Once you watch this film, you’ll wonder — just how did this play on TV? It was part of the 13 titles included in Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package syndicated in 1975 (the others were Marta, Maniac Mansion, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, The Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch) and several of these films aired intact on regular television! I can’t imagine — nor will you once you read this — what people thought! I even found a mention that the scene where Klaus Kinski inserts a pin into a girl’s eye aired uncut on Pittsburgh’s beloved Chiller Theater (indeed, it played on  July 7, 1979 and December 26, 1981, thanks to the amazing listing on the Chiller Theater fan site).

1906. Austria. Greta von Holstein (Ewa Aulin, Candy from Candy as well as Death Laid an Egg) has been used and abused by all of the men in her life, including Dr. von Ravensbrück, a rich cad who knocks her up and leaves her to die in childbirth.

Three years later. Her hunchback brother Franz, besotten with incestual love, brings her back to life with a magic medallion inscribed with the secret of life over death. He tries to get back into her pants, so she throws a black cat at his face. It eats his eyeballs, because, well, this is a Joe D’Amato movie. She then escapes into the world where she seeks revenge on the von Ravensbrück’s family.

Walter, the son of the doctor who done her wrong, and Eve, his wife, take her in after an accident outside their home. They both fall in love with her, which gives D’Amato license to shoot long lovemaking scenes. You may know him on one hand for his horror films, like Beyond the Darkness, Frankenstein 2000, Absurd and Antropophagus. But you may also know him for his adult films like Porno Holocaust and the Rocco Siffredi vehicle Tarzan X – Shame of Jane. Here, he combines his love of the female form with his eye for murder and insanity.

Eva is becoming jealous of Greta. But what he doesn’t know is that her new lover is wiping out people left and right, just for fun. The butler in the gallery with a razor. The maid in the woods with a shotgun. A lab assistant in the lab with a metal club. Even the family doctor (Klaus Kinski, do I need to say more or tell you he was in Schizoid, Crawlspace, Marquis de Sade: Justine and more? Or that he was also a maniac who was drafted to the German army, spent time as a POW and drank his own urine to get sick and get home earlier? This is not the craziest Kinski story, by the way…) is strangled right after he learns how to use her amulet to bring back the dead that he had been experimenting on (as you do).

Eva’s jealousy wins out, so she walls her up alive in the rooms beneath the castle, killing her. But Greta isn’t done yet. She shows up as a ghost at a party and lures Eva toward falling off the roof. That night, Greta’s ghost gives Walter a fatal heart attack in bed. And all of this was just to lure her old lover, Dr. von Ravensbrück, to the funeral, where she leads him to a vault and suffocates him.

A police inspector wonders if he’ll ever add up the case, as he finds the corpse of Greta’s brother near her empty grave. She’s gone and he wonders whatever happened to her. The person he has been telling the story to? Greta.

I was really struck by Berto Pisano’s music in this. He also contributed the strange soundtrack to Burial Ground. Here, his music is jazzy and then atonal, with sharp stings to call out the action.

I feel like I need to take a long shower after watching this movie. Which isn’t a bad thing, really. It’s an effective mix of giallo and gothic romance, with plenty of sleaze and gore for those seeking those thrills.

Nieves Navarro is a true queen of giallo, appearing in All the Colors of the Dark, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, So Sweet, So Dead and Death Walks on High Heels. Here, she makes her second film with her husband, Luciano Ercoli.

In this one, she plays a fashion model named Valentina who agrees to help her journalist beau study LSD. But while she’s dosed and in the middle of a photo shoot, she watches a man brutally murder a woman with a spiked gauntlet. He thinks she’s just hallucinating and publishes her account, but she believes it’s real. And when the killer starts stalking her, she really starts to worry.

The entire opening of the film is one big acid freakout and everything that follows is the bad trip, the comedown and reality brutally intruding into drugged out bliss. This is a film packed with brutal violence and plenty of gore, but it makes sense. The movie demands it.

The end, when everything is wrapped up by the killer (killers?) is pretty great, as the many red herrings are discussed and the entire plot is finally explained to us. If everything before felt like a nightmare, this is bracingly cold water directly to the face.

Even better, Navarro portrays a heroine who doesn’t faint at the first sign of danger. She deals with the ineffectual police and indifference of her boyfriend with aplomb.

And yes — this film is packed with bonkers crazy fashion — a metal/glass silver wig and a strange sculpted wall feature prominently — so if that’s why you love giallo, you’ll be quite happy here. Me? I loved every minute.

If you want to watch it, it’s on Shudder.

A man is stabbed on a train, leading the police to question Nicole (giallo queen Nieves Navarro) about diamonds that are missing. Her life turns upside down, as she begins to receive disguised phone calls asking about the diamonds and a blue-eyed masked man attacks her in her boudoir. She then remembers that her jealous lover Michel owns contact lenses in that color, so she runs away with an older eye surgeon to the coast of England. But Michel isn’t far behind…

The first of three giallo directed by Navarro’s husband, Luciano Ercoli, this is what the genre should be: shocking, lurid, bloody and oh so fashionable. It also makes a deft turn from what we expect from the form into an actual mystery film.

There’s a plot twist here that honestly shocked me, so I won’t spoil it. While the other two films in the Ercoli giallo trilogy — Death Walks at Midnight and The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion — are much better, this is still a quality film worthy of your time. Some critics decry them as Ercoli making movies just to feature his wife, but if you had a quality woman like Navarro in your life, I bet you’d do the same.

Want to see it for yourself? It’s on Shudder along with plenty of other great giallo films!

When a movie starts with a fashion model dying during a back alley abortion and it being covered up as a drowning, all before the opening credits, you know that you’re in for something demented. When you realize that the film was written and directed by Andrea Bianchi, who brought us Burial Ground, you will either run screaming or sit down and pay attention.

The doctor who performed the operation is killed by a maniac in a motorcycle suit, but nobody at the Albatross Modeling Agency cares. All Carlo, the head photographer, cares about is using his modeling connections to pick up women. That’s how he meets Lucia (Femi Benussi, Hatchet for the Honeymoon), whom he takes from the steam room to the modeling agency.

Magda (Edwige Fenech looks better than I’ve ever seen her look in any movie) is jealous, so she surprises Carlo with some black lace, and they begin an affair. We then see a photo of the main agency members, like Mario, Magda, Carlo, Stefano, Dorris, Maurizio and his wife, and the owner of the studio, Gisella. There’s one other person in the photo—Evelyn, who we saw die in the beginning.

Mario heads home, and the killer shows up. When their helmet is removed, Mario knows the killer. But it’s too late. He’s dead now. The killer takes the photo so that they have a checklist of who to kill.

So then there’s Maurizio, who is cheating on his wife with a prostitute. He takes her on a crazy ride through the streets and then takes her back to his place, where he begs and threatens her life before she suddenly wants to have sex with him — because, you know, that’s how things worked in the 1970s — before he lasts all of a minute and starts embracing his blow up doll. Honestly, what the fuck? Of course, he’s killed right afterward. Good riddance.

Carlo later witnesses Gisella being murdered and even photographs the attack, but he’s hurt in a hit-and-run accident. While he’s recovering, Magda develops the film, but the killer ruins the negatives.

After killing Doris and Stefano, the murderer tries to kill Carlo and Magda, but the killer is knocked down the stairs. So who is it? New model Patrizia — Evelyn’s sister — blames him for her sister’s death. However, she dies before she can tell the police of his involvement.

The movie ends with Carlo playing around by mock choking Magda before initiating anal sex with her, as she tells him not to, in a scene meant as a comedy but lost in translation and the fact that forty-plus-year-old Giallo could never anticipate the #metoo movement.

The title of this film says it all. It’s the most nudity I’ve ever seen in a movie. And it’s one of the most lurid I’ve seen, too. I do not know if Bianchi intended this as a comedy, but it feels like one.

It’s almost incredible that a movie with this much nudity and mayhem moves at a glacial pace. It felt like the film’s first hour was the entire running time and contained wall-to-wall misogyny. I know, I know, that’s the majority of Giallo, but it feels so overwhelming and alien when seen with today’s eyes. I mean, should I be shocked that a movie called Strip Nude for Your Killer is so sexist? And why do I love it so much? Maybe it’s because Edwige Fenech makes me watch anything that she is in.

Films just show up in my YouTube subscriptions and I watch them, always hungry to discover something new. Imagine my surprise when I looked up and this film went from a giallo to a totally NSFW affair!

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x585zup

Dublin, 1902. As an acting troupe finishes their latest show, Count Marnack shows up and invites Evelyn and her friends — Cora, Rosalind, Penny and stagehand Samuel — to his castle. Once they get there, everyone but Samuel gets down — as we share a name I was displeased by this. But seriously, I was not expecting hardcore insert shots on YouTube. I figure they had a program to catch things like that (they caught a clip of a song in a trailer we used and took one of our podcast posts down and they let this go?)!

The secret is that the Count’s father and grandfather killed their brides with a ceremonial dagger. And the Count’s first wife went missing long ago. Soon, people start showing up with their heads missing. So whodunnit? The maid? The gardener? A ghost?

This film boasts some nice period costumes and settings, but it’s patently ridiculous. It wants to be a giallo but where those films are sexy, this is just plain rutting in the sheets. I feel like Jon Lovitz’s character Evelyn Quince from SNL’s Tales of Ribaldry. “No, no, no, no, we’ll have none of this! You’ve gone too far! You’ve ruined it for me!”

That said, I’ve never seen a movie go from pornography to an Agatha Christy style resolution within its running time. That said, the insert scenes weren’t in the original cut and were only added when the film was released in France as L’insatiable Samantha in 1977.

London. The 70’s. Professor of Italian Enrico Rosseni (Fabio Testi, The Four of the Apocalypse) is on his boat, making out with Elizabeth (Cristina Galbó, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, The House that Screamed) and trying to get her to go further than she has before. Right when it seems like he’s going to finally conquer her, she looks up to see a woman being stabbed on the shore.

After angrily rowing to the shore, Rosseni and Elizabeth find no evidence of a crime. He accuses her of being too religious, like all the girls at the school her uncle sent her to. The next morning, while he dresses and argues with his wife Helga, he hears about a horrid murder on the banks of the Thames river. He drives to where he and Elizabeth were and finds tons of cops. And there are even more at the school where he works!

The victim was one of Elizabeth’s friends, so she wants to tell the police what they know. However, he doesn’t want the affair exposed. However, his pen has been found near the body and he shows up in the crime scene photographs in the newspaper.

More murders. More clues in Elizabeth’s mind. More priests doing evil things. More anger from Helga. More of Rosseni trying to solve the crime. And all he has is one clue: Who is Solange and what was done to her?

The movie takes a turn when Elizabeth is killed inside the apartment that Rosseni has rented for the two of them to continue their affair. And at that point, Helga starts being much nicer to our hero. As their relationship improves, her makeup grows softer, her clothing gets more fashionable and her hair comes down. How strange to find a giallo about a relationship coming back together as the result of murder!

What happened to Solange (Camille Keaton, I Spit on Your Grave)? She was given an abortion that all of the murdered girls were there for. In a kitchen, no less. And all of those girls were involved in doing drugs and dating older men.

So what do the cops do? Oh, just set up a sting operation with all of the surviving girls. And of course, Solange just happens to show up, walking through the park. Here’s the second of course — the cops bungle everything and the killer takes Brenda, asking her the story of Solange, as he did every other victim.

This is one well put together film, thanks to Massimo Dallamano, who was the cameraman for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. Joe D’Amoto was the cinematographer and added plenty to the film. And you can’t deny the power of having an Ennio Morricone score!

This film is an interesting combination of the German krimi film and the Italian giallo and gave way to Dallamono’s Schoolgirls in Peril trilogy, which includes What Have They Done to Your Daughters? and Rings of Fear.

I always love seeing what titles films get released and re-released under. What Have You Done to Solange has so many, including an attempt to sell it as a teen comedy entitled The Rah-Rah Girls! You can learn more at the amazing Temple of Schlock site. And for an awesome police report of the events of the film, head to The Giallo Files.

So who was the killer? No spoilers here. You’re just going to have to watch this on Shudder.

“…And then a sudden violent shock that left a deep impression on the mind and damagen (sic) it permanently…”

“What has been remains imbedden in the brain nestled in the folds of the flesh. Distorted, it conditions and subconsciously impels…(Freud)”

Those words start this movie off, with a crime being shown in the past and then fast forwarding 13 years into the future, where we meet one screwed up family. There’s the mother, Lucille and her children Colin and Falesse. Yet all is not as it seems — the real Falesse has been locked away in a mental institution and is being replaced by Lucille’s daughter from her first marriage, Ester.

Ester lures man after man to their estate and then goes into a trance and kills them, upon which point she relives the decapitation of her stepfather 13 years ago. Of course, she’s also in love with her brother Colin. Remember when I said this family had some problems?

Then, Pascal, the killer from the opening sequence returns. He’s brutal and uncompromising, demanding $200,000 from the family, then having sex with Lucille and Ester in front of Colin. Finally, after killing one of Colin’s vultures, Lucille draws on her experience in a concentration camp to kill Pascal with gas while he showers. The flashback to the Nazi camp is harrowing and feels so different — and much darker — than the body of the film.

Yet what if Ester’s father isn’t dead? And what if he comes back? Can the family keep killing and getting away with it? And is “I’m sorry I took your place, but I really had no idea I wasn’t you!” the best giallo quote ever?

This is one strange movie — it combines Nazi elements, a police procedural, a giallo, a psychological examining of identity and even comes close to a Last House on the Left vibe.

Severin released this film several years ago, but it’s sadly out of print. It’s certainly one of the oddest entries in the genre and one you should track down. I’ve only barely touched on the many twists and turns of the plot because I believe that you should enjoy them for yourself.

Did you know that Larry Cohen wrote, produced and directed the last film Bette Davis was ever in? No? Well, she dropped out after filming began, citing issues with the script and how she was being photographed, but Cohen claims that it was due to her ill health. Regardless, the results are…interesting.

Davis plays the title villain, a chain-smoking witch (Becca sees her as the hero of the story) who marries Sam (Lionel Stander, Max from Hart to Hart) while his vegetarian family — daughter Jenny (Colleen Camp, the maid from Clue) and husband Steve (David Rasche from Sledge Hammer!) — are on vacation.

When Davis left the film, her character becomes a cat and her daughter Priscilla (Barbara Carrera, Never Say Never Again, Condorman) takes over as the film’s villain. She mostly argues with her other about switching bodies and sleeping with Steve.

People get shrunk, Tom Bosley, Seymour Cassel and Richard Moll (remember, all 80’s horror and science fiction must have either him or Robert England in it) show up and there’s a crazy moment where Jenny discusses how much she misses her mother and they show a photo of Joan Crawford!

This is…well, it’s weird. You can tell the movie fell apart when Davis left days into filming for a dentist visit and never came back. Her ADR was all done by Michael Greer (Thorn from Messiah of Evil!), who was an accomplished female impersonator. What a strange film!

I fear sounding like a broken record, but Larry Cohen’s films contain themes that stay timeless, regardless of when they were released. Take The Stuff for example — consumerism, corporate greed, celebrity culture, junk food — none of the theme in this film have gone away. If anything, they’ve only increased in importance.

The Stuff — a yogurt-like white dessert — is discovered coming out of the ground like black gold to Jed Clampett. It’s sweet and addictive and quickly gets sold like ice cream. It’s all natural with no calories and incredibly filling, so it helps people lose weight. Of course, sales go through the roof and destroy the ice cream industry. Along with junk food mogul Charles W. “Chocolate Chip Charley” Hobbs, these purveyors of sugar hire David “Mo” Rutherford (Michael Moriarty, who also appears in Cohen’s Q) to get to the bottom of The Stuff and then destroy it.

The more he learns about the product, the more horrified he becomes. The Stuff is actually a parasite that takes over whoever eats it, taking over their brain and gradually transforming them into zombies as it consumes them from the inside out — the very inverse of how people consume products.

A young boy named Jason is learning the same lesson the hard way. It’s ruined his family, so he destroys a supermarket display.

David also meets Nicole, the ad exec who learns that the campaign that she created for The Stuff has only led to death and destruction. As someone who has worked in the ad industry for over twenty years, the battle between craft and commerce has never been so beautifully illustrated than it is here. The film is packed with fake commercials of celebrities hawking The Stuff, including Wendy’s pitchwoman Clara “Where’s the beef?” Peller, who yells, “Where’s The Stuff?” to Abe Vigoda.

Everyone that consumes The Stuff eventually turns into a gooey white substance and those under its grip do everything they can to kill our heroes (Nicole and David become lovers; they rescue Jason just as the police arrest him). The corporation that makes The Stuff claims they are trying to rid the world of hunger, but the possibly extraterrestrial substances is really being created to take over the world.

They work together with retired United States Army Col. Malcolm Grommett Spears (a perfectly cast Paul Sorvino, Goodfellas) to destroy the zombies and a lake of The Stuff before sending a civil defense message to the country — the only way to destroy The Stuff is to burn it with fire.

David then visits the leader of The Stuff Company, Mr. Fletcher, who reveals that they haven’t destroyed all of the ways they can get the product. Now, they’re working with the ice cream industry –including Mr. Vickers, who originally hired David — to make The Taste, a product that is 88% ice cream and 12% The Stuff. They believe that it will be much safer and still as addictive. However, David brings in Jason and the two force the CEOs to eat The Stuff at gunpoint. David asks, “Are you eating it or is it eating you?” as the cops arrive to arrest the corporate con men.

You know how you should never leave the credits during a Marvel movie? Cohen was again ahead of his time here, as the final crawl also has moments showing smugglers selling The Stuff on the black market and a woman in a bathrobe saying, “Enough is never enough” while holding a container of The Stuff.

From its inventive gore and special effects to its wry social commentary, The Stuff is sheer delight. It moves fast, it’s packed with action and it has plenty to make you laugh, too.  It may make you avoid ice cream for awhile, too.

You can watch The Stuff on Shudder (it’s also available with commentary by Joe Bob Briggs) or you can grab the Arrow reissue at Diabolik DVD.