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The Case of the Scorpion's Tail (1971)

30/3/2017

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A model aeroplane explodes mid-flight, killing all aboard, including 35 Britons and a rich businessman called Kurt Baumer. Baumer's wife, Lisa, is in bed with a lover when she hears the news.

She then gets rather better news when it turns out that Kurt had taken out a $1m life insurance policy a year before he died, with Lisa the sole beneficiary. The policy was taken out in Greece, where Kurt spent much of his time. Lisa is followed from the insurance company's office by another former lover, a drug addict who blackmails her because of a letter she once wrote expressing the wish that her husband died. When she calls to the addict later that evening to retrieve the letter, she finds him dead and the letter gone.

Lisa flies to Greece, pursued by Peter Lynch, an investigator working for the insurance company. She is summoned to a meeting in an empty theatre by Lara, her husband's Greek lover, who attempts to get Lisa to hand over half the fortune. The incriminating letter was stolen by Lara's 'lawyer', Sharif, who attempts to attack Lisa. She flees before he can get to her, aided by Peter, who followed her to the theatre.

The next day, Lisa takes delivery of the policy, in cash. On returning to her hotel room she's brutally stabbed to death by a leather-clad assassin. Her corpse is  discovered that evening, with the money gone.

Peter is taken in by the police as a suspect, but, in part thanks to John Stanley, an Interpol agent, declaring that he's probably innocent, he's released. He follows Stanley to Lara's apartment, where he narrowly escapes being killed by an axe-wielding Sharif. 

Peter takes time off from following people and gets close to Cléo Dupont, a French photojournalist who's covering the case. After they return to his hotel room to find it trashed and searched, they switch rooms and make love. Lara and Sharif, who were behind the trashing, agree that they were mistaken in their suspicion of Peter, and decide to continue their quest for the money the next day. However, on returning home, Lara is stabbed to death by the same assassin, who also dispatches Sharif, who returned to try and save her.

Cléo gets a telephoned tip off about the murders from Stanley. The local police inspector, Stavros, has his men watching Peter, so they knew to call the hotel to get a hold of her.

Peter and Cléo continue their romance. After leaving her apartment and realising that he's left his car keys there, Peter returns and just about foils an attack on her by the assassin. Stavros and Stanley don't seem to believe his story, and seem reluctant to speak to Cléo to corroborate it.

Lisa's lover, who she was with when the plane exploded, is also in Greece, and is killed by the assassin.

A small cufflink found at the scene of Cléo's attack sparks something in Peter's memory, and he enlarges an old photo of Kurt Baumer to reveal that the cufflink belonged to him. He suggests that Baumer didn't take the ill-fated flight, and has instead been offing the various people that stood between him and his $1m. The police apparently buy this theory, and send Peter and Cléo off on a romantic cruise. They'll pretend to be hunting Peter as the chief suspect, but really they'll be tracking Kurt.

Cléo notices Peter swimming towards a small island with a large, full bag, which is empty on his return. At the same time Stanley discovers that the cufflink from the crime scene was a Turkish knock-off of an original. 

Cléo steals off the boat while Peter's sleeping, and discovers the money stashed in a secret cove which is only accessible through an underwater passage. Peter confesses that it was he who killed Lisa and Lara, and Lisa's lover, a steward, was his accomplice and had planted the bomb and staged the attack on Cléo. She stabs him with a harpoon gun and makes a break for it. He pursues her to the nearby rocky island, and is about to dispatch her when he's shot dead by the police, who've found them by tracking the location of the boat's last broadcast.

Stanley had found the original complete set of cufflinks at Baumer's mansion, and we all know that no right thinking man has two sets of identical cufflinks, so this cleared him. Plus, the dead steward's girlfriend had been wearing a similar cufflink, which she said her boyfriend had brought back from Turkey, when the police interviewed her. Deciding that Peter was the only person who could have left the cufflink in Cléo's apartment as a deliberate ploy to frame Baumer, the police knew they had their man (somewhere out at sea).

Cléo leaves hospital, and Stanley swoops to steal her from under Stavros' nose, telling her that he  was waiting for "a beautiful day, and a beautiful girl" before leaving Athens.



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The Case of the Scorpion's Tail is an early 70s Sergio Martino giallo, so it is, of course, immensely stylish. There are numerous slick, slick scene transitions throughout the film. He flips the widescreen camera onto its side for a couple of crazily-framed shots, and he lights Lara's apartment for her murder scene as if he's Mario Bava. The score is excellent, although the aforementioned scene with Lara is bizarrely played without any accompaniment, which seems an odd decision. Perhaps Martino felt that the lighting alone would be sufficient to sate the audience, and he didn't want to be too stylish. But, no-of course he did; he's Sergio Martino, everything about him was too stylish (BUT WHY NO MUSIC THEN, SERGIO?)

Making the eventual killer the police's number one suspect is a fairly ballsy move, and Peter's use of his steward accomplice to alibi himself for the attack on Cléo isa classic piece of misdirection The only problem is that, beyond Tom Felleghy as an insurance company worker, and a peeping Tom neighbour of Cléo's, both of whom have one scene in the film, there are precious few other suspects, especially once the steward is dispatched. Stanley, the incompetant Interpol agent, is the obvious other suspect, although his increasing immersion in, and enthusiasm for, the investigation makes this unlikely. And Stavros seems too removed from the Baumers to have had a hand in their demises. Baumer himself, who is at one point a suspect despite being dead, does have enough of a presence throughout the film to be viably considered for the murderer, but gialli very rarely introduce a killer as a previously-unseen character. Of course, the characters within the film don't have recourse to this line of logic.

It's a great, fun film though, bearing the fingerprints of both Martino and Ernesto Gastaldi, the main scriptwriter, throughout. Not for Gastaldi the then in vogue Freudian psychosexual killers  of Argento; he was resolutely an inheritance plot artiste. He prided himself in his airtight plotting, something lacking from the vast majority of gialli, and on first viewing he seems to have done a great job here. As with almost all constructors of tightly-wound plots, though, he's had to cut a few small corners here and there.

(I'd like to preface this examination by saying that if I went through the plot of almost any other giallo with as fine a tooth comb  as this, I'd still be writing twenty years from now. In a way-I hope, anyway-drawing attention to the occasional slight deficiencies of the plot will enable to you simultaneously see its strengths, and to appreciate the twisting and turning complexity of the average Gastaldi script. His films tended not to have the traditional amateur detectives, simply because there wasn't room to accommodate them on top of all the plotting and killing.)

It's extremely difficult to come up with a mystery plot which simultaneously contains airtight logic and enough misdirection to surprise and delight the audience. Only the very great (Agatha Christie probably being the greatest of all) could pull this off even occasionally. Gastaldi probably qualifies as one of the great plot constructionists, but on this occasion, he does resort to, shall we say, 'convenient anomalies' to aid in the subterfuge.

To explain what I mean by this, consider that most, inferior, whodunnits contain basic plots, with the mystery element enhanced by having several characters act in a manner that is designed to draw the audience's suspicion upon themselves. They usually do something, say something or stare after someone in a manner that strikes us as strange, out-of-character. This is the low-end of the 'convenient' behaviour spectrum. 

Gastaldi, in Scorpion's Tail, uses a higher form of convenience. Characters do and say things that seem normal enough (or suspicious enough, where needed), in a manner designed to misdirect the audience. These misdirections are, for the most part, subtle enough that they don't immediately spring to mind as anomalous once the killer's identity is revealed.

(An example of a low-end anomaly would be the moment in Scream where Billy, standing alone, berates himself as being "Stupid!" after upsetting Sidney and sending her crying to the toilet, for a planned ambush. This moment exists purely to try and trick the audience into thinking that Billy [who has been foregrounded as a suspect in a similar manner to Peter in Scorpion's Tail] is innocent; he wouldn't have behaved like that if the camera wasn't on him.)

The anomalies in Scorpion's Tail are chiefly filtered through the police's behaviour and observations. First, though, there's the small, large matter of the $1m, around which the plot revolves. Lisa insists upon receiving the money in cash, presumably at the urging of her steward lover, with whom she plans to go to Tokyo (and he, in turn, is presumably acting at the urging of Peter). Without easy access to the money, Peter's whole plan falls down. We never find out why exactly Lisa has agreed to cash the bond, though. This point is quickly lost and forgotten, though, amid the fast-moving forward momentum of the film. 

Now, to the fuzz. When we're first introduced to John Stanley, he states that he feels Peter is innocent, based on no evidence whatsoever. Still, the more an audience, who are already conditioned to see Peter as not guilty, since the film is barely half an hour old at the time, hear that he's  innocent, the more they'll believe it. He also, later, states that he believes the killer is a sex maniac, killing random women This despite only two women (and one man) having been murdered at that point, with both of them having strong connections to Kurt Baumer (this isn't one of the convenient anomalies; it's just damn poor police work).

Later, when Cléo thanks Stanley for calling her in Peter's hotel room (in the Italian language version anyway; in the English one he phones her paper and tell them to call the hotel) with the tip off to Lara's murder, Peter seems indignant that the police knew where  she was. He's told that, as he's still a suspect, he's under police surveillance. Are we to assume, then, that the surveillance team knew which room Peter and Cléo moved to after his original one was trashed, but they didn't notice him leaving to commit a double murder, and subsequently returning? 

Moving on to the steward, his exact relationship to Lisa varies slightly in the different language versions. In the Italian one, he and Peter are fully in cahoots, and  are planning to lure Lisa to Tokyo, where they'll do away with her and steal the money. In the English version he's fallen in love with Lisa, and is planning to go to Tokyo with her to escape from Peter (this doesn't sit well with his apparent immediate resumption of his Greek relationship, nor-crucially-with the cashing of the bond). In both versions, he's outside Greece for the first series of murders  (in Turkey, getting the cufflinks, for at least part of this time), and is thus alibied. The police reveal, in the Italian, Gastaldi-penned version, that they were already aware that he was a lover of Lisa's, so surely they'd have hauled him in after the plane explosion? If they're nominally watching suspects, such as Peter, surely the steward also warranted a tail once he'd returned? The steward's murder was always going to incontrovertibly link him to the case, so Peter's attempt to portray him as a stooge of Baumer's does make a lot of sense. However, the logic he suggests as being behind 'Baumer's killing of the steward (partner-in-crime who knew too much) is the exact logic which led to him committing the actual murder. If the police buy the steward as an accomplice, why can't he be Peter's?

Later, the police do claim that Peter was always their main suspect, and they were just waiting for him to slip-up. If this is to believed, his eventual slip-up, detailed below, isn't anywhere near as amateurish as the police's letting him sail away, unobserved, with an innocent woman in tow.

And, why did Peter swim out to deposit his money in the secret cave in the middle of the day? Why not  wait til nighttime and lightly drug Cléo? If he managed to stash the money without her finding out, the police would have had no case against him, bar Stanley's cufflink hunch, which wouldn't have stood up in court. Peter's managed to evade Cléo before (not to mention the police surveillance), when he popped out of his hotel to kill Lara and Sharif, so why does he suddenly display such incompetence?

It's easier in books, where you tell, rather than show, to construct a perfect mystery plot. Hearsay and the recounting of events hold equal weight to 'present' incidents in books, as they're all just words on a page. Once visuals, which portray rather than describe events, are introduced to the mix, it's harder to show enough to keep the audience interested, but hold enough back to retain the air of mystery. Of course, directors such as Dario Argento were able to get around this by adding a subjective element to the visuals, which weren't always to be trusted (Hitchcock, too, had done this back in the 40s, with Stagefright).

Gastaldi and Martino had one of the greatest writer-director partnerships of all time because Gastaldi's fastidious attention to details and logic was perfectly complemented by Martino's excess of style, which made everything they made so watchable. It's tempting to hope for one, final pairing of the two, given they're both still alive. But perhaps it's better to appreciate what we they've already given us, and enjoy their one mystery  that can't be fully solved, despite my best efforts here-why are their films so bloody good?
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The Monster of Florence (1985)

27/3/2017

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The Monster of Florence is one of those gialli that tries something different. For one thing, there's no actual resolution to the mystery of who the titular Monster is. This isn't really a spoiler, as the film isn't overly concerned with that aspect of the mystery, preferring instead to focus on hypothesising pop-psychology as to the killer's motives. Also, the Monster of Florence was a real-life figure, whose identity was never uncovered, so if you've done any reading on the subject before watching the film, (e.g. reading this piece right now) you'll have altered your expectations accordingly (do so right now please). (Interestingly, the Monster's 17 year reign of terror ceased at pretty much the exact same time the film was released.)

The film itself is basically a premake of Zodiac. The two films have a lot in common-based on true story, a killer shooting people at night in cars, amateur 'investigation' by writers, the focus of the movie shifting from uncovering the killer's identity to the effects of this investigation on the investigators, a lack of clear resolution. One of them's a bit better than the other, though (I won't explicitly say which, but if you mount your own amateur investigation over the next few minutes you should be able to infer which film I prefer).

One of the big differences between the films lies in the process of investigation depicted (which is why I used inverted commas above). Zodiac's Robert  Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) tracks the Zodiac killer over several years, with the case gradually consuming his entire life. Monster's Andreas, played by Leonard Mann, begins the film by resuming work on a previously-abandoned book about the serial killer terrorising Florence. In an early conversation with an investigating officer, he's told to take advantage of the scope for imagination afforded by his job, and he certainly takes this advice to heart. Eschewing the fact-centric approach traditionally taken by murder investigations, Andreas spends the rest of the film building a Freudian profile of the murderer in his mind, constructing elaborate backstory and motives for the killer based on No Evidence Whatsoever.

Although, there may be some evidence after all-Andreas draws a picture of what he thinks the killer may look like, which is pretty much a self-portrait (and both he and his girlfriend agree on this). He seems sexually distant from said girlfriend (the fool; she's very nice-looking), and his 'imaginary' killer is impotent. Also, his killer's imagined home is filled with large versions of a wooden figurine he has on his own desk. In short-he's either the killer, or his psychological profile of said killer is highly autobiographical; in effect he's investigating his own life and childhood by proxy. 

This latter explanation is the more likely, and marginally more interesting, of the two possibles. However, Leonard Mann isn't a good enough actor to really captivate, and even at that he's not given enough to do, so the film becomes nothing more than a load of shots of him looking constipated, a parade of anonymous  people being shot and cut up, and a too-on-the-nose-Freudian-to-be-true reconstruction of the killer's burgeoning mother issues. A black and white trial sequence towards the tail end of the film brings most of the characters together to gaze at the person who's ruined all their (imaginary) lives, and ends with a judge stressing the need to understand the killer's life, and not just cast him out of society. This desire to understand chimes with Andreas' need to get to the bottom of the killer's/his own neuroses. 

Because Mann spends the film reinterpreting (or reliving) past events, there is little or no tension to any of the murder scenes. The first such scene, which opens the film, does take place in the 'present', and achieves a reasonably evocative atmosphere, even though the audience is denied any chance to identify with the victims, seeing them as no more than silhouettes in a tent before the killer goes to work. The lighting, camerawork and editing throughout the film are consistently impressive, even if the framing and music are fairly bog-standard, nicely complementing the acting. Gabriele Tinti, who was obviously pouring all his energies and youth into his marriage with Laura Gemser, turns up in a small supporting role looking near-unrecognisable. 

As I said, Monster is one of those gialli that thinks outside the box. I'd hazard a guess that the director saw it as a more of an arty thriller, but he does frequently draw upon imagery typical of the genre, and the amateur investigation aspect secures its spot in the pantheon of gialli. Its unusual approach, which it shares with another based-on-a-true-story giallo, The Pyjama Girl Murders, is to be commended for effort. In terms of execution, and watchability, however, neither film hits the spot.  The execution of both is po-faced and methodical, and I like funner, messier executions. In my films, anyway.

(Zodiac's better, by the way. That last paragraph has inspired me to avoid an open ending of my own.)

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Sketch of the real Monster of Florence. Does the film's director, Cesare Ferrario, look like this?
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The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance (1975)

23/3/2017

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Count Marnack, a curiously-named Irish nobleman, falls in love with Evelyn, one of a troupe of actors who are planning to disband after finishing their current run of shows.  Evelyn bears more than a passing resemblance to Marnack's wife, who left him without warning in the recent past (because she is played by the same actress). Marnack invites Evelyn, and four other members of her company, to his island, where he lives in a large castle. 

The troupe make themselves at home, with 'romantic'  couplings aplenty, much to the chagrin of the Count's maid and butler. We discover that the Count's father and grandfather both died in identical circumstances-finding their spouse in the arms of another man, they decapitated their wives and jumped into the ocean, committing suicide, but, undeterred, Evelyn allows herself to be romanced by him. The maid, slightly deterred, grudgingly allows herself to be romanced by Luciano Pigozzi, who has some dirt on her. The designated slut of the group, Cora, spurns the advances of lovelorn Samuel, the troupe's gopher, and seduces an earthy fisherman, who lives on the other side of the island and turns out to be Luciano Pigozzi's son. And the other two actresses spend most of their time in bed, conducting a tepid love affair. This inspires one of the castle's two young servants to convince the other to feel her up.

If that paragraph felt long, consider yourself lucky that you read it in under 55 minutes (if you didn't, you can't read [and thus probably can't understand this either, you fool]).

Anyway, after 55 minutes, Cora is decapitated. A black-and-white storm rages, delaying the arrival of the police.  Muddy footprints coming from Cora's room suggest Pigozzi, the gardener, as the guilty party. Then one of the lesbians is decapitated. 
Muddy footprints coming from her room suggest Pigozzi as the guilty party. We discover that the dagger used by the Count's relatives for their decapitations, which looks too small for efficient head-chopping, has vanished. The other lesbian is decapitated.

A policeman (played by Luigi Batzella, director of The Beast in Heat) arrives,  and Samuel confesses to the murders in an attempt to be seen for once in his life as anything but a figure of fun. The policeman dismisses him, then reveals that Pigozzi had gone to the police the previous day, fingering the maid as the guilty party. (He doesn't reveal why the police took a day to act upon this information.) The maid breaks down and confesses-she and the Count were childhood sweethearts, but class differences came between them. She kidnapped the Count's wife when he was on the mainland, and kept her locked in a secret dungeon, where she slowly went insane. The maid has been letting her out at night, to eliminate all her rivals for the count's affections (apart from, curiously, the only actual rival; Evelyn).
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One of the three best Irish-set gialli of all time (albeit a distant third best of the three that exist), Bloodsucker is a fascinating film. Before you rush out and buy a copy, it's fascinating in the same way that The Room, or the political success of Donald Trump, is fascinating. You wonder what curious confluence of events have occurred which let these abominations slip through the cracks of the system, to emerge blinking in the light of an unsuspecting world.

That's probably a bit harsh on Bloodsucker-it's actually nowhere near as bad as The Room or Trump-but it's still a bad, bad film. The denoument is a tableau-styled scene of the remaining characters sitting in a cramped room, taking turns to speak at length. Length being the operative word here, as the scene runs to almost ten minutes. Coming after the aforementioned 55 minute soft-porn build-up, this effectively means that the action is compressed into a brief, fifteen minute window. Although 'action' is overstating it; we get no actual murder scenes, and are forced to make do with pedestrian 'aftermath' discoveries of corpses.

There are other failings; almost too numerous to note. To hint at a few, though: the black and white stick footage of the storm, the visible gauze filters early on, the 'aunt' character's complete and utter irrelevance, the confusion of sexuality with sex, the title, the curtained walls of the castle's corridor, and the shockingly dilapidated state of the skirting boards. The sexy shenigans of the opening hour are often laughably adolescent in their conception and execution. And so on.

The weird thing, though, is that there is a clear  awareness of the genre in evidence, with the failings possibly coming from the directing side of things (Alfredo Rizzo was in his mid-70s when he made this). The name Evelyn, alone, displays an awareness of the genre's history. The set-up is fairly standard too, following the standard Ten Little *cough*s set-up beloved of several gialli. One of the main limitations of that scenario is that it limits the scope for any amateur sleuthing, one of my favourite tropes. When that's combined with a lack of any inventive murder scenes, or inventive scenes of any kind, then you know you're in trouble. 

Yet, the ingredients are all there-the storm, the Double, the ancestral curse, the stock characters. It's just that something has gone badly wrong along the journey from brain to  page to production to screen. But still, it's not without its loopy charms (and, again, gets nowhere near The Room-esque levels of ineptitude). So, instead of criticising it any further, let's take a different tack. The film does a terrific job of including as many different giallo stereotypes as possible, each with equivalents in films past and future, and each bringing something different to the table in terms of being a red-herring. Here's a quick summary-

The Damaged Aristocrat  Giacomo Rossi-Stuart's Count Marnack isn't quite as troubled or damaged at most of his equivalents, but he is clearly a bit mental, having attended every performance bar one of the acting troupe's play. He has historical precedent weighing heavily on his shoulders.
Other examples: Lord James MacGrieff (Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye), Lord Cunningham (The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave)

The Innocent Double Evelyn (Patrizia Webley) resembles Marnack's wife, in one of the most popular tropes of Italian genre cinema (going back to Barbara Steele in Black Sunday [and before that to Vertigo]). She possesses little character herself, but is the vortex around which the plot, such as it is, swirls. Occasionally, such characters aren't quite as innocent and devoid of personality as you might think.
Other examples: Susan/Monica (Una sull'altra), all the women (The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave)

The Slut  Cora (played by Krista Nell, who was sadly dying of leukaemia at the time). is just one of many sexually confident women who suffer for their desires. Long before slasher movies adopted the sex=death paradigm, gialli, as product of a Catholic country after all, were knee deep in dead sluts. Sluts tend not to be the killers, or even red herrings, but rather act as fodder to kick-start the plot.
Other examples: Julia Durer (A Lizard in a Woman's Skin), all the women (The New York Ripper)

The Disposable Women The two lesbians exist seemingly only to add to the skin quotient, and provide easy cannon fodder. Occasionally you might get a cheeky lesbian who's only pretending, and is really an evil genius. Not this time, though.
Other examples: The very similar characters in Torso (Torso), Tilde and Marion (Tenebrae)

The Religious Nut I won't give other examples of such characters here, because their nuttiness is often hidden until their unmasking. In this case, the butler (Mario de Rosa) considers the actresses to be the spawn of Satan, and openly rejoices in their murders.  This is probably meant to push him to the fore of our list of suspects, but it's so overdone that you can immediately discount him. Unless, in a cunning post-modern twist, the filmmakers knew that we'd all have realised that it was a terrible film, and thus might think that the killer would in fact be that obviously signposted. If this was indeed the case, take a bow Signor Rizzo.

The Earthy Hunk  It's a fact that women like a bit of rough. And rough, gruff, men with dirty hands pop up from time to time in gialli. And, because of the genre's frequent depiction of the upper classes, these earthy chaps are often made aware of their place in the hierarchical pecking order, and thus have large chips on their shoulders. In Bloodsucker's  case, the fisherman fulfils this role.
Other examples: Simon (Bay of Blood), La Maciara (Don't Torture a Duckling-NB when it's an earthy hunkette, the sexy aspect disappears, replaced by fear)

The Luciano Pigozzi  Essentially an unsexy, unhunky variant on the Earthy Hunk, An especially useful suspect in films which involve a succession of women getting bumped off, Pigozzi can always be relied upon to supply a steady stream of shifty-eyed looks and mournful stares at the nearest female. In Bloodsucker, he gets a rare example to actually touch one of these females, although she's not exactly brimming with consent.
Other examples: Luciano Pigozzi (Blood and Black Lace), Luciano Pigozzi (Naked... You Die)

The Impressionable Youth Young, innocent characters (usually of the female persuasion) are often corrupted by others in gialli. In the case of this film, the 'corruption' is merely the observing, and tentative practising, by the servants of lesbianism (essentially being just another excuse for t&a), but there remains the remote chance that one of them, who has heard about the family curse, has gone in for some copycat murders.
Other examples: Gloria (The Suspected Death of a Minor), the kids at the end of Bay of Blood (Bay of Blood)


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The Scorned Lover  A staple of murder mysteries down through the years, Femi Benussi appears here as a combination of the jealous avenger and the earthy hunk (her relationship with the Count having been doomed by their differing backgrounds). Everyone can identify with wishing ill upon someone who's wronged you, the question is, has the jilter or jiltee taken their anger to the next level (or, maybe, a level or two above that)? It's also interesting to note that Bloodsucker, although packed full of skin and sex, doesn't really feature any illicit trysting. There were obviously some sacred lines that Rizzo wouldn't cross.
Other examples: Giorgio (The Bloodstained Butterfly), Antonio (The Pyjama Girl Case)

Bet you didn't think I'd wring that much juice out of that film, did you?
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Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye (1973)

21/3/2017

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This is one of the most fun gialli out there. It's set in Scotland, centring around a cursed family with a made-up name (MacGrieff), offers a caged gorilla (/man in a cheap gorilla suit) up as one of the murder suspects, and features a wooden (not literally, in one of the film's few concessions to sense) Serge Gainsbourg as a Scottish policeman.

The plot, such as it is, concerns an aristocratic family who live in a crumbling, rat-infested castle, and who allegedly turn into vampires when murdered. That legend is about to be put to the test, as several family members, associates and pet gorillas are mercilessly slaughtered by an unknown killer, with an inheritance scheme ultimately revealed to be driving the plot. At the centre of it all is Corringa (Jane Birkin), a schoolgirl who surprises her mother and aunt by arriving unexpectedly early to her aunt's castle (she's been expelled from school for being naughty and visiting boys), and her cousin James, Lord of the Castle (Hiram Keller), who stalks about the place using secret passages, and wallowing in his apparent madness.

This madness supposedly led to him murdering his baby sister as a child, although we later discover that he is in fact innocent of this crime, and may have been conditioned into thinking that he's insane. At least he has this induced madness to fall back on by way of explanation when he and his cousin start an illicit affair; she has no such excuse. The film is full of secret affairs, secret passages and secret gorillas. Oh, and the titular cat, who creeps about the castle in a James-esque manner, and always manages to be present whenever the murderer is doing their dirty work. The cat puts in a solid performance, leaving Gainsbourg, for one, trailing in his wake.

As you've probably gathered from the above, this film's as mad as Lord James. Margheriti gets a co-writer credit, which I wouldn't be surprised to discover was derived solely as a result of his freestyling on the set. He throws in some arty shot-from-above compositions and Bava-esque gel lighting too, whenever the scene threatens to become too mundane. The film's supposedly adapted from a novel by Peter Bryan, but this seems like a made-up credit. It does play like a quasi-remake of Top Sensation at times, with the action set almost exclusively in a castle rather than upon a boat. The domineering mother figure, maladjusted man-child, cynical family 'friend' and spurned prostitute figure all recur, as does the 'pure' love between the man-child and a sweet young woman (Top Sensation does steer clear of the incest angle, but replaces it with a bestiality one).

Seven Deaths is often described as a gothic giallo. This is true, but it doesn't really have much in common with Gothic cinema of the 60s and 70s, of which Margheriti was a leading proponent. The ingredients are there-large castle, graveyard, crypt, gorilla suit-but they're served up in a manner that generates an  atmosphere of insanity more than an atmosphere of creepiness (creepy incest aside). This does tie in neatly with the supposed Madness of Lord James, although I doubt Margheriti rationalised his approach to such an extent.




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The film more closely resembles  Gothic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which adopted a similar throw-everything-at-the-old-crumbling-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. It makes for a great fun watch, although anyone expecting a tightly-wound plot, or extravagant gore effects, will be disappointed. Margheriti never had the flair for, or interest in, OTT violence which was possessed by Bava and Argento (Cannibal Apocalypse being an exception, though by all accounts that film's gore is entirely down the Giannetto de Rossi's influence), and his plots, although occasionally intricate, usually served as a mechanism through which he could showcase his visual inventiveness and general sense of fun. This film's no different. Its giallo attributes are many, albeit rarely rising above box-ticking. but if you're willing to sit back and let the film wash over you, you'll be swept along on a deliriously fun 94 minute ride.  ​
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Tulpa (2012)

17/3/2017

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In a pre-credits sequence, a woman meets a man for a bondage session. They don't speak, and seem to be meeting by prior arrangement. A traditionally-clad killer appears and kills the man, castrating him, and takes a business card as a memento.

Lisa, a business woman with a senior position in an investment firm, is under pressure at work to perform. She leads a secret double life, visiting a secret sex club at night to perform in a different manner. We discover that the card taken from the castrated man was a membership card for the club, called 'Tulpa'. 

A woman with whom Lisa had sex at the club is stalked and murdered by the killer, who finishes her off by tying her to a roundabout at a fairground and repeatedly rotating her into barbed wire.

Lisa's boss clearly has amorous designs on her, and her colleagues don't like her. She returns to the club for more fun and games. This time, as she has a threesome with a man and a woman, she sees a mysterious masked figure spying on her. Later that night, the woman from the threesome is brutally murdered, taking steaming water to the face.

Lisa's boss is mentioned as being a suspect in a corruption probe. When she's shown an article about this in a newspaper, her attention is caught by a piece on the opposite page, detailing the three recent murder victims. We discover that she'd also previously had sex with the castrated man at Tulpa.

She breaks into Tulpa to access their membership files, and contacts Stefan, the man from the recent threesome, to tell him his life is in danger. He decides to stay rather than flee, because she took the trouble of contacting him (WTF Stefan??!).

Maria, a work rival of Lisa's, had followed her to Tulpa, and photographed her break-in. She's murdered, in a staged suicide, right after sending the photos to Ferri, another work colleague. Ferri attempts to blackmail Lisa (but also makes the rookie mistake of showing the photos to their boss before he does so), and also falls into the killer's clutches. 

Lisa is forced to resign after the disappearance of her two colleagues and appearance of the photos, so she goes to stay with her best friend, Giovanna. That night she's woken by mysterious noises, and finds Stefan in the shed, bound and almost dead. It turns out that Giovanna, jealous of her friend's multiple lovers, was the killer. She stabs Stefan to death before a vision of the mysterious owner of the Tulpa club, Kiran, appears, and causes her to commit suicide. Lisa's boss comes  to the crime scene and apologises for suspecting her.

Five months later, Lisa is the president of the company, and returns to Tulpa, ready to sample life's darker, neon-red pleasures once more.

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Tulpa's not a bad giallo (it's not a neo-giallo; it's just a giallo set in the twenty first century). It doesn't hold a candle to the classics of the genre, but it gives as good as it gets, with limited success. I haven't dealt with the concept of a 'Tulpa', after which the sex club was named, too much in the above synopsis, because, even if I had, the ending would still come across as ludicrous. A 'tulpa'  is a Buddhist concept whereby an object or being is created by force of will alone. Lisa reads a book about tulpas (tulpae?) which suggests that a person who summons one can occasionally lose their connection with it, which creates a scenario whereby an evil demon is stalking the world without a master.

Watching the film, I assumed that the tulpa stuff was a semi-interesting metaphor for Lisa's guilt at her connection with the murder victims. The sex she'd shared with them had given the killer his or her agency; so in effect the sex created the killer. Which nicely ties into the fact that the sex club is called Tulpa. Why Federico Zampaglione felt the need to throw the club's resident shaman, Kiran, into the finale as a quasi-vision, suggesting that Giovanna has been possessed by an actual tulpa demon and bringing a wholly  unnecessary metaphysical bent to the climax, is anyone's guess. He should have learned from the victims of the weird sex club-sometimes a normal, not-weird climax is your best bet.

The soundtrack, partly composed by the director, is also a big disappointment. It seems to be channelling the Buddhist mysticism aspects of the film at least as much as classic giallo music. This is to be applauded in some respects, in that he's not just re-treading old ground (and, indeed, the lack of any pastiche or homages in the film in general is to be similarly praised), but the score just isn't that effective. 

Returning to the climax, and setting aside the tulpa possession side of things, I feel Zampaglione dropped the ball here in other ways. Lisa unwittingly runs straight to the killer seeking solace, but the film just rushes ahead to a generic walking-through-a-dark-house-at-night scene (and, as with all the nighttime scenes in the film, it's too dark) without pausing to consider the delicious opportunities the scenario offers.

One area where Zampaglione does adhere to giallo tradition is in the killer's unmasking. In common with 98% of gialli, we discover that Giovanna is the killer at the climax of the film, as a classic Big Reveal. The mechanics of the reveal, and its position at the end of the film, quickly became a formulaic part of gialli (and slashers which incorporate a whodunnit aspect), and it's one of the least experimented-with tropes.

In an unproduced giallo script I wrote almost a decade ago (called The Three Sisters), the killer's identity is revealed halfway through the film, though only to the audience. This allowed for several tense scenes later on in the film, where the  audience's awareness of one character's true colours and simultaneous awareness that this knowledge was not possessed by the other characters creates a base level of tension in pretty much every single scene. (You may ask why this films remains unproduced if the script was so brilliant and tension-inducing; many's a night I have sat out under the stars shouting that same question up at the movie gods. I'll let you know if they get back to me.)

Gialli often derive tension from the space between what the audience knows and what the characters know
 for murder scenes (think of any number of shots of black gloved hands entering the frame as a blissfully-unaware character goes about their business in the background), so it's strange that so few writers and directors take it that bit further and apply this knowledge-gap theory at the level of plot. (That's not to say none do; Mario Bava, who clearly was bored of the formulaic side of gialli with his later entries, reveals the killer's identity at the beginning of Hatchet for the Honeymoon. Other films which feature early unmaskings are The Killer Must Kill Again and Formula for a Murder.)

In the case of Tulpa, the fact that Lisa has unwittingly run straight to the lion's den (Giovanna's house) offers a great opportunity for an early unmasking. The question of who the killer is would have been answered, but other questions would be generated by our knowing that Giovanna is the killer-will she kill Lisa? Why is she killing people? How will normality be restored (another trope with which filmmakers of gialli seem loathe to experiment)?

Instead, we get the aforementioned walking-through-a-dark-house scene. Lisa finds Stefan, strung up and on the verge of death, and Giovanna appears to finish him off. Lisa may as well have gone to Stefan's house, or her own house, for all the relevance the location bears to the scene-the fact that she's just run straight to the clutches of the killer is almost incidental, and ultimately contributes nothing. 


​

I'm not sure whether I'm being too harsh or too forgiving of Tulpa. It's entirely laudable that Zampaglione has made a film which is a 21st Century giallo, and steers well clear of the neo-giallo ghetto. There are some incredible make-up effects (which are helped immeasurably by the overly dark photography) and some decent set pieces  (the first stalk-and-slash scene features a great bit in a tunnel, before the darkness overwhelms the action). The mystical aspects, however, don't work at all, and there are some plot holes for those people who like everything wrapped up in a neat logical box (how did Giovanna get into the club the first time, to witness Lisa and the castrated guy's sex session?). And, ultimately, it doesn't hold a candle to the best gialli. But thank Buddha that films like it are still being made, and in Italy too.
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Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

15/3/2017

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 Whatever about some of the other films I've covered here, this definitely isn't a giallo. There's no murders (of humans, anyway) or investigation (at least in any literal sense). The film is, however, a fascinating companion piece to the genre.

The film is set in 1976, just after the heyday of the giallo. Gilderoy, played by Toby Jones, travels to Italy to oversee the post-production audio of a Susperia-esque film (which in no way resembles a giallo, despite what all the reviews would tell you) called The Equestrian Vortex. We follow Gilderoy as he becomes increasingly isolated from, and then subsumed into, the unfamiliar environment and petty backstage squabbling.

The foreign fish-out-of-water aspect of traditional gialli is alive and well here, and it's hard not the think of Umberto Lenzi's recent interviews whenever Santini, the egotistical director of The Equestrian Vortex, is on screen. And the sound recording process, and equipment, is fetishised throughout, with regular close-ups of a black-gloved finger operating the playback machine. It's not exactly a faithful reconstruction of the working conditions of the era, if the interviews with participants in Italian post-production are anything to go by. The idea of importing a sound specialist would have been seen as a ludicrous extravagance, and the whole process was usually exported to a separate facility, with minimal involvement from the producers. And, if an expert was imported, he wouldn't have been kept around for long enough to be driven mad by the process (though the fact that his flight allegedly didn't exist hints that he may not actually have been imported).​

In his commentary for the film, Peter Strickland suggests that there are hidden, but accessible , clues scattered throughout the film which point towards a 'correct' interpretation of the events depicted. He does acknowledge, however, that alternate readings of the film are just as valid as his own. This is a counterpoint to the giallo investigation of a film such as, say, Deep Red, where the interpretation of sounds and images is at the core of the plot, with everything hinging on the correct interpretation. Here, rather than a pursuit of truth, the focus is on a pursuit of meaning, with no one true answer.
 
The film ultimately is a mixture of art film and psychological thriller (going easy on the thriller aspect), and the last twenty minutes will probably leave some viewers scratching their heads and contemplating donning black gloves to murder Peter Strickland, but as someone who's ploughed the lonely post-production furrow (albeit in the comfort of my own living room), I could identify all-too-readily with the encroaching madness which threatens to overwhelm a lengthy post-production process. And, as with Gilderoy at the end of this film (KIND OF SPOILER), when the lights go out on the life of a filmmaker, we're all subsumed by our art, if, indeed, our art survives at all.
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The Washing Machine (1993)

13/3/2017

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Vida Kolba, one of a trio of sisters living together in Budapest, argues with her boyfriend/pimp, Yuri, who she's discovered is cheating on her. They have make-up sex against a sexy open fridge, with Vida's youngest sister, Ludmilla, watching from the stairs. Vida storms off before climax, having being reminded of Yuri's philandering ways. Later that night Ludmilla finds Yuri's corpse, chopped up and oozing blood, in the washing machine. Or does she???!

The next morning, Inspector Stacev, heading the subsequent investigation, can't find any evidence of the murder. Each of the sisters, who had all been sleeping with Yuri, accuse one of their siblings of the murder, and attempt to win Stacev over by seducing him. Stacev becomes increasingly caught up in their web of seduction and lies, which drives his girlfriend Irina to suicide. 

In a bizarre about-face, the sisters then begin confessing to Yuri's murder, with Stacev no nearer the truth. Eventually, when confronted with photographs of one of his sisterly liaisons, their true motive is revealed: they want to recover a suitcase which was confiscated by the police one week before Yuri's 'murder'.
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This is just one of a number of early 90s Italian films which are erotic thrillers shot with an eye on the international market. None of them seem to have really made a splash, probably because none of them were very good. Once again we're faced with the hoary old 'what is a giallo?' question, as this film seems to be widely accepted as part of the cannon, whereas Sergio Martino's Naked Obsession, which has a reasonably similar plot, is not (the main reason being that there's more of a murder investigation plot in The Washing Machine, plus, possibly crucially, its protagonist is on the right side of the law). As I've written before, assigning a genre to a film can be extremely reductive and pointless, given that the focus is on what a group of films have in common rather than their individuating qualities. It can also, however, provide a useful pathway for the discerning fan to navigate their way through the hundreds of thousands of films which exist.

Why am I writing about The Washing Machine, for example? Because it's a giallo, and I write about gialli. Why have I seen Naked Obsession, enabling me to compare it to this film? Because it was directed by Sergio Martino, one of Italian genre cinema's finest craftsmen (pre-1990, anyway). A film can be marketed(/defined) by its content, actors, behind-the-camera talent, and so on. And such trivialities as whether or not a particular film can be considered a giallo can actually make a big difference to its potential audience, particularly on home video. One particularly thorny-for me, anyway-consideration for some giallo fans is nationality.

There are those who maintain that only Italian films can be considered gialli. This seems ridiculous to me, particularly because many of the films themselves were made with an eye on the international market, and used international actors, languages and financing. If the films were closely tied into specifically Italianate social concerns, a la  many neo-realist films, then a case could be made for it being part of a national cinema, but they're not. In fact, many gialli are either set outside Italy, or depict foreigners in Italy. At best they're international cocktails with an Italian flavour, and, as with all cocktails, some are more flavoursome than others. And, above all, it seems ludicrous to have to justify why Luciano Onetti's (Argentinian) Frnacesca is at least as much of a giallo as Enzo G. Castellari's Cold Eyes of Fear.

The Washing Machine boasts a largely Italian cast and crew, contains two murders and one suicide (which is dealt with an almost horrific air of casualness); it contains a murder investigation, a loud, driving score, occasional directorial flourishes and maintains a healthy level of eroticism throughout. Its giallo credentials seem pretty air-tight. However, when you see these elements put into action on the screen, the giallo mask (the masked killer, incidentally, being one of the traditional giallo elements that's MIA) slips somewhat. The main characters, who initially accuse each other of committing the murder which kickstarts the plot, quickly start confessing to the murder themselves, seemingly trying to outdo each other in terms of outlandish unbelievability. The investigative plot thus grinds to a halt, the film becoming a sub-sub Rashomon parade of T&A, until these characters deign to unveil the truth. Anyone who's a stickler for narrative logic may also find fault with the notion that a policeman in Budapest would simultaneously work on both the murder and drugs squads.

This flirtation with giallo is nothing new for Deodato, who made several films which hover around the periphery of the genre without ever really striking out for its heartland (Bodycount, Dial: Help, Phantom of Death). The murders (SPOILER ALERT) both take place within the last few minutes of the film, with the original killing, which drives the plot, turning out to have been fabricated. This results in one of my favourite type of twist, with the 'plot' we've believed to have been driving the film revealed to have been the cover for another, deeper plot.  Overall, though, what really differentiates the film from any number of North American 'erotic thriller' productions (e.g. Jade,  Basic Instinct)? The answer, sadly, is that the film is largely the product of Italian people. So, by covering it here and eschewing its North American brethren, I'm just as guilty as those internet idiots of giallo fascism (not Italian fascism, though; that was more Mussolini's bag).

Unless it's all just cover for another, deeper plot which I've cunningly concocted.

It's not though.

*

Some quick notes regarding the style of the film: it looks much the same as the other early 90s Italian films, with a stark, desaturated palette, although the nighttime lighting is slightly more interesting here than in those Lado, Martino etc efforts. Given that (SPOILER AGAIN) there's no killer at work until the final few minutes, the lack of stalk-and-slash scenes is a necessary evil, so to speak. There are a couple of scenes which feature the nominal lead, Inspector Stacev (this is another internationally-set giallo)  creeping around in the darkness, but Deodato doesn't fully commit to either scene in terms of creating a fully-fledged giallo set piece.

The second is thrown away completely, ending almost before it has begun with Stacev lashing out at a mysterious intruder, who turns out to be his (soon to be late) girlfriend. The first is a promising set-up, with Stacev and Vida, one of a trio of sisters at the centre of the film (and 'The Three Sisters' would have been a much better title), searching an abandoned house for clues, with Vida disappearing suddenly, just as the lights cut out. Stacev slowly ascends the stairs, unsure of what has happened to Vida and who or what else may be in the house, before he's suddenly handcuffed to the banister and brutally raped by his erstwhile companion. Although, as is par for the course in exploitation films, because the rapist is a highly sexualised women, it's presented as an act of eroticism rather than one of violence.

The slow ascension of the stairwell is accompanied by Claudio Simonetti's brilliant score, and does threaten to become a properly tense scene. The problem is that Deodato can't resist filming  Philippe Cariot, playing Stacev, in a series of stylishly gliding tracking shots and pans as he climbs the stairs. We know that no masked killer (or rapist) is going to jump out at him simply because the shots are too artful, too carefully composed for Deodato to risk upsetting their balance by introducing a wildcard element. 

In my opinion, the best way to generate tension in such a scene is to cut down on the number of shots, and keep the framing wide, maintaining or heightening the presence of the location, so that the character's vulnerability and isolation is foregrounded. The location becomes almost a malevolent presence, as we know that its harbouring an actual human malevolent presence. This puts the audience on edge, and a well-timed jump scare can put them over that same edge.

Another tactic is to build up to a clearly telegraphed and choreographed moment. Music can play a huge part here, and there's scope fora greater variety of camera angles and shot selection. Here the tension is derived not from wondering when the attack will come, but from the knowledge that it is coming, whether we like it or not.We're watching  a character moving slowly, inexorably, towards their inevitable demise, and there's nothing we can do to prevent it (apart from look away, a tactic which Dario Argento satirises in Opera).

In the case of The Washing Machine, Simonetti's score doesn't quite generate the requisite tension, being slightly too melodic and overused in the film to really set us on edge, and, as stated before, the focus is slightly too much on the glossy technical aspects, with shots selected to look nice rather than to add anything atmospheric.​

 

The 'attack', such as it is, comes in a shot which focuses on Stacev's hand sliding along the banister towards the camera (frame-left). Vida's hand shoots  in from the right hand side, in an effective enough jump scare. The moment is largely unsuccessful, for me anyway, because there is no sense of cumulative tension, beyond that automatically generated by having a man walk alone through a dark house. The isolation of, and focus on. a single, not-especially-vulnerable body part (the hand), also  takes the edge of the scene.

Which is maybe not such a bad thing when you consider the extremely edgy rape scene to follow.
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Francesca (2015)

9/3/2017

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The Onetti brothers returned two years after Sonno Profondo with this effort, which is more accessible in terms of plot and imagery, but still fails to provide the relief that comes from standard cinematic grammar with any regularity. The camera isn't quite as first person-y as it was in Sonno, but the editing is just as restless, the framing still baroque and flashy, enough to probably turn most people off. Which won't really concern the Onettis, as this film is squarely aimed at the giallo fanboy (and girl [and boy dressed as girl]).

It looks similar to Sonno, with a heavily graded image doing a mostly-excellent job of evoking 70s colour palettes, and a heavily Goblin-inspired soundtrack driving the action. There aren't any artificial scratches on the 'film' this time; they've settled for a sprinkling of fake  grain. The image is in 2.35:1. and some shots seem awkwardly framed, as if the decision to crop the image to that ratio was made late in the day (or Luciano, who again wears many, many hats on the film, forgot his framing one on occasion). The quickfire editing and stylised (if cropped) framing do threaten to overpower the narrative, but given the fairly standard nature of said narrative, which  this may well have been a deliberate choice. One recurring motif is a jarring cut to a shot which tilts uwards, which is possibly meant to reflect a thematic concern with, or plot point about, growing up.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a series of murders which have shaken Rome (AKA Argentina) to its core. The victims seem to have been targeted for their immorality, with the killer being inspired by The Divine Comedy. One of the investigating policemen makes a tenuous connection between the murders and the disappearance of a child (whose father is a leading Dante scholar) fifteen years previously. A few grains of fertiliser, which are found at an early murder scene, prove to be the vital clue, with the time it takes for the lab to analyse them providing the breathing room for the visuals, music and style to take centre stage for most of the brief running time. 

The props, costumes and tropes which were the focus of most of Sonno's close-up-heavy visuals all return, which has led to many reviewers suggesting that the film strays too far into the realm of pastiche. Once again, as with Sonno, I'd argue that the fact that the film contains the germs of a murder-mystery plot amidst all the bottles of J&B and red telephones elevates it above many of its neo-giallo contemporaries (into the world of the pure giallo), and I'd definitely take an Onetti brothers film above an art installation by Cattet and Forzani any day of the week. 

One thing that's maybe hindered by the incessant pace of the editing and idiosyncrasies of the framing is tension. The murder scenes revolve around the sudden appearance of creepy doll, so it's hard to make them un-creepy. Onetti does his best, though, with either too short a build-up (in the case of the first full murder scene), or an overly edited, too-tightly-framed lead-in (in the case of the pianist's murder). A church murder scene confuses atmospheric dutched shots of religious statues for tension-generation, and the ever-present and ever-dominant soundtrack has nowhere to go when it comes to the murders, being as it is dialled up to eleven the whole time.

One area where Onetti excels-and this is something that can be very useful for no-budget filmmakers-is in his extension of the cinematic world beyond what is shown in the film. The film takes place over a few days and contains a few characters, but flashbacks and, even more so, television news reports expand the filmic universe (briefly intersecting with that of Sonno) by giving us backstory and introducing characters with an economy of effort (and economy). In some ways, most classic gialli are centred around an investigation into an this extended cinematic space, with the identity and motivations of the killer rooted in events of the past, but Onetti manages to expertly distil these past events into brief snatches of dialogue and abstract imagery, extending his miniscule budget as much as possible.

It's not a film that everyone-even seasoned giallo hounds-will love, but there's undeniable talent in evidence here, as well as (I believe) an under-appreciated and under-acknowledged commitment to honouring the investigative side of the classic gialli. They even throw in an homage to Dressed to Kill, and all those other films where killers are in drag, by the incongruity of big man feet stomping around in high heels.

Oh, and the  credits are just as Onetti-onanistic as those of Sonno.
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Un silencio de tumba (1972)

2/3/2017

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Jess Franco was mental. He made between 170 and 190 films, and his efforts ranged from relatively lavish period spectaculars to low budget action films to shot-in-an-afternoon porn films. He made sporadic attempts to break through to the mainstream, with straight horror films (1960s), a childrens' film (70s), action flicks (80s) and a vehicle for a popular rock band (90s), but he was at his happiest with a minimal set, a single camera and a naked woman. His best work was unmistakably his, permeated through and through with his own brand of languid erotica and eccentricities.

Un silencio de tumba was adapted from the book you see to the left. (This was unusual for Franco, who often attempted to imbue his films with the respectability of the literary adaptation by citing non-existent works by 'David Khunne' in the credits [fans of a certain recent Irish giallo may be wondering where they've heard that name, and credit, before.]) I haven't read the book, but, from what I've heard about it, Franco's script actually improves upon the novel. Anyone familiar with Franco's early 70s output may scoff at the notion of there having been an actual script-he averaged 8 or 9 films a year at this time-but Dorado Films' Blu ray release includes the scripted ending as an extra. It's striking just how detailed-and traditional in form-the script is, even referring to a shot list. It's also striking just how much more effective the scripted ending would have been. The fact that aural and visual inserts which set up the discarded ending do exist throughout the finished film suggests that the change happened relatively late in the day. And this, in many ways, is what makes it a Franco film.

There's no nudity, no surrealistic imagery beyond a disembodied eye occasionally seen in extreme close-up (a hangover from that original ending) and the plot is standard giallo fare, but the execution is classic Franco. You don't make nearly 200 films by approaching each one with Kubrickian levels of focus, and its often been said of Franco that he lost interest in projects as soon as a newer idea supplanted it in his affections. And Franco clearly had a lot of ideas.

​​The easiest way to rush through a film is to cut down on that pesky shot list, and film scenes in their entirety from a fixed position, reframing when appropriate. In Franco's case, this usually means zooming, often when inappropriate (not necessarily here though, there are no vaginas into which to zoom). Mario Bava's quite-similar 5 Dolls for an August Moon similarly uses zooms and reframings to rush through a condensed shooting schedule, but Franco ain't no Bava (and, equally, Bava ain't no Franco). 

5 Dolls isn't your typical giallo in execution, though, and is more of a fun romp than a terrifying thriller. As is the similarly-shot Bay of Blood. Because, simply put, it's very hard to generate tension without camera movement and editing. And a good old-fashioned thriller, though, which Un silencio is attempting to be, needs tension. There are occasional moments which do create an effective ambience, helped hugely by Franco's traditionally strong location scouting and atonal soundtrack, but, ultimately, Franco's heart wasn't quite in the project. The surprising aspect of this is that it was the first production of his Manacoa Films company, no doubt as such chosen due to the international popularity of the giallo, and he presumably had his own money on the line. But that temperament was as restless as his early 70s camera.

In basic terms, a tracking shot moves the viewer through space. A zoom, though, is different. It condenses space, and, certainly in Franco's work, can both condense and stretch time. Think of any number of sequences from The Female Vampire, with Lina Romay rolling around on a bed, with and without a companion, with the camera seemingly having all the time in the world to hone in on various parts of her flesh without risk of having missing anything when it next zooms out to take in the whole picture. Time in Franco's films does not follow standard rules, and whole sequences can take place in a kind of temporal limbo (see Stephen Thrower's amazingly brilliant book 'Murderous Passions' for more on this). And, when it comes down to it, someone who loves to suspend time and poke around his own erotic fantasies isn't really cut out for shooting a traditional giallo, which demands taut and surefire directorial control.

I certainly didn't dislike this film as much as Thrower did. Dorado's Blu ray looks pretty good-and I really like Franco's proclivity for slightly overexposing his outdoor scenes-and there are far worse gialli out there. However, Franco's lack of interest/ability with regard to generating tension combined with the very few on-camera kills (the focus is on the body-finding aftermath, another area of common ground with 5 Dolls), and his refusal to throw off the shackles and cut loose with style and mood result in a pretty anodyne offering from this most idiosyncratic of artists.

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    Dáire McNab

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