The poster for this movie says: “WARNING: In this movie, you are the victim.” It’s factually correct, because if you were planning on being entertained, you’re out of luck. You’d be better off throwing $5 at the register and running out of your used video store than buying this DVD.

But really, Sam, why not tell us about the film first…

John Baxter (Tony Roberts, Annie Hall, Popcorn) is all about exposing psychic con artists, like James Randi with a white man afro. Along with his partner Melanie (Candy Clark, ex-wife of Marjoe Gortner and as well as acting in Cool as Ice, Q, 1988’s remake of The Blob and providing the voice of Stella Star in Starcrash) he busts up a special effects-aided seance at 112 Ocean Avenue (dum dum dum in Amityville!). The lady running the show spits right in his face and then, he decides to but the place after his real estate agent talks him into it. But guess what? Flies attack and kill that agent, turning him into a rotting corpse.

He buys the house anyway.

All manner of accidents befall John and Melanie. The worst one? Well, I guess that’d be when Melanie gets killed in a car wreck after seeing a demon’s face in a photograph and rushing to show John. But that dude just thinks it’s all a coincidence. Oh, John.

What would make things worse? What if John’s daughter Susan (Full House’s Lori Laughlin), her friend Lisa (Meg Ryan!) and their boyfriends play Ouija in the attic.? The game tells them that Captain Howdy just got a promotion to Admiral. Just kidding. The game informs Susan that her life is in danger, but she ignores it and dies in a boat accident. Her mom, Nancy, sees a vision of her walking up the stairs of the dock, but nope. She’s a goner.

John still thinks this is all make believe, even when his ex-wife thinks her daughter is still alive and he keeps having dreams about the old well in the basement. So he brings in Doctor Elliot West (Robert Joy, Desperately Seeking Susan) and his team, who succeed in getting the demons in the house to show up. Elliot asks for whatever in the well to reveal itself and bring Susan back to life, but in one of the few bright spots in the film, a demon leaps out — right at the viewer — and burns the doctors face and drags him to Hell. The house implodes and only a few of the team, Nancy and John escape. The well keeps glowing as we hit the credits.

Due to a lawsuit between the Lutz family (the original owners of the Amityville house) and Dino De Laurentiis, this is film does not refer to them at all and had to be listed as not a sequel to the original film. That said — the DeFeo family who lived in the house before the Lutz’s are referenced more than once. But hey — weren’t they called the Montelli family in Amityville II: The Possession? At least John is based on someone real —  Stephen Kaplan, who was investigating the film at the time of filming as he was sure that the Lutzes’ story was a hoax.

Look, you may enjoy this film. But after the complete and utter insanity that is the second film in the series, it feels like a step backward. But where can you really go after part 2? It’s a film that throws you down the steps and laughs at you.

Remember Joe Eszterhas? The writer who pretty much owned the theaters in the late 80’s and early 90’s with films like Flashdance, Basic Instinct, Jade and Showgirls?  In addition to Sliver, at least two of the films above — Basic Instinct and Jade — could qualify as giallo-style films. When reviewed through the lens of 2018, his films seem puerile at worst and silly at best, gradually becoming goofier the sexier they claim to be.

Directed by Phillip Noyce (Dead Calm, The Saint), based on a novel by Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, No Time for Sergeants, Deathtrap, The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil…man, did Ira have his finger on the pulse of pop culture or what?) and produced by Robert Evans (Ever wonder who owns the IOU on my writing style? Wonder no longer, baby. Also, watch The Kid Stays in the Picture to learn how the producer of The Godfather and Rosemary’s Baby was often more interesting than the stars of his films), Sliver was originally rated NC 17 due to its sex scenes and some male frontal nudity. Also, there was an original ending — we’ll get to it in a bit — that audiences hated.

Carly Norris (Sharon Stone, Basic Instinct) is a book editor that never seems to go to her job. While she is there, she spends most of her time gossiping and bemoaning the fact that she never gets to have sex, despite being oh so fashionable and, you know, looking like Sharon Stone in 1993.

Somehow, she gets to immediately move into the best New York apartment ever, as the previous tenant (Naomi Singer, who looks exactly like Carly, which is a giallo staple if I’ve ever heard of one) has recently fallen to her death from her balcony.

Everyone in the building wants to get to know her, no one more than Zeke (William Baldwin, Flatliners). Within, oh let’s say a day or two, they’re having sex all over the place and talking about flying a plane into a volcano. He says that he designs “computer video games” and she’s just happy to have a younger man interested in her, despite the fact that she has a six-figure clothing budget (giallo fashion alert) and, you know, looks like Sharon Stone in 1993.

Carly also has another suitor, a writer named Jack (Tom Berenger, Major League) who is the most sexist character in the film, but certainly not in Eszterhaus’ oeuvre. As more neighbors begin to die, she begins to distrust both Zeke and Jack.

Oh yeah — there’s also Vida Warren, who is a model, but also a hooker, and also has the worst cocaine snorting scene in the history of film, treating it as a child would Pixie Stix.

At the close of the film, we learn that Jack killed Naomi, the original tenant because he was jealous of Zeke, who actually designed and owns the building. Zeke knew Jack killed her because of his network of security cameras, but he didn’t want his secret getting out.

Zeke invites Naomi to enjoy the cameras, but she eventually destroys his control room, telling him to get a life before she leaves both him and her home.

Joe Eszterhas’s original ending — where Zeke turns out to be the killer, revealed to a sympathetic Naomi as they fly over and perhaps into a volcano — was “incomprehensible to test audiences,” which led to Eszterhas writing five different endings. The re-shot ending, where actors Tom Berenger and Polly Walker wear S&M fashions, had to be filmed with body doubles as the actors did not agree to this in their contracts. Eszterhas hates the film, particularly the new ending and final line.

The sex scenes were a big deal when this came out. During the filming of them, Sharon Stone bit William Baldwin’s tongue “with such force that he couldn’t talk properly for days afterwards.” This may be why neither actor would speak to one another by the end of the filming. What remains on the screen is coupling that is at best robotic and at worse, ridiculous. It’s still not the worst sex scenes in an Eszterhaus film.

Sliver is filled with that trademark Eszterhaus wit. Witness dialogue like Carly saying, “You’ve been spending too much time with your vibrator.” Her friend’s reply? “I certainly have – I’ve been getting a plastic yeast infection!” By wit, I mean copious amounts of the kind of sex talk that CEO’s that have been removed thanks to modern thinking and the #MeToo movement would find humorous or normal.

Oh yeah! Martin Landau is in this and utterly wasted! There’s no reason for him to even be in this movie! He does absolutely nothing other than make you look at the screen and say, “Martin Landau is in this.”

The giallo themes that the film starts with — Carly being a dead ringer for a murdered woman, high fashion, the promise of kink — pretty much go nowhere. The film was a commercial, if not an artistic success. But it seems like there was so much promise that goes undelivered and the film begs for an Argento or even DePalma touch. Even a late in the movie knife murder reminds you that this film could be all masked faces and black leather gloves, but never goes all in.

Let’s get this out of the way: Brian De Palma, much like Giallo, was heavily influenced by Hitchcock. In fact, when an interviewer asked Hitchcock if he saw the film as an homage, he replied, “You mean fromage.” That said — Hitchcock died three months before the film was released, so that story could be apocryphal (it’s been said that the famous director made this comment to either a reporter or John Landis).

What is true is the interview that De Palma did after Dressed to Kill (Rolling Stone, October 16, 1980).  The director claimed, “My style is very different from Hitchcock’s. I am dealing with surrealistic, erotic imagery. Hitchcock never got into that too much. Psycho is basically about a heist. A girl steals money for her boyfriend so they can get married. Dressed to Kill is about a woman’s secret erotic life. If anything, Dressed to Kill has more of a Buñuel feeling.”

However, I’d argue that this film has more in common with Giallo than anything the “Master of Suspense” directly created. That’s because—to agree with DePalma above—this film does not exist in our reality. Much like Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, it exists in its dream reality, where the way we perceive time can shift and change based on the storyteller’s whims.

Yet what of DePalma being dismissive of Argento in interviews, claiming that while he saw the director as having talent, he’d only seen one of his films? Or should we believe his ex-muse/wife Nancy Allen, who claims that when she told DePalma that she was auditioning for Argento’s Inferno, he said, “Oh, he’s goooood.”

Contrast that with this very simple fact (and spoilers ahead, for those of you who worry about that sort of thing, but face facts, this movie is 37 years old): DePalma rips off one of Hitchcock’s best tricks from Psycho: he kills his main character off early in the film, forcing us to suddenly choose who we see as the new lead, placing the killer several steps ahead of not just our protagonists, but the audience itself.

And yet there are so many other giallo staples within this film: fashion is at the forefront, with a fetishistic devotion to gloves, dresses, spiked high heels, and lingerie being displayed and removed and lying in piles all over an apartment or doctor’s office. This is the kind of film that makes you stop and notice an outfit, such as what Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson, Big Bad Mama, TV’s Police Woman) wears to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the blue coat that Liz Blake (Nancy Allen, Carrie, Strange Invaders) wears to meet Dr. Robert Elliot (Michael Caine, how could we pick any movie other than Jaws 4: The Revenge).

Then there are the music cues from Pino Donaggio, who also scored Don’t Look Now, Fulci’s The Black Cat, and Argento’s Do You Like Hitchcock? The film not only looks the part, but it has intense sound, too.

We also have characters trying to prove their innocence, investigating ahead of the police. Or the son of the murder victim who wants to discover why his mother really died. Or her doctor, who has an insane patient named Bobbi who has stolen his straight razor and demands that she give him more time than the rest of her patients. All of them could be the killer. Giallo gives us no assurances that just because we see someone as the protagonist, there’s no reason they couldn’t also be the antagonist.

Let’s toss in a little moral ambiguity here, too. Kate is a woman who is bored with her life. She’s raised a son and seen her marriage lose any hope of sexual frisson. Liz is a prostitute — no slut shaming here, she’s a strong businesswoman more than anything  — but she’s also a practiced liar, as a scene shows her deftly manipulating several people via phone to get the money she needs to buy stock based off an insider tip she receives from a client. Dr. Elliot is obviously attracted to Kate but claims that his marriage prevents him from having sex with her. Yet it seems like he has secrets beyond informing the police of the threats of his obviously unbalanced patient, Bobbi. And then there’s Peter, Kate’s son, who has no issues using his surveillance equipment to spy on the police or Liz. If this character seems the most sympathetic, remember that he is the closest to the heart of DePalma, whose mother once asked him to follow and record his father to prove that he was cheating on her.

Finally, we have the color palette of Bava’s takes on giallo mixed with extreme zooms, split screens and attention to the eyes of our characters. The blood cannot be redder.

The film opens with Kate in the shower. While the producers asked Dickinson to claim that it’s her body, it’s really Victoria Johnson (Grizzly) as a body double. Her husband comes into the shower to make love to her, but she finds it robotic and not the passion she feels she deserves. Directly after, she tells Dr. Elliot that she’s frustrated and attempts to seduce him, but he rejects her.

More depressed than before the appointment started, she heads to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite being surrounded by inspiration, such as the statue of Diana by Saint-Guadens, West Interior by Alex Katz and Reclining Nude by Tom Palmore (a tip of the hat to the amazing I Talk You Bored blog for an insightful take on the film and the research as to what each work of art is), she absentmindedly writes entries in her schedule. Planning the holiday meal gets her through the mindlessness of her life, flowing penmanship reminding her to “pick up turkey” instead of slowing down and appreciating not just the artwork around her but the people. There’s a young couple in lust if not love. There’s a young family. And then, a man with dark glasses catches her eye before brazenly sitting down next to her.

We are used to male characters chasing after female characters who aren’t defined by anything other than being sex objects. Instead, we have Kate pursuing the man, making the first, second, and even third moves until we realize that she was just following the man’s breadcrumbs.

Of note here is that color plays an essential role in the scene, as do expected manners. Kate is a wife and mother. She is who society expects to have virtue, and she is clad in all white, but her intentions are anything but pure. She finally has what she wants—the thrilling sex life that she may have only read about in trashy paperbacks.

This scene is a master class in pacing and movement. Imagine, if you will, the words on the page: Kate follows a mystery man through the museum. And yet, those are just eight words. We get nearly nine minutes of wordless pursuit, yet it never grows dull.

Finally, Kate follows the man out of the museum, but she loses him until she looks up and sees her glove dangled from a taxi. But blink, and you miss death in the background as Bobbi blurs past the camera.

When we catch up with Kate, it’s hours for her but seconds for us because this movie is a dream universe. She wakes up in bed with a stranger. There’s a gorgeous camera move here as DePalma moves the camera backward, an inverse of how a lesser director would have treated this scene. Instead of showing the two lovers tumbling through the apartment and removing clothes at every turn, we see Kate reassembling herself to move from her fantasy world to reality and toward her real world, which will soon become a nightmare. The camera slides slowly backward as she gets dressed, remembering via split-screen and sly smile how she doesn’t even remember where her panties have gone. She’s still wearing white, but under it all, she’s bare, her garments lost in a strange man’s house. A man whose name she doesn’t even know.

So now, as she emerges from realizing her sexual fantasies, she feels that she must make sense of it. She wants to write a note to say goodbye but doesn’t want to overthink it. Maybe she doesn’t even want it to happen again. And then she learns more about the man. It starts with his name and then becomes more than she ever wished to find out: his health report shows that he has multiple STDs.

Kate leaves the apartment and makes her way to the elevator, where she tries to avoid anyone’s eyes. In the background, we see an ominous red light, ala Bava. Bobbi—death and punishment for sin—is coming.

The death scene — I hold fast to my claim that The New York Ripper is close to this film but made by a director who doesn’t have the sense to cut away from violence — DePalma stages his version of the shower scene. But more than Psycho, we’ve come to identify with Kate. She’s a woman fast approaching middle age who wants a thrill, and yet, she’s punished by disease and death. She didn’t deserve this, and her eyes pleaded not to the killer as much as they did to the camera. And to us.

Here’s where we have to wonder aloud about DePalma’s long-discussed misogyny. This film was protested by women’s groups, who stated in this leaflet that “FROM THE INSIDIOUS COMBINATION OF VIOLENCE AND SEXUALITY IN ITS PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL TO SCENE AFTER SCENE OF WOMEN RAPED, KILLED, OR NEARLY KILLED, DRESSED TO KILL IS A MASTER WORK OF MISOGYNY.” Is DePalma guilty of the slasher film trope of “you fuck, and you die?” Maybe. Perhaps if she had remembered her marriage, at best, she wouldn’t be here. At worst, she wouldn’t have forgotten her ring in the stranger’s apartment and would have survived.

The way I see it, the death of Kate allows us to make the transition from past protagonist to new heroine, as the doors open post-murder to reveal a grisly scene to Liz and her john. The older man runs while Liz reaches out to Kate, their eyes meeting and fingers nearly touching. Kate’s white purity has been decimated by the razor slashes of Bobbi, the killer. As their transference is almost complete, Liz notices Bobbi in the mirror. Remember that we’re in a dream state? Time completely stops here, so we get an extreme zoom of both the mirror and Liz’s face. She escapes just in time, grasping the murder weapon and standing in the hallway, blood on her hands as a woman screams in the background, figuring her for the killer.

At this point, the film switches its protagonist. Unlike the films of David Lynch, like Mulholland Drive, this transference is not a changed version of the main character, but her exact opposite. Kate wore white, was older, and had a marriage and child, yet she slowly came to feel like an object to the men in her life. Liz wore black, was young and single, but was wise to the games of sex and power. She isn’t manipulated, turning the tables on men by using their needs for personal gain. Kate may have seen sexual fantasy as her greatest need, but for Liz, it’s just a means to an end.

Kate and Liz are as different as can be. For example, Kate goes to the museum to find inspiration. Liz only sees art as commerce, and she spends plenty of time explaining to Peter how much money she could make by acquiring a painting.

Dr. Elliott discovers a message from Bobbi on his answering machine (these machines and the narrative devices they enable must seem quaint and perhaps even anachronistic to today’s moviegoers). Once, Bobbi was his patient, but he refused to sign the paperwork for their (as the pronoun hasn’t been defined, so I’ll use they/their) sex change. In fact, Dr. Elliot has gone so far as to convince Bobbi’s new doctor that they are a danger to herself and others.

The police, however, have arrested Liz, and Detective Marino (Dennis Franz, TV’s Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue) doesn’t believe a word she has to say. There’s a great moment here where Liz goes from wide-eyed ingenue to knowing cynic in the face of Marino’s misogynistic tone. Meanwhile, Kate’s son Peter (Keith Gordon, Jaws 2, Christine) uses his listening devices in the station to learn more about his mother’s death than the police are willing to let on.

He begins tracking Liz, obsessively noting the times that she comes and goes from her apartment. He’s doing the same to Elliot’s office. But he’s not the only one tracking people. Bobbi has been stalking Liz, including a sequence where our heroine goes from being chased by a gang of black men to talking with an unbelieving police officer to Peter saving her from Bobbi with a spray of mace.

Because Peter has seen Bobbi also emerging from Dr. Elliott’s office, so he joins forces with Liz to discover who she is. That means that Liz uses her chief weapon — sex — to distract the doctor long enough to discover Bobbi’s real name and information. We learn that Liz’s mental sex game is as strong as her physical attributes here — she says that she must be good to be paid as well as she is. She knows precisely the fantasy Dr. Elliott wants to hear. But perhaps she also knows the fantasy that the mainly male slasher/giallo viewer wants: the woman submitting to the killer holding the knife.

Peter watches outside in the rain when a tall blonde pulls him away. Has he been taken by Bobbi? No — Liz returns to have sex with Dr. Elliott; he has been replaced by the killer. Bobbi lifts the razor as Liz helplessly crosses her arms in front of her face for protection. But at the last minute, the blonde who grabbed Peter outside is revealed to be a police officer, as she shoots Bobbi through the glass. That shattered pane also breaks Bobbi’s illusion and mask, revealing that Dr. Elliott is the man under the makeup and clothes.

The killer is arrested and goes into an insane asylum; Dr. Levy explains that while the Bobbi side of his personality wanted to be free, the Dr. Elliott side would not allow them to become a true woman. Therefore, whenever a woman broke through and aroused the male side of the persona, the female side would emerge and kill the offending female.

Inside the mental asylum, a buxom nurse attends to the male patients. The room is bathed in blue light, a cool lighting scheme that echoes Mario Bava’s films. The movie has moved from a dream version of reality to a pure dream sequence. It intrigues me that Carrie and Dressed to Kill both start with a shower scene and end with a dream threat to the surviving secondary heroine.

Within the asylum, Dr. Elliott overcomes the nurse and slowly, methodically, folds her clothing over her nude form. As he begins to either dress in her clothes — or worse, molest her dead body — the camera slowly moves upward as we realize that there is a gallery of other patients all watching and screaming. This scene reminds me of the gallery of residents watching a doctor perform surgery, yet inverted (have you caught this theme yet?) and perverted.

Bobbi emerges once again, and because she is dead, she cannot be stopped. Liz is bare and helpless in the shower, and nothing can protect her from being slashed and sliced and murdered — except that none of this is real. She awakens, screaming in bed, and Peter rushes in to protect her. And for the first time in the film (again, thanks to I Talk You Bored for noticing), she is wearing white.

Many find this a hard movie to stomach due to its misogyny. I’ll see you that and tell you it’s a misanthropic film that presents all of humanity, male and female, negatively. The men in this film are actually treated the way women usually are in films, as either silent sex objects (Warren Lockman), sexless enemies (Kate’s husband), shrill harpies that need to be defeated (Detective Marino) or sexless best friends who provide the hero with the tools they need to save the day (Peter). Seriously, in another film, one would think Peter would have a sexual interest in Liz, but despite her double entendres and come-ons, he remains more concerned with schedules and numbers and evidence.

Bobbi, the combination of male and female, comes across as a puritan punisher of females who benefit from sex, either emotionally or monetarily. Or perhaps they are just destroying the sex objects that they know that the male side of their brain will never allow them to become. Interestingly, Bobbi’s voice doesn’t come from Michael Caine but from De Palma regular William Finley (The Phantom of Phantom of the Paradise).

What else makes this a giallo? The police seem either unwilling to help at best or ineffectual at worst until they tie things up neatly at the end. And the conclusion, when the hand emerges not from the doorway — but the medicine cabinet — to slash Liz echoes the more fantastic films in the genre, such as Suspiria, All the Colors of the Dark and Stagefright, where reality just ceases to exist. At the end of all three films, the heroine has confronted the fantastic and may never be the same.

In the first, Suzy narrowly escapes from hell on earth and emerges laughing in the rain. Is she happy that she survived? Has she achieved a break from reality? Is she breaking the fourth wall and laughing at how insane the film has become, pleased that the torture is finally over?

In the final scene of All the Colors of the Dark, the fantasy world is all a ruse, yet our heroine, Jane, is now trapped in the dream world. She can tell what will happen before it does; she knows that her husband has both slept with and killed her sister, but he has saved her from a fate worse than death. Yet all she can do is shout, “I’m scared of not being myself anymore. Help me!”

In Stagefright, the final girl walks out of the scene and out of reality as she defeats the killer. She has transcended being an actress to removing herself from fiction.

In all these films, the characters are not unchanged by their experiences with the dream world. In Dressed to Kill, the final dream sequence renders Liz truly frightened for the first time in the film. It’s the only time we see her as vulnerable — even when faced with an entire gang of criminals on the subway, she retains her edge. As Peter reaches out to comfort her — the only sexless male in the film and not just a sublimated one like Dr. Elliott — she recoils from his touch before giving in to his protective embrace.

In the same way, the film changes us. It has thrilled us, made us think, or even made us angry. True cinema—true art, really—makes us confront what we find most uncomfortable. Sure, we can deride and decry many of this film’s choices, but the fact that I’ve devoted days of writing and over three thousand words to it speaks to its potency. Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far.

PS—I’ve often discussed—in person and on podcasts—that I experienced so many R-rated movies for the first time via Mad Magazine. I’m delighted I could find the Mort Drucker illustration for his skewering of Dressed to Kill.

Douglas Hickox directed one of my favorite films, Vincent Price’s Theater of Blood. And he also directed this — a TV movie turned video store favorite thanks to its striking box art.

Joe Steiner (Richard Widmark, whose portrayal of Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death would inspire Eric Binford in 1980’s Fade to Black) is a cop who can’t let go. A brutal slayer of an entire family on a child’s birthday has scarred him and he promises the dead family that he won’t rest until he brings their killer to justice.

Allen Devlin (Keith Carradine, Nashville) is a man without an identity. He was in a car crash that destroyed both his face and memory. He wakes up with a scarred visage that upsets nearly everyone that sees it except for his nurse, Chris Graham (Kathleen Quinlan, Airport ’77).

Mike Patterson (Michael Back, Swan from The Warriors) is another cop who was Chris’ boyfriend and lost her to Allen. He can’t let go.

All three men are trapped by the past: Steiner believes that Allen is the family killer. Mike wants Chris back at nearly any cost. And Allen might be a new person, born on the day of his car crash, but he may also be that killer. Even he isn’t so sure.

So how is this a giallo? It doesn’t have the expected psychosexual and fashionista elements, nor the camerawork showing the killer’s POV. However, it does feature plenty of identity confusion and a main character who may or may not be the villain.

Come to think of it, this film has a strange narrative in that there is no real hero of the piece, with all three men and Chris serving as characters within the story framework instead of a sole protagonist for us to root for.

For a TV movie, this gets pretty dark, with some uncomfortable male on female violence at the end. There’s also a great steadicam sequence where Chris opens door after door to try and find either her children or the killer, with the smooth movement of the camera slowly increasing her worry and making the scene quite claustrophobic.

Originally airing on July 28, 1995 on HBO, Blackout gained even more notoriety as it inspired Ed Sherman’s murder of his wife Ellen in August of that year. Sherman also used an air conditioner to slow the decomposition of his wife’s dead body in an attempt to establish his alibi.

Blackout has never been commercially released on DVD, but you can find it at the VHSPS, a great source for all films that have been forgotten.

I’m going to start this off with an unpopular take. This is not a bad movie. When I first met my wife, she used to tell me how much she loved it and I thought she was crazy. Surely, everyone online that went out of their way to destroy it had to be right, right?

Wrong. Go with me on this alternative universe logic — if Lindsey Lohan were a disgraced movie star in 1967 instead of 2007, she would have gone to Italy to make movies for directors like Bava, Argento, Martino and Antonio Margheriti. She would have been in the same company as Anita Ekberg, Florinda Bolkan, Elke Somer and even Edwige Fenech.

The film has all the hallmarks of giallo: a serial killer is abducting, torturing and killing young women in the suburb of New Salem. An evening of fun for Aubrey Fleming (Lohan) turns into weeks of torture as she wakes up bound and gagged on an operating table, her hands deep in dry ice.

The FBI Task Force has already given up hope of finding the killer, but a driver discovers Aubrey on a deserted road in the middle of the night. To the shock of her parents, she declares that she’s really a stripper named Dakota Moss and has no idea who Aubrey Fleming is. And then she realizes that she’s missing her hand and half of her leg.

At this point, you’re either going to give up on this movie or dive in. I advise diving right in.

While the police, the doctors and her parents believe that this is all PTSD, Aubrey/Dakota insists that she is not who anyone thinks she is. Things get weirder when FBI agents discover a story on Aubrey’s laptop about a girl with an alter ego named Aubrey. And DNA confirms that Dakota really is Aubrey. This inversion of identity is key to the main tenets of classic giallo.

Dakota has a theory of her own: She’s Aubrey’s twin sister and her injuries are Corsican Brothers-like (or Tomax and Xamot, if you prefer) sympathetic wounds as she experiences the plight of her symbiotic sibling.

Sure, her mother has a pregnancy ultrasound that shows only one fetus. But Dakota confronts her father (or Aubrey’s, stay with me) as she believes that her mother lost that child soon after its birth and that she and Aubrey were the twin children of a crack addict named Virginia Sue Moss. Aubrey was taken to live in comfort city mouse style while she stayed with Moss, trailer park mouse style. The complication? Virginia Sue Moss was yet another character from Aubrey’s short story.

Richard Roeper claims that this is the worst movie of the 2000s, calling the film “a ridiculous thriller (minus the thrills)” and saying that it’s filled with a” nonsensical plot that grows sillier by the second, tawdry special effects, heavy-handed symbolism that’s big on electric-blue hues and mechanical performances are all culprits as far as the title’s concerned.” Has Roeper even seen a giallo? Because reading that sentence makes me want to watch this movie all over again!

Back to the movie: Dakota starts to see visions of the killer slicing up his captive which draws her to the cemetery. As she investigates the grave of another victim, Aubrey’s friend Jennifer, she finds a blue ribbon from a piano competition. Aubrey was a noted pianist and there’s a note attached from her (and Jennifer’s) piano teacher, Douglas Norquist. As her father (or Aubrey’s, look, it’s not a giallo if you don’t get confused) looks on, she declares, “I know who killed me.”

That’s because the ribbon says, “Blue Ribbons Are For Winners, Never Settle For The Red, Rest In Peace, Douglas.” It’s a metaphor for the lives of the twins: Aubrey is the blue chipper with a boyfriend that loves her, good grades, plenty of friends and a bright future. Dakota works in the red light district and faces a life of poverty.

Without any police backup — again, this happens all the time in giallo — they confront Norquist. Daniel is killed before Aubrey leaves the safety of the car and enters the house. She fights Norquist, cutting off his hand, before she’s tied up. He asks her why she returned after he buried her alive before she frees herself and kills him. She heads into the woods where she digs up Aubrey, verifying that she was not insane and had been right all along. Then, she lies on the ground with her twin sister.

Some of the few critics who liked this movie compared it to Brian DePalma or David Lynch films. Sure. Or you could go right to the source — Italy.

If you replaced the score of the film (that said, I love that The Sword and The Melvins are heard in this film) with some insane synth or orchestral music (someone get Claudio Simonetti, Piero Umiliani or Morricone on the line), if you made the homes space age lounges filled with improbable furniture and if you had more than one scene of Lohan stripping (any of the sex in this movie is honestly the unsexiest sex ever, they should have really studied Sergio Martino movies), this movie would fit perfectly into my DVD collection between Hatchet for the Honeymoon and Inferno. Who am I kidding? It’s on my shelf already!

This is not the first time Lohan played twins on film, thanks to starring in the remakes of Freaky Friday and The Parent Trap. Again, this is perfect giallo casting — not to mention pure exploitation — showing her gone to seed as two twins who couldn’t be more different.

However, this was not an easy movie to film for director Chris Sivertson, as Lohan had an appendix operation during shooting. Plus, there were times when she would not show up at all — necessitating a body double be used to film the end of the movie. Even worse, she was followed by paparazzi throughout the shoot and some of them are still in the background of a few shots!

There are giallo techniques used throughout the film, such as a neon sign outside the strip club that foreshadows Dakota’s injuries and the fact that Bava-esque blue and red lighting determines which character is on screen between Aubrey and Dakota.

While so many decry this film for not making any sense, if you’ve made it through any number of classics (sure, the director claims Hitchcock as a primary influence, but you can say that he’s the well from which all giallo flows) like The Bird With the Crystal Plumage or Deep Red or A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, you’re going to be just fine. The world was just ready to devour Lindsey Lohan and this film would be its sacrificial lamb. Oh if only there were an Italian film industry for her to turn to and appear alongside Ivan Rassimov!

Julie (Marianna Hill, Messiah of Evil, The Baby) writes the lonely hearts column for a newspaper, but she’s suddenly getting more than letters from the lovelorn. An anonymous person is sending her letters threatening to murder people. And at the very same time, members of her group therapy session are getting stabbed and killed, one by one. Is there a connection?

Schizoid has all the markings of a giallo — the main character is in the middle of a murder investigation and has no idea who is behind it, while many of the killings are from the murderer’s POV. And let’s not forget the black leather gloves!

It’s missing the insane devotion to fashion and interior design, but we can’t hold that against it, as at least Dr. Pieter (Klaus Kinski, a legit real life maniac who always plays maniacs on screen) has an interesting home.

Right from the beginning, when the ladies of Dr. Pieter’s encounter group luxuriate in a hot tub, we get the idea that someone is watching. When one of them leaves, she is run off the road, chased into a farmhouse and repeatedly stabbed with a pair of scissors. Several days later, a couple that’s trying to have sex is surprised by the body.

Are the letters connected? Why do they mention a gun when the murders are done with a knife? Who is the killer? Is it Gilbert (Christopher Lloyd, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension), the weirdest person in her therapy group? Is it her ex-husband, Doug (Craig Wasson, Body Double) who argues with her every day because they work in the same place? Or how about Dr. Pieter, because he’s Klaus Kinski? Beyond that, he’s having sex with every single one of his patients, including a stripper named Pat (Flo Gerrish, Don’t Answer the Phone) who he takes against a hot water heater! And hey — his relationship with Alison, (Donna Wilkes, Jaws 2, Angel) his daughter, feels super incestual. Maybe that’s who the killer is!

This film also follows the giallo tradition by having police officers that are so ineffectual that they depend on the heroine to do her own investigation with no protection and only a special phone line to help her.

Alison and Dr. Pieter argue repeatedly, especially after he grows closer to Julie, bringing her home to dinner. She begins to dress in her mother’s clothes or as a little girl and even steals her father’s gun.

The police put in the phone line, but every single call seems to be cranky readers who are angry about Julie’s column. Then, Alison calls her from a payphone, gun in hand. Julie gets Alison to come visit her at her house, where her husband (she doesn’t call him ex-husband) is doing some repair work. Alison throws out a whole bunch of the letters and brandishes her gun, but it’s unloaded. Then, the phone rings.

It’s Dr Pieter, who demands to know where this number reaches Julie. He comes to visit, but someone takes a shot at him. We don’t see who, but he assumes that it is Alison. The lights go out and we have no idea who is in the room with him. The phone rings again, but it’s not Alison or Julie on the line. They’re both tied up and a man is on the other line — but who!

Should I reveal it here? I won’t. But I will say that this movie is truly a giallo because it’s the person that is the least likely suspect and the police come running at the last moment. And by that, I mean just in times for the credits.

Director David Paulsen also brought Savage Weekend to the screen, but is more well known for his primetime soap opera work on shows like Knots Landing, Dallas and Dynasty.

Want to see this one for yourself? Shout! Factory has a great budget double disk of this paired with X-Ray.

Bill Van Ryn writes the film blog Groovy Doom, admins the Facebook page of the same name, and publishes the horror and exploitation fanzine DRIVE-IN ASYLUM. 

Alfred Sole’s 1976 horror thriller Alice, Sweet Alice is that rare horror flick that contains several twists and turns, yet holds onto its ability to shock and disturb even after the surprises are known. Be warned, in talking about this fantastic film and its creepy, multilayered pleasures, I will reveal the identity of the killer.

Catherine Spages (Linda Miller) is divorced from her ex-husband, Dom (Niles McMaster). She lives in a tenement apartment building with their two daughters, Alice (Paula Shepard) and Karen (Brooke Shields). Aside from the pressure of raising the girls without her husband, Catherine is challenged by the rivalry between them; twelve-year-old Alice seems resentful of the attention that her younger sister gets. She terrorizes Karen in a number of ways, including frightening her with a Halloween mask, stealing the girl’s favorite doll, and manhandling the veil Karen is to wear on her first Holy Communion. The parish’s handsome young priest, Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich) also gives Karen a lovely family heirloom rosary as a gift, furthering Alice’s motivations for antagonizing her sister.

The family and the parish are shaken when Karen is murdered on the day of her first communion. She is attacked by a small figure wearing a child’s yellow raincoat and a mask, the same Halloween mask that Alice possesses; after strangling the child to death, the killer hides her body inside a chest and sets it on fire. Devastated by the loss of her daughter, Catherine’s emotional state begins to unravel, leaving Alice even more unstable than before. Could she be responsible?

Of course the movie toys with this idea, and Alice herself is a fascinating character, memorably played by actress Paula Sheppard. Sheppard only appeared in one other film, the 1984 cult classic Liquid Sky, before turning her back on acting and leading a private life. Here, she is the dark core of the film, an ambiguous character who veers between a glowering menace and a frightened child. The story captures her during a moment of passage into young adulthood, ultimately demonstrating the ways that adult conflicts can affect the course of a child’s development. Older than her sister, Alice is affected more deeply by the separation of her parents. Often silent and sullen, she is possibly even dangerous, as evidenced by a scene where she seems to kill a kitten with her bare hands when her lecherous landlord tries to molest her. Most likely, the story establishes these characteristics in Alice so that we believe she could indeed be responsible for the murder of her sister, as well as a violent stabbing attack that is carried out on her manipulative, overbearing aunt Annie (wonderfully characterized by actress Jane Lowry with all the exaggerated shock tactics of a drag queen).

Alice, however, is not the film’s killer. In a twist that predates the sudden arrival of Mrs. Voorhees at the conclusion of Friday the 13^th, Mildred Clinton emerges as the mad slasher who carries out her violent revenge on those around her that she deems wicked. She plays Mrs. Tredoni, the rectory’s housekeeper, who we learn had a young daughter who died on the day of her First Holy Communion (shades of Friday the 13^th again). Further defying expectations is the fact that the reveal isn’t made at the end, but with the final third still ahead.  She pulls off the mask for a reveal just as she murders Dominic, a character we may have thought would be the hero of the movie. Mrs. Tredoni’s motivations for carrying out this bizarre form of revenge stem from many places; in retrospect, we can see that she targeted Catherine because she considers her a ‘whore’ due to her divorce. Also, she feels a desire to see her own loss of a child inflicted on another woman. She dresses like Alice during the attacks in order to throw suspicion on her, perhaps recognizing that Alice is also a ‘bad’ girl. But also, Mrs. Tredoni harbors a love for the handsome Father Tom that may go beyond her devotion to the church. After murdering Karen, she reclaims the rosary that Father Tom gave her, a clue that Dominic takes to his death by using his teeth to pull it off the crazed woman and swallowing it.

Mrs. Tredoni is one distorted character, but yet another is Catherine’s obese landlord, portrayed by Alphonso DeNoble. With ghoulish circles under his eyes, pale white skin, and a tendency to talk to his cats in a high falsetto voice, DeNoble nearly steals the show. Jane Lowry, as Aunt Annie, also makes a meal out of the scenery, playing a shrewish woman who serves as yet another bad role model for Alice Spages. Annie addresses everyone in the film as if she’s a schoolteacher talking to a petulant student, and orders her weakling husband around like a drill instructor. Linda Miller as Catherine possesses few of these overblown qualities, herself being the ‘normal’ woman surrounded by horrible people—one of whom wants to destroy her life.

One intense moment in the film is a good indicator of the film’s haunting tone; Catherine comes to the rectory to wait for her ex-husband, who has been helping her cope with the loss of their daughter. She’s welcomed by Mrs. Tredoni, who we know has just murdered the man, but she has trouble keeping up a pleasant facade with Catherine, and grows increasingly agitated. While revealing her own tragic past, she suddenly picks up a large knife and casually aims it directly at Catherine. Moments later, news arrives of Dominic’s murder, and Mrs. Tredoni relishes Catherine’s screams of anguish.

The film’s horrifying climax furthers the contrast between Alice and Mrs. Tredoni, positioning them as similar personalities at different stages in their development as monsters. Having been spotted and identified by police at the scene of her latest crime, Mrs. Tredoni is pursued to the church, where Father Tom is saying mass and just about to give communion. At his own request, the detectives allow Father Tom to try to convince Mrs. Tredoni to go quietly with them. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake of refusing her communion after giving it to Catherine. Mrs. Tredoni, now furious beyond reason, pulls the large butcher knife out of her shopping bag and plunges it into Tom’s throat. Tom dies in Mrs. Tredoni’s arms as the police close in, and in the ensuing horror and panic, Alice slips away with Mrs. Tredoni’s shopping bag containing the murder weapon. These events have almost certainly shaped Alice for the worse, perhaps beginning a new cycle of trauma, anguish and revenge.

The movie was conceived and originally released as Communion, which is the title of the tie-in novelization. It returned in a limited release as The Mask Murders in 1977, and then was released more widely as Alice, Sweet Alice in 1978. It returned in 1981 with yet another title, Holy Terror, featuring an ad campaign that played up Brooke Shields’ brief appearance in the film, despite the fact that she was about 10 when she made it (and the image of Shields in the ad was current!). Shot in New Jersey, the strange editing, sound design and overall look of the film is that of a European giallo.  The fact that it’s a period piece set in the early 1960s may also have something to do with the fact that it appears to be a European production, as if the film is a foreign storyteller’s take on American angst and terror. It also draws a few themes from Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 Don’t Look Now, namely the use of yellow raincoats, a diminutive adult female killer who disguises herself as a little girl, and the climactic throat slashing with rivers of blood.

The movie is not European, however, and director Sole actually grew up in New Jersey, although he did study architecture in Italy. Like the best horror directors, Sole takes familiar elements (working class families and the culture of Catholicism) and distorts them into grotesque caricatures to disturb and unnerve the audience. This slightly askew viewpoint, along with the performances Sole gets from his able cast, goes a long way in achieving that elusive goal of turning a seemingly ordinary world into a nightmare landscape. It’s a shame he didn’t keep going as a director; frustrated by industry politics, he abandoned directing in 1982, choosing instead to make a long career for himself as a production designer. I’d have loved to have seen him continue making films with modest budgets and the generous imagination he displays in Alice, Sweet Alice.

A new horror movie? We went and saw a new horror movie? Yep. We sure did. The results? Well, pretty much exactly what I expected, sadly.

Never forget that before they started the Insidious series, Leigh Whannell and James Wan created the Saw franchise. That one got driven into the ground. And with Insidious: The Last Key, you can feel that the franchise is desperately seeking something new as it whistles past the graveyard, never letting you forget that Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Ouija, all of these Insidious movies) died at the end of the first movie.

There’s even a maudlin scene where she talks about how she and her dog have grown old. There are numerous heartstring tugs — well, I should say, attempted tugs — that fall flat.

Where the film succeeds is when it shows us where Elise came from, a home that is possessed by both human and supernatural horror. There’s a sequence there where Elise is sure that there’s someone else in the room with her and her brother that approaches a fright, but the film devolves into by the numbers trips into The Further.

Specks and Tucker (creator Whannell and Angus Simpson) are the other highlights of the film, a welcome bit of fun in an otherwise lumbering mess. The film feels four hours long, with the second half — introducing Elise’s estranged brother (Bruce Davison, The Lords of Salem) and his family — feeling like the only time this film picks up steam.

New baddy Key Face looks interesting (he’s played by Javier Botet, who has a lock on playing spectral evil thanks to roles in Crimson Peak, The Conjuring 2, It and the upcoming Polaroid and Slender Man), but we never really learn why he’s doing what he does. I don’t always demand that horror films have backstory — Halloween doesn’t need it — but I felt there was no real motivation here.

This film has been in the can since August of 2016 and was moved from October of last year to make way for Happy Death Day, so the producers have to overjoyed that it’s already made four times of its budget.

Obviously, we’re going to get more of this series. They already set up Imogen Rainier, Elise’s niece, as having her gift. So they can always go back and rewrite the ending of Insidious 2, if they want. I just hope that they try and invest the film with some level of humanity, unlike this effort.

Also, Becca reminded me as we walked to the car that you need to watch these movies in this order: 3, 4, 1, 2. I have the sinking feeling that I’ll be watching the other films this week. I find them all lacking when compared to the Conjuring films.

I just wish that Hollywood would make a horror film I want to see. Looking at the films in Drive-In Asylum makes me sad that at one point, there were so many genre films to choose from. I feel that we have to go out and see every horror film that’s out (fuck, I had to suffer through that It remake this week on video and the trailer for Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare made me throw up blood) just to keep these movies viable. Other than The Witch and Get Out, I’ve been sorely disappointed. Here’s hoping that the rest of 2018’s new horror films easily jump over the very low bar that Insidious: The Last Key sets.

Silence of the Lambs is a great movie. But you’re reading my words right now, so I want you to know that Manhunter is a way better movie. In fact, it’s nearly a perfect film, one whose perfect union of light, color, tone and sound nearly moves me to tears.

Dino De Laurentiis was involved in this, changing the title from Red Dragon, and being his usual hamfisted self, but Michael Mann was coming in hot from TV’s Miami Vice (he’d previously directed Thief and The Keep before that show caught fire).

William Petersen (who would go on to star in CSI) is phenomenal as Will Graham, a former FBI profiler who has to come out of retirement to help solve a murder. Working on his character with the Chicago and FBI Violent Crimes Units, he learned that profilers often had to compartmentalize their personal lives, because it was near impossible to turn off the things they’d seen. In fact, at the conclusion of the film, Petersen found it near impossible to shake the character.

Tom Noonan (Frankenstein’s Monster in The Monster Squad) researched serial killers, but found himself sickened by what he learned. Instead, he tried to become a man who saw that he was doing good for his victims instead of harming them. He was doing it out of love. Improvising during his audition, he noticed that he was frightening one of the casting agents, so he pushed hard to frighten her even more. He claims that this is what secured the role for him. 

But the real star of the show is Michael Mann’s eye and his work with director of photography Dante Spinotti. There are color tints throughout the film, ala Bava, with cool blue representing love and green with purple and magenta to denote the violent moments. Petersen has said that Mann wanted a visual aura for the film, so the story could work on an emotional level.

Even the framing of the shots — watch how close Petersen is with other characters in the film, particularly how Dennis Farina (whose acting career began in Mann’s Thief) nearly collapses before coming near him at the end of the film, where once they could sit side by side.

Let’s get into the story: Will Graham (Petersen) is a retired FBI profiler who had a mental breakdown after being attacked by the serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (yes, that’s the correct spelling and Brian Cox (Zodiac) is commanding in this role). His old boss Jack Crawford (Farina) needs him to come back and enter the mind of the Tooth Fairy (Noonan), a killer who preys on families. Graham and Crawford both promise his family — Molly (Kim Greist, C.H.U.D.) and Kevin — that he will only look at the evidence and not get involved.

What follows is a cat and mouse game of trying to find the Tooth Fairy while Graham must return to confront the man who nearly cost him his life and sanity, Dr. Lecktor. Everything the police try backfires, including using a tabloid journalist to draw out the killer, which puts Graham’s family in direct danger when Lecktor gives the killer their home address.

There’s a great scene here where Graham and his son shop. In what would be a throw away scene in any other film, the true humanity of Mann’s work, in contrast to his meticulous editing and color theory, shine through. You can tell that Kevin has been forced to grow up and become the man of the house while his father was destroyed by Lecktor. And now, his father has to prove that he can protect his family again.

Meanwhile, the Tooth Fairy has found love with Reba (Joan Allen, Room), a blind co-worker. She cannot see his hairlip. She isn’t aware that he’s watching his victims while they enjoy a romantic dinner. His love for her and her acceptance has suppressed his bloodlust. Yet just as Graham’s profile discovers just how important that acceptance is, he sees her go home with another employee. It’s simply a ride home, but the killer goes wild, killing the man and abducting Reba. She calls him by his name and he replies, “Frances is gone. Forever.”

What follows is my favorite scene in the film, where we visually see how Graham’s mind works, as he figures out the connection between the murders where families were killed and their eyes replaced with mirrors. He figures out that all of the films came from the same lab. As he looks out the window, sure that he is right and ready to be confirmed, even when the lab says they have different labels, he confidently looks out the window and asks them to peel the label back. His hand against the window, the moon bright, he is proved correct and the chase is on.

As they determine the Tooth Fairy’s identity on the plane, leaving police cars barely enough time to meet them as they land, you know that Graham will not wait for backup. He is back, in his element, no longer a beaten man. As they make their way to the Kansas City riverfront (a bravura scene with a house that was made just for the film), Graham and Crawford race through the woods as the Tooth Fairy begins shotgunning cops.

During the final encounter, Mann shot multiple speeds, so that cameras were recording the same scene at 24, 36, 72 and 90 frames per second. This gives the shootout a feel that Spinotti said was off tempo and staccato. I found it disconcerting, the violence, not Hollywood glamour but messy real life.

Even more intriguing is that the climax was shot after principal photography and when the union crew had run out of hours. There wasn’t even an effects crew on hand,  so the skeleton crew that remained blew ketchup across the set through hoses to simulate blood spray. 

The home of the Tooth Fairy is an otherworldly place, blasting Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Via,” lunar landscapes blocking rooms, before Graham busts through the window, breaking the Tooth Fairy’s carefully created world. Despite this act of heroism, the killer simply drops him to the floor and continues killing cops. yet Graham rises and defeats the man and confronts his victim. When he asks him who he is, he replies, “Graham. Will Graham.” He has left the other demons in his mind behind. He is himself again, ready to leave this world behind and return to his family.

So how is this film a giallo? Simple. Where it has no connection to the fashion and female protagonist that are hallmarks of the genre, the color choices, driven hero and psychosexual motives of the killer are pure giallo. So is the devotion to symmetry in the shots, echoing the work of Argento. However, this is a film stripped of the camp that is at the heart of so much giallo. Yet there it is, inside the DNA of this film.

An Italian ripoff of both Predator and Terminator starring Reb Brown (Yor Hunter from the Future), directed by Bruno Mattei (The Other Hell), from a script by the husband and wife team of Claudio Fragasso and Rosella Drudi (who concocted Troll 2, a movie that is at the same time not a sequel and not about trolls)? You had me at Italian ripoff.

Major Murphy Black (yep, Reb Brown) is the leader of a team of commandos that are on a mission in the jungle. Only Mascher knows why they are really there — to test his new invention, Omega-1 (who is played by writer Claudio Fragasso), a robot that looks like a BMX racer with scuba gear.

But first, they have to rescue Virginia (Catherine Hickland, Witchery) from soldiers who are overtaking her hospital camp. Just like Predator, the team easily kills all of the terrorists/evil guys/generic villains, but it’s just to set up the real story. Yep, Masher wanted to see how his creation would stack up against Murphy.

The robot is smart enough to kill everyone, even his creator, and destroy the one device that is supposedly the only thing that can kill it. Also, Omega-1 is really a cyborg with he brain of Murphy’s old friend, Lt. Martin Woodrie.

Only Murphy and Virginia survive, despite numerous attacks by the cyborg. At the end, the cyborg corners Murphy in the jungle and shows him how to initiate his self-destruct sequence. And that’s that.

Are you wondering just how close this movie is to Predator?

There’s your answer right there.

Even I can’t defend the fact that I waste nearly ninety minutes of my life watching this movie. On my deathbed, I will pull my family close and whisper, “I only regret one thing. Robowar.” Hopefully, they realize that I mean a Bruno Mattei movie and don’t think that it’s a Rosebudian cipher and they have to go on a quest to discover what I mean. I also hope that none of them watch Robowar.

That said, it is on Amazon Prime.