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: 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: A Quiet Place to Kill

Apologies for the minimal visual content in today’s Giallo Sunday offering; the streaming copy I watched froze just before the end credits and I’d only seen fit to take one screengrab. Nonetheless, it features a bottle of J&B, so at least there’s one giallo trope present and correct.

Umberto Lenzi’s output is prodigious and entirely genre-based: polizia, gialli, war movies, horrors. His string of gialli from the late 60s to the mid-70s are of a uniform standard – glossy, sexy, cynical – and provide something of a headache for the film historian.

For example: Lenzi’s 1969 giallo ‘Orgasmo’ (not to be confused with his later ‘Spasmo’) starring Carroll Baker as an American heiress who gets involved with a European couple only for sexual tension and murderous passions to come to the surface was retitled ‘Paranoia’ for the American market. A year and three films later (told you his output was prodigious) Lenzi made a giallo called ‘Paranoia’, which again starred Carroll Baker again as an American heiress again becoming embroiled in sexual tension and murderous passions after again getting involved with a European couple, which – to avoid (or maybe generate) confusion – was retitled ‘A Quiet Place to Kill’ for the American market. Lenzi’s next film, starring Ray Lovelock and a jailbait Ornella Muti, was called ‘An Ideal Place to Kill’, and therefore retitled for the English speaking market ‘Oasis of Fear’ a.k.a. ‘Dirty Pictures’.

For the purposes of this review, I’ll go with ‘A Quiet Place to Kill’ as a title. That or, ‘The One Where Carroll Baker Plays a Racing Driver’. Or maybe not; that makes it sound too much like an episode of ‘Friends’.

Anyway, Carroll Baker plays Helen, a racing driver who, recuperating after a crash, is invited to spend some time at the coastal villa of her ex-husband Maurice (Jean Sorel). Arriving, she discovers the invitation came from Maurice’s new wife Constanze (Anna Proclemer). Constanze has twigged to something that Helen also found out the hard way – to whit, Maurice is a good-looking, smooth-talking love rat who leeches off rich women – and is looking for a partner in crime to help her dispose of Maurice and make it look like an accident.

The film plays out against a sunny backdrop of louche, amoral privilege, where characters wander around in elegant fashions, yachting, diving, playing tennis, drinking champagne or cocktails or (hey, let’s not forget who the sponsor is!) J&B, lounging by the pool, shooting each other baleful looks, and engaging in the odd bit of hate-fucking.

So: glamorous people, glamorous locations, copious amounts of nudity and a general air of moneyed cynicism. Oh yeah, and a murder plot. Let’s not forget the murder plot. Do I need to tell you that it doesn’t entirely go to plan? Do I need to mention that a rogue element enters the proceedings – in the shape of Constanze’s headstrong teenage daughter Susan (Marina Coffa). Or that there are possible witnesses to a certain, compromised event? Or that an authority figure – in this case public prosecutor Albert Duchamps (Luis Davila) – is sniffing around, convinced that there are inconsistencies.

The second half of ‘A Quiet Place to Kill’ inhabits the kind of territory best described in Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’: you know what’s happened, why it happened, who did it and how they potentially screwed up, and the tension is generated by watching them scurry around like rats trying to lie, obfuscate and side-step their way free of the consequences. Lenzi throws in a final act curveball that explodes the character dynamics and steers things in an even more reprehensibly cynical direction.

There may not be any likeable characters here, but there’s plenty to enjoy: Baker is luminously gorgeous and spends much of the film in various states of undress; Sorel plays the good-looking bastard to a tee; Guglielmo Mancori’s widescreen cinematography is eye-catching; the lounge jazz soundtrack is, as ever in this genre, hilariously inappropriate; and the twists of the last few minutes are as serpentine as the hair-pin bends one of the characters makes a tyre-squealing escape attempt along in the tense finale.

GIALLO SUNDAY: Eyeball

I was violently ill last night and spent most of today laid up feeling sorry for myself; consequently this week’s Giallo Sunday entry is bit more rough and ready than usual.

Another case of a dementedly brilliant original title rendered bland for the English-speaking market: ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Umberto Lenzi’s ‘Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro’ (trans: ‘Red Cats in a Maze of Glass’).

The title’s not as tenuous as you may think. The “red cats” bit references a witnesses description of the murderer, identity hidden under a red macintosh, plunging through rain-strewn shrubbery away from the scene of the crime. The “maze of glass” bit … ah, that would take us into spoiler territory.

Set in Spain, ‘Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro’ follows a package tour as they do the rounds of the tourist spots. Under the less than trustworthy aegis of tour guide Martinez (Raf Baldassarre) – a man who letches after anything in a skirt and enjoys playing not particularly endearing practical jokes – the group includes elderly cleric Reverend Bronson (George Rigaud), married couple Robbie and Gail Alvarado (Daniele Vargas and Silvia Solar), same sex couple Lisa (Mirta Millar) and Naiba (Ines Pellegrini), the laconic Hamilton (John Bartha) and his jailbait granddaughter Jenny (Veronica Miriel), and Paulette (Martine Brochard), ostensibly travelling alone but who bumps into her boss (and lover) Mark Burton (John Richardson). Mark is looking for a bit of the old in-out-in-out with Paulette while his wife Alma (Marta May) is recuperating at a clinic back in the States.

Then a murder occurs: a young woman, knifed to death and her left eye gouged out. A second killing takes place: one of the group, same modus operandi, during a ghost train ride at a funfair. Inspector Tudela (Andres Mejuto) – a week away from retirement – reluctantly gets saddled with the case. Tensions develop between the holidaymakers; suspicions are rife. Things get murkier when Mark discovers that Alma never showed up at the clinic and may be stalking him in Barcelona. Then there’s the revelation that certain parties might be implicated in a crime back in America; a guilty secret that has come back into their lives a continent away.

On one hand, ‘Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro’ is fairly boilerplate: the cop on the verge of retirement, the randy tour guide, the bickering couples, the unstable wife hovering in the wings. There are references aplenty to other films, most notably ‘Don’t Look Now’. The carousel of suspicion which whirls from one character to another until everybody on the tour bus seems to have motive, opportunity or hidden agenda is pure Agatha Christie. Red herrings swim through scene after scene with fishy abandon. The killer’s motive, when finally revealed, is as random as, say, that of the antagonists in ‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’ or ‘The Case of the Bloody Iris’.

And yet there’s much to enjoy: the peregrinations of the tour bus allows Lenzi to juxtapose the brief but full-blooded murder scenes against chocolate box cinematography; the focus shifts almost constantly, denying the easy identification of a protagonist and keeping an atmosphere of uncertainty simmering away; and the set-pieces are well staged, Lenzi cleverly orchestrating the comings and goings of the tourist group so that any one of them could have done the deed and no-one has a cast-iron alibi.

The cast do an okay job, even if the English dub I watched lumbers them with clunkily expositional dialogue. Elsewhere, though, ‘Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro’ delivers what you want from a giallo. The required amount of blood, nudity and J&B is present and correct. The whole thing moves along at a decent enough pace and Lenzi pulls some iconic and – at the denouement – effectively icky imagery out of the bag.