"Welcome to Spring Break... The annual migration of the idiot," as Michael Parks succinctly puts it. And if there's a better showcase for this than the 2020 spring break, which involved a lot of blithely ignoring the encroaching Covid-19 pandemic, then I haven't yet seen it. But I have seen this giallo/slasher. Three times, in fact!*

The middle-aged leader of the youth motorcycle gang The Demons is sent to the electric chair for a crime he claims not to have committed. The execution was executed in a quaint seaside resort which hosts the annual uniquely American shenanigan-fest known as spring break. At least, somewhere adjacent to the main filming location hosts it, so the producers were able to nip over there to film some stock footage to blend into the final film. Anyway, when the next spring break rolls around the usual array of airheaded teens and twenty-somethings roll up to get wasted and roll in the hay. But not everyone's happy to host the libidinous layabouts - the local police chief (John Saxon playing the standard hardassed John Saxon cop, with a sprinkle of sexual perversion on top) and local priest disapprove of anything approaching fun. As does a mysterious leather-clad biker who shows up and starts electrocuting revellers with his specially modified motorbike. Is it Diablo, the dead gang leader? Course it's not-if you know anything about gialli you already know who it is!

This film is possibly directed by Umberto Lenzi, and possibly not directed by him - for years it was believed that he made it using the pseudonym Harry Kirkpatrick, until an interview in which he attributes direction to the film's screenwriter James Justice (who wrote the script under the Kirkpatrick alias). Roberto Curti, who's far more knowledgeable about these things than me, says that Lenzi made it, and my opinion is that he's probably right. It's a long, long way from Lenzi's earlier gialli and poliziotteschi, but so was all of his work from this era - Hitcher in the Dark and Black Demons (especially the latter) are textbook examples of the kind of low rent Filmirage-esque production (HitD actually was produced by that company) which proliferated in the late 80s; specifically, Italian films shot in America which captured enough local flavour to be sorta-convincing as American productions. The drawback of this shift in setting was that the films lost some of their uniquely Italianate edge - those wacky quirks which marked their fare apart from, and more enjoyable than, standard US exploitation films. The Filmirage-type productions actively tried to pass for lower tier American product, which probably helped international sales, but cost the films something of their souls. (I should say now that I actually like a lot of Filmirage films, several of which did retain just enough of their Italian qualities to stand out - I merely refer to them here as a yardstick because they proliferated to such a degree). But, to bring my ramblings back around to this film, even though we're a long way from Seven Blood-Stained Orchids here, I do think the same man's hand (directing hand) is responsible for both.
 
The film probably wouldn't be considered a giallo without the Italian involvement (although the identity of the killer - which I won't be getting into here because it had very much Been Done by this point, and I have written about the trope before - does provide another link), and it's pretty much an attempt to capitalise on the fag end of the slasher trend; gialli not being exactly hot box office fare in the late 80s. Killing young people through electricity isn't very gialloey either (although Wes Craven may have liked the idea, as Shocker, made the following year, isn't dissimilar to this film in its set-up). 

The cast are largely young and expendable, and there's no attempt at any real investigation into the killer's identity. This is somewhat of a surprise, given the prevalence of the police in the film, as well as the manner in which de facto leading man Skip is run out of town by John Saxon, with a threat that he'll be framed for the murders if he returns ringing in his ears. He does return, but rather than conduct anything approaching a logical investigation, he merely sends his new girlfriend out on her tiny moped, hoping to lure the killer into attacking her (he's not following at a discreet distance ready to intervene or anything, that would be too intelligent an idea for a spring breaker).

Skip is probably the least annoying of the young male cast, and it says a lot when you're saying that about a character with whom we're meant to sympathise just because he threw an interception in the Rose Bowl. This is classic Italians-in-America filmmaking: throw in some classic American references to uniquely yankly products like the Rose Bowl, and no-one could possibly question the provenance of the film. And if the shoehorned-in reference tugs on the audience's heartstrings, so much the better. Skip mopes into town and quickly catches the eye of local barmaid Gail, who mopes to and from work at walking pace on her little motorbike. She's also the sister of the girl who Diablo murdered (allegedly), which is pretty useful for narrative purposes. Gail and Skip bond as they investigate the disappearance of his homosexual friend, Ronny, who's also, bafflingly, the self-appointed leader of a 'beaver scouting patrol', bless him. He's fallen afoul of the Demons, now led by Diablo's homosexual brother, who strangely has a different ethnicity and accent. His accent (stilted and Hispanic) is actually almost the exact same as his new lady's, and she is literally the exact same as his brother's old lady.

As already stated, Skip and Gail don't really drive the narrative at all (if they do, it's at walking pace), and the film just bounces along from set piece to set piece, including some footage shot at a Playboy wet t-shirt competition. There are fairly chunky and clunky comedic elements, with the Porkies-style films obviously being another influence. And speaking of films being influences, who could forget Jaws, which lends a mayor-trying-to-keep-a-lid-on-an-escalating-crisis subplot (Mayor Loomis in this case, in another horror film reference), as well as the scene in which an utterly hilarious banterhound pretends to be a shark (check out the police dude's reaction - shoot now, deal with animal rights activists later). 

The chasm between the acting ability of the young and old(er) players is so great as to be almost confusing; one feels that Michael Parks's perma-grimace is an unvarnished reaction to the efforts of his co-stars. The murder scenes are OK, and feature some decent burn make-up and some less successful shots of mannequins' heads on fire. The killer's appearances (as well as those of a mute weirdo cop) are accompanied by a heavy metal-lite track, showing Umberto had been paying attention to the 80s sonic swerve taken by his old pal Dario Argento (or else James Justice had been paying attention, which is actually probably as likely). The up-tempo riff-monstering can only do so much to make things exciting, though, especially in any scene involving Gail's moped. 

I suppose I'll briefly touch on the motivation offered up by the killer - the usual 'I'm eliminating sin by sinning' nonsense. The killer is affronted by the raw sexuality and carnality of spring break (but, obviously, simultaneously obsessed with it). In much the same way, this film made by a group of middle-aged Italians doesn't know quite what to make of its young subjects - it's willing to depict them having fun, often with their baps out, but you get the feeling that there's a school of thought that they may be having just a leetle too much fun on occasion. That particular school is out for Easter, though, so the filmmakers do bravely depict plenty of immorality.

*Take a wild guess when the third time, after which this review was written, was...

This late 80s American-set, British-financed film is more of a mongrelly, giallo-influenced piece than a purebred example of the filone, but we try not to be racist, so here goes.

A serial killer is slashing his (or her) way through the yummy mummies of Arizona. Philandering Paul (who still loves his wife, as he reminds us every four-to-five minutes) becomes a suspect when police link his new tyres to one of the murder scenes. When yet another housewife is offed, Paul struggles to provide an alibi without divulging the details of his latest extra-marital affair. Fortunately his wife has learned of the affair, and doesn't hesitate to reveal all to the police. Is Paul now vindicated, exonerated and in the clear? Not quite...

{SPOILERS THROUGHOUT!] This is a bit of a mental film, which befits its creator, Donald Cammell, who was, to cast aside propriety for a moment, a bit of a mental man. It both reveals the killer extremely early, and, bravely (/mentally) has the main suspect turn out to be actually guilty. Yes, that's right - Paul is the middle-aged mummy murderer, and a dog murderer, and almost a daughter murderer (to be fair, she is really, really weird, and her mother tries to muscle in on the daughtercide when she drops the kid from a second storey window from which she herself refuses to jump). 

The final forty minutes of the film are pretty out-there; about as far out-there as Paul, with his ranting about black holes being analogous to the darkness at the heart of women (if you want to talk about darkness at the heart of something, take a look in the mirror mate). It's not just Paul's behaviour that's off-kilter - his wife Joan settles in to spend a night in his company after discovering a load of dismembered body parts under their bathroom sink. The lengthy scene in which she settles in to hear him rant and rave has a curiously banal air of domesticity which is pretty unique, although the scene's novelty does become somewhat wearing the longer it goes. The remainder of the film plays out as a kind of cat-and-mouse game, albeit one in which Paul doesn't really seem to have much interest in actually catching his mouse; his interests lie more in the field of making odd noises and rubbing blood/paint on his face. 

While the ending isn't very gialloey (although Formula for a Murder, to give one example, isn't exactly dissimilar in structure), the first half of the film contains many nods to the filone. We get black-gloved killings, multiple extreme close-ups of eyeballs and some pretty out-there camerawork (including an early snorricam effect) and editing. Saying that, the editing style owes everything to Cammell's own ideas about time and pacing, and nothing to the influence of gialli.

The lengthy flashbacks seem to initially exist to provide backstory for John and Joan's relationship history, but turn out to be performing much the same function as the standard giallo flashback - ie to provide a bit of context and background for the killer's behaviour.* The police, initially quite perceptive in immediately landing upon John as a likely suspect, gradually fade away into nothing, proving ultimately as effective as most giallo cops. But enough of reductively listing the  giallo connections and influences of this film.

Well, actually, the rest of my notes are about aspects of the film which aren't unrelated to gialli-which makes sense, I suppose, given the subject of this blog. So here are a few more observations: the fetishisation of the local cop's teeth, replete with extremely crisp foley work, is a truly bizarre moment, which performs absolutely no function narratively (and aren't such non-sequiturs an integral part of the Italian genre film?). The cop character seems to be being floated as a red herring, as is Joan's ex-boyfriend Mike, who plays a crucial role in the finale and is probably 7/10ths as mental as John - he witnessed John essentially conducting a blood rite with a dead deer, and decided to keep the info to himself until such a time as he could get the drop on John with a rifle. Also, perhaps it's no surprise that the police investigation fizzles away, given the chief detective's penchant for washing his hands in toilet bowls (although, to be fair, his knowledge of ancient Indian rites is incredibly prescient, albeit never used as anything but quasi-exposition for the audience).

The stalk-and-slash murders are fairly gialloey (and slashery, albeit the attempts at suspense and the preponderance of eyeballs probably tips the balance towards the former). The intrusion of a bright white sneaker into one scene jars somewhat, and screams 80s (which is fine, though, cos it was made then). The music is fairly perfunctory, although the opening theme seems to be trying to leap into the main music from Inferno, teasing as it does the main riff from that song. But overall, the music, murders and mystery aspects don't quite hit the mark in purely giallo terms.

But that's not really the point, as this isn't really a giallo. It's a crazy film about a crazy guy, specifically about that crazy guy's dual existence as crazed killer and... somewhat loving father and husband (albeit one who does cheat a lot).** There are a lot of unique touches befitting the idiosyncratic mind of its creator (/adaptor, as it was a very loose adaptation of a book), with the best, for my money, being the scene where Paul's interrogated by the police, who get Joan involved for a bit of good cop-bad cop (or good cop-bad wife), making for some pretty off-the-wall viewing. And consider her fury when she thinks her husband is innocent of murder and guilty of adultery, and contrast that to how she acts when she discovers that he's actually an insane serial killer... Crazy stuff altogether. And it's these myriad idiosyncrasies of tone and logic which seal this film's status as an honorary giallo, as out there as anything the likes of Andrea Bianchi or Mario Landi could dream up.

*The bleached-out grainy images of these sequences recall the technique used by Jess Franco to delineate flashbacks is his masterpiece Nightmares Come at Night, although given the extremely limited distribution that film had until the 2000s I can conclusively assert that the similarity is entirely coincidental.

**Duality being clearly something in which Cammell, writer and co-director of Performance, held a keen interest.

If you've ever wondered what would happen if someone gave you some money and told you to make a giallo, this film might be the sort of thing you'd come up with (unless you're a good director). Directed by one-and-only director Helia Colombo, it's the work of someone very well-versed in the form and history of the filone, but sadly Helia shows precious little filmmaking ability to back this up. That's not overly surprising, given that he was a composer, but he presumably allowed himself to dream when he embarked upon this passion project.

In a sleepy backwater village 30 (or 32) kilometres from Rome, someone is murdering young models. We know it's a man because we can see a brief glimpse of a male face in the opening murder scene, which sees a young woman run screaming through some woods with full-on bap flap while the killer traipses behind her, only for her to inexplicably stop running when she comes within sight of a busy road. Anyway, that's too much detail for a synopsis, so let's push on. Another young model who'd been posing for wheelchair-bound weirdo (these things are not related) Parisi, a photographer who can somehow afford to rent what is clearly meant to be a palatial country house, is murdered-the killer's fifth victim. This model's boyfriend Giorgio, who declined to rescue her from automobile trouble on the night of her murder because he was cock-deep in another lady, decides to travel the 30/32km to investigate her final movements. A bickering couple, Lucia and Antonio, have recently taken up positions as servants in the country house, which is also home to Parisi's wife and niece (who have a bit of a semi-incestuous thing going on [they're not blood relatives, so it's broadly fine apart from the rape aspect]) and is frequently visited by local doctor Dalla. Anyway, Giorgio arrives at the house and thinks about investigating the murder of his gf, and thinks about trying to shag the maid or the niece, and then it turns out that there's another person investigating the murders but even that doesn't matter because the murderer is uncovered by yet another character who uses an invention that doesn't exist.

Yeesh. This is a bad film, but it's certainly not unenjoyable. I'm not going to use the dreaded 'So bad it's good' phrase, but this is not a good film, and its failings do somewhat work in its favour. That's as close to the dreaded phrase as I'll get when discussing a film which isn't The Room. Most of those elements which provide pleasure in traditionally good gialli - the set pieces, the twisty narratives - are MIA. Even narrative illogicality, something of a hallmark of the genre, isn't really present, simply because there basically is no narrative - I've described the set up above, which takes maybe thirty minutes to come together and is followed by almost an hour of Absolutely No Further Developments.

Giorgio is probably the least sympathetic leading character in giallo history (think Nino Castelnuovo in Strip Nude and strip the character metaphorically nude of anything resembling standard human emotions), which is notable at least. His callous dismissal of his girlfriend (or girl friend, possibly)'s request for help on the night of her death doesn't seem to have led to a single second of remorse. He conducts his extremely half-assed investigation not to provide any sense of closure for her or her memory, but rather in the hope of landing a scoop which will advance him in the field of journalism. Unfortunately, despite his lazy, skirt-chasing ways, it seems as if he may indeed have gotten his scoop come the end of the film. 

His position as chief investigator is usurped right at the death (after the final death) by another character, who reveals themselves to have been working as a PI all along. The only problem here is that this character has also achieved precisely nothing - they found out some pertinent backstory which somewhat fleshes out the killer's motivations, but did they use this info to ensnare the guilty party? Did they fuck! No, the killer is unmasked through the use of a machine which can 'photograph thoughts', with the proof of guilt supposedly being the killer imagining a young woman with her clothes off. (Probably just as well this machine doesn't exist in real life...) The machine itself is just as batshit as the concept - the camera is hidden in a weird face statue thing with coloured lights for eyes. Not something you'd see every day in a giallo, that's for sure.*

The mystery angle is pretty poor as well - within seconds of the killer first appearing I'd written down something they'd said, followed by "guilty!" It's debatable if there was an attempt to hide the character in plain sight by suggesting their guilt right off the bat with the hope that we'd thus dismiss them as potential suspects - I suspect this theory gives the filmmakers entirely too much credit, even though if that indeed was what they were trying, it's an abject failure. But hey - better to be an abject failure than just boringly miss the mark.

The direction of the murder scenes does, sadly, boringly miss the mark (unless all you want are tits covered in blood). The effects work isn't terrible, but there's little imagination or flair in the staging. Some of the conversation scenes are also poorly directed - a lengthy dinner table scene halfway through sees much of the dialogue either taking place offscreen or being spoken by characters who have their back to the camera. Several scenes, this among them, were covered by a high angle master shot (not a bad idea, and something I did myself in my own giallo), which is a good way of maximising space (and this is badly needed in order to sell the illusion that the main location is a big country house) but there either wasn't the time, money or inclination to get sufficient coverage to make the scenes flow. 

Finally, those of you who love a good poliziotteschi/giallo hybrid and whose appetites have been whetted by the title should stand down, as the fuzz only make a single, fleeting appearance at the end of the film. The film was shot under the title 'The Cabbage Patch', which is fairly appropriate in terms of suggesting just how odd and off-kilter the end product is, but its delayed release (shot in 1972, released in 75) at the height of the eurocrime boom no doubt led to the wholly unsuitable title with which it was saddled. Staying on the cabbage patch for a moment, I'll close by saying that Helia Colombo is clearly a fan of the genre, and has studiously run through a checklist of giallo tropes which characterised the great and the good early 70s films. However, there's one ingredient which Maestros Argento, Martino and Fulci had in spades which Helia C was singularly unable to call upon: talent. You can tick all the boxes you want, but unless you’re somewhat able to think outside them, and possess a modicum of directorial talent, you’re probably not going to make a great film.

*Saying that, it's something that you've kind of seen before. Well, not quite, but Helia C has clearly been watching the latter two entries of a certain animal trilogy.