The late 1960s were certainly a time of plenty for anyone who was partial to zany gialli starring Jean Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin. Hot on the heels of the previous year's Deadly Sweet, this effort is similarly stylish, has similarly experimental editing, and has about the same amount of focus on the mystery aspect (which is to say, very, very little). 

Marco and Anna are on the down-slope of a marriage, with he apparently having a proclivity for secretly murdering prostitutes in a swanky hotel, with the cooperation of the staff. She's rich, and together they run a chicken farm on the edge of town, where they've recently sacked all their workers, replacing them with Technology. They live with Gabri, Anna's cousin, who is secretly having an affair with Marco. She's also pretending to spy on him for Anna, and also seems to be rather close to Mondaini, a hip young marketing guru who's been brought in by Big Chicken Inc. to design a new advertising campaign with Marco. Will Marco's predilection for murdering whores come back to haunt him? Will Anna find happiness by going undercover as one of his whores? Will Gabri's true intentions be revealed? And will those shots of chickens being killed and defeathered ever end?

Although this film has much in common stylistically with Deadly Sweet, there are marked differences on a thematic level. Deadly Sweet is a film about films, existing on a superficial-but extremely seductive and fun-level, whereas here Questi ladels on the political subtext. You could probably view this as nothing more than an eccentric arty film which anticipates the 'rich people sleeping around' trope which predominated in late 60s Lenzi-lensed gialli, but sets the action in a chicken farm as opposed to a scenic coastal location. However, that would involve ignoring a lot of the subtle, and not-so-subtle, political elements which Questi liberally sprinkles throughout the film. I should say at this point that arty films with a heavy political subtext aren't exactly my cup of tea generally, but I did find  Death Laid... extremely watchable, and the 104 minutes flew by much faster than I'd been anticipating (not because I watched it on fast forward; they actually went by in 104 minutes. I'm merely referring to my subjective experience of time, don't you know). Right, let's do some thematic diving!

The two main points that Questi is making, as far as I can make out, concern, broadly speaking, vegetarianism and socialism. It might be more correct to say that they are the two causes he's supporting. The sequence showing chickens being killed and cleaned goes on for an uncomfortably long time, which is, of course, entirely the point. Questi is showing us a tiny part of the process by which chicken arrives on our plates ready for consumption. He shows us apparatus which itself 'consumes' the chickens, allowing for their swift execution, and then lingers over the process by which the carcasses are relieved of  their feathers. The scene is shot fairly matter-of-factly, and the power, and message, comes from the fact that we're aware that we're watching real animals being slaughtered and treated. The sound effects and editing do accumulate a sort of weight, though, and anyone who can watch the sequence without feeling even the tiniest bit queasy deserves to be given free chicken dinners for life.

The farm workers, who gather outside the perimeter, occasionally breaching it to issue empty threats against Marco and Anna, represent the Workers  being abandoned by Big Corporations in the race to accumulate wealth. The attitude of the corporation is neatly summed up when Marco's concerns about genetically modifying chickens are dismissed as being "moral," which is outside their wheelhouse of concerns. The machinery which is shown to be more efficient and cost-effective than the workers is also shown to be dangerous, as it consumes people and animals indiscriminately. 

There are parallels drawn between the workers and the chickens, again made rather explicit by the advertising campaign Mondaini presents to Marco, which (hilariously) seeks to anthropomorphise the chicken by presenting him in a variety of everyday human roles.  The corporation exploits the chickens for profit, just as it previously exploited the workers, who have been consumed and spat out by the system much as the mechanised killing apparatus taken in chicks and spits out paste. The final shot of the film, showing a police officer eating a chicken egg, is another heavy-handed depiction of the Powerful Elite consuming those lower than them.

So, Questi is pro-vegetariamism and anti-worker exploitation. One further layer which is worth uncovering concerns the difference between illusion and reality. There are a couple of different ways in which this is interrogated in the film; the most obvious being the use of real footage of chickens being slaughtered versus the illusory murders of humans, achieved using make-up effects. However, there's another layer to this, as (SPOILER) Marco's prostitute killings are revealed to be nothing more than kinky role play, with the prostitutes willingly playing dress-up (and extolling his virtues to the police when they come asking about him). Neither Gabri not Mondaini know that these killings are just pretend; they think Marco genuinely kills the hookers, which forms the cornerstone of their devious plan to take over the family business. You could stretch things a bit and say that Questi's taking aim here at those who object to cinematic violence, or at least conflate it with real life acts. His previous film, Django, Kill!  was certainly violent, but, like this film, it took place in an idiosyncratic world, very much divorced from reality. And Questi, who fought in the resistance during WW2, was very much aware of the realities of actual violence.

'Idiosyncratic' is certainly an apt term to describe the world in which Death Laid takes place (just patting myself on the back there for coming up with it a couple of sentences ago). Real human emotions are on display-the ennui of the ageing rich couple is a constant theme, and Marco and Gabri share one scene in which he articulates an achingly-real desire to escape his life and start again. The fact that we think he's a murderer undercuts the scene's effectiveness somewhat, but it nonetheless achieves a certain level of nostalgic resonance. Marco's perpetually confused friend, who's recovering from electro-shock therapy and searching for a road which sounds suspiciously like the one in Robert Frost's wood, evokes ideas of memory, life decisions and whether we can ever truly begin again.

One of the first American quasi-gialli (I'll leave it to another day to draw up a definitive list and chronology of same), this film is an interesting intersection point-or, more accurately, divergence point-between the giallo and slasher film. Based on a story and script by John Carpenter, and released a couple of months before Halloween, it's a reminder of just how influential the little Italian flicks made by Mario and Dario had become by this time.

Famous, and controversial, fashion photographer Laura Mars specialises in fetishistic images of death. Specifically, dead women. Just as she's launching a big new exhibit and book, women-and men dressed as women-from her inner circle start dropping like flies. What's more, Laura, through some kind of second sight, sees glimpses of the killer's point of view as he stalks and slashes his way through her friends and colleagues. As the police 'investigate' (/ineffectually sit outside people's apartments), the killer turns their sights, and Laura's occasional sights, to Laura herself...

This film deals with a couple of fairly weighty issues: the fetishisation of violence in art, and the victimisation of women in both art and real life. At least, it pays lip service to these issues, but does it really get to grips with either? Before we get to that, I'll say that this isn't a bad film, but it's quite vanilla in giallo terms. There's very little gore, no real investigation, and minimal moments of baroque Argento-esque style. It's worth a look, though, and features some bigger names than you'd normally find in a giallo, if that's your thing (one of whom, Brad Dourif, pops up again fifteen years later in Trauma).

The story lends itself naturally to Layers. Layers of text and subtext; layers of meaning and depth. You have voyeurism and scopophilia, fetishisation and commercialisation of violence against women, and mirrors. Lots and lots of mirrors. This (mirrors) is an example of 'depth' in a film which is fairly redundant to me-seeing characters reflected in a maze of mirrors is an impressive technical achievement, and we can take it as a given that it's the film 'subtly' telling us that one or more characters have a fractured personality. And here, sure enough, the killer seems to be a bit schizo. It's a bit of a cul-de-sac in terms of opening up the film for discussion, though, much like having goodies dress in white and baddies in black in westerns. Sure, we can point out to our less cerebral friends that the director has colour-coded the characters to externalise their inner goodie- or baddie-ness, but there's not a whole lot more to say beyond this.

There's more to chew over elsewhere, though. I'm unsure of just how much Carpenter remains in the final product (allegedly not a whole lot), but the idea of Laura seeing the stalk and slash through the killer's POV did come from him, unsurprisingly given how he utilised first-person shots to such an extent throughout Halloween. Laura doubles as the film's audience during her vision scenes, observing events over which she has no control. This point is explicitly made when she tells Tommy Lee Jones' inspector "I can't see what's in front of me. What I see if that," and points at an image on a screen. And yet, by creating such images in her working life, she also doubles as the filmmakers; commercialising artistic violence. She attempts to explain away her career choice by saying that she seeks to depict "moral, spiritual, emotional murder." She says she can't stop murder, but can "make people look at it."

Does she really want to do this to remind people of how horrible the world is, though? Or is she merely seeking to justify her life choices by hiding behind a smokescreen of spurious and specious reasoning? Why exactly is making people look at murder preferable to the alternative (ie, not making them look art it)? Similarly, John Carpenter, and Irvin Kershner (to a far lesser degree), made money by making horror films. They can claim that they're making people look at murder with altruistic intentions, but are they really trying to convince us, or themselves? For the record, I don't think it's necessary to justify commercialising violence; murder existed before films were invented, after all. Even if a work of art inspires a copycat murder, the killer is obviously mental to begin with and would no doubt have figured out a way to commit heinous acts without artistic inspiration.* This is, nonetheless, something that any person who sends violent images out into the world must grapple with at some stage. Or, at least, should grapple with.

Making Laura a woman is an interesting move. A cynic might argue that it's simply efficient filmmaking, allowing one character to simultaneously open up the dialogue about representations of violence on screen and fill the woman-in-peril role. Similarly, is her second sight indicative of women being more in  tune with the world around them, or is it merely a way to film murder scenes in a disorienting manner while also keeping things relatively studio-friendly and bloodless? (Neither; it's almost certainly to allow for an exploration of the point of view, as suggested above.) 

To return to Laura's dual function as both purveyor and potential victim of violence, why shouldn't she be allowed to be both? People who complain about woman being reduced to the role of disposable victim in films have a (generally) valid complaint, but the fact remains that, in real life, women statistically are far more likely than men to be victims of violent crime.  Female actors generally seem more physically vulnerable on screen than men, so it's easier to create a sense of danger and dread. The fact that Laura fulfils this role while also earning her corn by taking advantage of female vulnerability adds a delicious layer of irony to proceedings. You could argue that she's not a good female role model, but fuck it-why should she be? Non-white males in films tend to be viewed as being representatives of their gender/race/sexuality, which has always sat uneasily with me. In many ways viewing characters in this way has the opposite to the desired effect; the intention is to push for greater representation of and appreciation for 'marginal' groups, yet when confronted with an example of someone from such a group, their individuality is immediately tossed aside, and their personality is viewed as being representative of a whole. This is unfair on both the group and the characters themselves.

That Laura adds a veneer of sex and sexuality to her images is also interesting. Is photographing sexy women, and photographing imaginary acts of violence against sexy women, in any way offensive? Well yes, in that plenty of people in the film express outrage at Laura's work, which would undoubtedly have met the same response in the real world. And just look at the response to slasher films, and to Dario Argento's comments about preferring to kill beautiful actresses in his films. But, then again, the most inane utterance can cause offence (or faux-offence) in the Twitter age. I don't want to get all PC-gone-mad about things, so I'll say that the characters in the film, and IRL, have every right to protest Laura's work. But, at the same time, I don't think she's unequivocally crossed any line. As a woman, she's within her rights to interrogate and present female sexuality as she wishes (again, as long as she doesn't cross any lines). If you don't like it, don't consume her work! Feel free to protest it too. But just don't go calling it offensive; it's offensive and distasteful to you, not objectively offensive, and there's a difference.

The fashion backdrop also works as a reference (intentional or otherwise) to Blood and Black Lace, and the combination of fashion and second sight anticipates Nothing Underneath. The issue of the second sight is an interesting one; initially we're faced with the possibility that what Laura's actually experiencing are flashbacks to murders she herself has committed. This reduces the film to a very basic either/or scenario, so it's made clear reasonably quickly that the visions are real. This, of course, places the film at the edge of the supernatural subgenre, although the second sight is the only such element in the film. Its existence is never really addressed, and it basically functions as either a plot gimmick or subtext gimmick (or both), depending on your outlook.

Aside from the sexuality of the fashion shoots, there's also a slightly cloying post-coital scene, which is very much a Hollywoodised version of a typical giallo sex scene. The emotions expressed within it are fairly over-the-top and sugary, but the Italian gialli weren't immune to such flourishes either. As stated at the outset, there's very little visual style here, despite the possibilities opened up by the fashion shoot-setting and second sight murder scenes. One reasonably atmospheric sequence sees Laura running through a vast empty studio, and the moment when she realises the killer's identity features some classic Eurocult style-a push in on the killer's face followed by a zoom into the Eyes on Mars. 

Regarding the identity of the killer, there's no real investigation to speak of, with the police instead seeming to adopt an approach of waiting to happen upon the killer to presenting themselves 'in the act'. They spend much of the film functioning as ineffectual bodyguards, with two murdered characters meeting their demise while apparently having police protection. SPOILERS This may not necessarily be indicative of poor policing, though, depending on who exactly was providing said protection. END SPOILERS

The Big Reveal, replete with dolly and zoom, is one of those that comes about three minutes after anyone with half a brain would've figured out the identity of the killer for themselves. The film further tips its hat by having one of those classic 'disembodied voice' moments, when one character tells another that everything's OK now and the threat is vanquished. As I've previously noted, when the person doing the reassuring is heard but not seen, you can be reasonably sure that things are very much not OK, and the owner of the voice is, in fact, the threat. Here, there's no reason why they couldn't have shown the voice owner as he speaks the reassuring lines. I'm guessing that it wasn't such a clichéd trope in the 1970s as it is today. In fact, a huge amount of horror movie clichés go back to this time and this year, and this writer (the writer of this film; not me). This isn't the best 1978 John Carpenter-related film; it might not even be the second-best-I haven't seen his TV movie Someone's Watching Me (note the continued theme of eyes and seeing). But it's definitely in the top three.
​

El Fulcerino returns with a film which, while not among his very best work, is nonetheless a fascinating attempt to breathe new life into an increasingly stale filone. Unfortunately, because its innovations were of the cerebral rather than visceral variety, the film was not a success upon release, and left Fulci's career languishing somewhat in the doldrums. The next time he returned to the filone, he did so on the back of a run of gore-soaked epics, and delivered The New York Ripper, which is about as different a giallo from this film as it's possible to be.

Virginia Ducci has a form of second sight, which enables her, walking in the schoolyard of her Florentine convent, to see her mother's Don't Torture a Duckling-esque suicide leap from the cliffs of Dover.  Years later she's freshly-married to an Italian businessman, played suavely by Gianni Garko, but still prone to hallucinations and premonitions. She has one such vision as she's driving through a tunnel, blacking out but somehow managing to navigate the tunnel and pull in neatly to the side of the road. The vision apparently shows a limping, moustachioed man, a fifty-something woman with her skull smashed in, a smashed mirror, a lushly decorated red room and a body apparently being sealed behind an in-construction stone wall. Virginia travels on to one of her husband's properties, which she's never visited before but wants to renovate. Realising that one of the rooms was featured in her vision, she takes a pickaxe to a wall and uncovers the skeletal remains of a 25 year old model. Her husband Francesco, a former lover of the model, is initially suspected and arrested, but is released after evidence comes to light suggesting he was in America at the time of the murder. Meanwhile, Virginia is trying to reconcile the inconsistencies in her vision with the facts as they appear to be-why did she see the victim as being much older than she really was, and why does the moustachioed man, who she tracks down with surprising ease, not walk with a limp?

As I've previously stated, this film plays like an extended riff on the central conceit behind A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, specifically dreams as visions, as opposed to jumbled webs of nonsense and half-memories being spun by our subconscious mind.  It also begins with a reprise of the finale of Don't Torture a Duckling, with a dodge dummy tumbling down a cliff to its doom, albeit there are fewer sparks here when the dummy makes contact with the cliff, and the effect is less spatially disorientating in general. The eerie driving sequence, which manages to imbue a nondescript stretch of road and tunnels with an uncanny menace, may have also spawned future Fulci work, sadly, with Door to Silence featuring interminable stretches of John Savage driving through the American countryside.

In order to better sell the conceit of the dream vision, Fulci makes Virginia a patient of a parapsychologist, played by Marc Porel, who is predisposed to believe her seemingly outlandish claims. Saying that, he does toss the occasional large pinch of salt at her claims, and doesn't just swallow everything willy-nilly. He also hints at the possibility that this film takes place in a Tenebrae-like very, very slight alternate universe, asking Virginia at one point "Who didn't have a relative or friend who had dreamed of someone being run over, then the next day that person is really run over?" Speaking empirically, I'd wager that quite a lot of people would not know anyone to whom that description could be affixed.

Luca, Porel's character, also lays the groundwork for the film's big twist (SPOILAGE AHEAD), by pointing out to Virginia that the mounting inconsistencies between her vision and what apparently happened to the dead model suggest that she may have had a premonition, rather than a flashback. The precise nature of Virginia's second sight is never made clear, but we know from the film's opening she can witness events which are happening elsewhere in the present. She makes references to premonitions and calls herself a 'clairvoyant', both of which would suggest that she primarily does deal in seeing the future, not the past (although clairvoyance can also mean a general ability to experience things 'beyond normal sensory contact').

However, it's a fairly natural assumption to think that she's had an extra-sensory flashback when she recognises the room in Francesco's house from her vision, and finds a walled-in body in the exact spot where she'd had a vision of its having being sealed in. It'd be easy to dismiss the film for dealing in outrageous coincidences when you learn that the vision was indeed a premonition, and had nothing directly to do with the model's death. However, one must bear in mind that the second walling-in can only happen because of the discovery of the first one, which was itself sparked by the vision itself. In this way, the vision becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, and the double-Poe isn't egregious. Plus, if you've already killed and walled in one young woman, why wouldn't you do it again? (I mean, there are lots of reasons, so don't think about Garko's plan for dealing with Virginia too closely. At all.)

There are some clues as to the twist in the cinematic language of the flashback, although it'd be a fool's errand to attempt to guess the twists in films which engage in dreamlike imagery by analysing said imagery with cold logic. Nevertheless, it's worth pointing out that the old woman's face is shown as viewed by another person's (/a camera's) perspective, whereas the shots of the sealing-in are all first-person. What's more, this first-person is clearly still alive. Also, the fact that we can clearly see the woman's dead face suggests that she's not been walled-in (unless the killer fitted the makeshift grave with a light source), or at least couldn't have been the person who's watching themselves being entombed. And, if I had to guess who the person through whose eyes Virginia sees was, I'd have to go out on a limb and say that it was probably herself. However, as I said, it's all well and good to employ such rigour on a third or fourth viewing of the film, but when you're dealing with fractured dream visions it generally wouldn't pay to be so logical in your interpretations when first watching it. Although, as I've just shown, it would pay here. But not always.

Anyway, such a reading of the film's images depends on a correct interpretation of certain images and conventions. And what Fulci is really interrogating here is the inherent truth, or untruth, of images. (Bear with me...) One of the main innovations Dario Argento had brought to the genre was to imbue his films with intellectual concerns,  Bird... being a perfect example, with its questioning of gender roles and interrogation of the reliability of subjective vision. Fulci (for the most part) removes the subjective from his images here, instead presenting them as disembodied fragments. These images do not necessarily mean anything on their own, but can be interpreted by us, and Virginia, to mean certain things. As the film progresses, and we're privvy to more information, the original interpretations are shown to be erroneous. The very nature of the vision, originally assumed to be flashback, is shown to be wrong, but there are also more specific errors.

As an example, we assume that the limping man is Gabriele Ferzetti because he's the only man who appears recognisably in the vision. And Virginia assumes the dead person is the fifty year old woman, again because she 'sees' no-one else. What's crucial here is context; when we're first presented with the images we attempt to construct a coherent straight-line narrative from them, even with a paucity of concrete information. Then, with the accumulation of knowledge, we're able to fill the gaps between the images, allowing us to recontextualise and reinterpret them, and getting one step closer to the 'truth', if such a thing exists (it does here, because it's a mystery genre film, but does it in life?? OK, I'll leave it there). On a purely cinematographic level, the Ferzetti assumption, as an example, displays the suggestive power of editing, and shows how keen we are to make associations and connections between things in order to make sense of them.

Speaking of Ferzetti, he's prominently billed here, but has a very contained, and temporally-short, role in the film. The nature of the plot is such that he's required to assume the role of assumed-killer when he does appear, in a kind of drawn out version of the red herring moment which is afforded most characters in a giallo. This, of course, leads the experienced viewer to discount the likelihood of his actually being the killer, and to look elsewhere for suspects. And, apart from Porel's whiter-than-white character, who could adopt a Julia Durer-esque tactic of taking advantage of having Virginia's confidence by enacting her visions IRL (in real life, you fuddy duddies) but never really gets close to being a suspect, there aren't many other possibilities. Other than the actual killer, of course. 

Having a seemingly obviously guilty character like Ferzetti handy gives said killer, Gianni Garko's Francesco, a clear acting choice (assuming that Fulci didn't drag performances of his choice from his players, which, by all accounts, is a safe assumption to make)-he can try to blend into the background, unobserved by those searching for clues and suspects, or he can play up his sympathetic qualities, the better to highlight the dark and untrustworthy nature of Ferzetti. This latter option can't be too hammy, though, or it'll attract suspicion by virtue of its seeming overabundance of virtue. Anyway, although Ferzetti does bring some nuance and hints that there's more to his character than meets the eye, he-like Garko-is extremely constrained by the general demands of the role, and turns in a performance which isn't too difficult from the classic Jean Sorel or George Hilton.  It's easy to criticise actors for being too bland (which I've done recently with Sorel's reactions to his daughter's death in Lizard), but bear in mind that they're constantly making choices, and sometimes the choice which best serves the film, and plot, is to downplay their reactions, thus keeping their motives obfuscated and obscure.  Obviously.

The final half hour here, once we establish that the vision was a premonition rather than a flashback, is rather too devoted to depicting every single piece of the puzzle slotting into place. I've only watched the English dub, which may well be more sledgehammery than the Italian version, but the running voiceover flashbacks which emphasise how we need to reinterpret previous events and statements are slightly too prevalent. There's no need to show every little part of the puzzle slotting into place; give us a general overview and trust us to complete the final few pieces ourselves. Fulci was likely proud of the visual and plotting complexities, but it shows its hand just a bit too much. On the other hand, the film ends very abruptly, eschewing a happy-ever-after coda, not even showing the moment the killer is properly taken down. Fulci's happy to let us extrapolate here, probably because the extra couple of minutes would've been no different to what we'd seen in a hundred other gialli.

And this film is different to other gialli. It's not necessarily a thrill-a-minute adrenaline ride, but it's a very neatly conceived and executed film, and, as with all his pre-Zombi gialli, would serve as an excellent rebuttal to anyone who dismisses Fulci as a talentless gorehound. Elements of his later work can be seen here, with another example of his fondness for his blown-out crime scene photography, and a hesitant attempt at the zoom-driven pick-axe action which would recur in the Gates of Hell trilogy. But it's the elements which gradually, and sometimes suddenly, disappeared over the years-the plotting, the subtext and the graceful camerawork and editing-which make this film what it is, and leave you wondering what might have been if this had been his global smash instead of (the still excellent) Zombi 2...

This film was Lucio Fulci's third, and probably best, giallo. It's a film where his ever-increasing technical standards were very much in evidence, as was his growing rage against the machine that was Catholic Italy of the 70s.

In Accendura, a small town in Southern Italy which is connected to the rest of the county by a modern motorway, someone is murdering young boys. The local simpleton is initially suspected, after he's found to be behind an attempted blackmailing of one victim's parents. However, it turns out that he merely came across the child's corpse and, sensing a money-making opportunity, buried it before making the call. The town's attention then turns to local witch, La Maciara, who has been missing for over two weeks. The police manage to track her down and she confesses to the crimes. However, it turns out she was merely using voodoo against the three children, and didn't physically kill them. After her release, she's brutally set upon and murdered by the fathers of the deceased. Reporter Andrea Martelli and recovering drug addict Patrizia, meanwhile, form an alliance to try and get to the bottom of the murders, even as the film does its best to push Patrizia as a suspect. Patrizia then sees the decapitated head of a Donald Duck doll which she bought for a deaf and dumb girl placed among the tributes for the killer's latest victim. Using some fine extrapolation skills, she and Andrea concoct an explanation for the girl's proclivity for dismembering dolls which also points the finger at a suspect for the murders. They're not quite right, but enough in the ballpark that the real killer is outed, just in time to fall to their death in a shower of sparks and crushed papier maché.

If you haven't seen this film, you should probably stop reading here, as most of what I'll be discussing will be spoilerific. Starting now. The main concerns of the film on a thematic level are the superstition and insularity of small-town Italy, and the power, and abuse thereof, of Italian institutions, especially the church. This is, as far as I can make out, the second giallo in  which the killer is revealed to have been a priest, after Who Saw Her Die?, which opened after principal photography had begun on this film. It seemed to open the floodgates, with many, many more religious killers appearing in future films, suggesting that Fulci (and Aldo Lado) was articulating what a lot of artistic types were thinking.

It's difficult to discern who bears more of Fulci's scorn, the townsfolk or the authority figures. It's difficult to even know if he sympathises with Patrizia, one of the nominal leads, given that she's trying to extricate herself from a world of drugs and partying, and enters the film lounging naked and (mostly) jokingly trying to seduce a child. She's certainly shown in general as possessing, for the most part, good intentions, but, then again, she's also highly foregrounded as a suspect. This could be Fulci's way of admonishing her for her licentiousness. Likewise, Andrea isn't exactly the most driven investigator; he's motivated as least as much by the thoughts of getting a scoop as by any need for justice to prevail.

And is it even justice? (Yes, it is, but I'm asking a rhetorical question here.) The children who are murdered aren't exactly cherubic innocents. They smoke, they spy on people having sex, they slag off the local simpleton for doing exactly the same thing, and they generally seem like Normal Kids. It's actually refreshing to see such a portrayal of children, which is far removed from their troubling representation in Dallamano gialli, for example. And, unless I'm very much mistaken, I believe that Fulci intended to present the children in such a realistic manner, the better to act as a mirror to highlight the flaws and vices of the grown-up characters.

What I mean by this is that the way the adult characters view, and treat, the (normal) children tells us everything about their own personae. Patrizia sees the kids as burgeoning sexual beings, and is clearly something of a sex-fiend herself. The local priest, who steadfastly ignores Patrizia's flirting, sees the kids as loci of purity and innocence, at risk of corruption from the wider, wilder world. He proudly boasts to Andrea of banning certain publications from the local newsagents, as part of a fight to protect the town from said wider world. La Maciara believed that her deceased child was the spawn of the devil, and seems to hold a similar opinion of most adolescents, showing her general superstition.

The witchcraft practised by La Maciara and her 'mentor' Francesco is apparently closely related to religion (even though the local priest doesn't seem to have any real relationship with them). This seems reflective of Fulci's wider view of religion, which he saw as hypocritical and nothing but dressed up superstition. And, even though the murdered boys haven't been sexually abused,  the film does seem to be quite prescient about the misuse of power in the church which would be exposed over the following decades. La Maciara is one such (tangential) victim of this power, having been brought to the saint-obsessed Francesco for an exorcism as a youngster. She became pregnant as a result of his rituals, eventually losing her child (whom she considered to be the spawn of Satan). Everything in her world goes back to children-she's murdered because of her supposed role in the local murders of children (the fact that the townspeople still consider her guilty because of her witchcraft also showing their own superstition and small-mindedness), she became a witch after the exorcism incident in her childhood, which led to her own deceased child. The last thing she sees is a car full of children driving by on the new motorway, a symbol of familial unity which is forever out of her reach.

​The authorities, represented by a local and regional police force who combine to tackle the murders, don't exactly come out of the film in credit either. The local policemen, while possibly being less superstitious than the average townie, are very much complicit in having allowed the insular nature of the area to flourish. They seem extremely tolerant of the mob mentality which prevails in the town, and ultimately prove clueless when attempting to solve the crime. Even the out-of-towners fare little better, being reduced to ciphers through which we get to see the strange ways of the locals.* For the first two thirds of the film the police do play a prominent role in proceedings, partly to give us an insight into the ways of the town, and partly (I reckon) because the investigative plot wasn't beefy enough to sustain more than a few minutes of Andrea and Patrizia poking around late on, so instead we're presented with the repeated failures of the po-po.

To return to Patrizia, her opening scene is worth discussing in further detail. Her behaviour towards young Bruno is certainly predatory and paedophilic in nature, but she seems to be acting more to amuse herself than possessing any designs towards actually seducing the child. It's still undeniably creepy (and a bit sexy, when it's just her on screen), and possibly does give some weight to Don Alberto's views of the wider world being corrupting; Patrizia having been born locally but reared in a big city, where she came into contact with drugs and sex and rock and/or roll. Either way, although Bruno spent his last night on earth drawing naked women on his copybook, it's not as if he wasn't a horny little kid before meeting her, so Patrizia has merely given him food/fodder for thought; she hasn't changed the course of his life irrevocably. Not like a certain religious nut does.**

The mystery is serviceable, although it clearly wasn't Fulci's main concern, with the end deductive process being hurried and stretching credulity somewhat. The fact that this is  (again, to the best of my knowledge) the second giallo to feature a priest killer would certainly have given the end reveal added punch for contemporary audiences. The film's cinematography is extremely stylish, albeit with one or two clunkily-shot dialogue scenes, but for the most part it looks gorgeous.   Fulci's economy as a director is in evidence in several shots which combine zooms with tracking, with constant reframing to keep the action moving. It's the cinematographic approach which allowed Jess Franco to be so prolific around this time, but here it's executed far more smoothly and stylishly. The soundtrack is magnificent, and Fulci's love of dogs, and use of their barks and growls to menacing aural effect, is very much in evidence.  He also uses very ballsy editing and framing to heavily hint at the identity of the killer (check out a track through the church after Bruno's mother shouts that she knows the killer is there), presumably banking on the audience's reverence for the church to preclude them from having any suspicions towards it. 

Fulci's extreme lack of such reverence, also evident in The Eroticist and Beatrice Cenci, drives this film. It's a powerful film borne of powerful feelings, and one that anyone who dismissed him as a gore-obsessed hack should be made to watch on repeat, until they can't take it any more and throw themselves off the nearest electrified cliff. Or until they admit they were wrong, whichever.

*There's also a strange interaction where the head of the investigation, upon being told that La Maciara's child was rumoured to have "lived for a couple of years... kept hidden away, because it was the son of the devil," responds by saying, seemingly without irony, "a natural assumption." I think the line reading may have been deficient here, otherwise the implication is that the sophisticated big city policemen are just as susceptible to superstitious nonsense as the locals.

Lucio Fulci's second giallo film has much in common with his first-a lack of on-screen murders, an abundance of on-screen sexuality, an unhappy marriage at the core of the story, a distrust of the counterculture-but it's much more frenzied and stylish in execution. Is it better though? Well, you'll have to watch both of them to answer that. And when you do, come back here to read the rest of this shite.

Uptight, posh Carol Hammond is stuck in a wet blanket of a marriage, to that reliable philanderer Jean Sorel (/Frank Hammond). She is plagued by nightmares/erotic dreams about her party-loving, sexually liberated neighbour, Julia Durer. She recounts these dreams to her psychoanalyst, who interprets everything in a 'very good, you're making progress' kind of way. When Carol dreams about Julia's murder, she's shocked to discover that life has imitated the land of the nod, and Julia's been slain in exactly the manner she dreamt. All the evidence, specifically a murder weapon with her fingerprints all over it and one of her fur coats being found at the scene, seems to suggest that Carol is guilty, but the police can't find an acceptable motive. Meanwhile, a Mrs Smith was trying to blackmail Carol's politician father by hinting that a member of his family is up to no good sex-wise, and sure enough Frank's cheating is exposed. It's also discovered that Carol kept a dream diary, which would have provided anyone who read it with the perfect opportunity to frame her for Julia's murder by copying her dream. Then the police establish (without divulging their methods) that Julia Durer was Mrs Smith. Who has silenced her, and why? And what the hell do the damn hippies who keep lurking in the background want?

I'll get this out of the way first, before I chip away at the film's flaws-this is a great giallo. Despite not having any real murder scene, beyond a depiction of Carol's dream killing of Julia, in every other way it is a quintessential giallo. The music is beautiful, nudity abounds, there's style to burn, plenty of stalk (if not slash) sequences, and the plot makes absolutely no fucking sense at all. This last point is something that tends to get tossed around as a defining characteristic of gialli, but that does the work of Ernesto Gastaldi, for example, a great disservice. Here, though, with the frequent diversions into dreamland, the film does a damn good job of making you unsure just what the hell is going on.

This is necessary-the plot is actually paper thin. It's difficult to get too deep into discussing this film without spoiling it, so if you haven't seen it, reread the last couple of sentences of my opening paragraph and jog on. The chief reason for the lack of plot is that the solution to the murder mystery is actually presented to us right at the start of the film. We see a stylised, slow motion depiction of the murder as Carol recounts it to her psychoanalyst, which turns out to be a confession of sorts, fed through a dream prism in an attempt to generate an alibi. The evidence which the police accrue-which seems pretty airtight to me-also points squarely at her. So, instead of unravelling layers of a mystery as it progresses, the film actually begins with the solution, then attempts to cloak it from us and by adding layers of obfuscation and distraction.

Some of these layers, it has to be said, come from characters acting fairly irrationally. Carol, in particular, makes some incredible decisions, which seem chiefly motivated by the scriptwriters' desire for her to seem innocent of the murder. She's worried that the hippies who were present when she murdered Julia will go to the police, so she follows them to a commune and lets them observe her to see if they recognise her. Presumably if they did, they wouldn't necessarily be forthcoming with that information; most people wouldn't tip their hands to a murderer if they can help it. She also agrees to meet the hippies in the empty basement of Alexandra Palace-a location which should've raised some suspicions-and travels there without any weapon. Surely she should've been trying to eliminate the hippies? Instead they try to murder her-which the film does a decent job of justifying, to be fair. Still, though, her approach to the meeting makes no real sense. 

The police, also, provide much scope for the wool to be pulled over our eyes by essentially being shit at their jobs. The crime scene unit (who provide possibly the first instance of Fulci's beloved extreme flash photography) are pretty efficient-and the scenes wherein they present their evidence to the inspector are very well directed and presented-but the subsequent investigation has more holes than a human being. First off-given that for anyone apart from Carol to be guilty of the murder they'd have had to read the written description of her dream,* why don't they go looking for her dream diary? Also, their method for tracking down the red-haired hippy who tried to kill Carol is to put out an instruction to 'check out anyone [in London] with red hair and put the screws on them'. This specifically isn't an example of the film using police incompetence to further muddy the plot waters, but it does sum up the investigative level of the fuzz. The one thing holding them back from charging Carol is a lack of a motive. Aren't there hours of psychoanalytic recordings of her describing her obsession with Julia which would tick this box? Obviously these could come under doctor-patient confidentiality, but that didn't stop the doc from readily passing them to Carol's father.

The fact that we're presented with the solution early on means that there's not much of an investigative thrust to the film. Jean Sorel musters up a brief flurry of energy to search for the dream diary, and his daughter-Julia's step-daughter-tracks down the hippies to try and clear her father's name. Once the incompetent bobbies take over from the crime scene analysts-who, interestingly, are portrayed as bumbling fools in contrast to the suave detectives despite being much more efficient in their work-they mostly just lurk in the background, waiting for the family machinations to deliver a suspect to them. Although, to be fair, the manner in which Carol's guilt is eventually uncovered is pretty slick**.

Style-wise, we have the same occasional bursts of shonky handheld footage which intruded into Perversion Story, although here they aren't quite as off-putting, and may on a couple of occasions (the dinner scene and when Julia's suspiciously eyeing Joan and Deborah) have actually been a deliberate stylistic choice. The dream sequences and chase scenes make good use of a variety of angles and lenses,  and are played out for the most part without music, relying on ambient sounds, frenzied breathing and the inventive camerawork.  The editing is extremely sharp, with an energy to some scenes which anticipates Orson Welles's manic style from F for Fake and (what is currently viewable of) The Other Side of the Wind.  The acting is decent, although I've finally figured out what's at the root of the frequent criticisms of Jean Sorel-he's fine portraying any emotion up to a medium level, but once something properly cataclysmic befalls his character, he always seems to plump for catatonia as his character's response. Maybe he thinks he's doing more with his eyes than he really is, or maybe he just knows his limitations as an actor, but it really hampers his last few scenes here, as he stands around stony-faced after the murder of his daughter. Florinda Balkan is pretty damn good, though.

In terms of Uncle Lucio, he's really beginning to hit his stride here. The style is, as just stated, very impressive throughout, being at least a match for Sergio Martino's slick gialli of the time, and possibly being more in tune with the narrative demands of the material. His stated aversion to psychoanalysis isn't quite as much in evidence as it might have been, although the doc doesn't exactly come across as providing a competent service. Fulci's mistrust of hippies and the counterculture are very much in evidence, although there seems, in Carol's fantasies about Julia, to be an acknowledgement of the appeal of such a lifestyle. Or maybe just an acknowledgement of the appeal of watching two women lezz off. The idea of a crime being anticipated by, or mirroring, a dream later became the central concept of The Psychic, a more restrained but no less impressive offering. Overall, this isn't quite as good as Fulci's next giallo Don't Torture a Duckling, but, then again, very, very few films are...

Also known as Perversion Story, this film represented a big turning point in Lucio Fulci's career, having previously worked almost exclusively in the Italian comedy genre ('Italian comedy', which was very much its own idiosyncratic beast, specifically being the genre).  It's a long way away from the gore-soaked horrors with which he'd come to be closely associated, but it's an important stepping stone nonetheless, as it showed that there were more strings to his bow than being able to film Franco Franchi pulling faces.

Doctor George Dumurrier, who runs a clinic in San Francisco, is trapped in a loveless marriage with asthmatic Susan. He escapes both his marriage and his clinic (in which, despite us being repeatedly told it's 'his life', we never really see him)  to have an affair with a friend, Jane. While away on a 'fundraising trip' (ie a shagfest with Jane), George's brother Henry tells him that Susan has died of an asthma attack. We discover that she had a secret life insurance policy worth $2 million, with George as sole beneficiary. Susan's sister, Marta, doesn't seem too happy with George, and Henry too seems to eye him with suspicion. George then receives an anonymous tip-off which results in him witnessing the striptease performance of Monica Weston, who is a dead ringer for Susan (albeit with different colour hair and eyes). Suspecting that there's more to Susan's death than meets the different-coloured eye, George and Jane seek to befriend Monica to find out more. The police, acting on a tip-off from the insurance agency, discover evidence in Monica's apartment which suggests she's been posing as Susan. Eventually she confesses all, and the murderer is caught. Or are they..?

There's a fail aul whack of Vertigo off this film, as you've probably gathered from the synopsis. There's also a healthy sprinkling of The Sweet Body of Deborah, and this is very much one of those late 60s rich-people-playing-psychological-games-in-exotic-locales gialli, rather than a Bava or Argento clone. Murders are few and far between, to say the least. What you do get, though, is an extremely liberal dose of sex and nudity, far more than was typical in a late 60s thriller, so that's something. 

Style-wise, the film exudes an air of competence rather than ostentation, only let down by occasionally shaky handheld work (and aerial shots which must have been shot by a defective camera, or else one operated by someone with a deathly fear of flying). There are some moments of arty style, not least in the sex scenes, which incorporate lush lighting and, on one occasion, some Camilla 2000-esque filming through a transparent mattress. These touches are needed, to be honest, as Fulci revels a bit too much in the new-found sexual permissiveness of the era, dragging the scenes on far too long.

The murder plot at the heart of the film is simultaneously brilliant and preposterous. Brilliant, in that the central conceit which underpins said plot is pretty ingenius; without giving too much away it's one of those plans which sees those characters doing the investigating thinking that they're making headway towards solving the case, whereas they're actually following a carefully laid-out path towards their own downfall. It's preposterous in that the evidence with which a court reaches a crucial verdict, which is later upheld by a state governor, is based on extremely flimsy and circumstantial evidence. The governor upholds the decision after granting a temporary stay of execution, despite almost all of the key witnesses for the prosecution having fled the country, which surely must give rise to some reasonable doubt. 

The murder plot, and film as a whole, hinges on the credulity of the appearance of Ms Weston, who looks exactly like Susan Dumurrier, and was apparently tied up in the circumstances surrounding Ms Dumurrier's death. (SPOILERS) Not everyone buys this, and to be fair George and Jane do harbour serious suspicions that Susan and Monica are the same person, but surely either they or the police could've easily gleaned conclusive proof as to who she really is? Granted, she spent a few months creating the persona of Monica, but couldn't the police have dug a little deeper? Or examined her to see if she was wearing contact lenses and a wig? (The fuzz seem to be already convinced of George's guilt, and swallow anything which supports this, despite there not really being a sense of him being a suspect until he's casually told that he may be facing the chair.) Also, if my wife stripped in front of me, wearing a wig and coloured lenses but speaking in her usual voice, I'd like to think I'd be pretty certain it was her. Simply put, George should've been certain that Susan and Monica were the same person from the off, and the police, and George's legal team, should've been able to prove the same without too much difficulty. That this doesn't happen is crucial for the film's execution, so to speak, but upon repeated viewings becomes hard to ignore. (SPOILERS END)

The film slows slightly once Monica shows up, initially to linger over her body for an extended striptease, but then to detail George and Jane's attempts to uncover the truth about her identity, and, as a consequence, Susan's death. Up to that point we've been witnessing George's life spiral out of control (borne with admirable stoicism by Jean Sorel, unsurprisingly), but there's not quite enough meat for the investigation to sink its teeth into, with very little actual progress made for a good half hour. Saying that, as stated above, on first viewing the mystery of Monica's provenance will probably be more than enough to sustain viewers.

The climax is actually executed quite daringly, with few of the main characters getting any quality screen time over the final seven or eight minutes. There are a couple of big temporal leaps in the film; early on we jump from Susan's death to a month later, and towards the end we skip over an arrest and trial. We're then on the point of witnessing the gassing of a leading character, when we jump to a brand new chap with a microphone addressing the camera. He fills us in on the dramatic events which stopped the execution in its tracks, some of which we're shown, but much of which we're merely told. It very much keeps any catharsis at arm's length, but then again none of the characters are especially likeable-at least, they're not morally upstanding, and would possibly have been viewed with some suspicion and/or distaste by Fulci-so perhaps they don't deserve full redemption and a happy ending. Adding to the surreal nature of the ending is the fact that the reporter character, who gives us a heavily visually-orientated tour of San Quentin's gas chamber, turns out to be working for radio.

There are other slightly bizarre touches, as you'd expect in an Italian production. As stated, the criminal case which is brought against one of the leading characters in embarrassingly anaemic, and I was reminded of Dancer in the Dark in some ways, where a character is condemned to death in the most avoidable circumstances, simply because the film's narrative demands it. The corpse of Susan, which is being stored in a forensic lab, has decomposed an awful lot in the course of a month, suggesting that the lab doesn't have working refrigeration units. Further doubt as to the capabilities of the lab must be raised after they managed to initially miss the fact that Susan was poisoned. And, finally, in an amazing moment which is so throwaway it's easy to miss, Monica Weston, sitting on her bed in her smalls is asked an awkward question by George, who, as part of his investigation, has just completed a thorough inspection of her body. A knock on the door provides a timely interruption, saving Monica from having to answer the question. She's so relieved that she exclaims "Oh good, guests!" Well, you probably have to be there, watching it, but it's a very incongruous reaction, and should've been picked up on by George.

I haven't really passed much judgement on this film here. It is, simply put, great fun, especially on first viewing. The location work is brilliant, the sexuality is admirably envelope-pushing (and envelope-fingerprinting), the plot is brilliant (and shonky), and Fulci always seems in control. He'd go on to make more violent, and better, gialli, but if this film hadn't been as good as it is, the cinematic landscape of the 70s and 80s would have been all the poorer for it, as Fulci may well have returned to the Italian comedy wasteland. As long as you can swallow outrageous contrivances, and don't get annoyed when characters store medicine that can kill a spouse right beside medicine that can save said spouse's life, you'll find much to enjoy here. 

A rare example of a giallo which contains neither a whodunnit aspect nor a blackmail-related mystery to unravel, Hatchet for the Honeymoon can be seen as either Mario Bava showing his jaded attitude towards the filone, or his attempt to inject it with fresh life. 

After a slightly shonky opening sequence showing him murdering a newly-married couple on a train, we meet John Harrington, a fashion house owner who proudly declares himself in voiceover to be a 'paranoiac'. He believes women should live until their wedding night, "love once," and then be killed, and puts this belief into action whenever one of his coterie of models leaves to get married (the concept of married women working having obviously not penetrated late 1960s Paris). He's tortured by a faint vision of seeing his mother being murdered, with each kill he commits bringing him one step closer to having full access to the repressed memory, which will also reveal the guilty party. The police, naturally enough, suspect John of being guilty of the model murders, but can't gather enough proof. Meanwhile, his shrewish wife-who John seems to have married for her wealth-refuses repeated requests for a divorce, so the paranoiac murderer does what comes naturally to him. However, the news that ghosts don't exist had also not penetrated late 1960s Paris, and Mrs Harrington refuses to go quietly into the night...

This film is clearly intended to be light-hearted fun, with much of the second act following John's darkly comical, and increasingly desperate, attempts to dispense with his wife's remains, and thus get rid of her pesky ghost. More on the ghost in a bit. While there's neither a whodunnit nor blackmail aspect to the film, there is a minor mystery at the core of the plot: the identity of John's mother's killer. Given the paucity of potential suspects the film presents to us, though, there's no need to call in Sherlock Holmes to solve the mystery; John Holmes would've had a fighting chance of solving it (as long as enough blood was reaching his brain at the time). The piece-by-piece reveal of the killer's identity may have been influenced by the Harmonica flashbacks in Once Upon a Time in the West, and can in turn can be seen in Dario Argento's later Opera.

Argento could claim that Opera references his own work in OUATITW-although just how much he contributed to that film's screenplay is debatable-but it's notable just how closely the flashback device at the centre of that film echoes this one. Aside from that, it's impossible to discuss Hatchet without mentioning The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which was unveiled after this film was shot, but before its release. 

It's likely that Bava considered himself 'done' with the giallo after Bood and Black Lace. He didn't return to the filone for several years, before churning out 5 Dolls for an August Moon, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, and Bay of Blood in short order around the turn of the decade.  Although vastly different in many ways, all three films share a light-hearted touch, with none being rooted in anything resembling reality (consider 5 Doll's 'serum' Macguffin, the ghost angle here, and the general outrageousness of Bay of Blood's plot). This was very much pushing against the trend for sleek and sexy urban-set thrillers, of the sort popularised by Argento. The plots of Bird and Hatchet both centre around childhood trauma, but for Bava it's just a hook on which to hang a load of black comedy; for Argento, although he does include comedic scenes and characters, it's more of a left hook to the gut.

Bava's movement towards black comedy in his later gialli can be seen as either an attempt to broaden the filone's horizons, or as a sign that he felt he'd taken it as far as he could. While not being the sort of spoof films (although an argument could be made for Bay of Blood on that front) which tended to characterise Italians being 'done' with a genre*, he does fall on his tried and trusted box of cinematic tricks to construct a fun, but safe, piece. His beloved curved glass, which distorted the image when held in front of the lens, is present and correct, as are occasional bursts of expressionist lighting, particularly in the lead up to Harrington's murder of his wife. There are also more dollies than usual for this stage of Bava's career, although they're of the fast and jerky variety, lacking the grace and steady menace of B&BL.

Apparently the wife character wasn't included in the original screemplay (as the opening credits would have you believe it's spelt), and was a late addition after Laura Betti expressed an interest in working with Bava. One imagines that the film as written was a darker character study, Psycho without any ambiguity as to the killer's identity (there are still several overt nods to Hitchcock's film in the finished product). The introduction of Betti to the mix seems to have led to the least gialloey thing about the film-the supernatural aspect. 

There are many gialli with 'ghosts', which turn out to be  staged hauntings in order to drive someone (some woman) mad. There are very few which do actually contain supernatural elements, because once you establish that the film takes place in a (let's face it) alternate reality, the stakes are lowered all round. After all, if there's an afterlife, death-the fear of which is at the core of the giallo-isn't as big a deal any more. It's clearly not a big deal here anyway, with only a couple of semi-set pieces, and the return of Betti's character as a ghost doesn't really damage things too much, unless you tire of the comedic shenanigans of Harrington trying to dispose of her ashes. It's clearly just a cherry on the top of a frothy, light film, not intended to be seriously analysed by film studies nerds.

Still. If it is possible to return as a ghost, why don't any of Harrington's other victims return to rat him out to the fuzz? And how can Betti's character  have so much control over who sees and hears her? It's madness. What is also is, probably, is Bava processing some complex feelings about his own wife, who by all accounts was extremely difficult to live with (and probably mentally ill). And, while we're shooting proverbial fish in a plot-holed barrel, are we seriously meant to believe that Dagmar Lassander's character, a new model who claims to be the sister of one of the 'disappeared', is working with the police? Her providing of Harrington with an alibi can be explained as being part of a bid to win his confidence, and to ultimately glean conclusive proof of his guilt, as opposed to further circumstantial evidence of his links to murders/attempted murders, but be prepared to swallow a pretty large slice of scepticism all the same. 

Still, this is a film designed to be consumed then forgotten, as with much popular entertainment in the mid-to-late twentieth century. The thing with Mario Bava is he was too good a director to make something entirely disposable, and there are plenty of classy moments here. The introduction of a younger version of Harrington, who increasingly shares the screen with his older, more paranoiac incarnation, leads to some haunting moments, with the child actor being especially skilled at giving a look full of wist (wistful, if you will). The fashion house setting, back from B&BL, lends a touch of opulence, and allows for some excellent mannequin action.  The score contains a lot of Stelvio Cipriani-esque guitar stings, and you even get some B&W footage of Boris Karloff from The Wurdulak. All in all, this film won't change your life, but it will make it slightly more bearable for 85 minutes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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