GIALLO SUNDAY: Footprints

Alice (Florinda Balkan) is a translator living in a minimalist apartment in a soulless city dominated by high rise buildings. Rushing to complete a translation for a midday deadline, she turns in the document only to be met with accusatory hostility by her superior. It transpires that Alice’s deadline was three days earlier. Three days that Alice has no memory of. She’s frostily informed that she disappeared from a major astronautical conference after some kind of breakdown. Her job is now in the balance.

Already brittle, Alice is also plagued by dreams of an unconscious man being abandoned on the dusty surface of the moon as part of an experiment. She seems to think the dreams are a memory of a science-fiction film she saw many years earlier entitled ‘Footprints on the Moon’, a film she rushed out of before the end and has seemingly been disturbed by for much of her adult life.

In her apartment, she finds a dress with a spot of blood on it that isn’t hers, as well as a torn up photograph of an old hotel at a coastal resort. She can recall details about the hotel, such as an oriental room with a stained-glass window depicting a peacock, but cannot recall ever having been there before. Suspended from her job, she decamps to the hotel and tries to piece together the enigma of the missing three days.



Some of the townsfolk don’t appear to recognise her. Others cast suspicious glances. A little girl staying at the hotel, Paula (played by 70s cinema’s go-to girl for creepy kid performances Nicoletta Elmi), tells Alice that her name is Nicole, that she was staying at the hotel three days ago, and that she burned something out of fear that some unknown men were watching her.

So far, so mysterious. And in a more generic giallo a slew of murders would kick in at this point and Alice would doubtless be menaced by someone in leather gloves and a gender-disguising trenchcoat and hat. But director Luigi Bazzoni, adapting a novel by Mario Fanelli, plays his string out till the end, maintaining the enigma as he delivers a final-reel explanation that still leaves a few pieces for the viewer to try to manoeuvre into the bigger picture themselves.

Devoid of gore, chases, homicidal set-pieces and, indeed, pretty much anything you’d expect from a giallo, what ‘Footprints’ does offer is a genuinely intriguing mystery, off-kilter and hauntingly memorable imagery, and an incredible sense of atmosphere. It also has a glacially brilliant central performance from Bolkan, who plays Alice as buttoned-down and wound more tightly than a watch spring. With large tranches of the film consisting of Alice wandering the empty corridors of the hotel or adrift in the lonely environs of the resort town, staring out across the sun-dappled waters with a look of pensive melancholy, the closest point of comparison is Dirk Bogarde in ‘Death in Venice’.



Vittoria Storaro’s cinematography, effectively isolating Alice in scene after scene, points up the film’s art-house credentials, while Nicola Piovani’s achingly lonely score seals the deal. “Lonely” – I keep coming back to that word; and in fact that trailer for the Shameless DVD release I watched uses the phrase “the loneliest and most haunting giallo you will ever see”. I second that. As well as functioning as a thriller and a psychological character piece, ‘Footprints’ is also a study in disconnection, its protagonist gradually detaching from profession, home, landscape and finally identity.

GIALLO SUNDAY: Giallo

Nottingham Forest were, at best, an average football club when Brian Clough became their manager in 1975. What he accomplished with Forest was nothing less than alchemy. The 1976-77 season saw them promoted to the first division. They won the First Division English Championship the following season. They won the League Cup two years running (1978 and 1979), ditto the European Cup (1979 and 1980), prompting Cloughie’s immortal comment about Manchester United supremo Alex Ferguson that “for all his horses, knighthoods and championships, he hasn't got two of what I've got – and I don't mean balls!”

Since the Cloughie era, Forest regressed to average. And then to just plain dire. To the point at which a mate of mine, a season ticket holder of long standing, turned his back on the players after a particularly embarrassing (read: par for the course) defeat recently.

Being a Dario Argento fan is kind of like supporting Forest. Cloughie quit round about ‘Opera’. Things went downhill from there. There was the brief second tier reminder of the glory days with ‘Sleepless’ (comparable to Forest’s second division supremacy in the 1997-98 season), then it was balls-to-the-wall mediocrity all the way with ‘The Card Player’, ‘Do You Like Hitchcock?’ and ‘Mother of Tears’. True, his two episodes for ‘Masters of Horror’ were good stuff, but even a club in relegation can emerge with the occasional charity shield victory.

With Argento as with Forest: you go to each new film/match expecting nothing, generally coming away with nothing and yet still hurting like a bastard because you remember when they were on world-beating form and every film/match they directed/played was something magisterial and breathtaking and you’d be talking about it to your mates for years afterwards. You’d forgive how dull they are now if it wasn’t so easy to remember how fucking awesome they used to be.


So it was, having suffered a kick in the teeth courtesy of the awfulness of ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and abject heartbreak on account of ‘Mother of Tears’ (which, in terms of how to rape an astounding promising trilogy, is akin to J.R.R. Tolkein following up ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ and ‘The Two Towers’ with an uncorrected proof copy of Guy N. Smith’s ‘Night of the Crabs’), that I approached ‘Giallo’ with extreme scepticism. I made sure I had a few beers inside me, as well, just to be sure I was anaesthetized against the almost inevitable onset of disappointment.

‘Giallo’ opens with a ‘Seven’-style credit sequence and a moody score by Marco Werba. Derivative, I thought, but a decent enough attention grabber. The first shot, lit by the flat harsh light of a glaring lightbulb, was of a hypodermic needle drawing liquid from an unmarked vial. Then we’re at the opera in Rome with a couple of foreign students. Blowing the classical repertoire to hit a nightclub, one of them hooks up with a studly Italian lad while her friend heads back to the hotel. She hails a blandly anonymous cab. The driver takes the wrong route. The girl starts getting worried. She has every right to. The cab pulls into a secluded side street. The driver attacks her.


Nothing earth-shattering or genre-defining going on here, but staged, shot and edited for optimal impact. Next up, fashion model Celine (Elsa Pataky) hurriedly makes plans to meet up with her air hostess sister Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) before hitting the catwalk and strutting her stuff in the latest fashions. The show over, she grabs a cab and calls Linda en route. The signal is lost, the driver takes the wrong direction and Celine ends up a captive of a hideously deformed and jaundiced psychopath. Meanwhile, Linda reports Celine’s disappearance, but the only person who will listen is Inspector Enzo Avolfi (an expatriate Italian who has lived in New York for a while). Avolfi is investigating a series of brutal crimes against women undertaken by a “pattern killer”.

Okay. Out-of-her-depth heroine driven by need to explain sister’s disappearance hooks up with maverick-cop-haunted-by-inability-to-save-someone. So far so generic, but none of it actually bad. Half an hour in, I was being to wonder why ‘Giallo’ had attracted so much hate. It wasn’t great – in fact, by dint of the gamut of screenwriting clichés, it was only just running to borderline good – but by the same standards it wasn’t exactly a repellently nauseating POS either.

I kept watching. Linda persuades Avolfi to let her tag along to crime scenes and autopsies (yeah, whatever); much is made of Avolfi’s understanding of the psychopathic mindset yet it’s Linda who figures out a crucial clue (yeah, whatever); Avolfi’s investigative methods seem to consist of showing his face at crime scenes, having a quick word with the forensic boys, barking something out reports on his desk then beetling off for a quick drink without even bothering to talk to witnesses (yeah, whatever). It was all kind of ordinary. But it wasn’t a stinker.


And as the film reached the halfway mark, then crept towards the hour, I was convinced that ‘Giallo’ was nowhere near the clunker I’d been lead to believe. I was beginning to relish the composition of a revisionist review.

And. Then. It. All. Went. Tits. Up.

And not even tits up in an interesting way, when a film that’s been shaping up for greatness goes off the rails in such spectacular style that it’s almost impressive. No, ‘Giallo’ adheres to what, with a nod to T.S. Eliot, you might call “not with a bang but a wimp-out”.

Here’s a good time to spend a paragraph on the background to the film. And, anticipating what’s to come in the next paragraph, to throw out a SPOILER ALERT. ‘Giallo’ was written by Jim Agnew and Sean Keller (Keller had written the TV movies ‘Kracken: Tentacles of the Deep’ and ‘Gryphon’; it was Agnew’s first credit) as an homage to gialli. The script met with incomprehension in Hollywood. A European producer was interested and – in what must have seemed like a dream come true to the writers – the property found its way into the hands of Argento. At this point, serendipity found itself wrongfooted, hamstrung and hog-tied. The producers interfered, Argento announced his dissatisfaction with the theatrical cut, it premiered at the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival to complete indifference, word of US and UK distribution was muted, and then it emerged – in 2010 – that Adrien Brody was suing the producers over non-payment of his fee. In November 2010, a court ruled that Brody’s image could not be used to promote the film until his fee was paid in full. In January of this year, the case was reported to be settled.


Now, it’s difficult to gauge just how badly producer interference damaged Argento’s take on the material, but what’s inarguable is that ‘Giallo’ gives us Brody’s worst ever performance. Seigner, not the most expressive actress at the best of time, at least suggests more emotional involvement in the proceedings. The rest of the cast sleepwalk. A promising first hour suddenly gets the plug pulled on it as the final act inexplicably jettisons much of what has gone before and plods towards an arbitrary and pointless conclusion that doesn’t leave you thinking “WTF?” so much as “SFW?” The main part of the problem is that Avolfi is played by Adrien Brody while the killer – known as Yellow – is essayed by Byron Deidra (I’ll leave it to word puzzle fans to make the connection), a casting decision that makes no sense whatsoever given that : (a) cop and killer are unrelated, (b) cop and killer have no shared experience or (c) cop and killer are never revealed as two sides of the same coin. In other words, Argento introduces a subtext, plays on it for a little while and then all but walks in front of the camera, shrugs and says, “Oh by the way, that subtext? Fuhgeddaboutit!”

Going further than this: the killer’s motivation – a pathetic hint at he-kills-what’s-beautiful-because-he’s-ugly (oh, fuck right off; none of my three completed novels have been published, but I don’t go around bumping off authors at bookshop signing sessions); the young Avolfi’s escape from his mother’s killer – never explained; Avolfi’s insistence on a certain line of questioning with a witness – never revisited; Avolfi’s seemingly important purchase from a bookshop – an entirely superfluous scene (unless a subsequent scene was hacked); a couple of jarring transitions between day and night (further suggestion of editorial butchery). It all adds up to a turgid, uninvolving and structurally flawed piece of work. When the end credits rolled, I was left not with a feeling of frustration, confusion or even outright animosity, but simply one of abject disinterest. And you can’t say much worse about a film than that.

GIALLO SUNDAY: The Wax Mask

Wikipedia cites the Dario Argento produced ‘Wax Mask’ in its list of notable giallo titles, which was pretty much the only reason I approached it yesterday. I’d dispute its classification as a giallo, but not having watched any other giallo-rific titles in the last week, it’ll have to do for today’s post.

The story behind the film is possibly more notable than the film itself, so let’s start there. When the project got off the ground in 1996 it was intended as something of a comeback for Lucio Fulci, who hadn’t made anything for five years since the unfairly overlooked ‘Door to Silence’. Fulci collaborated with Argento on the screenplay (Daniele Stroppa also takes a script credit), the funding was lined up and pre-production completed. Just weeks before principle photography was due to start, Fulci died. Directing duties were swiftly assigned to SFX guru Sergio Stivaletti (Italy’s answer to Tom Savini). Stivaletti hadn’t directed before and has chalked up only three more directing credits since – two of them for television. The completed film was dedicated to Fulci and is something of a mixed bag.


Loosely based on a story by Gaston Leroux – the same story that, equally loosely, provided the raw material for Andre de Toth’s ‘House of Wax’ and Jaume Collet-Serra’s yawnsome remake – things kick off in Paris on New Year’s Eve 1900, fireworks bursting over the city in stark contrast to the crime scene Inspector Lanvin (Aldo Massasso) is called to. A couple have been gorily murdered, their hearts ripped out by a cloaked figure with a mechanical hand. Their young daughter, hiding, escapes the slaughter.

Twelve years later we’re in Italy and Boris Volkoff (Robert Hossein) is preparing for the grand opening of his wax museum, a place that is already being spoken about as a chamber of horrors. Aristocratic layabout Luca (Daniele Auber) accepts a bet to spend a night there, intending to blow his winnings on the company of pert hooker Giorgina (Valery Valmond). He doesn’t live long enough to collect them. Volkoff pretends he’s aghast, but is secretly delighted at the potential publicity. Meanwhile, journalist Andrea (Riccardo Serventi Longhi) senses a story and romances Sonia (Romina Mondello), newly employed as a costumier at the wax museum, with a view to getting close to the enigmatic Volkoff. Sonia, in case you haven’t guessed, is the girl who survived the attack in Paris. And no sooner has she commenced employment with Volkoff than she’s a mite curious (not to mention slightly traumatized) as to how Volkoff has managed to capture her parents’ murders in such accurate detail for one of his macabre tableaux.


I guess the not-particularly-engaging mystery element, Sonia and Andrea teaming up to unearth the incredibly transparent truth behind Volkoff’s creations, just about permits a case to be made for ‘The Wax Mask’ as giallo. The set design, particularly the baroque layout of the museum and the gothic stylizations of Volkoff’s workshop, are more in keeping with Argento’s ‘Suspiria’. In fact, if the filmmakers had reimagined Volkoff as a female character, played by – say – Mercedes McCambridge, this could easily have been a part of the ‘Three Mothers’ mythos. Come to think of it, for all its tired genre tropes and general air of predictability, ‘The Wax Mask’, retuned slightly to incorporate Mater Lachrymarum, would have still presented a better conclusion to the trilogy than Argento’s own ‘Mother of Tears’.

In its defence, ‘The Wax Mask’ is prettily shot in a BBC costume drama kind of way (not that your average BBC costume drama would feature a scene where two people’s hearts are ripped out and impaled on what looks suspiciously like a kebab skewer but, hey, that’s just one of the ways the Beeb misses out!), while Maurizio Albeni’s lushly romantic score is so deliriously OTT that it swiftly emerges as one of the film’s chief pleasures. Hossein, Mondello and Massasso turn in perfectly acceptable performances. Valmond, as the sparky but ultimately ill-fated Giorgina, is much better than the material gives her any right to be in what was the second of only two film appearances. The gore scenes do what they need to do, there’s enough nudity to keep the horny toad as entertained as the gore hound, the whole thing ends in a massive conflagration, and there’s the obligatory twist ending that you’ll be able to see coming like an ocean liner on a duckpond.


What you probably won’t see coming is an unrivalled moment of what-the-fuckery in during the fiery denouement where the film makes a sudden, jarring and jaw-droppingly inexplicable lurch into science-fiction. It sure ain’t Leroux’s original tale, I’ll tell you that.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: today’s Giallo Sunday offering, a blood-drenched, wax-spattered horror/sci-fi/costume drama with just a soupcon – maybe – of giallo.

GIALLO SUNDAY: Death Carries a Cane

There is tradition in gialli of wonderful Italian titles being dumped for the English market and replaced with altogether more generic handles. Hence, ‘Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer?’ (‘What Are These Strange Drops of Blood Doing on the Body of Jennifer?’) is retitled ‘The Case of the Bloody Iris’, while ‘I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale’ (‘The Bodies Displayed Traces of Carnal Violence’) becomes ‘Torso’. Maurizio Pradeaux’s ‘Passi di danza su una lama di rasoio’ (‘Dance Steps on a Razor Blade’) reached English-speaking audiences under the title ‘Death Carries a Cane’, which is at least apposite since the murder does indeed tootle about with a walking stick and even utilize said ambulatory aid in undertaking the murders. It’s certainly better than the German title, ‘Die Nacht der rollenden Kopfe’ (‘Night of the Rolling Heads’) which is total bollocks because, despite throat-cutting as the modus operandi, there’s not a single decapitation.

You might be wondering why I’ve just expended 150 words on alternative titling of gialli. It’s because, as a subject, it’s infinitely more interesting than ‘Death Carries a Cane’, one of the most perfunctory, pedestrian and determinedly unstylish examples of the genre I’ve ever come across. Which is a damn shame, since there’s trace elements of a decent mystery and some potentially interesting character dynamics going on.


The story starts with photographer Kitty (Susan Scott) at a tourist viewpoint peering through a pay telescope while she waits for her boyfriend Alberto (Robert Hoffmann). She witnesses a murder (a figure in silhouette and gender-disguising hat and trenchcoat – i.e the classic sartorial choice of the giallo villain – is viciously knifing a woman) but her allotted minute at the telescope is up before she can identify anything other than the house number. Hastily shoving another coin in, she’s too late to get another look at the killer, but notices that a chestnut-seller’s stall was knocked over and a hooker pushed to the ground, presumably by the fleeing murderer.

Alberto turns up, flustered and limping, and accompanies Kitty to the police station where she makes a report to Inspector Merughi (George Martin), arguably one of the most useless coppers in a genre famous for inept policemen, who spends the entire film sharpening pencils with a razor blade and asking pointless questions. With Merughi disinterested and Alberto more concerned with some designs he’s working on for composer/theatrical director Marco (Simon Andreu)’s forthcoming show, only tenacious journalist Lidia (Anuska Borova) – who’s romantically involved with Marco but dispirited by his lack of libido – takes any real interest in the story.


When the body is finally found and the modus operandi is determined to be the same as in an unsolved case that’s still on Merughi’s books, the inspector starts taking Kitty’s story more seriously. Then the chestnut-seller is dispatched and the police turn up their first clue: a bloodstain corresponding to the size and diameter of the tip of a walking cane. Remembering Alberto’s limp, Merughi fixates on him. Soon, even Kitty is suspicious of her boyfriend. Then Alberto is contacted by nosy old woman Marta (Nerina Montagnani) who tells him she knows who the killer is but wants money for the information. Alberto, determined to prove his innocence, agrees to get the moolah. No prizes for guessing who the next victim is.

Meanwhile, Lidia’s strained relationship with her twin sister Silvia (Borova again) – a dancer whose career went south after a leg injury – provides the link between the victims. Lidia begins to suspect her sister, while Silvia’s surly boyfriend Richard (Luciano Rossi) stares hypnotically at displays of knives in shop windows. The shoehorning in of Richard The Red Herring is utterly arbitrary. The casting of Borova of both sisters is confusing as the script – inexplicably credited to four people (I can only assume they wrote half a dozen scenes each without bothering to consult each other) – makes no effort to differentiate between them other than Lidia sometimes wears glasses; moreover, Silvia appears, un-namechecked, before it’s even mentioned that Lidia has a sister.

During the second half, ‘Death Carries a Cane’ settles into a nicely mysterious groove as clues seem to lead to a dance academy … only for the most arbitrary (and plot-hole ridden) ending I’ve yet seen in a giallo to come along and pull the plug on everything that’s gone before. It’s as if the writers decided, at the very last minute, to go for the ultimate rug-pull regarding the killer’s identity and were then forced to concoct a ludicrous bit of exposition in order to explain it.


‘Death Carries a Cane’ is a frustrating failure. Scene after scene hints at something really good if only they’d worked on the script a bit more and shot it with a modicum of style (cinematography and location work are drab at best). There’s a “production line” quality to the film, as if everyone turned up, did the bare minimum, wrapped the motherfucker as soon as they could and went down the pub. There are shoddy contrivances, blandly effective kill scenes that could have gone the grand guignol route to memorable effect, and some of the dreariest, least erotic sex scenes this side of a Joe D’Amto flick. It wastes giallo stalwarts Scott, Hoffmann and Andreu, and ends with a shrug rather than the heart-pounding jolt of a genuine revelation. It could have been a contender; it ends up taking a dive.

GIALLO SUNDAY: Knife of Ice

Umberto Lenzi’s 1972 giallo is an exercise in slow-burn and sleight of hand. Opening with some graphic (and most likely unfaked) bullfighting footage, Lenzi follows the opening credits with this quote: “Fear is a knife of ice which penetrates the senses down to the depth of conscience,” attributed to Edgar Allan Poe. The scene switches immediately to a railway station where Martha Caldwell (Carroll Baker) flinches every time a train passes.



We discover, in short order, that Martha is mute, the cause of her affliction was witnessing the death of her parents in a derailment at a young age, and that she is at the station to meet her cousin Jenny (Ida Galli, appearing under her Evelyn Stewart pseudonym), a soprano just back from a tour. Her physician, Dr Laurent (Alan Scott), is delighted at this positive step and still holds out hope of Martha regaining her voice.



Martha and Jenny are driven back to their uncle Ralph (George Rigaud)’s villa, an idyllic place except for the fact that it overlooks a cemetery. Their driver is the shifty and monosyllabic Marcos (Eduardo Fajardo). Ralph’s other staff are housekeeper Annie Britten (Silvia Monelli) and maid Rosalie (Olga Gherardi). At the villa, prior to a birthday party for the pre-pubescent Christina (Maria-Rosa Rodriguez), the daughter of a friend of the family, Jenny gives Ralph a gift of some books on the occult, a subject of which he seems to have specialist knowledge.





Lenzi takes his time establishing the protagonists and their interrelationships. Almost the first half hour is given over to character study: Martha’s troubled state of mind, her therapeutic love of painting and her friendship with Christina; Jenny’s relationship with Martha (Jenny features prominently in Martha’s recurring flashbacks to the bullfight depicted in the opening scene); Ralph’s interest in the esoteric, his heart condition and his dependence on medication; Dr Laurent’s omnipresence in the household (is he being overly solicitous to Martha, or is there an ulterior motive?); and the ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’-style goings on amongst the staff.



Just when you’d be forgiven for wondering what anything has to do with anything, the first murder occurs. And while ‘Knife of Ice’ certainly plays on the accepted iconography …





… it unfolds in notably bloodless fashion. For anyone who knows Lenzi solely by reputation – i.e. as the purveyor of such violent fare as ‘Almost Human’, ‘Cannibal Ferox’ and ‘Eaten Alive’ – ‘Knife of Ice’ will come as an eye-opener, with as much attention paid to characterization and pacing as there is to the elegant widescreen cinematography, and with a wordless central performance that must rank as Carroll Baker’s best.



The staid pacing is pepped up by some excellent set-pieces, including two fog-bound scenes that Lenzi milks for optimum tension. The lacunae necessary for the final act revelation are niftily scattered throughout the narrative. The eagle-eyed and congenitally suspicious will probably twig who the killer is, but the big reveal comes at the end of a cat-and-mouse sequence that only serves to sow further doubts.





Three corpses in, Inspector Duran (Franco Fantasia) assumes protagonist duties. Not your average giallo cop (i.e. he’s actually competent), Duran’s presence galvanizes the second half of the film, and the manhunt that ensues when the suspicion shifts to a drug-addicted Satanist sees the cemetery location used to excellent effect. But this digression – and it’s hardly a spoiler to say so – leads to a “wrong man” switcheroo comparable to that of ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’ and suddenly Martha finds herself again at risk.



‘Knife of Ice’ demands patience in its early stretches, but plays fair with its lacunae, and sprinkles in enough clues (however elusively) to justify its final act rug-pull. It’s not quite as stylish or baroque as many gialli, but it’s quietly compelling and confidently directed.

GIALLO SUNDAY: The French Sex Murders

Could this be the cheapest, shoddiest, most unintentionally funny giallo ever made? A film so lurid in its intent and retarded in its aesthetic that it makes ‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’ look like Fellini.



You know, I rather think it could.



On paper, it ought to be brilliant: wrong man shenanigans, a hint of the supernatural, the pseudo-scientific conceits of ‘Cat o’ Nine Tails’ and ‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’, eye-candy aplenty (Rosalba Neri, Anita Ekberg, Barbara Bouchet, Evelyne Kraft) and a suitably sleazy milieu courtesy of the brothel setting.



The problem is in the execution. Budgetary limitations scupper the opening sequence: a gender-disguised individual is on the run, police cars and on-foot gendarmes in hot pursuit. Said individual attempts to evade the authorities by hoofing it up the Eiffel Tower, which demonstrates all the logic of shimmying up a telegraph pole and taunting those at the foot of it with cries of, “Climb up and catch me, then, fuckos.” Evidently realizing that having got so far up, the only way is down – and with the tenacious Inspector Pontaine (Robert Sacchi) just a heartbeat behind – our felonious fugitive leaps to their death, director Ferdinando Merighi indelibly searing his audience’s collective eyeballs with this image:





That’s right, folks: a bit of black paper cut out in the vague shape of a human figure is dangled in front of a static shot of the Eiffel Tower. Inspector Pontaine lights a cigarette and glowers balefully at the camera in best Humphrey Bogart fashion, a bit of mumbled voiceover tells us how it all started, and the rest of the film unfolds in flashback. (A word on Pontaine: Sacchi looks a hell of a lot like Humphrey Bogart, a resemblance which might have given ‘The French Sex Murders’ a shot of much needed gravitas; unfortunately, his characterization of Pontaine is based on a really bad Humphrey Bogart impersonation. A really bad one.)





Anyway, how the whole thing gets started is like this: thuggish jewel thief Antoine Gottvalles (Pietro Martellanza) pulls off a heist by the sophisticated means of taking a crowbar to a display cabinet, scooping out its contents and shoving them in the pockets of his trenchcoat. Throughout this meticulous and professional operation, he neglects to wear gloves and touches every surface possible. Fuckin’ Raffles, this dude!



Having made a hasty exit from the premises (the only jewellers in Paris, it would seem, without an alarm system), does he then lie low till he can offload the goods? Or does he risk it and go straight to his fence? Maybe he has a buyer lined up already and exchanges the stones for cold hard cash in an underground car park before getting the fuck out of Dodge Paris.



Mais non. Our boy hightails it straight to the nearest whorehouse where Madame Collette (Ekberg) hesitates about letting him, knowing that he’s temperamental, unpredictable and obsessed with the voluptuous Francine (Bouchet). Nonetheless, a john’s a john and he’s good for the money so she packs him off to Francine’s room while she attends to the requirements of two high-rollers who are such respectable pillars of the community that their attendance at Madame Collette’s den of inquity is surreptitious to say the least. (This being a sleazy giallo directed by the staggeringly inept Merighi, surreptitiousness equates to creeping about swathed in a big shiny capes with an extravagant hoods that make them look like extras in some hallucinatory conflation of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, ‘Abba: the Movie’ and the KKK scene from ‘Blazing Saddles’.)



But I digress. Antoine indulges in a little gentlemen’s relish with the sultry Francine, during which interlude he plies her with the stolen jewels (smooth, bro, reeeeaaaal smooth) and begs her to come away with him. To, I don’t know, a life of sitting outside courtrooms or trying to secure the services of a solicitor at three in the morning. Something like that. Y’know, every girl’s dream.





Anyhow, the reality of things is brought home when Madame Collette calls to Francine to get finished with Antoine and service the next client. At this point, Antoine turns psycho, calls her a “filthy whore” (which is a bit rich, since he just tried to buy her affections with a fuckton of stolen goods) and starts knocking her about viciously.



Exiting the brothel, Antoine attracts the attention of a gendarme on the beat and does his best to downplay any hint of suspicious behaviour by doing a cartoon double-take and running like hell. He fetches up at the house of ex-wife Marianne (Neri).





Pearl’s Marianne’s a singer. In a nightclub. Owned by the corpulent Pepi (Rolf Eden). She’s entertaining Pepi when Antoine turns up and there follows an awkward moment which is only resolved when, after much soul-searching, the various parties discuss their romantic entanglements in a sensitive character-driven scene. No, wait; what the fuck am I talking about? Marianne tells Antoine to go to hell and Pepi takes a swing at him and the door slams in his face.



The long and short of it is that Francine is found dead by Madame Collette and Randall (Renato Romano), an American writer hanging around at the brothel to, ahem, research a new book (pmsl). Shortly afterwards, Antoine is picked up by the law, charged with Francine’s murder and sentenced to death. From the dock, he protests his innocence and curses everyone at the brothel that night. While he rants, the film inverts to negative. For a moment, I thought that this was an effective, if somewhat heavy-handed, means of emphasizing the intensity of Antoine’s POV as he looks out at the people in the courtroom, one of whom is the real killer. But then Merighi cuts, the POV is broken and the next shot is also in negative, so I was ascribing far too much intelligence and subtlety to the production and the likeliest explanation is a processing error at the lab which no-one noticed (or was bothered about) during editing.



Shit, I’ve hit 1,000 words already and I’m still on the synopsis. Still, I’m not convinced that I’ve adequately conveyed thus far just how egregious ‘The French Sex Murders’ truly is, so I beg your forbearance for a while longer.





Before Antoine can be dealt with by the full might of the law, he escapes. Quite how he manages this is left unexplained. I’m again guessing at budgetary limitations. This fairly important narrative development is relegated to Randall catching a news report on TV during a rare moment when he’s not at Madame Collette’s knocking boots doing research. When we next see Antoine, he’s driving a car around Paris and getting snarled up in traffic. So he pulls over and nicks a motorbike. This takes him out of the city, but he runs into a roundblock which he evades by driving round it (I am not making this up!). A gendarme jumps in front of him as if he’s a midfielder going for a tackle, then seems to remember that the script calls for Antoine to remain at liberty for another couple of pages and obligingly falls over. Antoine goes speeding off (it looks like he’s doing all of 15mph), turns a corner, sees a truck parked by the side of the road with its tailgate lowered, panics, slides off the bike and a lump of papier mache that’s supposed to be his head but looks like the work of a five-year-old at art class on a day when he was really bored intersects with the tailgate and goes rolling down the road.



At which point the unlamented Antoine departs this world, the film and my review. Oh, by the way, we’re only half an hour into the movie at this point. But fear not, the synopsis kicks into high gear at this point: a series of murders occur at Madame Collette’s house of vice, the modus operandi sufficiently similar to Francine’s murder to cast doubt on Antoine’s conviction. The presiding judge orders the case reopened. Peripherally, research scientist Professor Waldemar (Howard Vernon) – an old friend of the judge’s – seeks permission to remove Antoine’s eyeballs in order to isolate the final image recorded on his retinas and thus identify the killer. Everyone involved in the making of the film seems to have forgotten that while Antoine may well have clocked the real killer in the courtroom, the last thing he ever saw was the tailgate of a heavy goods vehicle. But hey-ho.





As the bodies pile up, Waldemar’s attention to his work is deflected by his concerns over the burgeoning romance between his daughter Eleanore (Kraft) and his precocious assistant, a subplot that seems to have nothing to do with anything … Or does it?





‘The French Sex Murders’ is a work of such unmitigated awfulness that its bad acting (particularly Martellanza), bargain basement production values (a desk and a telephone stand in for a police station, a few test tubes and a Bunsen burner for a lab), absence of a protagonist (the script continually flirts with establishing, variously, Pontaine, Marianne, Randall and Waldemar as the main character, finally settling on none of them), incomprehensible directorial decisions (virtually every murder is repeated four or five times in a series of discontiguous cuts, each time through a differently coloured filter) and complete indifference to continuity add up to something that genuinely needs to be seen to be (dis)believed.



From Ekberg’s gravity-defying bouffant hairdo to the most arbitrarily shoehorned in and unerotically shot sex scene outside of a Joe D’Amato film, from the complete squandering of gialli legends Bouchet and Neri in nothing roles to the yawnsome final act revelation, from the hamfisted exposition to the abject lack of pacing in anything remotely resembling an action scene, nearly every frame of ‘The French Sex Murders’ offers something to gape at in slack-jawed amazement. It takes a special kind of anti-talent to make a film this bad, and for that reason alone it’s unmissable.

GIALLO SUNDAY: Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye

Of all the gialli I’ve seen, Antonio Margheriti’s 1973 slab of gothic has one of the most wonderfully eclectic casts. Have you ever wanted to see Serge Gainsbourg as a highlands police inspector dubbed with a really bad Scottish accent? Then this is the movie for you!



In addition to Gainsbourg, we have Jane Birkin (the absence of “Je T’Aime...Moi Non Plus” from the soundtrack is a positive disappointment), Hiram Keller (‘Fellini-Satyricon’), Doris Kunstmann (Eva Braun in Ennio di Concini’s ‘Hitler: the Last Ten Days’), Francoise Christophe (Princess Daniloff in the 1947 film version of ‘Fantômas’), Dana Ghia (a giallo stalwart with appearances in ‘Smile Before Death’, ‘My Dear Killer’ and ‘The Bloodstained Butterfly’) and Anton Diffring (typecast as a German military type in everything from ‘The Sea Shall Not Have Them’ to ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and the TV series ‘Winds of War’).



Diffring gets a break from the Nazi uniform here, playing Dr Franz, consort to the hifalutin Lady Mary MacCrieff (Christophe) who’s hellbent on retaining the ancestral castle despite the exorbitant upkeep, the isolated locale and the medical attention required by her eccentric (and possibly delusive) son James (Keller). James, a socially inept and attention seeking young man who inexplicably morphs into romantic hero halfway through, keeps a pet gorilla and paints nude portraits of his, ahem, French teacher Suzanne (Kunstmann). Suzanne has been engaged by Dr Franz to seduce James and get herself impregnated with an heir; when it becomes clear that James’s only interest in seeing Suzanne au naturel is the opportunity to complete another canvas, Franz enjoys himself with Suzanne instead.





The family’s evidently depleted spiritual needs are catered to by Father Robertson (Venantino Venantini), but Mary is more concerned about her financial needs and proceeds to hit up her sister Alicia (Ghia), recently loaded courtesy of an inheritance, for a loan. Alicia, who would rather Mary sell the castle, moved to London and have James properly looked after, outright refuses to sink any capital into old pile, creating a frosty atmosphere between the sisters.



Into this environment comes Alicia’s daughter Corringa (Birkin), a free spirit recently expelled from convent school. James takes a fancy to her (the avaricious Mary instantly equates a potential match as a fast-track to Alicia’s inheritance), as does the bi-sexual Suzanne. Murder, mistrust and sexual duplicity ensues, with the eponymous cat slinking around as portent to a series of swiftly executed killings (a rare example of a giallo not dwelling fetishistically on its death scenes).



For a while, you’d be forgiven for pegging the moggy as number one suspect (perhaps in league with the gorilla, the simian being better suited to the asphyxiation killing); the fat, waddling, lazy-eyed feline is on the scene for every murder and its alibi is non-existent. It even manages an escape from a sealed tomb after Mary has it interred with the deceased as punishment for disrupting a funeral. Which is a tad harsh.





The fate of – well, that would be telling, but let’s just say the second victim (and the first character to die onscreen) – keys into a local superstition and steers ‘Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye’ into the quasi-supernatural territory of ‘The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave’ or ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’ (what is it about giallo titles and the number seven, by the way?) before the final act revelation confirms the machinations of considerably more earthly motives.



Margheriti takes a slow-burn approach, setting his characters against each other and keeping the tensions at a nice simmer for the first half before cutting loose with the first of the murders. Carlo Carlini’s widescreen cinematography provides some excellent and atmospheric compositions and Riz Ortolani’s score is magnificently overcooked. There are some good, disorientating moments, particularly Corringa’s arrival at the castle where an almost subliminal series of cuts to the watching gorilla left me bemused and slightly unsettled. Architecturally, the castle never convinces as Scottish, nor does the geography in the film’s few exteriors. Likewise, the dubbing is hysterically bad, the work of bored voiceover actors doing comedy Scottish accents. In this respect, ‘Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye’ hoves very very close to being more ‘Goon Show’ than Argento. Still, after the slow-burn first half, it whips itself into an eccentric and entertaining frenzy.

GIALLO SUNDAY: A Blade in the Dark

Until I watched Lamberto Bava’s ‘A Blade in the Dark’, my favourite line of dialogue in a giallo was a straight toss-up between “Right, send in the perverts” (‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’) and “I killed them because they were dolls, just stupid dolls” (‘Torso’).

I now have not one but two lines of dialogue – from the same film – that challenge these. The first, during an argument between film score composer Bruno (Andrea Occhipinti) and his actress girlfriend Julia (Lara Naszinsky), is apropos of her obsession with sun-bathing: “Is it possible you’re such a vacant nerd?” Bruno snaps. “Your satisfaction is to sit like a frog in the sun.”

Calling your g/f a nerd and likening her to a frog in the same breath – way to go, Bruno, you silver tongued devil, you.

The second concerns the murderer’s psychopathology. Now, I watched a lot of gialli – and I’ll happily admit that there’s still a good number of titles I have yet to acquaint myself with – and the motivations for a genre’s worth of black-gloved psychopaths are manifold: childhood traumas, botched abortions, inheritances, schoolgirl prostitution rings, sexual hang-ups, religious mania, property deals, inconvenient spouses and just plain old blood-lust. ‘A Blade in the Dark’ gives us a killer the key to whose psychology is – ready for this – “a morbid fear of tennis balls bouncing in the night”.

Because I don’t know about you, but those nocturnally buoyant tennis balls give me the willies good and proper. The more I think about it, the more I’m at a loss to understand why other filmmakers haven’t picked up on this. (“Are the snooker cues still screaming, Clarice?” “You can take our lives, but you’ll never take … our penalty!”)

Okay, let’s hit pause on the sarcasm and rewind for a plot synopsis. Bruno rents an isolated villa from rich pal Tony (Michele Soavi) so he can have some peace and quiet while he works on the score for a horror film directed by Sandra (Anny Papa). Between visits from the erratic Julia, he is visited by the flighty Katia (Valeria Cavalli) and the seductive Angela (Fabiola Toledo), both of whom have connections to the previous tenant, an individual known only as Linda.

In short order Katia and Angela go missing, Katia’s diary is torn up and burned, and a tape reel on which Bruno hears a voice saying something that seems to connect Linda to the strange events currently unfolding is destroyed. Bruno questions shifty groundsman Giovanni (Stanko Molnar) about the previous tenant, but he’s less than forthcoming. Then Sandra lets its slip that she has a connection to the mysterious Linda. Bruno grows increasingly edgy as events escalate, but without a body to prove that Katia or Angela have been murdered, and his story roundly scorned by Julia, he finds himself with no-one to whom he can turn.

Where it succeeds, ‘A Blade in the Dark’ does so on Bava’s twitchy directorial style: from his father and Dario Argento he obviously learned the effectiveness of a prowling, subjective camera. The villa – a building so seemingly sprawling that half the time I wanted to cast an eye over the architects drawings just to see if it really was that big – offers opportunities for tense cat ‘n’ mouse sequences and architecture porn cinematography which are both seized with equal glee.

Made in 1983, it harks back to the gialli of the previous decade, particularly Argento’s ‘Deep Red’: musician protagonist, long sequences of said reluctant hero exploring a house that may or may not be deserted, a major clue (visual in ‘Deep Red’; dialogue in ‘A Blade in the Dark’) hidden in plain sight, sexual ambiguity in the last reel revelation. And for the most part it’s a stylish and compelling enough throwback.

However, there’s little investment in the ostensible mystery with Bruno, atypical for a giallo protagonist, neither witnessing an actual murder or getting hung up on an overlooked clue, the importance of which only becomes clear late in the day. Bruno’s tenuous reasons for believing that Katia and Angela have been killed – while explicitly proved to the audience in two extended setpieces – don’t really hold water and make for some awkwardly exposited scenes when he tries to discuss his concerns with Julie, Sandra or Tony.

Katia’s diary, the strange voice on the tape (no explanation for which is ever satisfactorily provided) and the peregrinations of the thuggish Giovanni are herrings of various shades of red, but Bruno never really pursues or discounts any of these angles. There’s an illogicality about ‘A Blade in the Dark’ which – while it’s kind of petty to carp about illogicality in gialli – becomes increasingly notable the longer the film continues. (Subject of which, twenty minutes shorter would have been an ideal length.)

This illogicality is present in scene after scene. It’s there in the discontinuity of Sandra discussing the revelation in the final reel of her film (“wait till you see reel twelve”), a clue which ties in to the killer’s motivation, only for the killer to break into the studio and hack apart the contents of reel ten (“the final reel,” as Sandra’s projectionist breathlessly gasps). It’s there in the ability of the killer to be at Bruno’s villa (described early on in the film as “isolated”) just minutes after vandalizing the film, while it takes Bruno three or four times as long to get back after he realizes that Julia is in danger. It’s there in the scene where Bruno asks Julia to accompany her on an errand and she snubs his company for the pleasures of sunbathing (hence the aforementioned “vacant nerd”/“frog in the sun” diatribe; Bruno’s errand turns out to be a secretive enquiry into Julia’s recent inexplicable behavior … so why invite her along?

‘A Blade in the Dark’ often seems like a collection of cool set-pieces strung together by a patchwork quilt of a narrative that hadn’t been particularly well thought out. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen plenty of gialli you can say that about which have been deliriously entertaining. ‘A Blade in the Dark’, for all its technical prowess, doesn’t quite achieve the delirium and grand guignol gratuitousness that defines the top flight examples of the genre.

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: My Dear Killer

Tonino Valerii’s ‘My Dear Killer’ opens with something that I can honestly say I’ve never seen before in all my misspent years of watching gialli: death by digger bucket. The poor unfortunate who gets his bonce brutalized between the blades is one Vincenzo Paradisi (Franceso di Federico). The investigation is headed up by Inspector Luca Peretti (George Hilton), who begins his enquiries at the firm who hired out the equipment. The trail leads to the first of several corpses: that of Mario Ansuini (Remo De Angelis), the driver who was booked to operate the digger on the day in question. Everything points towards Ansuini committing suicide, but Peretti suspects otherwise.

Peretti isn’t your typical giallo cop. He’s attentive to detail, intuitive, tenacious and definitely not there for comic relief. In fact, with the exception of the snivelling cop-hating rag-and-bone man Mattio Guardapelle (Dante Maggio), there are no characters who provide comic relief. ‘My Dear Killer’ is populated with as sleazy, cynical and black-hearted a group of characters as you could ever hope not to meet. At least two of them – moist-lipped sculptor Beniamino (Alfredo Mayo) and trucking company boss Giorgio Canavese (William Berger) – are paedophiles, while the various members of the Moroni family are dysfunctional plus VAT.

The Moronis are a moneyed but jealousy-ridden bunch, also the victims of a high-profile kidnapping – their young daughter. The payoff went south, the girl was found dead at an abandoned shack and one of their members died in an attempt to follow the kidnappers. I’m keeping the details of the kidnapping and the Moroni family infrastructure deliberately vague; Valerii dedicates the mid-section of the film to carefully establishing the whys and wherefores. It’s during this section that ‘My Dead Killer’ could almost pass for a Sunday evening BBC television whodunit – and, to his credit, Valerii makes Peretti’s painstaking attempts to connect the clues quietly watchable.

Elsewhere, however, it’s business as usual for this genre. ‘My Dear Killer’ emerges as something of a precursor to ‘Deep Red’, with a child’s drawing providing a crucial clue, while Peretti races from clue to clue, witness to witness, only to find, as the bodies pile up, that the killer is always one step ahead of him. (If Argento and his ‘Deep Red’ co-writer Bernardino Zapponi did rip off ‘My Dear Killer’, all I can say is power to them: they took some elements from a middling giallo and amalgamated them into one of the genre’s bona fide masterworks. Also, ‘Deep Red’ has an ending that functions like a blow to the solar plexus, while ‘My Dear Killer’ winds up in Agatha Christie fashion with Peretti arraying the suspects in a sitting room and delivering a five-minute monologue.)

The death scenes are properly gruesome, involving bludgeoning, strangulation, hanging and the improper use of power tools. Rooftop chases and bottles of J&B are, however, sadly lacking. And the presence of a naked pre-pubescent child at Beniamino’s studio is just plain unnecessary. Worse is the blithely unconcerned way in which Valerii presents the scene. It’s a slap in the face to the viewer’s sensibilities. The filmmakers demonstrate an equal lack of concern with this subject matter in a subsequent scene where Peretti braces Canavese, reminding him that “you were caught in a brothel with a twelve year old” and promising to quash the prosecution if Canavese co-operates!!!

Maybe that’s the essential problem with ‘My Dear Killer’: it goes for the gore as nastily as anything by Fulci with its power tool set-piece, and it baits controversy with the aforementioned imagery, but ultimately it’s slow-burn procedural with a yawn-fest denouement that, for all Peretti’s loquacity, leaves several plot points unanswered. I used the word “watchable” a couple of paragraphs ago: it’s a good epitaph for this film. ‘My Dear Killer’ is consistently watchable, and even delivers a couple of scenes that are genuinely gripping; but it’s memorable for the wrong reasons.

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.

GIALLO SUNDAY: poster edition (2)