulci's economy as a director is in evidence in several shots which combine zooms with tracking, with constant reframing to keep the action moving. It's the cinematographic approach which allowed Jess Franco to be so prolific around this time, but here it's executed far more smoothly and stylishly. The soundtrack is magnificent, and Fulci's love of dogs, and use of their barks and growls to menacing aural effect, is very much in evidence.  He also uses very ballsy editing and framing to heavily hint at the identity of the killer (check out a track through the church after Bruno's mother shouts that she knows the killer is there), presumably banking on the audience's reverence for the church to preclude them from having any suspicions towards it. 

Fulci's extreme lack of such reverence, also evident in The Eroticist and Beatrice Cenci, drives this film. It's a powerful film borne of powerful feelings, and one that anyone who dismissed him as a gore-obsessed hack should be made to watch on repeat, until they can't take it any more and throw themselves off the nearest electrified cliff. Or until they admit they were wrong, whichever.

*There's also a strange interaction where the head of the investigation, upon being told that La Maciara's child was rumoured to have "lived for a couple of years... kept hidden away, because it was the son of the devil," responds by saying, seemingly without irony, "a natural assumption." I think the line reading may have been deficient here, otherwise the implication is that the sophisticated big city policemen are just as susceptible to superstitious nonsense as the locals.

Lucio Fulci's second giallo film has much in common with his first-a lack of on-screen murders, an abundance of on-screen sexuality, an unhappy marriage at the core of the story, a distrust of the counterculture-but it's much more frenzied and stylish in execution. Is it better though? Well, you'll have to watch both of them to answer that. And when you do, come back here to read the rest of this shite.

Uptight, posh Carol Hammond is stuck in a wet blanket of a marriage, to that reliable philanderer Jean Sorel (/Frank Hammond). She is plagued by nightmares/erotic dreams about her party-loving, sexually liberated neighbour, Julia Durer. She recounts these dreams to her psychoanalyst, who interprets everything in a 'very good, you're making progress' kind of way. When Carol dreams about Julia's murder, she's shocked to discover that life has imitated the land of the nod, and Julia's been slain in exactly the manner she dreamt. All the evidence, specifically a murder weapon with her fingerprints all over it and one of her fur coats being found at the scene, seems to suggest that Carol is guilty, but the police can't find an acceptable motive. Meanwhile, a Mrs Smith was trying to blackmail Carol's politician father by hinting that a member of his family is up to no good sex-wise, and sure enough Frank's cheating is exposed. It's also discovered that Carol kept a dream diary, which would have provided anyone who read it with the perfect opportunity to frame her for Julia's murder by copying her dream. Then the police establish (without divulging their methods) that Julia Durer was Mrs Smith. Who has silenced her, and why? And what the hell do the damn hippies who keep lurking in the background want?

I'll get this out of the way first, before I chip away at the film's flaws-this is a great giallo. Despite not having any real murder scene, beyond a depiction of Carol's dream killing of Julia, in every other way it is a quintessential giallo. The music is beautiful, nudity abounds, there's style to burn, plenty of stalk (if not slash) sequences, and the plot makes absolutely no fucking sense at all. This last point is something that tends to get tossed around as a defining characteristic of gialli, but that does the work of Ernesto Gastaldi, for example, a great disservice. Here, though, with the frequent diversions into dreamland, the film does a damn good job of making you unsure just what the hell is going on.

This is necessary-the plot is actually paper thin. It's difficult to get too deep into discussing this film without spoiling it, so if you haven't seen it, reread the last couple of sentences of my opening paragraph and jog on. The chief reason for the lack of plot is that the solution to the murder mystery is actually presented to us right at the start of the film. We see a stylised, slow motion depiction of the murder as Carol recounts it to her psychoanalyst, which turns out to be a confession of sorts, fed through a dream prism in an attempt to generate an alibi. The evidence which the police accrue-which seems pretty airtight to me-also points squarely at her. So, instead of unravelling layers of a mystery as it progresses, the film actually begins with the solution, then attempts to cloak it from us and by adding layers of obfuscation and distraction.

Some of these layers, it has to be said, come from characters acting fairly irrationally. Carol, in particular, makes some incredible decisions, which seem chiefly motivated by the scriptwriters' desire for her to seem innocent of the murder. She's worried that the hippies who were present when she murdered Julia will go to the police, so she follows them to a commune and lets them observe her to see if they recognise her. Presumably if they did, they wouldn't necessarily be forthcoming with that information; most people wouldn't tip their hands to a murderer if they can help it. She also agrees to meet the hippies in the empty basement of Alexandra Palace-a location which should've raised some suspicions-and travels there without any weapon. Surely she should've been trying to eliminate the hippies? Instead they try to murder her-which the film does a decent job of justifying, to be fair. Still, though, her approach to the meeting makes no real sense. 

The police, also, provide much scope for the wool to be pulled over our eyes by essentially being shit at their jobs. The crime scene unit (who provide possibly the first instance of Fulci's beloved extreme flash photography) are pretty efficient-and the scenes wherein they present their evidence to the inspector are very well directed and presented-but the subsequent investigation has more holes than a human being. First off-given that for anyone apart from Carol to be guilty of the murder they'd have had to read the written description of her dream,* why don't they go looking for her dream diary? Also, their method for tracking down the red-haired hippy who tried to kill Carol is to put out an instruction to 'check out anyone [in London] with red hair and put the screws on them'. This specifically isn't an example of the film using police incompetence to further muddy the plot waters, but it does sum up the investigative level of the fuzz. The one thing holding them back from charging Carol is a lack of a motive. Aren't there hours of psychoanalytic recordings of her describing her obsession with Julia which would tick this box? Obviously these could come under doctor-patient confidentiality, but that didn't stop the doc from readily passing them to Carol's father.

The fact that we're presented with the solution early on means that there's not much of an investigative thrust to the film. Jean Sorel musters up a brief flurry of energy to search for the dream diary, and his daughter-Julia's step-daughter-tracks down the hippies to try and clear her father's name. Once the incompetent bobbies take over from the crime scene analysts-who, interestingly, are portrayed as bumbling fools in contrast to the suave detectives despite being much more efficient in their work-they mostly just lurk in the background, waiting for the family machinations to deliver a suspect to them. Although, to be fair, the manner in which Carol's guilt is eventually uncovered is pretty slick**.

Style-wise, we have the same occasional bursts of shonky handheld footage which intruded into Perversion Story, although here they aren't quite as off-putting, and may on a couple of occasions (the dinner scene and when Julia's suspiciously eyeing Joan and Deborah) have actually been a deliberate stylistic choice. The dream sequences and chase scenes make good use of a variety of angles and lenses,  and are played out for the most part without music, relying on ambient sounds, frenzied breathing and the inventive camerawork.  The editing is extremely sharp, with an energy to some scenes which anticipates Orson Welles's manic style from F for Fake and (what is currently viewable of) The Other Side of the Wind.  The acting is decent, although I've finally figured out what's at the root of the frequent criticisms of Jean Sorel-he's fine portraying any emotion up to a medium level, but once something properly cataclysmic befalls his character, he always seems to plump for catatonia as his character's response. Maybe he thinks he's doing more with his eyes than he really is, or maybe he just knows his limitations as an actor, but it really hampers his last few scenes here, as he stands around stony-faced after the murder of his daughter. Florinda Balkan is pretty damn good, though.

In terms of Uncle Lucio, he's really beginning to hit his stride here. The style is, as just stated, very impressive throughout, being at least a match for Sergio Martino's slick gialli of the time, and possibly being more in tune with the narrative demands of the material. His stated aversion to psychoanalysis isn't quite as much in evidence as it might have been, although the doc doesn't exactly come across as providing a competent service. Fulci's mistrust of hippies and the counterculture are very much in evidence, although there seems, in Carol's fantasies about Julia, to be an acknowledgement of the appeal of such a lifestyle. Or maybe just an acknowledgement of the appeal of watching two women lezz off. The idea of a crime being anticipated by, or mirroring, a dream later became the central concept of The Psychic, a more restrained but no less impressive offering. Overall, this isn't quite as good as Fulci's next giallo Don't Torture a Duckling, but, then again, very, very few films are...

Also known as Perversion Story, this film represented a big turning point in Lucio Fulci's career, having previously worked almost exclusively in the Italian comedy genre ('Italian comedy', which was very much its own idiosyncratic beast, specifically being the genre).  It's a long way away from the gore-soaked horrors with which he'd come to be closely associated, but it's an important stepping stone nonetheless, as it showed that there were more strings to his bow than being able to film Franco Franchi pulling faces.

Doctor George Dumurrier, who runs a clinic in San Francisco, is trapped in a loveless marriage with asthmatic Susan. He escapes both his marriage and his clinic (in which, despite us being repeatedly told it's 'his life', we never really see him)  to have an affair with a friend, Jane. While away on a 'fundraising trip' (ie a shagfest with Jane), George's brother Henry tells him that Susan has died of an asthma attack. We discover that she had a secret life insurance policy worth $2 million, with George as sole beneficiary. Susan's sister, Marta, doesn't seem too happy with George, and Henry too seems to eye him with suspicion. George then receives an anonymous tip-off which results in him witnessing the striptease performance of Monica Weston, who is a dead ringer for Susan (albeit with different colour hair and eyes). Suspecting that there's more to Susan's death than meets the different-coloured eye, George and Jane seek to befriend Monica to find out more. The police, acting on a tip-off from the insurance agency, discover evidence in Monica's apartment which suggests she's been posing as Susan. Eventually she confesses all, and the murderer is caught. Or are they..?

There's a fail aul whack of Vertigo off this film, as you've probably gathered from the synopsis. There's also a healthy sprinkling of The Sweet Body of Deborah, and this is very much one of those late 60s rich-people-playing-psychological-games-in-exotic-locales gialli, rather than a Bava or Argento clone. Murders are few and far between, to say the least. What you do get, though, is an extremely liberal dose of sex and nudity, far more than was typical in a late 60s thriller, so that's something. 

Style-wise, the film exudes an air of competence rather than ostentation, only let down by occasionally shaky handheld work (and aerial shots which must have been shot by a defective camera, or else one operated by someone with a deathly fear of flying). There are some moments of arty style, not least in the sex scenes, which incorporate lush lighting and, on one occasion, some Camilla 2000-esque filming through a transparent mattress. These touches are needed, to be honest, as Fulci revels a bit too much in the new-found sexual permissiveness of the era, dragging the scenes on far too long.

The murder plot at the heart of the film is simultaneously brilliant and preposterous. Brilliant, in that the central conceit which underpins said plot is pretty ingenius; without giving too much away it's one of those plans which sees those characters doing the investigating thinking that they're making headway towards solving the case, whereas they're actually following a carefully laid-out path towards their own downfall. It's preposterous in that the evidence with which a court reaches a crucial verdict, which is later upheld by a state governor, is based on extremely flimsy and circumstantial evidence. The governor upholds the decision after granting a temporary stay of execution, despite almost all of the key witnesses for the prosecution having fled the country, which surely must give rise to some reasonable doubt. 

The murder plot, and film as a whole, hinges on the credulity of the appearance of Ms Weston, who looks exactly like Susan Dumurrier, and was apparently tied up in the circumstances surrounding Ms Dumurrier's death. (SPOILERS) Not everyone buys this, and to be fair George and Jane do harbour serious suspicions that Susan and Monica are the same person, but surely either they or the police could've easily gleaned conclusive proof as to who she really is? Granted, she spent a few months creating the persona of Monica, but couldn't the police have dug a little deeper? Or examined her to see if she was wearing contact lenses and a wig? (The fuzz seem to be already convinced of George's guilt, and swallow anything which supports this, despite there not really being a sense of him being a suspect until he's casually told that he may be facing the chair.) Also, if my wife stripped in front of me, wearing a wig and coloured lenses but speaking in her usual voice, I'd like to think I'd be pretty certain it was her. Simply put, George should've been certain that Susan and Monica were the same person from the off, and the police, and George's legal team, should've been able to prove the same without too much difficulty. That this doesn't happen is crucial for the film's execution, so to speak, but upon repeated viewings becomes hard to ignore. (SPOILERS END)

The film slows slightly once Monica shows up, initially to linger over her body for an extended striptease, but then to detail George and Jane's attempts to uncover the truth about her identity, and, as a consequence, Susan's death. Up to that point we've been witnessing George's life spiral out of control (borne with admirable stoicism by Jean Sorel, unsurprisingly), but there's not quite enough meat for the investigation to sink its teeth into, with very little actual progress made for a good half hour. Saying that, as stated above, on first viewing the mystery of Monica's provenance will probably be more than enough to sustain viewers.

The climax is actually executed quite daringly, with few of the main characters getting any quality screen time over the final seven or eight minutes. There are a couple of big temporal leaps in the film; early on we jump from Susan's death to a month later, and towards the end we skip over an arrest and trial. We're then on the point of witnessing the gassing of a leading character, when we jump to a brand new chap with a microphone addressing the camera. He fills us in on the dramatic events which stopped the execution in its tracks, some of which we're shown, but much of which we're merely told. It very much keeps any catharsis at arm's length, but then again none of the characters are especially likeable-at least, they're not morally upstanding, and would possibly have been viewed with some suspicion and/or distaste by Fulci-so perhaps they don't deserve full redemption and a happy ending. Adding to the surreal nature of the ending is the fact that the reporter character, who gives us a heavily visually-orientated tour of San Quentin's gas chamber, turns out to be working for radio.

There are other slightly bizarre touches, as you'd expect in an Italian production. As stated, the criminal case which is brought against one of the leading characters in embarrassingly anaemic, and I was reminded of Dancer in the Dark in some ways, where a character is condemned to death in the most avoidable circumstances, simply because the film's narrative demands it. The corpse of Susan, which is being stored in a forensic lab, has decomposed an awful lot in the course of a month, suggesting that the lab doesn't have working refrigeration units. Further doubt as to the capabilities of the lab must be raised after they managed to initially miss the fact that Susan was poisoned. And, finally, in an amazing moment which is so throwaway it's easy to miss, Monica Weston, sitting on her bed in her smalls is asked an awkward question by George, who, as part of his investigation, has just completed a thorough inspection of her body. A knock on the door provides a timely interruption, saving Monica from having to answer the question. She's so relieved that she exclaims "Oh good, guests!" Well, you probably have to be there, watching it, but it's a very incongruous reaction, and should've been picked up on by George.

I haven't really passed much judgement on this film here. It is, simply put, great fun, especially on first viewing. The location work is brilliant, the sexuality is admirably envelope-pushing (and envelope-fingerprinting), the plot is brilliant (and shonky), and Fulci always seems in control. He'd go on to make more violent, and better, gialli, but if this film hadn't been as good as it is, the cinematic landscape of the 70s and 80s would have been all the poorer for it, as Fulci may well have returned to the Italian comedy wasteland. As long as you can swallow outrageous contrivances, and don't get annoyed when characters store medicine that can kill a spouse right beside medicine that can save said spouse's life, you'll find much to enjoy here. 

A rare example of a giallo which contains neither a whodunnit aspect nor a blackmail-related mystery to unravel, Hatchet for the Honeymoon can be seen as either Mario Bava showing his jaded attitude towards the filone, or his attempt to inject it with fresh life. 

After a slightly shonky opening sequence showing him murdering a newly-married couple on a train, we meet John Harrington, a fashion house owner who proudly declares himself in voiceover to be a 'paranoiac'. He believes women should live until their wedding night, "love once," and then be killed, and puts this belief into action whenever one of his coterie of models leaves to get married (the concept of married women working having obviously not penetrated late 1960s Paris). He's tortured by a faint vision of seeing his mother being murdered, with each kill he commits bringing him one step closer to having full access to the repressed memory, which will also reveal the guilty party. The police, naturally enough, suspect John of being guilty of the model murders, but can't gather enough proof. Meanwhile, his shrewish wife-who John seems to have married for her wealth-refuses repeated requests for a divorce, so the paranoiac murderer does what comes naturally to him. However, the news that ghosts don't exist had also not penetrated late 1960s Paris, and Mrs Harrington refuses to go quietly into the night...

This film is clearly intended to be light-hearted fun, with much of the second act following John's darkly comical, and increasingly desperate, attempts to dispense with his wife's remains, and thus get rid of her pesky ghost. More on the ghost in a bit. While there's neither a whodunnit nor blackmail aspect to the film, there is a minor mystery at the core of the plot: the identity of John's mother's killer. Given the paucity of potential suspects the film presents to us, though, there's no need to call in Sherlock Holmes to solve the mystery; John Holmes would've had a fighting chance of solving it (as long as enough blood was reaching his brain at the time). The piece-by-piece reveal of the killer's identity may have been influenced by the Harmonica flashbacks in Once Upon a Time in the West, and can in turn can be seen in Dario Argento's later Opera.

Argento could claim that Opera references his own work in OUATITW-although just how much he contributed to that film's screenplay is debatable-but it's notable just how closely the flashback device at the centre of that film echoes this one. Aside from that, it's impossible to discuss Hatchet without mentioning The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which was unveiled after this film was shot, but before its release. 

It's likely that Bava considered himself 'done' with the giallo after Bood and Black Lace. He didn't return to the filone for several years, before churning out 5 Dolls for an August Moon, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, and Bay of Blood in short order around the turn of the decade.  Although vastly different in many ways, all three films share a light-hearted touch, with none being rooted in anything resembling reality (consider 5 Doll's 'serum' Macguffin, the ghost angle here, and the general outrageousness of Bay of Blood's plot). This was very much pushing against the trend for sleek and sexy urban-set thrillers, of the sort popularised by Argento. The plots of Bird and Hatchet both centre around childhood trauma, but for Bava it's just a hook on which to hang a load of black comedy; for Argento, although he does include comedic scenes and characters, it's more of a left hook to the gut.

Bava's movement towards black comedy in his later gialli can be seen as either an attempt to broaden the filone's horizons, or as a sign that he felt he'd taken it as far as he could. While not being the sort of spoof films (although an argument could be made for Bay of Blood on that front) which tended to characterise Italians being 'done' with a genre*, he does fall on his tried and trusted box of cinematic tricks to construct a fun, but safe, piece. His beloved curved glass, which distorted the image when held in front of the lens, is present and correct, as are occasional bursts of expressionist lighting, particularly in the lead up to Harrington's murder of his wife. There are also more dollies than usual for this stage of Bava's career, although they're of the fast and jerky variety, lacking the grace and steady menace of B&BL.

Apparently the wife character wasn't included in the original screemplay (as the opening credits would have you believe it's spelt), and was a late addition after Laura Betti expressed an interest in working with Bava. One imagines that the film as written was a darker character study, Psycho without any ambiguity as to the killer's identity (there are still several overt nods to Hitchcock's film in the finished product). The introduction of Betti to the mix seems to have led to the least gialloey thing about the film-the supernatural aspect. 

There are many gialli with 'ghosts', which turn out to be  staged hauntings in order to drive someone (some woman) mad. There are very few which do actually contain supernatural elements, because once you establish that the film takes place in a (let's face it) alternate reality, the stakes are lowered all round. After all, if there's an afterlife, death-the fear of which is at the core of the giallo-isn't as big a deal any more. It's clearly not a big deal here anyway, with only a couple of semi-set pieces, and the return of Betti's character as a ghost doesn't really damage things too much, unless you tire of the comedic shenanigans of Harrington trying to dispose of her ashes. It's clearly just a cherry on the top of a frothy, light film, not intended to be seriously analysed by film studies nerds.

Still. If it is possible to return as a ghost, why don't any of Harrington's other victims return to rat him out to the fuzz? And how can Betti's character  have so much control over who sees and hears her? It's madness. What is also is, probably, is Bava processing some complex feelings about his own wife, who by all accounts was extremely difficult to live with (and probably mentally ill). And, while we're shooting proverbial fish in a plot-holed barrel, are we seriously meant to believe that Dagmar Lassander's character, a new model who claims to be the sister of one of the 'disappeared', is working with the police? Her providing of Harrington with an alibi can be explained as being part of a bid to win his confidence, and to ultimately glean conclusive proof of his guilt, as opposed to further circumstantial evidence of his links to murders/attempted murders, but be prepared to swallow a pretty large slice of scepticism all the same. 

Still, this is a film designed to be consumed then forgotten, as with much popular entertainment in the mid-to-late twentieth century. The thing with Mario Bava is he was too good a director to make something entirely disposable, and there are plenty of classy moments here. The introduction of a younger version of Harrington, who increasingly shares the screen with his older, more paranoiac incarnation, leads to some haunting moments, with the child actor being especially skilled at giving a look full of wist (wistful, if you will). The fashion house setting, back from B&BL, lends a touch of opulence, and allows for some excellent mannequin action.  The score contains a lot of Stelvio Cipriani-esque guitar stings, and you even get some B&W footage of Boris Karloff from The Wurdulak. All in all, this film won't change your life, but it will make it slightly more bearable for 85 minutes.