One of those films which exists somewhere in the margins of the farthest reaches of the filone, Hotel Fear was Francesco Barilli's follow-up to The Perfume of the Woman in Black. It shares many characteristics with that film, not least the fact that it's barely a giallo. But it sort of is, kind of, so here we go.

Fifteen year old Rosa and her mother run a rural hotel as the Second World War enters its dying days. They are barely able to source enough provisions to feed their meagre roster of guests, who are a motley crew of perverts, whores, gigolos and lunatics. When her mother is found dead in suspicious circumstances, Rosa, who spends her days resisting various hotel guest propositions and waiting for her father to return from war, takes charge of the hotel. After some gangster action, a harrowing rape and a lot of gratuitous nudity involving the aptly-named Eleonora Fani, a black-gloved killer finally shows up (for about ten seconds) and we have ourselves a bit of a giallo. Normal service then resumes as Rosa continues to be menaced by her guests and haunted by her past. Will Papa ever come back to pluck her from this purgatory?

Well, that all depends on what version of the film you're watching... More on that anon. First up, as a giallo this film doesn't cut the mustard - there is a very brief black-gloved murder sequence after 71 minutes, and there is kind of a mystery as to who the killer is, but this is definitely one of those films which wouldn't even come into the generic conversation if it wasn't an Italian co-production. Having said that, some of the secondary characteristics (albeit those ones which were far from the sole preserve of the giallo) are alive and well: the off-kilter atmosphere, the vibrant cinematography, the terrific score, to name but a few. 

Giallo plots were often either constructed around a foreign/displaced protagonist, or located in a foreign (aka exotic) location. This would partly have been down to mindless copycatting of the formula of early successes such as The Girl Who Knew too Much and The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, but I think something else was at play too; specifically, the fact that involving a 'foreign' element grants more leeway in terms of narrative plausibility. If a film is set in a country or city with which you as a viewer (or you as a filmmaker) is not familiar, you're far more likely to ignore absurdities, or to write them off in a 'I guess the police don't get involved as much over there' kind of way. Similarly, introducing a foreign character to a familiar locale gives the filmmakers an excuse for avoiding the police procedural route - the foreigner might feel uncomfortable inviting police attention onto themselves (justifiably so, given the 'We're gonna hold onto your passport' turn to which such attention often leads), or they may just be ignorant of the judicial processes. Bird, and many other gialli, cleverly forces the protagonist to conduct a parallel investigation to that of the police, as he is their main suspect who must work to prove his innocence. All of these distancing methods allow the viewers to set aside/excuse narrative shortcomings.

This film plumps for one of the lesser-utilised distancing methods: time. By setting the film during WW2, specifically its final days when the Italian resistance was crumbling, we don't question why the police don't get involved at any point - they  likely had far bigger fish to fry! Even if the film hadn't been set at that specific point in time, a generic period setting buys plenty of leeway - sure didn't people in the past do things all differently?! But the specific setting is important in this instance, as it's one of a very few gialli (or giallo-adjacent films) which directly incorporate and acknowledge WW2, the scars of which would have still been fresh on the Italian psyche at the time of Hotel Fear's production. I've written before about the shift in killers' motivations from money/greed to insanity as a result of buried trauma, and suggested that this was indicative of a younger generation beginning to come to terms with the effect the war had had on Italian society. The directors who were at the forefront of the 1970s boom were too young to have played an active part in the war, so any connections they had to it would have come from parents, uncles, older brothers etc. And so, the family traumas which motivate their killers likely had parallels in real life, as these predominantly left-wing intellectuals had to reconcile the fact that their relatives propped up a fascistic regime in the very recent past. 

Rosa (or Julia if you're Spanish, more on that anon) is haunted by the war even as it plays out around her, as she scans the sky day after day in a futile search for her father's plane. What life she can live after the film will forever be in the shadow of the war, which has changed everything irrevocably, and tragically. Similarly, those Italians who grew up to parents who lived through fascism are also necessarily tainted by the communal experience of the war, something with which Italy is in many ways still reckoning today. The war is also rendered here in more specific, less allegorical terms. The haunting air raid sequence, which is based entirely around creative lighting and sound design, reminds us of the backdrop against which the film's action is taking place, which also partly explains the characters' extreme eccentricities - there's very much an End of Days feeling. The film also makes a none-too-subtle point about church hypocrisy, and Luc Merenda's ageing girlfriend can be seen as a nod to the 'old exploiting the young', linking into the general theme of War, where old men wearing medals send younger folk to their doom. (Saying that, Merenda's character is equally despicable, possibly suggesting the amorality of youth.)

And now, finally, we arrive at Anon. If you watched this film in Spain (under the classy title of 'The Rape of Ms Julia') you would have seen [SPOILERS] a friend of Rosa's (/Julia's) father magically appear to massacre her tormentors and murder her father, who is in hiding in the hotel after betraying his army unit to the enemy. If you watched the Italian version, the man in hiding is not her father but her mother's lover. The betrayal remains, but this time Rosa's father is one of those who died as a result. The murder of the lover character is heartily endorsed by Rosa, who screams at the soldier to kill the traitor after she discovers what he did and what happened to her father as a consequence. By contrast, Julia, as Rosa is named in the Spanish version, begs for mercy on behalf of her father, only for her pleas to fall on deaf ears. According to Roberto Curti, the Spanish version actually syncs up better with the actors' lip movements, so it's possible that this was closer to Barilli's intentions (though he did not write the original script), but I feel the Italian version works slightly better overall. In each instance the teenage girl is irrevocably traumatised by what she's witnessed (and what she herself has done), but whereas the Spanish version saddles her with the knowledge that her father was a treacherous coward, the Italian version sees her retreat into a kind of fugue state, wherein she denies the truth of his death and vows to keep searching the skies for any sign of him. Both versions acknowledge the permanency of wartime traumas, but the Italian version renders the effects more hauntingly.

Speaking of haunting, I can't finish without commending Barilli's effective use of shadows and dream imagery to create an undeniably haunting atmosphere. His work (ie his two borderline gialli, which are the only films he directed) contains sequences which play like dreams, but which are actually taking place within the diegetic space of the film. In particular, he seems to be able to portray the power which mob mentality can exert over a group of people (something which, again, resonates strongly with the WW2 theme). He renders this by transforming them into mindless ghouls who operate with a single-minded purpose, yet are devoid of a mind in any recognisable sense. His work is haunted by the ghosts of memory and shared trauma, and it's a damn shame that he didn't get an opportunity to direct any more feature films. But it's also great that he was able to make films at all, and if you ever wanted to see a film which combined The Perfume of the Lady in Black with the evocative rural atmosphere of Pupi Avati's best work, scored by a copyright friendly version of Bernard Hermann's score to Psycho, then this is the film for you.

Blind pianist Peter Oliver overhears snatches of a conversation in a nightclub which suggest that someone is being blackmailed into doing some Pretty Bad Shit. As luck would have it, out of all of the hundreds of thousands of people in Copenhagen, the blackmailee happens to murder Peter's girlfriend, a model called Paola. She had been involved in a blackmail scheme of her own, roping in her photographer cousin to snap pics of her in bed with her boss's partner, and, as luck would have it, said cousin is murdered whilst both Peter and the fuzz are en route to interview him. More victims follow, some of whom are gifted a white/yellow shawl and a wicker basket containing a mysterious object before dying of apparent heart attacks, others of whom are bumped off by a black-gloved killer in more traditional style. Will Peter and the po-po, who pool their resources (not that the police bring much to that particular pool table) be able to uncover the identity of the mastermind behind the mayhem before it's too late? Well, yes and no, really - they will, obviously, unmask the killer, but not before pretty much everyone else has been obliterated.

Also known as 'Seven Shawls of Yellow Silk' in its native Italian (which is less of a spoilery title), this film was made at the height of the giallo boom, and arguably marks the moment when the filone's characteristics really became formalised. Liberally borrowing from Bava and, especially, Argento's classics, Sergio Pastore has created a film which functions as a sort of  greatest hits compilation (albeit a compilation of supermarket-style cover versions) until an abrupt left turn treats us to a finale featuring one of the grisliest set-pieces that's ever been filmed.

I could list the numerous references to Bav and Daz, so I will: fashion house setting (B&BL), blind protagonist (Co9T), musician protagonist (4FoGV) bird sounds on a telephone call pinpointing a location (BwtCP), animal shoehorned into plot/title (all Argento), amateur sleuth who's driven to investigate regardless of the personal toll it exacts (all Argento). Another device which is stolen/borrowed/homaged is the creation of an alibi which seemingly proves the killer's innocence (B&BL). In Bava's film the main killer manufactures a situation whereby they have an ironclad alibi, provided by the police no less, as they're in custody when a murder is committed. Here we swim in slightly muddier waters, with arguably four killers - the blackmailer, who masterminds everything; the blackmailee, who is coerced into transporting the mysterious basket to the site of a couple of the murders; the object in the basket, which commits a couple of the murders; and the blackmailing mastermind's guardian angel, who acts slightly irrationally to protect the blackmailer (/to make us think they're the mastermind and thus set us up for a shocking last second twist). The mastermind actually provides a false alibi for someone which tricks us into cleverly deducing that they're potentially lying in order to hide that someone's guilt, whereas actually they're planting an alibi to mask their own guilt. This is a neat device, which is unfortunately rendered less effective by the multiple murderers (and murdering things in baskets) knocking around, which essentially renders any and all alibis worthless.

The murder device at the heart of the film, which is alluded to by both the English and Italian titles, is among the most ludicrous of the filone. After gifting each victim a yellowy-white shawl, the blackmailee then places a basket containing a cat (yes, that's what's in the box) somewhere nearby. The shawl is dipped in a chemical which attracts (/angers) the cat, and the cat's claws are dipped in curare, a fast-acting paralytic agent which can sometimes lead to death by suffocation or cardiac arrest. The many moving parts of this murder method always manage to line up, but, given the blackmailer isn't above doing their own dirty work by just knifing people to death, employing the cat-poison method is ultimately ludicrously over-engineered. However, a) as stated, there is a bit of a fun-with-alibis vibe at play, which wouldn't be possible if the mastermind was running around knifing everyone themselves, and b) if you wanted realistic and practical murder plots you wouldn't be watching gialli.*

The setting of Copenhagen (and a bit of Germany) is certainly novel, with some decent travelogue footage padding out the Italian-shot interiors. Sergio Pastore's direction is solid, if never coming close to the then-recent heights of Bava and Argento, or even Fulci or Martino. There's an interesting mixture of lengthy, zoom- and rack focus-heavy takes and chaotic, fast-paced sequences which were shot with a more-is-more approach to filming, with lighting, framing and general precision taking a back seat as Pastore, his camerman and the editor cram in as many different angles and takes as possible. He tries to sell the Big Reveal moments - the discovery of corpses etc - by repeating shots (crash zooms) several times, or combining takes (crash zooms) from similar but slightly different angles, as the chaos reaches a(n apparent) thematic and stylistic crescendo. But then, just as you think you've sat through a breezy, fun Argento clone, Pastore throws in one of the most gruesome murder scenes ever filmed.

This scene - the slashing of a showering lady, was filmed only 12 years after Psycho, but it's an unbelievable progression in terms of gore. There's actually a foreshadowing scene in the film - a brief, intense array of close ups of a stabbing which are revealed to be from a scene in a film-within-the-film for which Peter's providing a score. These shots are brutal and graphic, but devoid of context they function as little more than an especially intense scene transition; there's an undeniable sense that what we're witnessing isn't 'real', even within the world of the film. On the contrary, the climactic shower slashing is extremely 'real', and depicts the slaughter of an extremely sympathetic character, who is essentially an unwitting casualty of Peter's obsessive pursuit of the killer. This context, allied to the frenzied editing and general energy of the bloodletting shots, produces an incredibly powerful sequence which is all the more shocking for coming at the tail end of this curare's egg (not a typo; the poison is called 'curare' remember, so it's a clever pun) of a film: it's not top tier, but there are few more gialloey gialli in existence.

*On the other hand, c) there seem to be only 2 murders planned initially, one of which is a cat-in-a-basket kill and one of which is a knifey job committed by the mastermind, who doesn't actually have an alibi for the cat kill, so why didn't they just do both murders themselves and d) it seems unnecessarily risky to involve a blackmailed drug addict in your zany scheme.

A hustling book salesman calls to an aristocratic mansion hoping to sell an encyclopaedia which includes a passage on the family who own the house. After unwittingly walking into a wake, the patriarch of the family having just died, he's persuaded to stay for the festivities by the deceased's lovelorn virginal daughter. And so, bookseller Dante walks into the low-level inferno of the Castle Zanotti, just as a killer starts to imaginatively slash their way through the eccentric family of serial masturbators, sexy nurses, face-blind matriarchs and that little chap from Zeder and The House with Laughing Windows. The clue to unlocking the mystery apparently lies in an old poem which was printed in the encyclopaedia, except it doesn't since the mystery doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.

If the above sounds to you like the set up for some sort of giallo parody crossed with one of those Italian sex 'comedy' films, prepare to be disappointed. As with all the Pupi Avati films I've seen, sex and sexuality are firmly of the repressed variety, both in terms of the characters and the film itself. It's also not really a parody as, other than black gloves and a sinister(ish) whisper, precious few giallo tropes are on display. The private investigator, who shows up after half an hour and comfortably beats off (engaging in some film-level humour there) the others to take the title of Most Unfunny Character, could have opened up the possibility of throwing a Poirot-type character into the mix, but as far as I could tell he's just a straightforward comic character, with no parodic or satirical bent (I say 'as far as I could tell' because there's one early dialogue exchange which is clearly referencing contemporary Italian politics, but it doesn't seem like that's a running theme). 

To try and make some hay out of the limp straw men characters, the film does seem to be in line with other Italian comedies of the era in depicting a kind of crisis of masculinity. I say 'masculinity', the 'joke' seems to be that not all men are cocksure and virile, ie masculine. It's difficult to know whether the films are exploring fears on the part of the makers that they themselves (presumably males of a somewhat artistic bent) might not be paragons of manhood, or whether they're just poking fun at a type of man whom they consider to be flawed and inferior. One possible explanation for the weak male characters is that Italian comedies tended to depict strong, sexualised female characters, and so an 'opposite' is required to set things up for some lulz. 

We get that exact situation here, with Carlo Delle Piane's ugly-Peter Sellers salesman chump proving inexplicably attractive to undersexed Francesca Marciano (although, this being an Avati film, the set-up isn't - as it typically would be - used as an excuse for lots of gratuitous nudity). It's not just Delle Piano either - the family's sons are rendered as 'weak'; one physically the other mentally (and morally [he's the literal wanker]), and the detective character is a self-described "cuckold", proving to be beyond useless at his job. The only real 'masculine' character in the much younger husband of the family's matriarch, something of an American horseman, but he's also shown to be something of a fool, being entirely ineffective throughout. That may suggest a judgement being passed on the male of the species (that they're all impotent in varying ways, and inferior to women)*, or else it might just be a load of unfunny blokes trying to throw a comedy film together.

There are a few decent moments-the killer's rictus grin at the end, as they advance slowly towards the camera is effective (though hardly an original image), and there are some excellently-photographed scenes of lone characters stalking around Castle Zanotti. There's even one moment which I initially thought was a brilliant attempt at audience manipulation-Bob Tonelli, the physically challenged character, slips on a pair of black gloves as he's about to depart a room. The framing is such that the gloves barely enter the shot, and the audience - who should still pick up the gloves' presence - seems to be dared to think that they've noticed a visual clue to the murderer's identity which the filmmakers were attempting to surreptitiously smuggle into the film by some clever framing, but which the audience has spotted through brilliant attentiveness. The very next shot depicts Bob walking down the driveway of the house sans gloves - is this a continuity error, or are the filmmakers doubling down on their ploy? Will he spend the rest of the film lurking in the background, out of focus or turned away from the camera, giving occasional glimpses of gloves and weapons which escape the ordinary viewer's notice, but which the superior, super-observant viewer, picks up on? As it turns out he won't, so it likely was just poor framing followed by a continuity error.

"Every time someone expects something from me, I always try to do the opposite," says Avati in the special features on 88 Films. This is very  applicable to this film, given that he made it after the excellent House with Laughing Windows - presumably people expected him to make another good film.**

*Given the 'solution' to the 'mystery', one could also argue that a comment is being made on the influence/power of the older generation, or even one's ancestors, with 'modern' man paling in comparison, but that would be a stretched argument.

**Ah, it's not that bad really, although it is very unfunny and is only of value to those of us who drink down any and all Kool Aid which was brewed by 1970s Italian genre cinema.

The House with Laughing Windows (or, as I call it, 'The House with Smiling Lips Painted on a Few of its Windows') is one of my all-time favourite gialli. It mightn't be to everyone's taste; it's quite leisurely-paced - deliberately so, to allow a certain atmosphere to pervade the film - contains very little in the way of gore, and has pretty much no nudity (technically there's a bit towards the end, but you'd want to be in a pretty desperate way to make anything of it). What it does have is the aforementioned atmosphere, which had become something of a hallmark of countryside-set gialli; a genuinely brilliant narrative; and masterful direction from Pupi Avati.

Avati, in contrast to other directors of his generation, has managed to remain active in the film industry, with only occasional forays into the world of television. He also has largely steered clear of exploitation/filone projects, the majority of his films being comedy-dramas with a bit of arthouse work thrown in. Still, this film, and Zeder, from the early 80s (a sort of zombie film companion piece to this one, which has a similar pace and setting) are his most enduring works, with each proving Avati to be a director capable of crafting images which once seen are never forgotten. In fact, one particular moment in Zeder comes damn close to the corridor scene in Exorcist III for the title of My Favourite Moment in Horror Films. Laughing Windows centres around the restoration of a crafted image - a painting - which, while possessing a relatively creepy quality, is actually quite poor on a technical level (this regularly happens in films, but understandably so, since film budgets typically wouldn't stretch to hiring great artists to create original works).

Stefano, played by James McAvoy under the pseudonym 'Lino Capolicchio', is hired by  a small (in every sense) businessman/gangster called Solmi  to restore a fading painting. The work, painted in a church by Buono Legnani, a semi-famous artist who self-immolated twenty years previously, forms one of the four cornerstones of Solmi's plan to regenerate his sleepy village - women, thermal waters and silence being the other 'selling points'. The restoration of the painting uncovers some unexpected details in Legnani's artwork. This process is mirrored by Stefano's delving into the artist's past, inspired by the research of his friend Antonio, who uncovered something shocking about Legnani before also apparently committing suicide. Having sought companionship in the arms of a local teacher (literally any teacher will do, apparently), Stefano pursues his investigation even as he's faced with the dawning realisation that the dark secret he's gradually uncovering isn't confined to the past; it's affecting, and infecting, the present.

The narrative of this film, while not overly complex, is pleasingly layered - the mystery of the painting is paralleled by the mystery of the past, with both intertwining to create the mystery of the present which is occupying Stefano. The suicide of Antonio (the apparent suicide) in some ways is the catalyst for the action, in that Stefano is inspired to continue his in-progress investigation into Legnani. (Curiously, despite clearly seeing a moving shadow in the bedroom from which Antonio falls, Stefano doesn't seem to twig that there was almost certainly a killer in the house until the next day.) However, the suicide-murder is swiftly forgotten as Stefano's investigations, and subsequent obsessions, gather momentum.

For all that there are several areas in which this film doesn't follow traditional giallo lines, several tropes are present and correct. The soundtrack is great, the protagonist is along the standard young-male-travelling-to-a-new-place lines, and the threatening phone calls he receives from almost the moment he arrives in town could almost come straight from an Argento film. (The voice making the calls, although speaking in a weird strained whisper, is unmistakably female; this initially feels like a potentially unintentional leaking of a future twist, but actually turns out to be a deliberate directorial choice.)

The spectre of World War 2 hangs heavy over events as well, which is not unheard of in other gialli, which interrogate Italy's past either directly (Plot of Fear, Watch Me When I Kill), or in a more allusive sense, with many examples of killers being driven by a deeply traumatic event in their past. The village, which has to import its teachers as the young residents leave at the first opportunity, is dominated by old people who seem to be collectively repressing some sort of trauma. The War is explicitly referenced several times, but the behaviour of Legnani and his sisters also hangs heavy, directly influencing the state of mind of one resident who stalks about in a daze wearing widow's clothing as she laments the death of her former lover. Coppola, the town drunk (and isn't alcohol a great way to forget?) discloses some of the crucial pieces of the puzzle to Stefano - in common with many alcoholics, his will can waver, and he's not capable of practising repression with the same rigour as some of the other townsfolk.

There's a sense that everyone has secrets, even Stefano - he openly lies to Francesca, the second teacher he beds, denying that he also romanced her predecessor. Francesca is a character on whom it's difficult to get a clear handle; you expect her to be a typical damsel-doomed-to-end-in-distress, and she almost is, but there are hints at (to be charitable) a deep quirkiness - she calmly shows Stefano her fridge infested with live snails, and she then lets herself into his house and listens to a recording of Legnani ranting for (she claims) two hours before his return. This is another example of attention to detail on the part of Avati and his co-writers - Francesca isn't a beacon of purity in a putrid swamp, rather she contains hidden (and dark) depths, as, ultimately, does everyone.

There's a sense that Stefano's story is being written for him, and not just in a literal, film-script way - he seems to be an unwitting participant in a macabre ritual which has been meticulously planned and guided by unseen hands (the last shot of the film is almost a literal evocation of this)*. Avati shows himself to be incredibly skilled at building an atmosphere of dread and unease, combining stark imagery and tight, taut framing (and occasional zooms to suggest a tightening of a metaphorical noose around Stefano). He frames the first sex scene from a distance, to emphasise the lack of real connection between Stefano and the first teacher, with the second such scene shot with a much more tender hand to suggest the possibility of a connection with Francesca. However, Stefano has lied to her about his relationship with her predecessor, and she's a snail-loving, sit-in-the-dark-listening-to-a-madman-ranting weirdo, and we can't quite escape the undercurrent of deceit and repression even when the film's at its tenderest.

And now we come to the finale (both of the review and the film). After another classic giallo trope (the crime scene which bears no trace of its former post-murder state when the protagonist returns with the authorities) things spiral into all kinds of weirdness, with the visual and aural landscape shifting to evoke a kind of waking nightmare. Legnani's sisters, who have been much discussed throughout the film, are [SPOILERS] revealed to be still alive and well, one of them being Stefano's own landlady. This is something which won't come as a shock to most viewers, given her age profile and the fact that Stefano regularly hears footsteps coming from her room despite her insistence that she's been confined to a bed for years (which does pose questions as to how she coped with the director's first name). But this, similar to the female voice making the threatening phone calls, is a kind of double-bluff, in that Avati lets us think ourselves clever and ahead of the game, before blindsiding us with a second, deeper reveal. On the off-chance that someone who hasn't yet had the pleasure of seeing the film has ignored the SPOILERS warning and is still reading this far I won't reveal the final twist, but it's one of the most brilliant moments in all gialli. A slight quibble would be that the dubbing doesn't quite work, as a certain cackling, overly-enunciating voice doesn't match some very restrained lip movements (it seems odd to be criticising dubbing in a giallo, but more attention to detail here would help sell the moment that much more). It doesn't really matter, though, as in the end sure aren't we all mendacious, lonely weirdos being unwittingly guided towards our ultimate end by the malevolent hand of Fate?**

*The Wicker Man would likely have been an influence, as would Don't Look Now (the artist coming to a strange place to restore a painting) and possibly even All the Colours of the Dark (Legnani rants about colours a lot in the recordings of his voice, but there's also a similar sense of his fate being guided/manipulated.) 

**This is another review which was written at the height of the Covid pandemic

Crazy Desires of a Murderer (or Morbid Vices of a Housemaid, to give it its Italian title, or Faceless Characters in a Dark Hallway, to give it my title) was made several years after the giallo boom peaked, and it's sort of one of those gialli which attempted to cross-pollinate with another genre, in this case crime/gangster films. I say 'sort of' because this is one of the worst examples of genre bending you'll ever see - the gangster and drug dealing element could not seem more shoehorned in if the bags of heroin were literally wedged somewhere using a shoehorn. Tying it all together (both in narrative and investigative terms) is an eccentric inspector who seems to have been modelled on Hercule Poirot, although what the egg-headed Belgian would have made of the bizarre goings on here is anyone's guess (he'd probably have cottoned on to several obvious clues a bit quicker than his facsimile though).

Returning to visit her wheelchair-bound father in his town/country villa/castle (I'd wager that a couple of very different locations were used for said building) Ileana brings a mixture of old and new friends to stay for a weekend of semi-debauchery. After one of the friends is murdered, and her eyes plucked out, an idiosyncratic inspector shows up to investigate. Is the murderer one of Ileana's friends, a mixture of drug smugglers and bed-hoppers? Or is it the butler (Hugh Denis), the doctor (Robin Williams), Ileana's mute brother who has a fondness for embalming animals and removing their eyeballs (Julian Casablancas) or the maid (she doesn't really look like anyone famous)?

In giallo terms, this is a classic set up of 'rich people gather for a jolly good party somewhere and then someone gets murdered'. In this instance the murders don't pile up (at all) - the film isn't overly short (88 mins) but Filippo Walter Ratti struggles to keep on too of all the 'action'. The group of friends disappear for pretty much the entire final third of the film, and the drug smuggling subplot never really intersects with the main storyline at all, at least until Inspector Poirot casually mentions it during the dénoument (which takes place in a courtyard rather than a Poirovian drawing room). Much of the film adopts a 'don't show, don't tell' policy, with fairly oblique plotting, leaving the viewer to plot their own through line to try and figure out what's going on. This interactive element is something I often enjoy in a film, but here it seems to be necessitated by accidental incompetence rather than deliberately elliptical or obfuscatory storytelling.

Corrado Gaipa's inspector is modelled on Poirot to the extent that his repeated insistence that the various characters gathered in the villa/castle have something to hide is taken almost verbatim from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. His eccentricities are likely modelled on Poirot's as well, although if the latter listened in to two people arguing about something which sounds a lot like a missing load of drugs, he probably wouldn't have allowed one of them to pop out to the graveyard in the garden and then drive off into the night unobserved, particularly if he had a police force at his beck and call (to be fair, calling in help from the wider police force tends not to be a feature of detective-led gialli, probably because having a load of cops chipping in would lead to the killer being caught in a quicker but more boring manner [or, in the case of The Three Sisters, because I couldn't afford to pay any other actors to be policemen]).

One device used by Ratti which is worth briefly examining is a recurring shot of an eye looking through a keyhole during an interrogation scene (which, to give the film its dues, is fairly creatively done, especially for 1977, with the various characters' questioning edited seamlessly together to create one long showcase of/introduction to the zany inspector). The shot is repeated once more towards the end of the film as well. The eye depicted is unquestionably a female one (unless one of the male characters likes dressing up in drag and wearing fake eyebrows when in their 'regular' guise), and the sting which plays on the soundtrack every time (EVERY time) the shot repeats during the interrogation scene is clearly meant to sound ominous, suggesting that the killer is watching proceedings. However, all we're really seeing is somebody watching other people, and there's no real reason to suppose that the voyeur is the killer. In fact if the eye is observing all that is shown between the repeated shots of it, there's no way that the person watching actually is the killer. We never find out who it is, and we may indeed be meant to take the eye to be the killer's, but a) it's not the killer's eye, and b) it's  impossible to watch yourself be interrogated through a doorway. Despite this likely being another example of lazy/incompetent filmmaking, one could also make a case of it being a prime example of how aural and visual cues can encourage the viewer to infer something which is actually never directly implied.

Speaking of aural cues, the (opening and closing) credits play out over the most pathetic dirge imaginable, but fortunately most of the actual film is accompanied by decent choonage. The direction is solid in terms of shot selection, but, as suggested by my alt. title, there are an awful lot of shots in which characters' faces are obscured. This isn't necessarily the director's fault, though, as the plot, and the guilty secrets harboured by most of the characters, necessitate a lot of creeping about in the dark. The problem is that it just isn't overly engaging after a while to watch a lot of creatively framed people sneaking about the place at night. The first murder scene is a bit of a showstopper - it contains some Fulci-esque full-on eyeball fun, as well as a close-up of the knife going into a pair of prosthetic tits (which look a bit fake, but in this case that's necessary in order to make them look real [ie the actress has fake tits I think]). It's not an especially showstopping scene overall, at it just involves someone creeping up on a sleeping lady and mutilating her, but the make-up effects are of a standard that further onscreen carnage would have been welcomed (the efforts of that department appear to have mainly been directed towards making animal replicas; at least, I hope they were replicas). All in all, then, this is not a Great Giallo. The Inspector is moderately diverting, some of the locations and effects are nice, and there's a quite nice scene where the maid stands in front of the mirror wearing just a collar. But overall, it's a somewhat less-than-nice entry into the filone.

IF YOU are in a wheelchair, why are you (and several other characters in Italian films-I'm looking at you, Baron Blood) living in a gaff with a load of stairs?

Titled and marketed as a direct sequel to Nothing Underneath in Italy, this film has nothing to do with Carlo Vanzina's film beyond being set in the fashion world, and being terribly, terribly 80s. Is it terribly, terribly bad though?

Sylvia O'Neal is an up-and-coming model in Milan. Her agency boss, Alex, also pimps on the side, and he reluctantly agrees to set Sylvia up with a rich old sleazy dude. The only problem is that he forgot to tell Sylvia about the arrangement, so when the old guy rocks up to a post-shoot hot tub session in Alex's house, her fellow models have to (/choose to) restrain her to allow him to have sex with her. Sylvia flees the house, taking Alex's car, which is later found crashed and burned out, housing an unidentifiable corpse. Using some far-fetched computer wizardry, the police ascertain that the corpse was shot in the head before the crash was staged, suggesting that Sylvia (if the corpse is indeed hers) was murdered. And speaking of murder, someone is doing just that to everyone who was involved in the hot tub rape. Could it be Melanie*, the mysterious American who might know more about Sylvia than she's letting on? Could it be music video director David, who owns some of those transparent, inflatable chairs? Or could it be Sylvia herself, back from the grave to enact her vengeance?

That's actually a tricky question to answer, in a way. In another way, (SPOILERS), it's very easy to answer: the killer is David. However, the fact that Sylvia's body is never formally identified might lead the seasoned giallo aficionado to suspect that she may rear her pretty head at some stage in proceedings. Intending to incorporate this 'twist' would also explain the paucity of suspects, which, once we discount those involved in the rape (and it's easy to do that, as they're mostly dispatched fairly quickly) numbers all of two people, the music video director who was returning from America on the night in question, and the American starlet who arrives in Milan right after the night in question. Suspicion is diverted slightly more towards Melanie, the starlet (she seems to recognise Sylvia's voice on an answerphone message, which is subsequently played to taunt those involved in the murder, and she actually turns out to be the 'dead' girl's sister), which makes David's unveiling as the actual killer somewhat (and I'm being generous there) surprising.

What would be slightly (again, being generous) more surprising would be Syliva ultimately being the killer, which seems to have been the original intention-storyboards of an alternative ending exist which seem to depict her being interrupted just as she's about to kill the last of those responsible for her assault. This would make sense narratively if an explanation could be proffered as to who the shot-and-burned corpse was, which sounds like something easily done, but the details would be quite important-if it was an innocent party who was killed simply for a bait-and-switch, Sylvia becomes a much less sympathetic character. Or, have I got this all wrong, and misindentified the characters in the storyboard sketches-is the detail about the body being difficult to identify a clever double bluff, designed to trick the complacent among us into thinking that we have the film's number, only for it to shock us by revealing that we've overthought things, and the killer is actually one of the obvious suspects? (END SPOILERS)

As was common at the time, there's a serious whack of music video throughout proceedings here. Not alone is there the literal music video (at least, I think that's what it is) which continues to be in production for a bizarrely long time considering the number of deaths among those involved, but pop songs dominate the soundtrack, accompanied by regular glossy, slow motion montages. Whereas the soundtracks of the 1970s gialli often seemed to drive the action on the screen, in films such as this (and Murder Rock, for example) the action grinds to a halt for the musical numbers. There is a score which pops up from time to time as well - I was going to refer to it as an 'original score', but Bernard Herrmann might have something to say about that (if he wasn't dead, poor chap) - and those of you who love synth drones (of whom I'm one) won't go home disappointed, so it's not just wall-to-wall pop. And, to be fair, the calibre of pop act is fairly impressive here (Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Huey Lewis etc).

The expensive soundtrack is almost another stick with which to beat the film, however - there was clearly a bit of money behind this film, in contrast to the straitened circumstances in which many of the great genre directors found themselves in the late 80s - and Dario Piana hasn't made the most of it. There are solid technical credits - the roving steadicam is impressive, if overused, and the slomo is nice-looking, if extremely overused (check out the sequence of the two girls making a bed). There's none of the credulity-defying psychic carry on from Nothing Underneath, although we do get some interesting takes on the functionality of computers - the forensic analysis which discovers the bullet hole in the corpse in the car would have been pure sci-fi in the late 80s, while the porno game (titled 'Porno Game' which Alex plays was actually quite a canny anticpiator of things to come, if some ads I've seen online are to be believed. Overall it's not a terrible film, but it's certainly not a shining example of the filone, much like the majority of 80s gialli. It is, in some ways (and bear with me here), analagous to the ridiculous stalking sequence wherein two cops trail Alex by driving right behind him as he walks to a café, before giving them the slip through the back door. There's a bit of money behind it (cop car with a working radio), and it looks nice (the sequence looks nice - that one's not really an analogy), but ultimately it's a bit too lunking and lacking in imagination (obviously he's going to escape via the back door, you stupid coppers) to really capture our hearts and minds (/Alex). 

I'll let myself out.

*Judging from this and the contemporaneous Faceless, Florence Guerin was very prone to being picked up in nightclubs

This features a surprisingly strong cast for an Alfonso Brescia production, although - reassuringly - the familiar shortcomings are there (just keep an eye on the day/night continuity in the final scene). It's likely that he could only afford the cast (Celi and Leroy especially) by shooting at breakneck speed so as to stretch every lira as far as it could go. It's ironic, therefore, that the film trundles along at whatever the opposite of breakneck speed is, until finally a neck is broken - or at least stabbed - on the 55 minute mark, leading to things picking up somewhat.

After a prologue featuring a WW2 Nazi planting a bomb in a room with a woman and child, an old man with a German name in 'present day' Spain turns up dead just after taking out a million dollar life insurance policy. Not only does he turn up dead, he turns up dead after taking a ghost train ride at a fairground whilst carrying a bag of cash, which has, of course, disappeared. Hotshot insurance investigator Robert Hoffmann is given instructions to find a reason not to pay out on the policy, and he immediately gets to work seducing one of the deceased Nazi's (come on-you'd worked that out, right?) daughters and inveigling an invite to their country pad. There follows dalliances with another daughter, as well as mild flirting with a widow, before things finally get going when said second daughter is killed and left naked in... her front garden.

Even though this is a fairly slow moving film, it actually contains one of the higher villain quotients - there are a huge amount of killers and plotters and stalkers, and as such the film plays like one of Edgar Wallace's less inspired stories. At the same time, the first daughter, Catherine, does get to show some dramatic chops as a character struggling with grief, even if some of the situations which bring on her bouts of sadness are fairly preposterous (why go to the fairground where your dad was murdered on a first date?). 

Brescia is no-one's idea of a top of the range director, but he does make moderately impressive use of the locations here - he clearly had an in with the fairground owners, and the country pile where much of the film takes place is fairly swish, as is, for that matter, the HQ of the insurance company (which may well have been a room in said pile). A couple of nighttime stalking sequences are well done, as is (if you overlook the continuity issues and its first couple of minutes) the fairground climax. There's even a hint of ingenuity and originality in a repeated device whereby characters' faces are deliberately obscured within the frame - obviously this wasn't the first time such a technique had been used in a film, but he employs it in a manner which acts as a précis of the film, ie that it's a murder mystery which presents a series of characters, whose shady motives we have to parse to find an ultimate guilty party.

I should say 'guilty parties', for as noted there are a lot of unscrupulous and murderous folk in the mix here. As such, it's impossible to fully guess what's going on, with most of the murders being committed by a character with no connection to the main narrative 'plot', which leaves us with a bizarre situation whereby those killings actually function as red herrings of sorts. The 'plot' in question is a revenge scheme deriving from the events depicted in the film's black and white (and mismatched stock footage-heavy) prologue. It's one of several gialli which feature Nazi characters (The Bloodstained Shadow and Plot of Fear to name two others), which, along with the then-burgeoning Nazisploitation genre, suggests an attempt by the children of fascists to come to terms with (and monetise) the sins of their fathers, albeit by transplanting the locus of fascism across axis borders to Germany.

Speaking of sins of fathers, Austrian actor Robert Hoffmann's character Chris is possibly the least sympathetic giallo 'hero' ever - he's an 'amateur' sleuth in that he's not a policeman, but his motivation to solve the case is derived from his job as an insurance adjuster. He shags his girlfriend's sister and snogs her mother when she's battling some pretty heavy mental health issues (as well as being stalked by Leiland Palmer off Twin Peaks), and he's also a peeping tom (although this trait was likely included merely to justify the depiction of a tryst between two marginal characters). And that's not even the half of it...

The film does pick up steam towards the end, and overall isn't a terrible watch (although if, like me, you watch it on the Full Moon Blu then be prepared to do some serious aural straining). The narrative contains so many little twists and shimmies towards the end that it can't really resolve itself in an overly-satisfactory manner, and the lack of screen time afforded the better actors (which is, as I noted, probably the most screen time that could be afforded) can be frustrating. It also contains quite a lot less sex than you're probably expecting, but on the other hand it contains a surprising amount of smashed glass, so swings and roundabouts.*

IF YOU are an insurance company, apparently you're not liable for a life insurance policy if [SPOILERS] you sell someone a policy and then murder them.

Also, IF YOU are an Italian driver in the 1970s, as neatly demonstrated in the tailing sequence here which was clearly shot among real traffic, road markings are, at best, a vague hint.

*I wrote this review during the Covid-19 lockdown,  and am posting it almost 3 years later, so I can't remember if that sign off makes sense, and refers archly to something about the film, or if it merely represents the blathering of a stir-crazed mind.

This  Spanish-Italian co-production takes its lead from the Umberto Lenzi-style inheritance gialli (and, therefore, Les Diaboliques), with the black-gloved, black-hatted and black-coated character accordingly being a blackmailer, not a murderer. 

Said blackmailer, Gert Mueller (whose identity is never obfuscated), drives to a small Spanish town to call on his ex-girlfriend, a former showgirl called Denise. His appeals for financial assistance are rejected out of hand, but he lands on a trump card when he discovers that Denise is having a secret affair with Peter, the twin of John, her husband. Gert attempts to turn this knowledge into cold hard cash via the medium of blackmail, only for the adulterous lovers to take advantage of the crisitunity, setting their own fiendish plot in motion  with the aim of turning John mental and getting their hands on his vast fortune.

I should add that the reason the lovers can't just kill off John is because he's cut them out of his will, presumably having suspected that something was afoot. The exact details of their plan are vague, in that the means by which they intend to take control of John's fortune are never fully specified (presumably they hoped to assume Power of Attorney with John being confined to either a mental hospital or prison). A much simpler plan would be to kill John, and to pass the corpse off as Peter, who would then pretend to be John (trust me, that is a lot simpler than what plays out on screen). Of course, Gert would still have to be taken care of, but as long as he doesn't find out that John's dead he wouldn't pose much of a threat, as his threats to reveal the affair to John  would be weightless, given John would be Peter (again, less confusing than the film). Even if Gert did find out the truth, he could just be murdered, and the body count would be no greater than what we end up with on screen.

But enough of what might have been (and I'll readily concede that the plot I've proffered above would make for a far more boring film). What is, is a fairly entertaining little number, which smacks of a few broad ideas which weren't quite developed sufficiently.  The set-up (a blackmailer gives an adulterous couple an opportunity to dispose of an unwanted husband/brother) is fine, but there are more than a few instances where  the lines joining the narrative dots are a little bit vague/unrealistic, which suggests to me that the script's first draft may have been rushed into production. When I'm writing, I tend to have a fairly tight handle on the overarching structure, and several key scenes/points, but the technicalities of getting from point A to point B are often something I gloss over initially, the idea being that it's better to complete a full first draft which can then be polished than to get tied up in minutiae and lose whatever passes for momentum in writing. Here, there's definitely a sense that the plot was constructed around a few key ideas, but the linking thread is extremely flimsy, and some pretty big liberties are taken with plausibility. 

In particular, there are two instances which defy logic, or at least push the boundaries of realism. These deux Deus Ex Machinas involve a Mission Impossible-style mask which is worn by two characters (having apparently survived fully intact after being ripped from the face of the first one to sport it), and a strange process of hypno-suggestion, whereby false memories seem to be implanted in one character's subconsciousness via an ESP  dialogue.

This latter process, which (and I don't think any readers will be shocked at this revelation) forms a crucial part of the scheming lovers' manipulation of John, is an especially confusing section of the film. John is kept heavily sedated - so far so good - and Peter seems to be able to communicate with him on an extrasensory, non-verbal plane (so far, less good). Somehow, he's able to convey the details of a series of things he's done whilst posing as his twin, so that John, when he comes out of his drug-induced haze, believes them to be his own memories. Other gialli (Nothing Underneath in particular) make dubious use of a supposed psychic link between twins, but there's no specific reference made here to the process by which Peter transfers the memories - it just seems to be a loose, undefined mix of drugs and twins.

*something about twin evils, drugs and greed?*

Even though John is the chief 'victim' here (apart from the people who die), he's not an overly sympathetic character, although his baffling eagerness to confess his alleged crimes to all and sundry (his doctor, the police, anyone willing to listen to him) is quirkily endearing. At least, it's endearing on one level, but on another, structural, level it's really just a narrative device to keep the film moving along - rather than the police taking time to track John down upon discovering evidence of a crime, which would be the usual practice, he speeds things up by presenting himself to them as a sacrificial lamb. There are other inconsistencies/lapses in logic, which again are designed to keep the film ticking along, and to buttress the atmosphere of mystery and confusion: why do the lights in the girl's apartment work perfectly all of a sudden? Why is the girl let go free? And why doesn't she take a leaf from John's book and go straight to the police when she is freed?

This is far from the only giallo which doesn't hold up to a close plot scrutiny, but it doesn't really hold up to any cursory examination whatsoever. The funny thing is that for the first hour or so there's no real mystery at play - we see the identity of the blackmailer from the off; we are aware of the affair right away; we know that the lovers are scheming to turn John insane and consequently take control of his money. It's just as well that the twists take a while in coming though, as keeping track of the John/Peter baiting and switching is challenge enough.

Overall, this isn't a classic, but it's a decent alternative to the sunnier Lenzi-type films which were coming out of Italy at the time. The acting is good, the music (rumoured to have been done by Morricone on the QT, but crdited to Franco Micalizzi) is solid (although there seems to be an attempt to imbue a recurring motif with hidden meaning which doesn't really work), and the cinematography is excellent. If you can overlook the occasional fudging of logic, and keep up with who's who and what's what, then there's much to enjoy here for fans of less murder-by-numbers gialli.