Sergio Martino's third giallo, after Strange Vice and Scorpion's Tail, is a change of pace; more of a is-she-crazy mindfuck like Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion than a straightforward murder mystery. It won't be to everybody's taste, and I'd imagine that it's towards the bottom of a lot of Martinophiles' lists of his gialli, but it's still a major work from a major director.

Jane, recovering after losing her unborn child in a car accident, is haunted by nightmares which fuse memories of the crash with images of her mother, whose murder she witnessed when she was five. She begins to see a figure from her nightmares, a stern-looking man with steely-blue contact lenses, following her around London, and begins psychiatric treatment at the behest of her sister. Jane also makes (very fast) friends with a new neighbour, who encourages her to abandon the psychiatric mumbo-jumbo and instead pursue a sensible course of black masses. Increasingly unable to discern between hallucinations and reality, Jane sinks ever deeper into the darkest recesses of her colourful mind.

As you may have gathered from that synopsis, this film is very much a case of style over substance. This is very unusual for an Ernesto Gastaldi-penned piece, although Sauro Scavolini, who was also given screewriting credit on several Gastaldi-Martino collaborations, and Santiago Moncada, credited with having originated the story, may have had more of a hand in shaping the story. I suspect that Martino himself can also claim much of the credit/blame for the  finished product.

That product resembles, in its first half at least, a directorial exercise in generating suspense.We're treated to almost the full gamut of typical giallo set pieces-stairwells, subways, isolated parks, home invasions and the classic car-that-won't-start are all thrown in there. All that's missing is an underground car park chase. None of the set pieces result in a murder, however, which represents a big change of direction from Martino (storywise; his filmic direction is as stylish and impressive as ever).

The troubling pregnancy (the termination of which occurs before the film's start), the apartment block setting and the intrusion of a devil-worshipping cult into a young woman's urbane lifestyle are elements which were obviously borrowed from Rosemary's Baby, as is the face-off between psychiatry and witchcraft. Whereas in Rosemary's Baby the coven's magic-and the devil himself-turns out to be real, here the coven is apparently a front for an extremely elaborate attempt at an old fashioned inheritance-grab.

It doesn't pay to peer too closely at the mechanics at work here, or else you'll find yourself wondering if the huge cost exacted by the coven, both in financial and human terms, was really worth it to inherit a few hundred grand, and whether there wasn't a more efficient way to clear the way for said inheritance than trying to literally scare Jane to death.  You may also wonder why the hell Jane was encouraged to attend sessions with Dr Burton. You may wonder why on earth, having apparently established(ish) the grounded-in-reality motives and methods of the coven, we suddenly discover in the last reel that Jane has a form of second sight, thus thrusting the film once more into the realm of the fantastic.

The answer to that last thing you've wondered is, most likely, because Sergio Martino, or his writers, wanted to explore the possibilities for generating tension by staging the same scene twice. Again, we see that the plot here is the flimsiest of flimsy, with the film really being nothing more (or less) than an exercise in style. But what style-it's possibly Martino's best-directed film, with every scene masterfully staged and captured. He's one of the best exponents of maximising the visual impact of his locations, which, given the pace at which these films were shot, he'd likely have only seen a very short time before filming. He's always able to find an unusual nook in which to place the camera, or plan an audacious pan to showcase the location in its full glory.

Edwige Fenech as Jane, supported by George Hilton doing his best John Cassavetes impression, turns in probably her best acting performance here. And she needs to; she's little more than a pawn, to be moved around on a whim in order to facilitate the staging of the next set piece. Her bonding scene with new neighbour Mary (not that kind of bonding, alas) is the most egregious example of this; there's a black mass scene to be had, so we rush through the first flush of friendship in barely ten seconds' worth of screen time, which is all it takes for Jane to arrange to see Mary 'sometime soon', then narrow that down to the next day for lunch, which becomes a morning's shopping followed by a lunch date. They're suddenly best friends, planning their lives around each other, and Jane is ready to agree to anything her bosom buddy suggests, including participating in a weird mass orgy in a big country house.

The cinematography, editing and music are also top notch, right from the get-go. One shot in the opening nightmare, a crane shot which lowers to ground level with the cameraman then walking out towards the action, was replicated almost exactly in Goodfellas almost twenty years later (it'd be pushing it to suggest that Scorsese or Michael Balhaus had seen this film though, but it shows that great minds sometimes do think like other great minds). 

A crazed sex killer is slashing his (or her) way through women in Austria. Julie Wardh (sic), who has temporarily relocated to the country to be abandoned by her husband as he pursues investment opportunities, finds herself threatened by an old lover, Jean, and beguiled by a new one, George. Meanwhile, the killer has started slashing its way through Julie's friends and acquaintances. After becoming convinced that Jean, who keeps sending her bunches of flowers with overwrought declarations of love, is the killer, Julie and her husband find him lying in his bath, wrists slashed. They also find a camera in his apartment with a blurry undeveloped photo of the killer chasing after Julie, suggesting that someone other than Jean is behind the murders. Julie flees with George to Spain, and news shortly reaches them that the killer has himself been killed, after attacking an air stewardess. However, just as she feels she can finally relax and enjoy life with her creepy new lover, she receives a fresh bouquet of flowers...

The strangely-titled Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (sic) is pretty much universally regarded as a classic of the filone. And it is, if you err on the lighter side of gialli. The plot is both deceptively simple and deliciously twisty, the 70s fashions and décor are present and correct, directorial style and memorable music are effortlessly provided by Sergio Martino and Nora Orlandi respectively, and the King and Queen of gialli, George Hilton and Edwige Fenech, are present and correct. For me, it coasts a little bit, almost too confident in itself, to be ranked at the very top of my list of favourites, but I still consider it a damn fine watch.

The plot, which, as I've stated is both straightforward and complicated, almost demands an immediate second viewing after you've watched it for the first time. I'm a big fan of plots which appear to be about one thing, only for the traditional late revelation to pull the rug out from under not only the characters, but us viewers as well. In other words, we think that a killer is motivated by X, when, in fact, that's what they wanted everyone to think; they're actually motivated by Y. This film has a lot in common with my own giallo, The Three Sisters, in this respect (or, more accurately, is an inversion of it)-sub in 'money' and revenge' for 'X' and 'Y', and you'll have a basic plot outline.

Rewatching this film with a knowledge of what's really going on is a very different experience to a fresh, unprejudiced watch. The first time around you see a jaunty romp which slowly but surely turns into a cat-and-mouse game as Julie moves ever-closer to the killer's orbit. Watching it a second time, you realise that the cat-and-mouse game has in fact begun even before the film begins, and Julie's decisions, apparently made of her own free will, are in fact guided by the evil hand of others. 

Edwige Fenech, as Julie, turns in one of her very best performances here. She's never going to produce anything Oscar-worthy, but she is given more to do here than just look nice and get her tits out (don't worry, she does plenty of that too).  Julie is an odd character, though, susceptible to a baffling array of whims and mood swings, and is seemingly continually adrift without a man at her side to anchor her. Her titular vice is apparently a simultaneous attraction to, and repulsion from,  blood. There's little evidence of this, bar a flashback sex scene between her and Jean which features some broken-bottle slashing, and a climactic scene where she freaks out upon seeing blood seep from beneath a shower curtain in her Spanish villa. The latter scene sees her reacting in much the same way as anyone (at least, any giallo heroine) would upon seeing some strange blood oozing towards them, blood fetish or no blood fetish. The former scene suggests that being physically attacked and (faux-[?])raped appeal to her at least as much as being a bit bloody. After all, if you want to incorporate a bit of blood into your sex life, there are safer ways than having a crazy guy attack you with a broken bottle.

In some ways, Julie's 'vice' is nonsense, and adds nothing to the film other than an oddball title and the excuse for some slo-mo flashback fucking. However, it actually functions as a neat metaphor for Julie herself-conflicted, on the edge and driving the action far less than we're primed to believe.

Martino directs with effortless style, as usual, and incorporates some nice pull-back zooms to emphasise certain characters' loneliness. One of these instances, used when Julie's friend is trying to meet a blackmailer in a deserted city park, leads into the first properly tense moment of the film, which up to then has been jauntily bopping along on a sea of froth and sex. Dario Argento almost certainly had seen this particular scene prior to making Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

Later, Martino gives his take on the classic underground car park chase, which is a qualified success. After a baffling start which sees Julie blinded and confused by flashing car headlights, aided by highly expressionistic editing, we discover that the car in question is actually situated behind her when it suddenly zooms past, nearly knocking her over. Even though it doesn't really hold together on reflection, and probably looked weak on paper, Martino and editor Eugenio Alabiso do a commendable job of creating suspense and confusion out of deceptively little. Then, after an encounter with the killer at the car park lift, Julie retreats to her car for a great sequence which consists of almost total stillness. The  finale of the scene, though, does its best to throw away the goodwill the rest of it has accrued; Julie waits for the killer to stalk away from the lift door, then drives her car a few metres towards it. She then parks, hops out and tries to escape to safety via the slow-closing and moving lift. Just stay in the car and drive away for fuck's sake!

There are a couple of other neat visual flourishes. When Mr and Mrs Wardh (sic) break into Jean's house to confront him, only to find him lying in a pool of his own blood in the bath, there's some terrific 'match' lighting. A staple of Italian films of the 70s and 80s was a scene wherein an actor in a dark room holds up a match and tries to sync their movements with an off-screen lighting guy operating a spotlight. This particular scene leads to a jump scare involving one of Jean's pet owls, with the lighting at the moment of the jump being preposterously unnatural, yet striking. A second visual moment to note comes late on, when Julie walks nervously through her Spanish villa, apparently both on-the-look-out-for and hoping-not-to-see-any blood. She walks past a row of portrait paintings, the first of which is particularly spooky-looking, giving the momentary impression of an evil presence gliding into frame. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Argento also channelled this scene, consciously or otherwise, for Deep Red.

This portrait scene comes towards the  end of what would become almost a trope within Martino's cinema; a half-hour final sequence which occurs in a single contained location, within which the film's protagonists strap in for an inexorable journey towards the film's climax. The location here, a Spanish village, narrowing in focus to a Spanish villa, foreshadows later sequences such as the boat/diving climax to The Case of the Scorpion's Tail (and we even get a diving sequence in Strange Vice, one of several similarities between the two films) and the mountain villa-set climax of Torso. This latter example really showcases the atmosphere of fear and dread which Martino was capable of cultivating; one in which he dabbled in Strange Vice without ever really committing to it.

There are other examples of ever-so-slight coasting, which could maybe be more accurately be described as script deficiencies. That's not to say that the script is worse than that of the average giallo; as previously stated on this site, Ernesto Gastaldi's work is generally of such quality that it should be held to a higher account than that of other genre writers. One of the most egregious examples of the iffy moments comes in a bizarre interrogation sequence, which begins with Julie identifying Jean to the police as the man who's been harrassing her, and ends with the Detective and Jean joining forces to turn on Julie, taunting her with the fact that Jean has an alibi for a recent attempted attack. In many ways it adds to the generally-delirious atmosphere of the film, but it certainly paints the mechanics of the police investigation in an unusual light (which possibly lays the groundwork for the equally unconventional approach taken by the authorities to entrap the guilty party at the film's climax). 

To give one further example of slackness on the part of the writer/director team, the second viewing of the film, when one watches with the knowledge of what's really going on, offers almost as much fun as the virginal viewing. You can watch events unfold as you connect the dots in a mental puzzle, mapping the characters' actual motivations over their apparent ones. There's just one misstep, when someone acts in a manner which is not justified at all by those actual motivations. The film is full of characters selling the apparent motivations both to the viewers and to those characters who are not in on the plot. This one dud moment (involving the scrunching up on a note just after Jean's body in the bath) is performed solely for our benefit, to guide us towards certain assumptions on our first viewing of the film (see my review of The Case of the Scorpion's tale for more on what I [somewhat pompously, in retrospect] termed 'convenient anomalies'). It could have been handled differently, in a manner consistent with the film's internal, overarching logic, with much the same effect. 

This film doesn't live up to its (amazing) title in terms of skin and sleaze, and it won't trouble anyone's  Top 5 Gialli list, but it does provide a rollicking good time, if you keep your expectations in check.

The film begins with a faceless man (technically a man with a face, but one which is obscured to us) being chased by police in Paris. He tries to elude them by scaling the Eiffel Tower, suggesting that he's thrown in the towel mentally. The man leaps to his death (in a hideously poor matte(i) effect so bad they show it twice in the first 3 minutes of the film), and we flash back to see how things ended up this way.

A no-good jewel thief, Antoine Gottvalles, sneaks into a Parisian brothel, from which he's been barred. The mistress, Madam Colette, agrees to let him sample her wares one final time. Unfortunately, Antoine's preferred prostitute, Francine, is found beaten to death minutes later. Antoine is convicted of her murder and sentenced to death, swearing vengeance from beyond the grave before he's led from the dock. He escapes as he's being transferred between prisons, only to be decapitated when his stolen motorbike crashes into a parked truck. Just when you think it's safe to return to the brothel, though, someone begins dispatching prostitutes and judges willy nilly. Has Antoine returned from beyond the grave to act upon his dying promise? This is a giallo not a supernatural film, so no, he hasn't. But who is doing the murders? And will we see that terrible matte effect one final time before the credits roll? (Yes, we will.)

Oh, and there's also the small matter of the investigating officer, Inspector Fontaine, being a dead ringer for Humphrey Bogart. This is no accident; he's played by Bogart professional lookalike Robert Sacchi (known from Play it Again, Sam). This explains one of the film's alternate titles, The Bogey Man. Somehow, the ostensible presence of Humphrey Bogart in the film never becomes too distracting; indeed, the film as a whole has a strange off-kilter vibe, and after a while you just accept each bizarre digression as par for the course.

This may explain how three of the main protagonists, Howard Vernon's* Professor Waldemar, his daughter and her frustrated lover (his assistant) slot neatly into the film after about twenty minutes, despite having no real connection with the events we've seen until that point (OR DO THEY??). Waldemar is friends with the judge who sent Antoine down, and they discuss the case over wine and chess, but such a tenuous connection to the events which are at the centre of the plot hardly justifies the amount of screen time afforded the judge's friend, his daughter and her lover (OR DOES IT??).

This leads us back to Inspector Fontaine. Ordinarily, you'd assume that such a gimmicky character, and one who is in a natural position to drive an investigation, will be anointed chief protagonist. He makes a belated play for such a role about halfway through, when he suddenly starts asking hard questions and refusing to let people leave before at least a couple of "Just a minute" and "Oh, just one more thing"s. This, though, is one of those films where no-one really grabs hold of the narrative, probably because the narrative itself is paper thin. Everything of note plot-wise is condensed into about five minutes towards the end of the film; the rest of the time we jump back and forth between various characters and scenes, the strangeness of which only really strikes you upon reflection.

Take the scene where Rosalba Neri (playing Antoine's ex-wife) sings her new song in her boyfriend Pepi's nightclub, as he watches on. Pepi is distracted by muscly peplum stalwart Gordon Mitchell, who's drunkenly pawing at Tina, a blonde girl who floats through the film seemingly with one purpose, to antagonise Neri. Pepi improbably beats up Mitchell, whose bulging shirt appears about to burst open at any moment, and saves Tina from a public sexual assault. Neri's only response is to throw a hissy fit, accusing Pepi of having only eyes for Tina and ignoring her own chanteusing. Even by the haughty standards of giallo characters, that's damn cold.

There are also some 'interesting' experiments with colour. And by 'interesting', I mean 'failed'. Most of the murder scenes feature the decisive blow repeated several times, with the image tinted a different colour for each repetition accompanied by a sting on the soundtrack. This may have been an attempt by the editor (hello, Bruno Mattei!) to liven up some pedestrian directing. At least it's different, I suppose. Then there's the moment when Antoine swears vengeance from the dock, when the image suddenly becomes solarised. This is also different, very different. And there's a reason why other directors don't use solarisation in their films.

The director here, Ferdinando Merighi, barely made anything else. He actually does a solid job for the most part, from a technical point of view (dodgy murders and solarisation aside). In terms of constructing a top-tier giallo, though, he fails miserably. The plot is weak, there are too many characters being juggled, and the stylistic flourishes which a top giallo demands are vastly misjudged (again, this may well have been Mattei's doing, but, if so, at least he was trying to bring some style to the party). On the plus side, the cast is surprisingly impressive (although sadly Barbara Bouchet and Rosalba Neri are kept studiously apart), and you get to see what it would have been like if Humphrey Bogart lost most of his charm and acted in a giallo.

Plus, you get to see what a  (presumably)  cow's eye looks like when it's cut open. And, as a bonus, you can see what it would look like if a cardboard cut-out of a man was thrown from the top of the Eiffel Tower. And if that doesn't make you want to rush out and buy the film, then don't rush out and buy the film.