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. 

This film, released to the civilised, English-speaking world with an extremely formulaic title-Formula for a Murder-is a Very Good idea which, infortunately, is only Quite Well executed. Still, it's a valiant attempt to put a fresh-ish spin on the genre, so fair fucks to Alberto de Martino for trying.

After losing the use of her legs when she falls down a flight of steps trying (unsuccessfully) to escape a paedophile posing as a priest, Joanna suppresses the memory of the incident. She grows up to be highly skilled at an array of sporting activities, which are all seemingly part of some multi-discipline modern pentathlon-style event which doesn't actually exist IRL. Her sexy round-faced friend Ruth fulfils all her leg-based needs, and her 'coach', Craig-whose ability to teach archery, in particular, seems to be extremely limited-wants to fulfil all her between-the-leg needs. After he pesters her into accepting a marriage proposal, he moves in and Ruth moves out. Oh, and Joanna's also rich through an inheritance, though she seems to prefer donating to her own school for paraplegics and the local priests than lavishing her wealth on herself. Just as things seem to be becoming idyllic, a mysterious priest shows up and starts offing men of the cloth, before he turns his attention to Joanna. Is it a ghost from her past returning to finish the job? Or, seeing as this is a giallo, is it an inheritance-based plot? Course it is!

There might be nothing new here in terms of the general Les Diaboliques-influenced plot, but de Martino does mix things up by pulling back the curtains on the mystery far sooner than is typically the case in a giallo (with 50 minutes still to run, no less).  We're left in no doubt as to who the killer-and what their motive-is, if indeed there was any doubt in the first place (if you ever find yourself as a doctor passing on confidential  information about a medical ailment which could kill a rich person, and the person with whom you're speaking stands to gain personally from the rich person's death, and this person says, "Let me get this straight" and proceeds to repeat what you've just said back to you for confirmation, you might want to alert the authorities). 

After the revelations the film relies upon the gaps between how much we know and how little Joanna knows to generate tension. This is a solid idea, and something I myself have experimented with in scripts in the past, and it does work here to some extent. There are two areas in which the film falls down a little, however. The first is a pacing issue, with 50 minutes proving slightly too long to sustain tension; indeed, there's precious little present until the final quarter of an hour.

Instead, we're treated to a dragged out will-they-won't-they-kill-her saga, as we begin to suspect whether or not the motive is really as clear cut as first presented. This doesn't make for riveting viewing, although a detour to New York sees things pick up, with a retooled version of the New York Ripper score and those dockland ship horn foleys which graced so many Italian exploitation films of the era lending the scenes a kind of comfy familiarity. The occasions when the priest reveals himself to Joanna, with squeaky-voiced doll in tow, do occasionally work as bizarro set pieces, as does a dream sequence set in broad daylight.

The second thing which holds the film back is the talent of its director. Alberto de Martino had a real skill for dreaming up film projects, but the execution seldom failed to live up to the idea. He's not quite a hack, but at the same time he doesn't ever seem to have a firm grasp on the directorial reins. A typical example of this is the curtain* sequence. This sees Joanna dangling out of a first floor bedroom window as she clings desperately to a large curtain. The sequence could have been a sweaty-palm-inducing set piece, but de Martino's approach was to film the action from as many angles as possible, and let the editor throw something together (which he did, but not especially skilfully**).

Without being too dismissive of de Martino's directing talents, I feel that the more successful moments in his films can often be credited to the contributions of his collaborators. The brilliantly-staged (if overlong) car chase in Strange Shadows in an Empty Room, for example, is almost certainly the product of Rémy Julienne's input. The wide angled lens is probably overused here as well, although that seemed to be a common ailment in Italian films of the 80s (cf Sergio Martino's work). That's not to say that this is a particularly badly-directed film. The final shot, whoever came up with it, is one of those neat conflagrations of railings and prison bars, which shows a character in the open air who is simultaneously trapped by their past. The chase sequence which precedes this is pretty good (albeit a tad dark on DVD), and the inability of the killer to dispatch a disabled woman is presented in a relatively believable manner.

What is less believable is Joanna's repeated attempted phoning of her doctor in the midst of this chase. Sure, he's a close friend and protector, but wouldn't the police be worth calling instead/as well?  On a side note, the fact that she's able to make the call in the first place gives rise to an interesting theory, which I'll attempt to expound upon here without being too spoilerific. Basically, when the killer comes face-to-face with Joanna for the first time, she refuses to countenance their explanation for what they've done. Maybe a better way to phrase that is 'justification for their actions'. Is it a better way? Maybe, but not better enough to justify my rambling actions here. Anyway, subsequent events would suggest that the explanation/justification was so much hot air, spouted on the spur of the moment to try to worm out of a tricky situation.

Except. A clear instruction was earlier issued by the killer's co-conspirator (yes, there's a co-conspirator) to render the telephones unusable. And yet, there Joanna is, misusing the phone horribly in a pea-brained attempt to escape. Does the killer's refusal to carry out this part of the plan back up their protestations regarding mind-changing and the like? It would certainly explain the overlong stretch of film before the climax, which is chiefly due to an apparent reluctance to put the final piece of the plan into action.

Paul Naschy returns with a cracking wig on his head, and a threadbare script in his pocket, for this Spanish giallo.

A woman's clothes-wearing killer is slashing their way through Milan, leaving a dragonfly on each corpse as a memento. This practise is apparently an homage to some obscure ancient civilisation's method of dealing with undesirables, which is exactly what the killer think they're doing in Milan. That's a view actually shared by Inspector Scaporella, played by Paul Naschy as a grizzled cigar-chomping veteran with a bad comb over. Nonetheless, after some past high-profile scandals, he still has to put his sympathies aside and try to catch the killer. As the pile of prostitute and drug addict victims grows ever larger, we realise that the killer might be someone close to Scaporella. Is it his (life, not law) partner Silvana, or one of his friends, a high society lot who seem to have plenty of skeletons in their closets? 

Or, at a stretch, it might be his police commissioner; we're not exactly over-burdened with suspects here, although a couple of characters who are integral to the plot are introduced late on only to be immediately dispatched. After a while it becomes fairly obvious that  Silvana (Mrs Scaporella) isn't the killer, but exists to provide a gender politics commentary which acts as a kind of companion piece to Daria Nicolodi's conversations with David Hemmings in the same year's Profondo Rosso.* Oh, and she's also there to show her tits a couple of times.

But yeah, that pretty much leaves Scaporella's group of friends as the suspect pool. They're fleshed out to varying degrees, but no matter what way you spin it, the end reveal isn't overly shocking or exciting.** There are probably too many victims presented, which doesn't allow much time for characterisation, or plot development. None of the murders are exactly top-of-the range set pieces either, although one, set in the clichéd (in horror films, in not gialli) environs of an abandoned fairground ride, is semi-effective.

There are some interesting touches, not least the necrophile professor character who provides both some invaluable exposition regarding the provenance of the dragonfly motif and some envelope-pushing thematic content (it mightn't be pushing it too much to see him as being representative of the Spanish ruling class fucking the rest of the moribund nation). He also commits the classic giallo error of uncovering some important informatio, and using this knowledge for attempted blackmail rather than police-assisting.

Later, another character commits the classic giallo error of uncovering the actual identity of the killer, then phoning the police to arrange a meeting so he can divulge said info. As always, he never gets a chance to impart said info, as the omniscience of the killer always seems to extend to knowing the details of such proposed meetings. 

This character then doubles down on his stupidity by blowing a second chance to finger the perp (double entendre fans should have a swell time with that sentence), when he chooses to use his last few seconds of life to indulge in an abstract portrait of the killer, instead of just writing their bloody name down. Naschy was certainly au fait with the genre anyway, as such irrationalities recur constantly. (He was also clearly a fan of Dirty Harry-style cop films, and relished any opportunity afforded him to indulge in macho gun play, to the extent that gun toting largely replaces his usual procession of sex scenes). 

As was common with Naschy films, the music is of the library variety, but again was chosen with a clear knowledge of the genre, with pieces from Mario Bava films being particularly prominent. The only drawback of this approach is that it makes us very much aware that we are not, in fact, watching a Mario Bava film, which is always a bad thing.

So, overall this isn't a great giallo. The central mystery comes up short, and the whole thing seems a bit vanilla, even with the necrophilia etc. There's a sense of Naschy and Klimovsky seeking to replicate the strange atmosphere of the Italian giallo, which seems organic to those films but imposed here (cf the Nazi gang). Still, there's plenty to enjoy (cf the Nazi gang), and Naschy is great value as always. The killer uses a dazzling array of weapons, (including golf club and umbrella***) and things are never boring. In the end, this slots comfortably into the back end of the pantheon of gialli, and, being that Naschy was clearly a fan of the genre, he can be justifiably proud of this fact.

*The near-to-climactic searching the house scene is also redolent of Profondo Rosso, albeit in a far more industrial and low budget way. It's worth noting that this film was actually shot in 1973, and sat on the shelf for a couple of years, so any resemblance is coincidental.

**There are three characters who so closely resemble each other that I'd defy you to be able to identify which one was which if you were presented with them after a viewing of the film. This may be a case of my semi-face blindness hampering me, but then again it may not be.

Most Paul Naschy experts will tel you that the man was responsible for three gialli; namely, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse, Seven Murders for Scotland Yard and Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (unless you're Troy Howarth on the commentary for Dragonfly, in which case you seem to forget about Seven Murders). I'm not here to quibble with these mysterious experts, but this curious effort does probably just about warrant consideration as a giallo. Then again, it's also part horror, part action, part comedy, part what-the-actual-fuck.

After being hired by a mysterious Japanese terrorist/freedom fighter organisation to steal some diamonds to fund their activities, mercenary Bruno has a change of heart, and takes the stones for himself. The only problem is that he's impregnated Mieko, the woman who hired him, who's also the sister of the group's leader. Not taking too kindly to Bruno's betrayal, the allegedly-pacifist Asians cobble together a ragtag band of other mercenaries, who are easily dispatched by Bruno when they track him down. Mieko comes closest to achieving her stated aim of killing him; she sprays him with bullets but he manages to get away, burying the diamonds on a hilltop before passing out. He comes to in a large country house, where the plot of Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is reenacted, albeit with a slight twist ending...

It really is remarkable just how closely this film comes to resemble Blue Eyes (after a completely crazy opening, which plays as if you've crash-landed halfway through a film-in-progress). I always find it slightly reductive to list things that various films have in common, even if such methodology forms the basis for a large percentage of academic film studies writing, but the similarities here do bear repeating:

-Paul Naschy, on the lam, takes refuge in a large country house, where two sisters somehow find him irresistible
(SPOILER)-A third sister is confined to the house, and saddled with an apparent disability (END SPOILERS)
-Frequent allusions are made to the animalistic nature of humans (c.f. the title of this film), and pigs are slaughtered
-Naschy comes clean about his sordid past, which seems to act as an aphrodisiac to the sexy sisters
-A black gloved killer comes along late in the game, and starts offing peripheral characters
-After turning over a new leaf (/deciding that shagging sexy film stars is preferable to a life of crime), Naschy's past catches up with him, with tragic consequences

The giallo aspect burns brightly here for part of the running time, but come the finale it very much takes a back seat, to the point where it's not even made fully clear who the black gloved killer actually was. Not that it really matters, given the direction in which the film ultimately veers. Naschy was clearly a fan of the filone, with the black gloves present and correct, and extreme CU shots of eyeballs appearing at regular intervals (and the eagle-eyed among you, or the human-eyeds who pay attention, may see some clues as to the killer's likely identity by closely observing these images).

The gore is fairly tame, apart from one extraordinary sequence involving some hungry pigs which may have inspired a similar scene in Ridley Scott's adaptation of Hannibal. It forms part of Naschy's seemingly ongoing thesis which seeks to prove that humanity and animals have more in common that we'd like to think. The scene, with the pigs noisily and messily devouring a dead body, initially appals, but, given the repeated references to human beings consuming meat which season the film, it's clear that Naschy is seeking to hold a mirror to us. While also including some commercially-friendly gore, of course.

One of the films which was made in the period following Blood and Black Lace in which the giallo had yet to fully establish its parameters, The Murder Clinic is often referred to as a gothic horror. While it does take place in an old, crumbling mansion (which'll be familiar to anyone who's seen Blood for Dracula or Slaughter Hotel), it's definitely more gial than goth.

After dumb (mute) Janey acts in an extremely dumb (stupid) way upon finding an intruder in her sanitorium bedroom (she runs away from the heavily-populated house to the dark and isolated woods), she's brutally slashed to death by a hood-wearing maniac. The killing is covered up by the sanitarium's owner, shifty Dr Vance, and his ratchety head nurse, Sheena. Together they convince newly-arrived nurse Mary that Janey's family arrived at dawn to take her away. Dr Vance then takes a trip to the hills to dispose of the body, where he's witnessed by Gisele, an unscrupulous woman who we've just seen club her husband to death (to be fair, he seemed to have aspersions towards doing the same to her). Gisele stages a 'chance' meeting with Dr Vance, and he takes her back to his sanitarium where she immediately sets about amassing enough info for a spot of blackmail. Meanwhile, Vance's horrifically-scarred sister-in-law, Laura. stalks about in the upstairs attic, his wife grows ever-more distant, the patients roam about the corridors at night (Vance apparently not being a big believed in locks), and the hooded killer gets ready to strike again. And again and again.

Well, maybe not again and again. This is one of those films with an early box-ticking murder which then settles down for a long period of watching people watch other people act shiftily. It's definitely one of the better examples of such a film though, and things don't really drag until the final couple of reels (which, admittedly, is a pretty fatal flaw; that's when things should be amping up). The vast majority of the film takes place in and around Dr Vance's sanitarium, which gets nice and dark at night, lending an easy gothic touch to proceedings. Occasionally too dark, in fact, for us to see what's going on (possibly a fault of Film Art's Blu ray, but I don't think so).  There's some decent storm action early on, and the 19th century setting allows for a lot of candles, and adds to the general sense of isolation, and imprisonment, of the inmates and residents of the sanitarium. To cap it all off, you have the classic trope of the mad woman in the attic (as with all the residents and inmates, apparently free to roam as she pleases at night), so those of you who love your gothics will find much to enjoy here.

Laura, the aforementioned mad woman, has a long line of antecedents, among them the likes of Jane Eyre's Bertha, but also has more contemporary connections, most obviously the tragically deformed characters at the heart of Eyes Without a Face and The Awful Dr Orloff.  The attempts of Vance to perfect skin graft techniques through experiments on animals doesn't exactly chime with the period setting, though (saying that, rudimentary grafting procedures did indeed take place in the nineteenth century). Still-isn't Vance a head doctor (and THE head doctor of the sanitarium; ithankyou)? What's he doing pissing about sticking skin onto guinea pigs??

Another slightly anachronistic element is the building site on which Laura has her tragic accident (she transforms into a shapeless bundle of rags and falls into a lime pit). I might just be being unwittingly dismissive of the building techniques of the nineteenth century, but the whole thing seemed way too modern a set-up. Anyway, the flashback itself is great fun, being one of those impossibly jaunty montages where everyone seems constantly on the point of bursting into hysterical laughter, such fun are they having. But, of course, such sequences are always a prelude to a fall,  at least in these sort of films, so if you ever find yourself in one, try and internalise some of your happiness.

There's a definite krimi vibe here at times too, not least in the slightly out-there hooded robe costume sported by the killer. A costume which, coincidentally, is  exactly the same as that worn by another character at regular intervals. This is classic giallo territory-the creation of a red herring through costuming (see Torso's neckerchief and any numbers of characters who break out a pair of shiny black gloves halfway through a film). It's a nice way to cast suspicion on someone without needing them to act suspiciously per se (although here, Laura-who wears an identical cape to the killer-attracts attention for everything she does, being the madwoman in the attic). God knows there's enough characters acting suspiciously here, half of them, admittedly, being sanitarium inmates who take full advantage of Vance's open door policy.

To close, I'll briefly dissect the final couple of scenes of the film, with attendant spoilers, so stop reading NOW if you haven't-Vance's wife is the killer-seen the film. I warned you! The scene in which Lizabeth-AKA Mrs Vance-admits her guilt before expiring (having also fallen prey to the turning-into-rags-and-falling-from-a-height congenital defect which claimed her sister) sees her admit criminal responsibility for her actions, but lays the moral blame squarely at her husband's (unlocked) door. She done the murders, but only because she was jealous of her sister "and all the others." Given that we've seen Vance proclaiming his love for newbie nurse Mary mere moments before, we can kinda see where she's coming from. He's left kneeling over her corpse, the judgey gazes of his colleagues raining down on him from above, and the sense is that he'll be left bearing his guilt for the rest of his life. The period setting aids the film here, as his philandering ways would have been seen as extra-naughty back in the day.

But then, just as you're applauding a fairly middle-of-the-road film for such a deliciously dark ending, it goes and throws in some classic 'ride off into the sunset' Hollywood nonsense. Vance, passing Mary as he leaves the sanitarium for the last time (what about your patients and guinea pigs, doctor?) stops his carriage and leaps out, in an obscenely romantic gesture. It proves enough to win Mary over, and she gladly signs on to take over the role of future-scorned Mrs Vance. It's a pity that the filmmakers felt the need to ruin the searing effect of the previous scene with such saccharine nonsense. 

I bought this film because Troy Howarth, in the first volume of his So Deadly, So Perverse books, had written about it, claiming that it just about fell on the right side of the giallo boundary line. How he came to this conclusion, while tossing films like Short Night of the Glass Dolls over said line, is anyone's guess. Perhaps the terrible print used for the Retromedia release played extra-dark on Troy's TV, leading to his imagination taking over and concocting a half-imagined film out of the darkened embers which remained onscreen. Nah, I'm kidding. Fair play to Retromedia for at least releasing this, and I'll call Troy's bluff and review this as a giallo. It kind of is, I suppose, in a way.

After a weird hippie gives him a gift of a mannequin (?!), frustrated artist John Ward does what anyone  would do-he takes her home and dresses her up like a prostitute who he's just met and who let him sleep with her for free for no reason and then he fantasises that the mannequin is real and has conversations with her and starts fucking her and then imagines that she's actually his old girlfriend/muse who at some point in the recent past started sleeping around behind his back. Well, that's what I'd do anyway. Anyway, the Sensuous Doll, as the ex-gf/muse seems to be credited, becomes more overt and brazen in her manising, and John becomes more and more consumed with jealousy, with shocking consequences (in a murdery, if not plotty, sense).

It's slightly unclear whether the portion of the film detailing the breakdown of John's relationship (and mind) is a flashback, or if its a subjective depiction of his reliving his recent past through the mannequin. If it's the latter, he engages in a lot of supposition and extrapolation when imagining conversations between other people to which he did not bear witness. Logic suggests it's the former, until an end-of-film 'revelation' tells us that John has been seen chatting away to the mannequin, apparently re-enacting scenes from their past. 

I suppose if you view everything as occurring through the crazy filter of Crazy John's mind, it would explain one or two things. For example, the Sensuous Doll's forgiving her clandestine lover-played by Venantino Venantini-abandoning her for a sojourn in Barcelona when he shows her a plane ticket as proof that he was indeed abroad, and not aboard a broad (although he may, of course, have been aboard a broad while abroad). Anyway, why does that plane ticket also gain loverboy his forgiveness-he still abandoned her! (And, he keeps bloody raping  her too.*)  Even after we seem to have left John's warped perspective behind, the film resolutely refuses to settle down and behave normally. The police apparently decide not to bother investigating whether or not the Sensuous Doll ever did exist as a real person, instead *SPOILER* arresting John for mannequin murder *END SPOILER*. I say 'spoiler'; anyone who has seen any Italian film ever will know where this is going based on the synopsis above. And this film, even though it's technically Italian-Turkish**, is no different.

That's one of the most disappointing things when considering this film as a giallo; the lack of a twist or surprise to liven things up. Even the mannequin aspect, while bizarre, isn't exactly original; Mario Bava had well and truly been there and done that before. The central figure of the tortured artist is also pretty much a classic cliché, even if here he's possibly less tortured and more batshit crazy. If I wanted to stretch this piece out, I'd ruminate on the possible metaphorical significance of the Sensuous Doll as representative of a piece of art which takes on a life of its own, leaving its creator languishing in the dusty doldrums. Sort of like how a director of a successful film for which the star takes all the plaudits might feel. However, from browsing his filmography it doesn't seem like Renzo Russo was the victim of anything of the sort. In fact, this film being a success may have prevented his career seemingly stopping stone dead after its release.

It's not terrible; Farley Granger is always fun to watch, even if he must've been hard up for cash at this stage in his career, such was his omnipresence in Italian genre fare. And Erika Blank and Krista Nell are pretty good to look at as the dolls (calling their characters the Sensuous Doll and Subservient Doll respectively pretty much defines the parameters by which they should be judged, so I can objectify them, thank you very much). There's some good location footage of Istanbul, and the hippie scene is one of the better examples of how middle-aged Italian directors were all at sea when it came to engaging with the counterculture.

​There are also moments of visual style, with some neat scene transitions involving characters walking 'through' the camera (again, not original-Bava and Margheriti in particular were fond of this-but you'll find some well-crafted examples of it here). The music is pretty poor for the most part, apart from one unbelievably beautiful and haunting theme, replete with warbly Edda dell'Orso-style vocals, which plays as the mannequin first comes to life. Despite some shaky handheld camerawork, the acting, lighting and (especially) music combine to create a moment of almost transcendental beauty, as the disconnected, damaged artist finds momentary kinship and acceptance and even love, albeit only within his crazy mind.

So, all in all, this is barely a giallo, and doesn't really bring much to the table. I may reassess if I get a chance to view a better presentation than is currently available, but then again I definitely won't. Still worth watching for that transformation scene, though, and then you can sit back and let the nonsense wash over you like a lovely, albeit rape-scented, Turkish bath.

I'll preface this review/ramble by saying that I've only seen the US version of this film, which is slightly shorter than the original, and has different music cues. Shorter though it may have been, it was nonetheless very much long enough...

Inspector Franz Bulon is hot on the trail of a drug-dealing gang who keep offing suspects just as he's about to take them in. He's also on the trail of his hot wife, whom he suspects of infidelity. Does that last bit make grammatical sense? Probably. You know what I mean, anyway. But yeah, Bulon tracks down the assassin, Sexy Max, but decides against taking him in. Instead, he cuts a deal: Sexy Max will kill his possibly unfaithful wife, and Extremely Unprofessional and Crazy Bulon will overlook all the other murders. But that's not the end of it; strap in for a couple of slight twists which will literally make you breathe normally.

As you may have gathered, I don't overly rate this one. The characters are all extremely unlikable, which isn't necessarily an issue, but they're also so fucking stupid. Max, played by Robert Hoffmann (an actor who frequently gets slammed for being bland, but he's perfectly fine here), gets caught after he leaves his trademark lucky dollar right beside one of his victims; Bulon is incompetent on any number of levels. As for Lisa-who's supposed to be a mysterious femme fatale figure-the only mystery here is how she can be so blithely reckless without getting herself killed. (That's not a spoiler; the film begins at its end [in the US cut at least] with Lisa at a funeral wearing the titular veil, and takes the form of an extended flashback.)

The film was made in the pre-Argento days, when The Sweet Body of Deborah had supplanted Mario Bava's early works as exerting the most influence on gialli. Unlike that film, and most gialli actually, the main male characters are of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get variety, with no real hidden agendas to provide intrigue and twists. There's a slight police procedural vibe too, without too much procedure actually being on display (there's no real need; the film-taking after its male characters-doesn't hold many cards close to its chest, so we know the murderer's identity, for example, almost immediately). And the policing-Christ, is John Mills's Bulon an annoying protagonist! His obsession with proving his wife's infidelity is such that you start hoping that he's right, just so all that time and energy won't have been misplaced. And, so you can watch his stupid grizzled face crumple with grief. The character is probably supposed to come across as obsessive and driven, but it's just pushed a bit too far, especially when he engages Max to kill his wife based on nothing more than a gut feeling that she's been fooling around. Where's the evidence, Mr Policeman?! And stop ignoring your co-workers when they greet you in the morning, you asshole!

There are a few twists and turns as the film progresses, but they're more like leisurely sweeping turns than sudden rug-pulls. As well as Lisa's potential infidelity, the question of whether or not she's involved in criminal activity is also bubbling to the surface, but the end reveal here is incredibly anodyne. I was hoping against hope that the criminal subplot would pack a greater punch than the fidelity one (which wouldn't be hard), but it's resolved in an extremely casual, throwaway manner, which pretty much sums up the film as a whole. 

The sexual envelope is slightly pushed, with regular flash cuts to shots of female nudity (featuring an obvious body double for Luciana Paluzzi), and Paluzzi does look pretty damn good, but the film is still under-charged sexually. The scenes with Lisa and Max might have come across as a bit steamier if I wasn't shaking my head in bemusement at her naivete in admitting him to her house (and body),when it should've been patently obvious that he was a hired assassin. I guess Lisa's just a bad girl with a death wish, or something.