Also known with the bizarre title The Fox with the Velvet Tail (bizarre not because of the title itself, but because it has zero relation to the film whatsoever), this is a film which takes its cue from the Gastaldi and Lenzi sun-drenched 60s thrillers, rather than Argento's stalk-and-slashers.

Trapped in a volatile marriage, Ruth finally spies a way out for good when she meets Paul, a dashing younger man. Given that he's played by Jean Sorel, Paul isn't necessarily all he's cracked up to be, however. He quickly makes himself at home in Ruth's seaside mansion, and, after Ruth narrowly survives a couple of unlikely 'accidents', her soon-to-be-ex-husband pops in for a visit. With a mysterious blonde woman looking on from a rented villa next door, and Roland, Paul's old friend from Vietnam, also lounging around like a character from a Jess Franco film, will Ruth emerge unscathed from the eye of the hurricane, or will she choke on the fox's velvet tail?

For a film that's 100 minutes long and features absolutely no blood-or onscreen killings-this is pleasingly engaging stuff. It toys with the viewer slightly, with the initial mystery seeming to concern the motives of Jean Sorel, which, as any giallo fan will tell you, tend to be nefarious. Just as you're beginning to think that you have the film all worked out, and pitying it for its naivete, it shows its hand completely, telling you exactly who is trying to do what to whom. This occurs pretty much halfway through, and the remainder of the film is a continual series of twists and turns, some of which are obvious, but even that sometimes seems to be deliberate, so as to obfuscate the build up to further, less obvious surprises.

The film largely takes place in a single location, a Franco-esque seaside villa, and,  as is common in this sort of giallo, there are very few characters. The reasonably clever plot mightn't be enough for the more gore-hungry fans out there, but it should satisfy the more cerebral cineaste. The performances are all decent, with Sorel doing his patented smarmy cad routine which would've been so familiar by this stage that elements of it must have slipped into his real life persona. Analía Gadé, playing Ruth, seems to have declined to do any front-on nudity, but acceded to offering a rear view.  The small print of the contract seemingly didn't put a limit on the amount of rear nudity she'd do, however, and José María Forqué takes every opportunity, and shoehorns in a few non-opportunities, to showcase her rear in all its glory. There's also a delightfully cheesy early sequence in which she's topless, but her wares are obscured by a succession of inanimate objects; the end result cannot fail but to bring Austin Powers to mind.

One iffy point is the attitude of the police, who (mercifully, given their evident lack of prowess) play a very minor role in proceedings. There's always a chance that an eventual court case will alter/correct the events of the final reel, but part of the process of buying into a film is the rejection of such notions, unless expressly signposted as a possibility by the director. Here, the police have clearly stumbled into a messy domestic situation, and any fool could see that there's some blackmail action happening. A realisation of this might've given them pause for thought in their interpretation of the circumstances surrounding the death of a leading character, but they seem happy to take said circumstances at (apparent) face value. As I said, the film concludes with arrests, which are by definition not definitive judgements, rather than deaths, and there's no doubt that everything feels narratively satisfying. It's just a shame it doesn't feel true-to-life.

After (very, very soon after) she begins receiving threatening phone calls and survives an encounter with an intruder in her apartment, Nicole Rochard leaves her stripping life in Paris to be installed as the countryside mistress of an English doctor, Dr Matthews.  The mysterious caller seems to think that Nicole has a cache of diamonds which were stolen by her father, a recently-murdered jewel thief. Nicole's Parisian boyfriend tracks her down in England, as does Dr Matthews' wife. Right about then she happens to disappear, later turning up drowned. After Dr Matthews survives an attempt on his life, and his wife does not, the police engage in a race against time to catch the killer before all of the shifty characters circling the case meet their demise.

This is one of the very best gialli of all time. It's not perfect-the first half hour sometimes plays like a love letter from Luciano Ercoli to Nieves Navarro's body-but it's never less than entertaining, even with a fairly extended running time (107 minutes). The direction is top notch, when Ercoli can tear his focus away from his soon-to-be-wife's ass, and the story is one of Ernesto Gastaldi's very best.

​Death Walks on High Heels provides one of the more enjoyable examples of a police-led investigation as well. The interplay between the investigating officers, Bergman and Baxter, veers between lighthearted and overtly comical, sometimes coming across as being as broad as the police banter from comedy-giallo The Weekend Murders. Somehow, this doesn't really hurt the film at all, with the jocularity of the police scenes contrasting nicely with the wild intensity of the parallel investigation of Simon Andreu, Nicole's spurned Frenchman. The relative scarcity of graphic murder scenes (there's only one full-on murder depicted-which is actually surprisingly graphic and gory-as well as a brief throat slitting at the start, although there is also a surprisingly-jarring eye-operation scene) helps keep the overall mood light, with the tone not dissimilar to that of Hitchcock in his pomp.

The parallel investigations are given almost equal screen time, and allow for a relatively non-linear approach to the plot (for a plot-driven giallo, anyway). We're privy to the information uncovered by the police, and witness snatches of conversations involving Andreu's Michel, which afford us a privileged position when attempting to figure out just what is going on. This is one of those mysteries in which almost every suspect is guilty of something; you just need to figure out what exactly is going on, and then link the motivation to the suspect. And, while there aren't quite clues provided, a logical approach to deduction should help to you land on the correct answers.

This isn't the criticism it would be for many films; for one thing, the extended length does allow for more thinking-time, and, the longer it goes on, the more your mental list of possibilities will taper towards the solution. Also, if you know your  Gastaldi gialli, you'll have a fair idea as to what the likeliest motivation behind the killings is. Still, even if you do guess who is guilty and why, it shouldn't sully your enjoyment at all; the film is much too damn fun for such trifles to really matter. It also holds up on repeat viewings, even if you might question why one character doesn't say anything when confronted with apparently decisive evidence of their guilt towards the end of the film. Well, eye tell a lie,* they do say something, but only after the truth has outed. The only other hole I could find-which isn't so much a hole as a missed opportunity-concerns Dr Matthew's reaction to the suggestion that Nicole could have been his attempted assassin. (SPOILERS) If he'd positively identified her, he'd have an iron clad alibi for her murder, and would have further strengthened his attempts to fudge her time of death. Then again, he doesn't seem to have ever been considered a true suspect (mostly, I'd imagine, with the intention of inculcating the same mindset among viewers), so doesn't really need to firm up his alibi. All the same, I can't help feeling that his reactions are designed to fool the viewers, and not psychologically consistent with his character. (SPOILERS END)

One interesting red herring-which may not even be an intentional one-concerns the resemblance of Matthews' wife to Nicole. They look so alike that I did a double take when she first appeared, so similar to Nieves Navarro does Claudie Lange look. This leads us to consider the possibility of a classic switcheroo, with one of the women assuming the other's identity. It's not overly likely, or even possible, given how events play out, but the thought does linger in the mind, distracting us. In the end, it seems to be nothing more than a coincidence, and one which wasn't even intended by the filmmakers. I'd be hard pressed to believe this, but given Ercoli and Navarro's personal relationship, it's just possible that he (and she) saw no resemblance between the two actresses, similar to the way that parents of identical twins can always tell them apart. I have to hold my hands up here and confess that I don't possess any great skills in the art of facial recognition, and often have difficulty remembering faces and telling people apart (I struggled greatly to differentiate between Anthony Steffen and Gabriele Tinti the first time I saw Tropic of Cancer, and, away from the giallo, I also couldn't tell Kevin Spacey and Russell Crowe apart in LA Confidential [in my defence, I knew who neither was at the time I first saw that film]), so this paragraph might just be an ode to my own failings as a human.

In some ways, there's not a huge amount to write about High Heels. At least, there aren't many aspects of the film which demand to be analysed. Again, not a criticism-the film is, to my mind, frothy fun from first to last (it's hard to even be mad at it for the endless nudity in the first half hour, although the bizarre blacked-up get-up Navarro sports for the first of her stripteases should raise some heckles), and easily one of the top ten gialli of all time. So, break out your blue contact lenses, put any dead bodies you have lying around on ice, and prepare for 107 minutes of pure entertainment. And then, probably best to get rid of that dead body ASAP (but have an alibi sorted, too!). 

 And so we come to the third and final entry in Massimo Dallamano's sexy schoolgirl series, also known as the 'Schoolgirls in peril' trilogy. He didn't direct this one himself, having sadly died in a car crash a year or two before filming, although his script remained in place (there are six credited writers, but it's hard to say if some of them came on board after his death to rework the material, or were involved beforehand, or were just credited for quota purposed).

After the discovery of the mutilated body of a schoolgirl in a large waterfall-dam type-thing. Inspector Di Salvo is tasked with solving the case. Under pressure for a swift resolution due to the prestigious circles in which the victim moved, Di Salvo refuses to toe the line, and gradually uncovers evidence of a sex ring involving young, lovely schoolgirls, and further evidence that links this ring to certain pillars of the community.

There may have been six writers contributing to this film, but the end result is lacking in depth or nuance to an alarming degree. Coming across as a hodgepodge of the two previous films in the trilogy, What Have... Solange and Your Daughters, this film combines sex rings and teenage abortions with motorcycling patsies and sprinkles them over the by-now-standard schoolgirl shagging shenanigans. These shenanigans could be said to constitute the reveal to one of the film's mysteries, specifically what caused the death of Angela, the discovery of whose corpse, replete with a mysteriously mutilated vagina, kickstarts proceedings. 

However, anyone who was familiar with Red Rings' canonical heritage wouldn't have considered the provenance of her injuries to be a mystery-it's a sequel to the schoolgirl sex films, so she was clearly involved in some schoolgirl sex which went wrong. Of course, you might be expecting some sort of clever double-bluff, but the longer you watch the film, the more you'll realise that this is unlikely to be the case. Interestingly, Alberto Negrin-who replaced Dallamano in the director's chair-does throw in a reference for those familiar with the film's giallo heritage, when the camera focuses on a leather glove on a character's bedside table. At this point in the film, we haven't as yet seen any leather-gloved killings, so the uninitiated (and stupid) might mistake the shot's focus to be fashion-oriented. If you're being charitable you might also say that the scene in which Fabio Testi's Di Salvo meets the teachers at Angela's exclusive boarding school is an homage to the same scene in Solange, as opposed to a lazy copy-and-paste job (there's even a teacher who arrives late, mirroring Testi's own entrance in Solange).

The other mystery the film presents is the identity (/ies) of the person (/people) going around killing anyone who seems to have knowledge of the underage sex ring.* The final revelation was presumably designed to be a huge shock, but it falls slightly flat (SPOILERS ahead). A large reason for this is that the film regularly employs the classic giallo eyeball close-up, but frames the eye in too wide a shot. This means we can clearly see the eyelash colour of the eye-owner, which mightn't be an issue if the eyelashes were a nondescript colour (anything but ginger). Alas, however, they are ginger, so that somewhat gives the game away. (They were clearly using the actual actor for the eyeball shots too, and not a body-double.) 

(Still SPOILERS) The ginger-eyelash owner, Angela's little sister Emily, seems initially to be a typical cute child-who-helps-the-police, a la the two girls who help catch the killer in ...Daughters, but as the film progresses she becomes something more. What exactly that 'something' is, though, is unclear. Whatever it is, it's enough to see her taken cruisin' by the police at night to shoot the shit. And it's enough to allow her to be virtually omnipresent, observing the older girls who were her sister's friends almost non-stop. You wonder what her attendance record must have been like for her own classes.

It's likely that Dallamano saw her as a symbol of purity fighting against the corrupting forces which would soon begin targeting her, an assertion I'm basing on Di Salvo's treatment of her once she's 'unmasked' as an attempted killer; he basically ruffles her hair and tells her to behave herself in future, even though she's repeatedly tried to murder a girl. The fact that she targets one specific girl, again and again and again, renders her, for me, more of a psychotic killer with unrelenting focus, a la Michael Myers. Her killing skills haven't caught up with her mind just yet, but they will... I won't get into Dallamano's skewed view of women and sex here, because I've discussed it enough with regard to the earlier films, but suffice to say that none of the other five writers have, to my money, managed to slip another perspective into the script. (SPOILERS end.)

And the script, as I said above, is lacking in more than alternative perspectives on women. The investigative process is so prosaic that it becomes almost an avant-garde send up of police procedurals (which was very much not the intention). I'll point out at this juncture that I'm reviewing the film based on the German Eyecatcher DVD, which may well have been missing some footage, despite billing itself as being uncut. There are two main breakthroughs in the investigation, which lead to the unmasking of the motorcycling stooge, and sex ring mastermind respectively. 

The first breakthrough happens offscreen, after Di Salvo barges his way into a dormitory at the school and demands that the girls start talkin'. We then cut to him arriving at a strangely-located caravan, which is apparently the weekend home of the motorcyclist who carries out the sex ring's dirty work. The second breakthrough happens because Di Salvo has uncovered-again, offscreen-some info about the shady past of another suspect, a clothes shop owner who was previously charged with producing art forgeries. After asking ex-forger about this, to a wall of impassivity, Di Salvo then sits on the info for a long time before deciding to actually dig out the file on the case (his methods for uncovering this info in the first place presumably didn't extend beyond another cop casually mentioning something to him). This file provides him with the identity of the sex ring mastermind, and the case is mostly closed,with all that remains being the ruffling of a child's hair. 

This is extremely lazy plotting, and we aren't even privileged with a view of the files Di Salvo reads on his visit to the police hall of records. We are treated to a rambunctious score, but if I wanted to watch a man impassively reading with a stirring soundtrack, I'd be a rather strange individual. And, in further weak writing, once you find out the identity of the mastermind you might wonder why the file in question even exists any more.

Returning for a moment to Dallamano's favourite topic-women-the character of Di Salvo's girlfriend here is truly bizarre, even for him. We first see her through Di Salvo's eyes as he catches her shoplifting, which is apparently a common occurrence for her. She abruptly exits the film halfway through, fed up with Di Salvo running out to try and solve murders, but in her brief onscreen time she never fails to mention how she's a shoplifter. One might think she represents unrepentant criminality, or something, but she doesn't-it's just lazy characterisation. She's a shoplifter, so no need to have her do or say anything else. In fact, she may only exist at all to add to her boyf's characterisation: he doesn't just investigate murders offscreen, he also lives with a criminal!!! Wow. (Surely he doesn't need any more characterisation, though; the scene where he interrogates a suspect by taking them on a rollercoaster, and sending them on a second loop for good measure,** already marks him out as a crazy maverick.)

It may also just be an attempt at humour, something which is prevalent throughout this film in what is possibly a half-hearted nod at the comedic turn the poliziotteschi had taken in the late 70s. The humour is hit-and-miss; actually, no-it's all miss, apart from one moment where Di Salvo's partner misunderstands a question while looking at a billboard ( I won't attempt to do the joke justice here, as to attempt to do so would be to suck away what little fun exists in the film). 

That's possibly a bit harsh; it's not a terrible film, just not a very good one, and certainly not as good as its canonical predecessors (for all their faults). Alberto Negrin does seem to know his way around a giallo, but is hobbled by an extremely lacking script (which is partly his fault, as he's one of The Six). You do get more than your fill of sleazy nudity, not-quite-enough murders, and absolutely no decent investigative scenes. Oh, and you do get one of the better examples of that absurd cinematic entity-the One Sided Conversation With a Killer Who's the Audience's POV (see My Dear Killer for an even better instance of this). What you don't get, sadly, is a film worth watching.
​

Greta, whose friend and sometimes-lover Sally has disappeared while working as secretary to a famous author, manages to secure the same position for herself. Her intention is to uncover the truth about what happened to Sally, with her suspicions aimed squarely at the author, Richard Stuart, and his wife Eleanora, who practise a seemingly carefree, hedonistic lifestyle. After Richard learns of Greta's motivations for taking the job, he decides to abandon his in-progress novel in favour of beginning a new murder mystery story about a woman investigating the disappearance of her friend, which seems to contain uncanny echoes of her own situation.

​Unable to gather any conclusive evidence of the Stuarts' guilt, however, Greta finds herself becoming increasingly drawn to Richard, and convinces him to reveal the truth about what happened to Sally. Is he really divulging the truth, however? Or is  he telling the almost-truth, while omitting a key detail? Yes, yes he is.

This is a film which has a big reputation among internet fanboys, but let me tell you-it's not the plot, acting or cinematography that has won their approval. Well, the cinematography has something to do with it I suppose, specifically the decision to film the lovemaking (/rape) scene between Rosalba Neri and Barbara Bouchet in super slow motion. But yes, that scene, and the general presence of those two leading giallo lights in the same film, is what accounts for much of the hullabaloo surrounding Amuck!. Its unavailability in a watchable format for many years didn't do its reputation any harm, either. But now that it's readily available in HD formats, what's it like? (And by 'it', I don't mean the sex scene [although that does look pretty spectacular on Blu]; I mean the film).

Sadly, the film isn't all that good. The initial set-up is promising enough, with the ulterior motivation behind Greta's taking her position with the Stuarts laid bare almost immediately, followed by her taking her position for the aforementioned bare lay, but not a hell of a lot happens thereafter. The set-up is more Agatha Christie mystery than murder-heavy giallo, with the plot centred around a single murder which takes place prior to the events depicted in movie. We do eventually see  a representation (not necessarily an accurate one) of this murder, but the first 'real-time' killing happens within the final ten minutes of the film. 

A paucity of murders doesn't necessarily equate to a paucity of set-pieces, and there is a strong scene in which Greta's life is endangered during a hunting expedition.* That's about it though, apart from a mildly suspenseful sequence in which Greta has to escape from a cellar and return a key to Richard's office without being seen. There's a vague sense of gradually escalating dread, and an ever-increasing threat to Greta's life, but, as is repeatedly made clear, she herself has chosen to take up her position with the Stuarts, and then refuses to leave it, so our sympathies for her are limited.

Surprisingly, given the relatively sedate plot, we don't actually get all that big an insight into the characters. Italian genre films in general tend to be lacking on this front; they can never quite nail a comprehensive psychological investigation of a character (their preferred investigation being of the external, murder-solving sort). Saying that, one of the things we all love about these films are their moments of crazed non-sequiturs, or, to put it another way, the barmy characters doing barmy things. If the focus was on a realistic character study, the wilder eccentricities which form much of the giallo DNA would be lost. That's not to say there aren't giallo which successfully delve into the depths of the human psyche, it's just that this isn't one of them.

One of the main reasons for our inability to really get to know Greta is her lack of a friend or colleague who can act as a sounding board. She does relate her suspicions to the local police commissioner, but for much of the rest of the time she's mute, even during (one-sided) conversations with her hosts/employers. When she does speak, she displays all the hallmarks of the slightly vapid giallo heroine. One of the more egregious examples of this comes when she's trying to explain to the commissioner how Richard is toying with her with the details of his new story. She says, "He’s dictating everything to a tape recorder and... oh it’s much too difficult to explain." No it isn't! Just tell him that the recordings detail the real-life murder of your friend, you fool!  

This is an example of behaviour which could only exist in a film, along with the classic phonecall-in-which-someone-tells-the-police-they-they-know-who-the-killer-is-and-will-tell-them-face-to-face-rather-than-just-saying-the-bloody-name-over-the-phone. Barbara Bouchet actually does a good job of emoting throughout, but there's not quite enough on the page for her to work with. 

Speaking of there not being enough on the page, the mystery plot is amazingly thin. Without giving too much away (well, OK, giving too much, but not everything away) this is a film in which you're led for most of the running time to think that one thing has happened, only for a lateish semi-twist to apparently tell you that you were slightly, but not totally, incorrect. But then another twist tells you that, actually yes, you were a hundred percent right all along. Not exactly from the M Night Shymalan school of shocks. There is a late, late attempt at another twist, through the final line of the film, but this revelation doesn't actually change anything or make us reconsider anything at all. 

Considering the plot-heavy nature of Silvio Amadio's first giallo, Assassination in Rome (compare the length of my synopsis for that film with this one), the lightweight story here is something of a surprise. He was likely attempting to create more of a mood piece (a sexy mood piece at that). There are some atmospheric scenes, and the cinematography is very handsome, if never overly suspenseful. Amadio was clearly a director from the classical school, with no avant-garde Argento-esque (or even Martino-esque) touches on show here beyond the slow motion sex. For a lot of you, though, those scenes will lead to more than enough avant-garde touches. you disgusting pervs.

If this film really cost only €15,000, as claimed on Imdb, then that's a pretty admirable achievement. Not that it's an especially good film-at all-but the producers have definitely wrung every cent out of that budget. The lighting, camerawork and set design are, for the most part, pretty decent, although the more I think about it, the more the film has that increasingly-common look whereby the visuals seem to be highly modern and polished, but they're actually just desaturated, with upped contrast levels, which isn't hard to do in editing. Still, said producers have also managed to cover the day rate of both Franco Nero and Tinto Brass, which I'd have thought would alone almost account for that fifteen grand budget.

Supposedly-but not really-based on a true story, Crazy Dog, or Cannepazzo, details how Marco seeks to uncover the truth behind the identity of the titular serial kiler who murdered his father twenty years before, despite the killer being known to have committed suicide, which suggests that the truth has already been somewhat uncovered. His investigation takes the form of an interview of Raul Chinna, a famous criminologist. Chinna tells Marco about an (ironically) unreported aspect of the case, namely the investigation  into the of murders by a reporter (there's the irony) called David Moiraghi. As the interview continues, we discover more about David, as well as Marco's father, and, ultimately, Chinna himself.

This film exists very much at the periphery of the giallo. Peripheral pretty much sums it up on many levels: the audience are peripheral figures, as we watch one man tell another about the activities of a third man from twenty years before. Flashbacks-within-flashbacks abound. The slick style, probably one borne out of the necessity of masking budget deficiencies, also keeps us at a distance, as the film jumps about manically without stopping to breathe. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it's not a good enough film to be improved much by more breathing room (as such, it should probably be humanely put down by suffocation). 

By contrast, the central investigation is so central that it has two distinct layers. The superficially 'main' investigation is that of Marco, out to (re)uncover the truth behind his father's murder. However, as stated, this investigation proves to be nothing more than sitting and listening to another character speak. David, the reporter of whom Chinna speaks, conducts the second, and in many ways only true, investigation, which takes up much of the screen time but is in fact extremely lacking in terms of detective logic. The only investigative breakthrough comes thanks to some wild extrapolating from David based off a newspaper report of a missing veterinarian, from which he surmises that the killer has based himself at an abandoned location where the vet used to perform experiments on animals. Hence the killer's self-awarded title, Crazy Dog.

The investigation is so prosaic that David doesn't even manage to uncover the connection between Crazy Dog's first eighteen victims (one of whom is Marco's father) himself; instead he gets essentially kidnapped, and the connection is laid out for him by the kidnapper. As with much of the film, the plot strand of David's kidnapping doesn't really stand up to scrutiny in terms of logic and motivation. The main purpose seems to be to distract the viewer from what's really going on. This could be said to be the intent behind much of the goings-on in gialli over the years, but here the leaps of logic come across as annoying and distancing, rather than being charming and eccentric.

I won't spoil the ending, with its twin revelations, but I will say that I guessed them both extremely early on. The twists are big, so big that they overwhelm what's come before, and are far from satisfying (and are very similar to each other). So that's pretty much it: a poor, predictable film noteworthy only for its cameos and its peripheral association with a once-burgeoning Italian filone.  The first 70-odd minutes is rendered redundant by the end revelations, and doesn't possess enough style or excitement to have made the slog through them worthwhile. The characterisation is OK in spots, as is the acting (Nero goes way OTT, and is saddled with ridiculous dialogue, but is still magnetic), but there's nothing about this film that will live long in the memory after watching it.

This film's title is coincidentally the emotional state in which I found myself after watching it.

After attending the funeral of their schoolfriend Jennifer Lopez (not that one), four girls find themselves being picked off one-by-one by a masked killer, who apparently is another, forgotten, schoolfriend. Oh, and they still find the time to take drugs and have sex. A lot of sex.

The film, billed as the first American giallo,* unfolds out of chronological order (which was very 'in' in the late 90s/early 00s), which adds absolutely nothing of value to proceedings. That's not surprising, though-pretty much nothing in the film could be considered as having any value. The cinematography is (I think; the DVD is shockingly-poorly authored) terrible, the acting worse, and the script makes the cinematography and acting look Not Too Bad.

The most impressive thing about the film is that its makers managed to persuade six actresses to disrobe (and, I think in at least one case, actually have sex) on camera for something which is as no-budget and low-hope as this is. An end-of-end-credits title card informs us that the director had identified "stylish visuals, techno scores, the whodunit element, violence, gore, large amounts of melodrama... (and) liberal amounts of nudity & sex" as being the hallmarks of the giallo genre. He's not wrong (apart from the techno bit), so it's a shame that he proves incapable of making something which showcases this knowledge of the filone. Sure, there is an extremely liberal amount of nudity and sex, but that's not an exclusive hallmark of the giallo film. The rest of the elements identified as being integral to the giallo are MIA.

The actresses were likely chosen for their aforementioned willingness to disrobe. They certainly weren't chosen for their acting talents; scenes which don't include bath-wanking, clothes-changing, showering or sex-having tend to depict the girls struggling to believably portray taking drugs, or chatting in monotones about men. The idea seems to have been to incorporate some earthy social realism into the mix, to pay lip service to issues such as drug addiction and eating disorders. The problem is, the characters don't really need to eat anything, so paper-thin are they.

And, for a film which features many scenes of women talking, it still struggles to pass the Bechdel test, such is the concern of the characters with looking good and impressing their men. Not to say that some women aren't like that IRL (in real life, yeah?),  but I'd say it's unusual for two of them to, as happens here, have an in-depth conversation about how they don't want to lose their boyfriends only to immediately launch into full-on lesbian action. Especially when they're sunbathing at a public beach (it must have been cold, or early in the morning, though, as there are no background artists visible at any stage on the ensuing scenery-munching scene).

The mystery which is notionally at the heart of the plot-who is killing these girls-is not one which seems to concern any of them at any point. Indeed, this may be the one justification for messing around with the timeline-if we lose track of how many of the friends are dead at a given point, we're less likely to pick up on their apparent total indifference to their predicament. There are a couple (literally) of suspects, but the longer the film plays the more you realise that we're just going to be treated to a last-second reveal, with no layers of mystery to be penetrated (unless you find the vagina an impenetrable mystery, in which case I would say you're in for a treat, except the shoddy image quality will likely only add to the vaginal mystique). 

The kill list-a list of the five main characters' names on a white board, with those who're killed marked off-is a decent, if not original, idea, which at least provides some semblance of a coherent structure. It did remind me that we never actually saw one of the characters being murdered though, so the kill list is at best a qualified success. And, the handwriting is very sloppy. 

Not seeing one of the characters being murdered barely qualifies as a letdown here, given that we'd have seen much even if the kill did happen onscreen-most scenes play out in static, poorly lit, poorly framed wide shots, with gore minimal at best. The grading is even worse, with much of the action playing out in tinted, monochromatic 'style' which can surely never have seemed like an actual good idea. 

The director, Sean Weathers,** was very young when he made this. I don't want to be too harsh on him, but he's since gone on to make over a dozen further features, so hopefully he's long since moved on from the level he displays here. He seems nice enough in the extra features, and the self-belief on display is admirable, if horribly misplaced. Still, he should focus on the positives-he seems to have had a prodigious talent for easily convincing women to take their tops off, which is something that, as the late 2010s unfolds, it appears is not shared by a large proportion of other males in the American film community.

Two years after he showed us what had happened to Solange, Massimo Dallamano was still worried about the many evils which could befall Italy's young people (/young girls). As the end title scrawl asserts, every year in the early 70s 8000 teenagers disappeared from their homes, with many dying or becoming addicted to drugs. And the majority of these 8000 kids apparently disappeared without trace. Well, that's why Massimo made a film about young runaways becoming junkies and disappearing and dying! Oh wait, no-he's only gone and made a film about non-runaway girls shagging.

After the nude body of a teenage girl is found hanging from the rafters of a loft apartment, evidence emerges which suggests that she was murdered elsewhere, with the suicide being staged. Commissioner Silvestri of the murder squad takes over the case. Somewhat-assisted by the spunky new (female!!!) DA, he untangles a messy web of underage prostitution which has links to the very top levels of society.

This is a much angrier film than Solange, which viewed the violation of the (somewhat) innocent young victims through a poetic, almost elegiac, filter, occasionally veering off course to indulge in some vigorous perving. Here, there's far less perving: only one and a bit semi-decent nude scenes for you raincoat brigade, unless you're into naked dummies. (Still, the character [if not the actress] in the nude scenes is fifteen, so Massimo hasn't gone and left you empty-handed, so to speak.) There's much more bile in general on display here; Dallamano is clearly fed up of political hypocrisy (if not general hypocrisy; he's still prone to celebrating both the purity and sexiness of young girls), and takes aim at the establishment with one barrel (the other one presumably aiming at an ingenue somewhere).

Anyway, that's enough pervy old man jokes for the moment. This is one of those gialli which takes a slightly different approach to the mystery element. It's also one of those gialli which isn't an out-and-out giallo; there's more than a hint of the poliziotteschi, with the investigation being police-driven, and a half-decent example of the Italian Chase Scene occurring at the halfway point.

The Italian Chase Scene differs from the Hollywood Chase Scene on one major point-permits. Hollywood, in an early example of political correctness gone mad, generally insisted on closed roads and shooting permits for city-based car scenes. Italy notionally did the same, but its directors took a very laissez-faire attitude towards these rules and regulations, even (/especially) when operating overseas. Very, very few of the Italian exploitation films  which utilised New York and London for exteriors, for example, would have gone through the official channels to obtain permits. Car chases, which were a staple of poliziotteschi, were usually filmed on open roads, often featuring stunt drivers weaving in and out of several lanes of moving traffic. Just keep an eye on pedestrians in such scenes, and see how often they look around in bewilderment or jump out of the way in a manner which is too natural to be the acting of an extra.

The chase scene in ...Daughters  is far from top-of-the-range (compared to, say, the admittedly-plot momentum-destroying one in Strange Shadows in an Empty Room), but it's not bad, and features some nifty in-car footage. The lax Italian attitude to safety would come back to haunt lead actor Claudio Cassinelli, however, when he died in a helicopter crash while filming Hands of Steel in Colorado. Ironically, it's quite likely that the production did have shooting permits, as an article in the Chicago Tribune stated that the crew had been based in the same location for ten days. Also somewhat ironically, possibly the most celebrated American car chase, from The French Connection, was in fact filmed sans permits. This somewhat negates my above ramblings, so I'll move on.

The car chase is preceded by a chase on foot down a hospital stairwell, which is actually far more exciting and dynamic, and also features an excellent surprise-hand-chopping-off. The music for this scene is bizarrely chilled, and lacking in any urgency, but the staging and camerawork almost make up for this. There's also a classic underground car park chase scene which, upon rewatching, I can see  bears a surprising amount of similarities to a chase sequence in my own Three Sisters. It was surprising to me, anyway, as I didn't realise I'd ripped off the film quite so closely (and worsely).

As I mentioned earlier, this film doesn't contain a typical guess-the-killer plot. It does, notionally, but the guilty party is not a character who we've come across previously. Although, saying that, the killer isn't the real baddie here-he's pretty bad, sure, but he's merely a puppet being manipulated by more powerful figures, from the upper echelons of society. We do see some of the less-important powerful figures, but the real top brass, ie the most guilty parties, remain off-screen. Thus, the real villain takes on a less-human and more-conceptual bent. It's not any one killer who's responsible, it's a system which has strained and broken under the weight of power.

There is a minor mystery revolving around the identity of a voice on a recording, the solution to which isn't overly dissimilar to the major 'eureka' moment in other gialli (eg Bird With the Crystal Plumage), and there's a classic 'switcheroo', where a dead character is claimed to be alive in order to flush out the killer. The tropes of the giallo are alive and well here, then, they're just serving a more complex, and political, story* than is the norm.

To return, then, to the issue of the female. Dallamano gives us, on paper at least, a female protagonist here with the top-billed Giovanna Ralli. She's continually having to assert her status as a(n assistant) District Attorney, in what was likely an all-too-accurate representation of Italian society in the early 70s (and the late 2010s). She's a far more independent, and less idiotic, character than Karin Baal's in Solange, but she actually contributes little or nothing to the investigative cause. She becomes a damsel in distress for the underground car park chase, and otherwise spends most of her time correcting people who assume she's a secretary, or that the (assistant) DA must be a man. Dallamano seems to be trying to make a point, or at least rebuff some prior criticism, here, but he can't quite see it through.

Then there's the thorny issue of the schoolgirl hookers. If Dallamano really wanted to light a candle for the (alleged) 8000 youths who went missing every year, he sure chose a strange way to go about doing it. The girls here are all from loving, middle-class homes (which can afford to send them to expensive therapy), and aren't runaways. The girls, too, possess that curious mixture seen in Solange: they're young, and therefore somewhat pure, yet they're also marked by deviant (/human) sexual desires, as evidenced by the way that all of them seem to be initially quite enthusiastic  about becoming prostitutes. Their burgeoning sexuality is thus bringing about their ruin, even if it's the very thing that clearly simultaneously fascinates Dallamano. It'd be a lot easier if all girls just remained prepubescent, he seems to be saying, like the two girls whose attentiveness (presumably due to their not being distracted by, or distracting to, sexual urges) leads to the eventual apprehension of the killer. Then again, even prepubescents aren't without sin, as he'd later show us...

This isn't half as beautiful a film as Solange, either visually (come back Joe d'Amato!) or thematically. It's bristling with rage, though, even if it's sometimes a contradictory rage which can't quite figure out what it's angry about. Ultimately, though, it seems to be saying that we are all just pawns, at the mercy of darker, inhuman forces. The climax reminded me a great deal of the scenes midway through The Dark Knight, where the police track down the sniper who shot at Commissioner Gordon. Just like in this film, there the sniper was but a pawn being manipulated by something far more sinister (The Joker). Unlike here, though, Christopher Nolan didn't focus his attentions on a plot strand about underage sex which in some ways has nothing to do with the apparent point the film's trying to make. He did have that scene with the  people on boats, though, which is almost as bad.

This film isn't an out-and-out giallo, but it ticks enough boxes to make it worth a look. It's a pretty good film too, which is an added bonus for those of us who watch anything remotely giallo-esque.

Inspector Amaldi and his partner Frese, in between visiting their ailing boss in hospital and romancing girls who've come to them for protection from stalkers, try to solve the case of a taxidermist who's going around lopping limbs off people (after killing them). They soon realise that events from their boss Ajaccio's childhood may hold the key to unlocking the case within which the solution to the case may be found...

This film displays at least as many, and probably far more, American influences than Italian ones. There's a vaguely CSI feel to it all, with the focus on crime scene aftermaths* and police investigation (and, going slightly further back, the crime scenes sometimes come across as Se7en-lite).  The typical late 90s/early 00s drab Italian photography is livened up occasionally by CSI-esque high contrast lighting, and a couple of chase scenes, and some flashbacks, employ jazzy music video editing. There's even a hint of Manhunter, with the tortured Amaldi seemingly unable to avoid throwing all of himself into every case (and some of himself into some of the subjects of some of  the cases).

Amaldi is a decent character, though; far more interesting than your average movie cop. He has the dark past which lingers over him like a perpetual raincloud, even if he's probably not as astute a cop as the likes of Manhunter's Will Graham (a criminally long amount of time elapses between the killer being identified as an amateur taxidermist, and the police actually finding a viable suspect). Speaking of viable suspects, the amateur sleuth (AKA the viewer; the traditional amateur detective character being almost extinct in twenty first century gialli) has a grand total of two from whom to choose. One of these is heavily red herringed, which pretty much does the sleuthing work for you (although the film does try and trick you by having the killer look about 20 years younger than the age that logic dictates he must be).

Eros Puglielli, who probably deserved a better career than he's gone on to have, could have given himself a fighting chance of a surprising reveal if he'd limited the killer's unmasked screentime to a single, relatively innocuous, early appearance. Having them return halfway through the film to remind the viewers of their existence, and deliver some fairly ponderous exposition, is, however, a dud move. I'll hold my hands up and say that I haven't read the novel upon which the film is based, so I don't know whether Puglielli has improved upon or bungled the original work. Either way, he shows some nice touches, and could probably have delivered a properly stylish thriller with more money and better material (couldn't we all though?).

There are a few giallo 'homages', with one of the more overt being the central plot device of a killer constructing a human doll from murder victims' body parts (a nod to Frankenstein via Lamberto Bava's Body Puzzle). There are a couple of small nods to Argento (climbing up a rickety ladder to access a building via a first floor window being one), as well as a modern take on the artificial-looking person-falling-down-a-cliff effect beloved of Lucio Fulci. Puglielli doesn't throw in any overt homages, which is to his credit-I don't need to be reminded of other, better films when watching something. He's made his own beast, something which he may have seen as a US-influenced thriller rather than a giallo (the film seems to have been primarily marketed as a straight thriller, and he describes it as a 'gothic film' in the 'Making Of' documentary) yet which, more than probably any other Italian film this century, proves that the giallo doesn't have to be a thing of the past, and that its DNA still pervades the odd Italian thriller. It's just a shame that the Italian film industry seems to have taken a leaf** from Inspector Amaldi's book of slow investigations, and is taking its sweet time about actually linking that DNA to a fully-viable suspect(/great giallo film).

 ​Enrico Rossini, an Italian who teaches at an English girls' school, is trapped in a stale marriage. He tries to liven things up by fraternising with Liz, one of his students. An idyllic boat date on the Thames is ruined, however, by Liz's refusal to let him to all the way (to full sex). He thinks her claiming to have caught a glimpse of a girl being knifed at the riverside is just her latest excuse, but when a body is discovered the next morning Rossini can't resist returning to the scene of the crime. The victim turns out to be one of Liz's classmates, and the police uncover clues that contradict Rossini's alibi. Now that he's under suspicion, Rossini does all he can to clear his name... no, wait, he establishes a love nest which he hopes will finally help him shag Liz. When two more of his students, including Liz, are killed, the police think they have their man, only for Rossini to be cleared through forensic evidence. Still, he's been exposed as a love cheat who tried to shag his students, so his wife does the only sensible thing and dumps his sorry... no, my bad again, she decides to give the marriage another go. She and Rossini join forces with the police to try and crack the case, which seems to hinge around a mysterious bearded priest, and a young girl named Solange...

What Have You Done to Solange?* is a very strange film. It straddles the wide divide between high and low art, often straining to touch both poles simultaneously. On the one hand you have Ennio Morricone's sublime score, Aristide Massaccessi's luscious photography and  Massimo Dallamano's stately pace and (largely) classy direction, on the other you have the lecherous scenes set in the shower of a girls' boarding school, and, indeed, the plot in general.

If you were surprised to read his wife is by Rossini's side for his investigations, know that he never successfully managed to have sex with Liz, which was noted in her autopsy. This is apparently enough to make Mrs Rossini forgive her husband's attempted indiscretions. Just as well Liz retained some of her virtue, or else our intrepid hero's reputation-and marriage-would've been ruined by her slutty, slutty ways! 

If you're surprised that Rossini (and forgiving wife) choose, and are allowed, to get stuck into the official investigation despite being teachers with absolutely no formal connection with the police, know that I am too. Especially given he showed no inclination towards amateur sleuthing when he was actually under suspicion for the schoolgirls' deaths. He's driven by something, though, to bring the mysterious 'bearded priest' to justice. If I had to guess what's at the heart of his motivations, I'd suggest that it's the same two things that lie at the heart of the film in general-a reverence for female purity and a reverence for tits.

Tits-wise, Rossini is all about bending Liz to his sexual will, to the extent that he cultivates the love nest, replete with posters of topless chicks stuck about the bed, to try and seal the deal. Likewise, the film contains two shower scenes, ostensibly to set up one of Rossini's fellow teachers as a red herring, but really as an excuse to revel in as much boobs and bush as possible. The second such scene contains an extended shot which cuts the girls' heads off, and literally renders them faceless flesh objects. The murder scenes, too, all contain female nudity. 

This is where the tits and purity intersect. These gritty, unpleasant scenes don't overly linger on the victims' bodies (which are nonetheless on full display); instead the intention seems to be to shock and appal the viewer. There seems to be an idea at play regarding the destruction of youthful innocence (even if it's unintentional, it's there). The schoolgirls, while never really portrayed as paragons of virtue, are young and beautiful. The film knows this, and appreciates it as much as Rossini, with his lusting after his students, does. And, when this youth and beauty are destroyed, the person responsible must be brought to justice. This seems to be what drives Rossini, even though he himself was engaged in a concerted campaign of attempted corruption (albeit corruption of a less extreme type). The fact that he's only motivated to investigate after Liz's murder, coincidentally the murder that proves his innocence, backs this up-he didn't have any inclination to do anything to clear his name himself.

My description of sex as 'corruption' just there was very deliberate. Given that this is an Italian film, and an Italian film from almost 50 years ago, it's not exactly progressive in its thinking. The men aren't judged for being pussy hounds, whereas the women bear all the consequences. (Note that in a 2006 interview, producer Fulcio Lucisano stated that the film is essentially conservative and anti-abortion.) Rossini does lose his job due to his indiscretions, but you don't feel that'll overly inconvenience him once his quest to avenge his virgin lover is over. The teacher who looks but doesn't touch is superficially painted as a sweaty pervert by the film, but isn't the film just as sweaty and just as pervy? In a literal sense, no, it's not, but in a metaphorical sense, it sure is.

It is a beautiful film in many ways, though. Ennio Morricone's soundtrack is sublime, among his very best work. Joe d'Amato (/Aristide Massaccessi, a man whose twin personae perfectly encapsulate the film's straddling of respectability and base exploitation) does a great job with the cinematography, and Massimo Dallamano is an assured director. It's a long film, though, and not exactly thrilling. Dialogue abounds, and, apart from one nighttime murder, which briefly hits lightning-and-shadows gothic heights, there's very little suspense. There's no appetite for showing beautiful things in peril, only in seeing them elevated (and bared) or destroyed.

The investigative plot proceeds at a fairly stately pace, and yet there are many strands which feel slightly incomplete, and not fully played out. This was most likely an editing decision, and necessary to keep the running time under two hours. As long as you stay alert, this slightly fractured approach to plot works quite well. In particular, scenes in which the police discover evidence are in short supply; instead we jump straight to said evidence being produced in front of suspects. This is an efficient way of streamlining, and actually can subtly cast suspicion upon the police as we momentarily wonder if they've manufactured evidence.

Said police do play a larger role than in most gialli, no doubt partly due to the German financing, and the film's being marketed there as an Edgar Wallace kimi (the edited, nudity-lite version may well have resembled a krimi, but the plot had nothing to do with any Wallace story). The krimi link may also account for the London setting, as a large amount of those films were set in Wallace's native land. It certainly wasn't set in the UK for reasons of verisimilitude, as the incident which sparks the plot into life wouldn't have occurred in the early 70s, thanks to then-recent legislative changes... 

The exact nature of this incident is one of the twin mysteries at the heart of the film, and is the answer to the titular question. The other is the  standard 'who is the killer?' mystery, which breaks from giallo tradition by almost being solvable through rational Holmesian logic. If you pay close attention during certain scenes, and question the provenance of certain information possessed by some of the characters, you should be able to crack the case. As usual, you'll have access to more info than the characters within the film, which might explain the bizarro left-field reasoning through which  Rossini lands on his main suspect (reasoning which is flawed anyway, due to either a mistake in the subtitles or scripting; just pay attention to what the photographer says on the boat, and compare that to Rossini's later logic).

The killer's reveal, which is possibly a belated attempt to generate suspense, doesn't really succeed, as it's dragged out interminably over close to ten minutes before a soundtrack sting accompanies the final, absolute, incontrovertible proof of the killer's identity. An identity which Rossini, first with his wife and then with wife and police, has spent the previous seven or eights minutes assiduously trying to establish. Karin Baal, in her hilariously forthright interview on the Arrow Blu Ray, says that the film is overlong and "not a thriller."** This is probably a fair summation, and it's possible that Dallamano wasn't even trying to make an exciting thriller, and was instead attempting something more beautiful, more fragile and more profound. What he came up with was sometimes beautiful, occasionally fragile, and profoundly uneasy with both itself and its women. 

If it seems like I'm overly-fixating on the treatment and portrayal of women in this film, get ready for the next two instalments of Dallamano's 'Schoolgirls in Peril' trilogy...

Supernatural goings-on in a ballet school in Freiburg ('Freiburg, Germany', as the narration in Inferno helpfully reminds us)  and an apartment block in New York lead Suzy Bannion and Mark Elliot to suspect that they've unwittingly stumbled into a world of witches and architects and possessed dogs, and  great fucking films.

Yes, these aren't full-blown gialli, blah blah blah, but they do both draw heavily on giallo iconography and they're made by Dario Argento and Mario Bava was involved with the production of Inferno and just shut up, alright?

I'm not going to write in-depth about these films-better writers than I, as well as Alan Jones, have already written reams on them-and it's boring to continue the jaded debate as to whether these films are gialli, but I'll briefly address that hoary old topic. Sure, they're predominantly supernatural horror films, BUT...

-their plots are constructed around baroque murder set pieces
-the murders are committed by disembodied gloved hands/arms (not literally you fool, but the killers are faceless)
-there is a mystery element, with Inferno in particular incorporating a whodunnit aspect
-they follow amateur investigations
-they have pounding music scores (of varying quality)

So, even if they don't tick every giallo box, they're far from divorced from the filone.  (I've ignored the trilogy-closing Mother of Tears here, as most of the above qualities, as well as quality in general, are lacking.) Besides, it's not as if no other gialli contained supernatural elements-The Killer Reserved Nine Seats, Nothing Underneath and All the Colours of the Dark feature either ghosts or psychic characters. Deep Red, which preceded Suspiria, also opens with a parapsychology conference which lays the roots for not just these two films, but Phenomena (yet another giallo with elements of the fantastique) too.

Suspiria is, to my money, one of the greatest films ever made. In aural and visual terms, it's probably never been bettered. It's not exactly overflowing with plot, but it doesn't need to be. By keeping the story-i.e. content-pared back to a minimum, the form of the film takes control. A brief digression for a trip to a conference (Argento must have had a thing for those) allows Udo Kier to describe the flimsiest of plot frameworks upon which Argento has hung his creative  robes, but this scene comes well over an hour into the film. In many ways it has as much value as a moment of respite from the grand guignol goings-on in the ballet school, before we head back for the climax.

In any other film the positioning of this expository scene so close to the climax would be problematic. Up to that point the uninformed viewer has no firm idea of whether they're dealing with a traditional murder mystery (albeit one featuring scenes of dogs going mental and getting in on the murdering, and a throaty voice whispering "Witch!" over and over on the soundtrack) or something more supernatural. 'Traditional' filmmaking would dictate that the parameters of the filmic universe be defined early on, so the audience knows how much 'magic' they can expect to encounter. After all, Die Hard would be a bit unsatisfactory if Bruce Willis reveals in the last ten minutes that he's able to control inanimate objects with his mind. At least, I'd imagine it would be; I haven't seen Die Hard. Anyway, the point is, Argento only really shows his hand after 75-odd minutes, which would ordinarily be a bit annoying. Here, though, it doesn't really matter at all. The exposition doesn't even reveal how to deal with the witch issue, it just confirms that we are indeed dealing with supernatural entities. 

As it turns out, dealing with supernatural entities is a lot like dealing with natural ones; you just stab 'em with a sharp object. And, as with each of the Three Mothers films, the ending of Suspiria falls a tad flat. However, as Kim Newman alludes to on his UK commentary with Alan Jones, it's hard to think of a better way to end them. The Mothers aren't physically imposing; it's the journey you undertake in order to come face-to-face with them that represents the real obstacle. Once you reach your destination you discover they're just women, possessing seemingly no supernatural powers suitable for mano-a-mano combat. Their murderous acolytes, who are on hand throughout both films to dispatch the secondary characters in the aforementioned giallo-esque set-pieces, are conspicuously absent when it comes to defending their evil overlords. In Suspiria, they're all in a room right down the hall, seemingly powerless to do anything once Suzy's entered the bedroom of the Mother of Sighs. In Inferno they're nowhere to be seen, with the Mother of Darkness consumed by a fire (inferno) which has almost assumed the role of background character by the time Mark 'unmasks' her true identity. (While Inferno does contain this whodunnit element, there's literally only one character, other than Mark, alive by this stage, therefore most attentive viewers should have cracked the mystery before the reveal). 

So, the endings aren't fantastic, and Inferno doesn't quite have Suspiria's sustained intensity, possibly due to its incorporating more locations, with a concordant drop off in production design and atmosphere (if Suspiria didn't exist, though, I'd be rhapsodising about Inferno's lush blue and red interiors). However, just as the journey of Suzy and Mark proves to be the crucial obstacle to be overcome, the journey through the hundred-odd minutes of each film is the real treat for the viewer.  So sit back, buckle up, and prepare for the ride of your lives. And, if your driver is Fulvio Mingozzi, get ready for some witch-hunting!
​