GIALLO SUNDAY: The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh

After a two-month hiatus, Giallo Sunday returns with Sergio Martino’s 1971 giallo ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’, his first foray into the genre and his first teaming with Edwige Fenech. How is it awesome? Let me count the ways.

Firstly, its success kicked off a string of stone-cold classic gialli from Martino: ‘The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail’, ‘All the Colours of the Dark’, ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ (its title, one of the most magnificent in all of cinema, suggested directly by ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’) and ‘Torso’, two of which reunited him with Fenech.

Secondly, it features stellar turns from three giallo legends: Fenech, George Hilton and Ivan Rassimov. Rounded out by Cristina Airoldi (who has one of the most memorable scenes in ‘Torso’), Alberto de Mendoza (a character actor extraordinaire with an incredible eight-decade career in cinema), Carlo Alighiero (who played Dr Calabresi in Argento’s ‘Cat o’ Nine Tails’ the same year) and Bruno Corazzari (one of the “go to” guys for all-purpose villainy in Italian cinema), the cast is tip-top.

Thirdly, it marries stylish thrilleramics with a psychological imperative (the “let’s scare Edwige to death” syndrome: cf. ‘All the Colours of the Dark’) and delivers the whole thing in such a twist-heavy package (the last third of the film is pretty much one narrative curveball after another) that it’s deliriously difficult to keep your eye on the ball.

Fourthly, it delivers a generous helping of much-loved giallo tropes, including extended, operatic death scenes (a protracted bit of business in a park bears comparison with Argento’s ‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’, made the same year), bottles of J&B all over the shop, a beleaguered but still gorgeous heroine, and black-gloved killers with sharp implements. Seriously, take a look at this little collection of screengrabs and tell me if they don’t scream giallo:

I could continue enumerating all the ways in which ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’ is one of the defining examples of its genre, but I’d probably end of with a repetitive article that segued into a several thousand word love letter to Edwige Fenech, so let’s get things back on track with a plot synopsis.

Julie Wardh (Fenech) has entered into a marriage of convenience with career-obsessed diplomat Neil (de Mendoza) – a man so stultifyingly dull that he dishonors the name Neil (plus, how dare someone who’s obsessed with work share the same name as me? I hate work) – in order to get away from her domineering and possessive ex, Jean (Rassimov). Jean, it is revealed in flashback, is the chap who happily pandered to Mrs Wardh’s eponymous weird kink. And the kink in question? “Blood both excites and repels her.” Hence Jean making love to Julie on a bed of broken glass. (Don’t try this home, kiddies!)

Returning from a trip abroad with Neil, Julie is unnerved by the ministrations of a psychopath targeting women in their neighborhood, and by the fact that Jean seems to be trying to inveigle his way back into her life – the two, she worries, might not be unrelated. Hanging out with BFF Carol (Airoldi), Julie meets Carol’s playboy cousin George (Hilton), whose attentions provide a welcome distraction from her worries. When a blackmailer observes her passionate interlude with George and threatens to spill the beans to Neil, Carol offers to deliver the pay-off in Julie’s place. Things go badly wrong and Julie’s life spirals into chaos and paranoia.

Any fuller synopsis than that would lead us into spoiler territory, so many great things about this film will have to go by the board, particularly anything relating to that aforementioned last third. I will give a nod, however, to the way Martino seems to wrap things up with a bit of expositional dialogue between two characters which leads to much (perverse) hilarity between them; Martino plays the scene as if he’s about to homage Clouzot’s raised-middle-finger-of-irony ending to ‘The Wages of Fear’ (I was even prepared to forgive him the plagiarism, it was done so gleefully), only to subvert expectations and deliver an equally delicious irony but effected by quite different means.

As with any labyrinthine plot, too much analysis can sometimes be fatal. The climactic revelations depend on alibis aplenty for more than one character, and the lacunae are pretty tenuous in places. Still, it’s no small measure of the film’s success that Martino is pulling unexpected moments out of the hat right till the end.

His direction is energetic. The camera prowls with POV-centric menace à la Argento. The set-pieces – including a cat-and-mouse scene in an underground car park, and a nervy exploration of an old dark house lit only by the guttering flame of a cigarette lighter – are confidently handled. ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’ was only his second non-documentary feature (after the spaghetti western ‘Arizona si scatenò... e li fece fuori tutti’), yet every frame demonstrates that with the giallo Martino had found his métier.

GIALLO SUNDAY: Spasmo

Umberto Lenzi’s psychological thriller starts with two effective rug-pulls. In the pre-credits scene, a young couple race down to the beach in the moonlight; stopping in the lee of a deserted beach house, they start making out. Lenzi’s camera frames the dangling feet of a hanged body behind them. A scream rings out as the girl turns and catches sight of it. The mood soured, they go to investigate. It’s a mannequin. An engine revs and a car roars off.

Post credits, Christian (Robert Hoffmann) and his on-off artist girlfriend Xenia (Maria Pia Conte) are walking along a beach when they spot a body lying face down. Xenia is horrified and hangs back; Christian goes to investigate. The body turns out to be very much alive; a victim of sunstroke who had momentarily passed out. She introduces herself as Barbara (Suzy Kendall) and Christian offers to fetch a flask of whisky from his car to help revive her. Barbara disappears, however, leaving behind an item by which Christian tracks her to a yacht owned by Barbara’s moneyed and much older boyfriend Alex (Mario Erpichini).

These sequences bookend two minutes of credits interspersed with rapid, disorientating cuts to a series of mannequins in macabre and sexualized tableaux. Their relevance is something that Lenzi doesn’t reveal until the very last scene; a nasty, morbid coda to an hour and a half of not-what-it-seems plotting.

Christian becomes obsessed with Barbara and poor old Xenia is unceremoniously sidelined. Gate-crashing a party at Alex’s yacht (or should that be “gangplank-crashing”?), Christian and Barbara lose no time in stealing away to a motel. Barbara insists that Christian shave off his distinctive beard before they get it on – a request that seems to have greater motive than simple comfort on Barbara’s part, particularly when Christian’s clean-shaven industrialist brother Fritz (Ivan Rassimov) comes into the picture – and while Christian is busying himself in the bathroom with scissors and electric razor, he is attacked by gun-toting thug Tatum (Adolfo Lastretti). During the struggle, the gun discharges and Christian is left with a body, his prints on the gun and Alex outside wanting Barbara back and Christian out of the picture.

Returning to the motel after a heated discussion with Barbara and Alex back at the yacht, Christian is disturbed to find the body missing. Meanwhile, more mannequins in death poses are turning up. Barbara flees Alex’s possessive influence and holes up with Christian in a holiday home she claims belongs to a friend of hers but is being occupied by the saturnine Malcolm (Guido Alberti) and his much younger consort Clorinda (Monica Monet). Christian comes to believe that he’s met Clorinda before and that she has something to do with his brother. As a plethora of unsettling events play out, Christian tries to hang on to his sanity while dealing with Alex’s benign influence and the possibility that the psychotic Tatum might not be dead after all.

‘Spasmo’ – a compellingly blunt title – plays out as utterly baffling for its first hour. Nothing quite connects; there seems to be little or no logic to narrative developments. Character dynamics are curious. Who exactly is the catalyst for the weird shit that happens: Barbara or Christian? Why does the mysterious Malcolm take such an interest? What’s the deal with Clorinda and Christian’s brother?

Things start clicking into place after an assassination attempt that plays out unexpectedly, sending Christian on a desperate chase to piece the remaining clues together. Everything is explained by the end credits, but Lenzi seems hellbent – right up to the end – to monkey with audience expectations. His determinism in this respect is entirely commendable, although it does make ‘Spasmo’ something of a hard slog in places, certainly in the middle section where the accretion of elliptical and seemingly uncontextualized incidents threaten to become infuriating.

The final third of the film more than compensates, however. The performances are uniformly good, with Kendall in particular taking a character who could have been unbearably histrionic and instead honing the characterization beyond what the often utilitarian script gives her to work with. It’s stylishly shot by Guglielmo Mancori, who makes excellent use of locations varying from swanky yachts and beach houses to abandoned quarries and industrial works. And those mannequins – carrying on a giallo tradition established by Mario Bava’s ‘Blood and Black Lace’ – bring a creepy visual element that’s all their own.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Emanuelle in Bangkok

I closed last night’s review of ‘Black Emanuelle’ – a film I had unhesitatingly evaluated on a single viewing as a fuck-awful POS – with the phrase “I’m looking to Joe D’Amato for an upgrade in quality”.

Dear readers, if I ever – ever – say anything like that again – EVER – you have my full permission to descend on Chez Agitation en masse and beat me like a piñata for several hours. And then really get stuck in.

What was I thinking when I wrote that? Was I trying to be funny? Looking to Joe D’Amato for an upgrade in quality!?!? Dear God, you don’t say something like that without consequences. And, oh sweet baby Jesus in a charnel house, did I suffer the consequences!

‘Emanuelle in Bangkok’ (a.k.a. ‘Black Emanuelle Goes East’, which makes it sound like a porno sequel to ‘The Ghost Goes West’) opens with a piece of music that makes the ‘Black Emanuelle’ OST at its absolute nadir sound like Handel’s ‘Messiah’. It’s called “Sweet Leaving Thing” and it’s “permorfed” (according to the end credits) …

… by Silky Sound Singer (who I hope with every ounce of moral outrage in my body was sued under the Trades Description Act for that name) and it’s egregious. I’m not talking bad. I’m not talking horrible. I’m not even talking fuck-awful. In fact, I don’t know if I have the linguistic ability to describe just how sanity-weakening, soul-destroying, aurally-offensive, harmonically-repulsive, bile-inducing and sonically cancerous it is … But I’ll try. Imagine listening to an ungodly conflation of the world’s worst country & western outfit and the world’s cheesiest oompah band. Now imagine listening to them while you’re undergoing major root canal work without anaesthetic and to ensure that you don’t pass out and miss even a single minute of the agony one of the dental nurses is hammering a six inch nail through your scrotum while her colleague repeatedly jabs you in the eye with the business end of an arc welder.

That’s what this song sounds like. You can probably find it on YouTube – hell, you can find the whole movie pretty easily online – but I would urge you not to. In fact, I’d beg you. It’s the aural equivalent of ‘2 Girls, 1 Cup’. You can never unhear it.

So, I was three minutes into the movie and the fucking opening credits music was making me want to self-harm. Surely it had to get better. I took a slug of whisky and told myself the worst was over. Christ, I’m a lying bastard.

The first scene has Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) taking a slow boat to Bangkok and dallying with a moody archaeologist named Roberto (Ivan Rassimov). Their first sex scene, in Emanuelle’s cabin, strives for authenticity. It looks like it was actually filmed in a ship’s cabin. And the thing about cabins is, they’re generally small. The scene is framed in a manner that suggests there wasn’t enough room for the camera and the DoP as well as the performers, so the camera was just rammed into the corner of the cabin and left to roll. Accordingly, the viewer is treated to several minutes of awkward manoeuvring, random body parts and generic slurping sounds. To make things worse, D’Amato decides to nick Albertini’s people shagging/piston rod and cylinder box juxtaposition from the original movie. Except that D’Amato ups the ante by cutting away to a roomful of piston rods hammering away as the massive marine engine powers the ship on through the night.

The, ahem, “story” involves Emanuelle’s attempts to get an interview with some royal personage. To this end, she dallies with the royal dude’s cousin. Said cousin takes her to a massage parlour where D’Amato happily rips of Gemser’s iconic scene from ‘Emmanuelle 2’. Then Emanuelle, royal cousin dude and an American couple – the wife was played by Ely Galleani, I can tell you that much, but I can’t be bothered hitting up IMDb for character names/cast list – who they randomly bump into all head for a club where a stripper does uses ping-pong balls in her act, after which they boogie on down to an opium den, get high and fornicate in various combinations. Ely Galleani has a too-brief girl-girl scene with the oriental masseuse. Which is nice.

Next thing, the deal with the monarch’s cousin goes south when some mercenaries who are about to stage a coup warn Emanuelle that Bangkok isn’t safe for her and she should leave. They issue this warning by way of a gang rape. If the very concept, content and execution of the scene isn’t offensive enough, it’s suggested that Emanuelle’s sexual confidence has equipped her to transmute an act of violence into a more or less pleasurable experience. That fact that the scene ends with the mercenary who instigated the gang rape seeing Emanuelle on her way and wishing her luck just ramps up the inappropriateness factor to a whole other level.

Emanuelle departs Bangkok, albeit on temporary papers since her passport was taken in a hotel room robbery. At the airport, she bumps into Ely Galleani. What do you know, they’re on the same flight! A Sapphic induction to the mile high club ensues.

Emanuelle travels to Casablanca where she looks up Roberto. He’s shacked up with a fellow archaeologist, Janet. She’s initially hostile towards Emanuelle, but a little three-way action breaks the ice. Meanwhile, Emanuelle petitions the consul to help out as regards her stolen passport and discovers that the wheels of bureaucracy spin a tad smoother when the consul’s daughter takes a fancy to you. Roberto doesn’t take too well to Emanuelle’s relationship with Deborah (she being la fille du consul) and angrily calls them “lezzers” before he storms off. At this point, the appearance of Vicky Pollard delivering a monologue along the lines of “yeah but, no but, what it was right, I sat next to that Emanuelle and she totally copied off me coz I told everyone about her diddling Deborah outside the consulate and Roberto totally busted me for it and oh my God I so can’t believe she did that coz anyway everyone knows she’s a lezzer” would have been the most awesome thing imaginable, an act of cinematic alchemy transforming this celluloid dunghill into something marvellous.

But unfortunately Vicky Pollard has standards and would never work with Joe D’Amato (“yeah but, no but, he’s totally a perv and he’d be shoving a camera up me skirt wouldn’t he?”) and instead of becoming something marvellous, ‘Emanuelle in Bangkok’ goes from bad to worse to pointless. The abrupt shift from Bangkok to Casablanca suggests nothing more than a first cut clocking in at an hour and D’Amato and company desperately shooting anything just to pad it out to feature length. The bits of supposed “local colour” that interspersed the kit-offery are mostly drab. There’s a grim and depressing scene, that seems to go on forever, of Emanuelle taking photographs of a snake-on-mongoose smackdown. It’s completely unfaked and it makes the turtle death in ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ look like an episode of ‘Animal Rescue’.

The whole misbegotten thing ends with Emanuelle reluctantly parting from Deborah, even though our infamously transitory and commitment-shy heroine has admitted to deep and profound feelings for the lass (a spiritual and emotional communion they consummate by taking a bubble bath together), because she has another assignment to go on. Against all the odds, their airport farewell is almost poignant … until that fucking song comes line-dancing onto the soundtrack again, stomping its dirty heels all over your will to live.