Monthly Archives: June 2020

Exploring: Italian Giallo Films of the 1960s through the 1970s

Posted on by

Editor’s Note: As this exploring feature wraps up our “Giallo Week” of reviews, we’re unpacking a lot of links of our past reviews within our analysis of the genre, as well as a listing of links for our week’s reviews. So bookmark this feature and return at your leisure for your one-stop source for Giallo films.

Most horror film aficionados believe the American slasher film cycle of the early eighties birthed with John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic Halloween*. In reality: slasher films got their start in Italy with a literary format known as Giallo or “Yellow” in the Italian vernacular.

Giallo pulp novels image courtesy of Casey Broadwater/Flickr with banner by R.D Francis/PicFont

Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s 126-paged novella horror classic (The Strange Case of) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, small literary houses in Italy churned out their Giallo variant: a cost-effective format of reading entertainment intended for male readers—considering most of the psychologically damaged antagonist’s victims were female—who eschewed cheaply-produced romance novels with splashy, sexy-gaudy covers enamored by the women in their lives. These Italian paperbacks were produced by small literary houses that kept their printing costs down by binding the books in universal, unadorned yellow covers with simple, black-lettered titles that readers could easily stuff the ironically blood red-soaked tales in their jeans’ back pocket for easy, portable reading.

While the names of Dario Argento and Mario Bava are bantered about as the fathers of Giallo, the true father—well, grandfather—is Edgar Wallace. Huh? The British-born writer who wrote the screenplay for 1933’s King Kong?

It’s true. The ex-army press corps and London’s Daily Mail scribe moved into novels and became the “King of the Thrillers” by grinding out 957 short stories, 170 novels, and 18 stage plays—many of which he riffed as a secretary dictated them. Many times, he worked on as many as three books at once.

Sadly, as with the prolific Phillip K. Dick, Wallace’s greatest fame was posthumous (he died in 1932). While alive, his first film adaptation was The Man Who Bought London (1916), and those adaptations hit fever pitch in the ‘60s with the forty-seven films of the Edgar Wallace Mysteries series.

Wallace’s new found fame—and on his way to becoming a Giallo inspiration—began when the Danish production company Rialto Film co-produced with the German film market, 1959’s Der Frosch mit der Maske (aka The Face of the Frog) which started the krimi genre (abbreviation for the German term “Kriminalfilm”). Krimis—like the later Giallo films they inspired, were hyper-noir films, replete with zooming cameras and lurid, masked supervillains. And many of Wallace’s novels sported those cheap yellow covers that gave our beloved, pre-slasher ‘80s films their name—Giallo.

What are some of the Wallace novel-to-screen Giallo adaptations you might have seen? Well, there’s Massimo Dallamono’s What Have You Done to Solange? (1972), Jess Franco’s Night of the Skull (1974), Riccardo Freda’s Double Face (1969), Umberto Lenzi’s Seven Blood Stained Orchids (1971), and Duccio Tessari’s The Blood Stained Butterfly—all are Wallace novel adaptations.

In the screenwriting department the Giallo genre owes much to Ernesto Gastaldi, who wrote many the the era’s classics, such as All the Colors of the Dark, Death Walks at Midnight, The Killer Is Still Among Us, Torso, The Scorpion with Two Tails, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, and Torso, to name a few. One of his earliest was the ’60s precursor, Libido, which he co-wrote and directed with Vittorio Salerno, who gave us No, the Case Is Happily Resolved.

Courtesy of GaiusMarius157BC/Reddit

Gialli offered European readers sexually-inspired gore stories that caused the fans of the suggestive, atmospheric horror films produced by Britain’s Amicus and Hammer Studios to flinch—and Stevenson, along with noted Gothic horror authors Sheridan Le Fanu, Gaston LeRoux, and Guy de Mausspaunt to roll over in their graves. (And don’t forget the inspirations of Thomas De Quincey to Italian filmmaker Dario Argento.) Gialli—filled with quaint, occasional reader-acceptable typos by way of underpaid and overworked editors and proof readers—were well-written, suspenseful and engaging tales (the “content” is the key) that Sheridan Le Fanu probably wanted to include in his influential, short-story collection In a Glass, Darkly (featuring the vampire classic “Carmella”) and realized he had to rein his imagination or be judged by a puritanical, elitist lynch mob for writing “filth.”

It was those yellow-bound books that inspired the spaghetti-horror (pasta-horror) cycle spearheaded by Mario Bava** with 1971’s Twitch of the Death Nerve (aka Bay of Blood) and Dario Argento+, who became the maestro of Italian Giallo films with 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. (Watch Carpenter’s Halloween, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th, and Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill—and compare to Bava’s and Argento’s work: especially look for the similarities of Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve vs. Friday the 13th.)

Produced for a reported $350,000 John Carpenter’s classic grossed an estimated $80 million dollars in worldwide box office during its initial release. Initially dumped into the U.S drive-in market to make a quick buck, the fluke blockbuster status of the film inspired mainstream Hollywood to jump on the yellow-painted bandwagon with 1980’s Friday the 13th and 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street++.

As fate would have it, the John Carpenter-inspired slasher film cycle coincided with the introduction of a contraption known as a VCR that played something called a VHS tape—and that hunk of analog electronics transitioned the slasher film genre from America’s outdoor drive-ins and onto the shelves of the burgeoning U.S home video market. (Don’t forget: Christopher Lewis’s groundbreak Blood Cult was the first “Big Box” SOV produced exclusively for the home video market.) Slasher films—affectionately referred to as “boobs and blades” for their concentrations on well-endowed, giggly women and the shiny, sharp objects that stabbed them—were cheap and easy to produce and the worldwide film markets were hot for product. Returns on a film’s investment produced under the “boobs and blades” banner were guaranteed. The films became the number one way for a newbie actor or writer, budding director or producer to get into the film business.

Courtesy of heliosphan/Picclick.com

At the same time those direct-to-video “boobs and blades” knock offs started flying off the video store shelves, a new form of heavy metal birthed in Britain in the late seventies—dubbed by Sounds magazine as “The New Wave of British Heavy Metal” (NWOBHM). Featuring the violent, religious mania and bloody lyrics composed by the likes of Venom and Iron Maiden, complete with the requisite Satanic imagery on the album covers, slasher films and heavy metal music were a match made in hell: the music coming out of England was, in fact, Giallo musicals. This music-inspired slasher sub-genre even got its own name: metalsploitation*+, which featured other beloved so-bad-they’re-good bloody analog tales showcasing the exploitive titles of Black Roses, Shock ’em Dead, Terror on Tour, Rock ’n’ Roll Nightmare, Hard Rock Zombies, and Rocktober Blood. The genre peaked—and quickly burnt out—when the major studios took a slice of the metalsploitation pie with 1986’s big-budgeted Trick or Treat.

However, before the glut of heavy-metal horror films hit the video store shelves, Paul Williams and Brian DePalma composed a campy, 1974 rock ’n’ roll Giallo-inspired reboot of Hammer Studios’ 1962 film version of The Phantom of the Opera (based on Gaston LeRoux’s novel). Somewhat similar to 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the camp ’n’ rock department, Phantom of the Paradise featured an emotionally damaged musician, Winslow Leech, who rains vengeance on the narrow-minded fools who stole his music and ruined his career. An emotionally damaged antagonist out for revenge who wears a mask? It’s pure Giallo. The only difference is that poor Winslow isn’t concealed behind POV black gloves.

Drive-In Friday: Black Gloves Required Night!

Needless to say, the Giallo cycle was misunderstood by mainstream America, with the genre’s mixtures of murder and the supernatural rated as “style over substance” and “lacking in narrative logic.”

Well, that’s was always the point, Mr. Mainstream critic. (That and if the friggin’ puritanical U.S. distributors didn’t chop and slice the Italian and Spanish imports into incomprehensible messes.)

Italian Gialli—or any of the Spanish variants—of the ‘70s always eschewed “realism” and “substance” over what were always the main priorities of the Giallo genre: art and surrealism rooted in Impressionism and Renaissance art.

The Giallo resume of Dario Argento, the leader of the genre, is the cinematic equivalent of Salvador Dali’s melting clocks and M.C Esher’s impossible objects and staircases to nowhere. Giallo is all about the utilization of oozing color palates and oddball light sources, nonsensical supernatural red-herrings to nowhere, psychic links to killers hidden in POV, whispered poetic passages, hypersexual oddball red-herring characters, rape and murdered moms, junk science (about sunspots, Y chromosomes, eye-memories, love-chemicals), pedophile fathers, doctors and detectives riddled with kinks and ulterior motives, and a general, overall incoherency (even before U.S. distributors got their hands on ’em) set to a soundtrack of jazz-rock noodling and chanting choirs.

The whole point of Paolo Cavara’s Black Belly of the Tarantula and Sergio Martino’s The Case of the Scorpion’s Tale—and every bloody tale concerned with insects and animals—is for you, the viewer, to have a series of “WTF” moments. Giallo films are crime capers, that is, film noirs+* (see the classics A Double Life, Black Angel, Double Indemnity, Farewell, My Lovely, My Name is Julia Ross, The Possessed, So Dark the Night, Sorry, Wrong Number) with the violence in full living-dead color, along with a dash of the supernatural tossed in for good measure.

Noir/detective paperbacks image courtesy of rubysresaleofrhodeisland/eBay

In 1944’s Double Indemnity, when Fred MacMurray pops up from behind the car’s backseat and strangles the husband of Phyliss Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), the camera pulls back and frames on her satisfied face as her husband gags to death off frame (and we can imagine what expression is across MacMurray’s face). That’s film noir. In a Giallo, the eye-buldging strangulation is in full frame. In film noir, the sex—via editing and cinematography—is implied. In a Giallo, it’s on camera—and, in most cases, only one person walks away unslashed from the encounter.

That “honey of an anklet” will get the colors of the dark, flowing.

Actor Tony Musante’s vacationing American writer Sam Dalmas and Michael Brandon’s rock drummer Roberto Tobias, in the respective films The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Four Files on Grey Velvet, have everything in common with William Holden’s Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd., Fred MacMurray’s pasty of Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, and John Garfield’s Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Each are somewhat well-intentioned, yet flawed individuals. The only difference is the film noir schlubs of the latter films don’t end up in a Dario Argento what-the-fuck Giallo plot twist of an intelligent chimp wielding a straight razor and having to rescue a cute girl with psychic links to insects (Phenomena, for those of you wondering what in-the-hell am I talking about).

Of course, as Sam, the bossman at B&S About Movies pointed out, we have Mario Bava to thank with his black-and-white, 1963 neo-noir The Girl Who Knew Too Much and its introductions of Giallo conventions serving as the progenitor for the genre. Then Bava sealed the deal with his next film, the 1964 color-shot Blood and Black Lace, which introduced all the high fashion, shocking color-palate gore, and psychosexual encounters missing from the likes of the black and white film noir classics, such as Double Indemnity and Sorry, Wrong Number, which inspired Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

Watch Federico Caddeo’s genre examination on Tubi.

So the next time you fire up The Conjuring or Happy Death Day, or any of the endless cycle of sequel-prequels-sidequels of the Blumhouse universe variety, just remember those are the digital copies of the original celluloids by Dario Argento (Deep Red, Suspiria), Mario Bava (Hatchet for the Honeymoon), Paolo Cavara, Ruggero Deodato (Phantom of Death), Riccardo Freda (The Ghost, The Iguana with the Tounge of Fire), Lucio Fulci (Don’t Torture a Duckling), Umberto Lenzi (Seven Blood Stained Orchids), and Sergio Martino (The Case of the Bloody Iris, All the Colors of the Dark, The Strange Case of Mrs. Wardh, Torso, Your Vice is a Locked Door and Only I Have the Key)—the Italian forefathers that birthed the jump-scares oeuvre of today’s digital divide in the first place.

But even I have to admit that no matter how much I enjoy the films of those Italian filmmakers, I am burnt out on them. But I love the era and adore the genre and I want more . . . but my yellow has turned to brown.

Thankfully, there’s a new crop of young turks keeping the genre alive, birthing a new genre: neo-Giallo—or what I like to call “Giallo impressionism.”

Granted, the frames of today’s modernized Gialli—fans will place the major studio wares of James Wan’s Malignant, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho and, Peter Strickland’s more deserving Berberian Sound Studio, on the list*—may be a bit to “pretty” in contrast to the classic, cheap n’ quickly made Giallo films of yore. The budgets of 21st century Gialli are more studio-generous; as result: they’re too carefully made—to please the suits bankrolling them—and lacking in the classic schlock and the exploitative elements, which takes away from the lack-of-logic strangeness we adore of the genre. The truth is we don’t want to make sense of these films rife with heart-weeping beautiful women victimized by ultra-violence dispensed by POV black-gloved killers slashing by way of ear-bleeding Morricone and Goblin soundtracks. (*I’ll even debate Sly Stallone’s Cobra and D-Tox, as well as Charles Bronson’s 10 to Midnight, are Euro-influenced Giallo variants crossed with Poliziotteschi elements in their frames.)

Regardless of those critical hesitations of the new breed, I relish my inhaling the new, yellow hues of Amer, Let the Corpses Tan, and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, The App by Elisa Fuksas, Mitzi Peirone’s Braid, David Fowler’s Welcome to the Circle, Sam Bennett’s Dark Sister, The Editor by Adam Brooks, Marco Rosson’s Evil River, the Argentinian Onetti Brothers with Francesca, Abrakadabra, Deep Sleep, and What the Waters Left Behind, Graham Denham’s Greenlight, Matthew Diebler and Jacob Gillman’s The Invisible Mother, Mandy and Beyond the Black Rainbow by Panos Cosmatos, Tommy Faircloth’s A Nun’s Curse, Bret Wood’s Those Who Deserve to Die, Under the Silver Lake by David Robert Mitchell, Marc Cartwright’s We Die Alone, and Vahagn Karapetyan’s Greek-twist, Wicca Book.

So, embrace the yellow leaking out of Kevin V. Jones across the marbled floors of Morningside, ye children of the night! Fill your goblets, for tonight; we dine by the plasma’s streaming glow. And it forever glows yellow and in all the primary colors of the dark.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies (to a truncated listing of all his reviews).

Here’s the complete list of all the films we reviewed for our week of Giallo films from June 14 to June 20, 2020.

Abrakadabra
Anquish
Arabella The Black Angel
Blackaria
A Black Veil for Lisa
The Bloodstained Butterfly
Blue Steel
The Cauldron of Death
Damned in Venice
Death Knocks Twice
Death Steps in the Dark
Deep Sleep
Domino
Double Face
Dumplings
Eyes of Crystal
Fashion Crimes
Fatal Frames
The French Sex Murders
A Girl in Room 2A
The House of Good Returns
An Ideal Place to Kill
Interrabang
The Killer is One of 13
The Killer Is Still Among Us
Killing of the Flesh
Knife of Ice
Knife Under the Throat
Nothing Underneath
Nude, She Dies
A Quiet Place to Kill
Red Nights
Reflections in Black
Screaming Mimi
Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye
Seven Notes of Terror
Slaughter Hotel
So Sweet . . . So Perverse
Symptoms
Tango
To Agistri
Trauma
Tulpa
Weekend Murders
What the Waters Left Behind

And here’s some more reviews from the past . . . and a few recent ones . . . since the site began:

Autopsy
Basic Instinct
The Blood Stained Shadow
Body Count
Cold Eyes of Fear
Crystal Eyes
The Corruption of Chris Miller
Deadly Games
Deadly Inheritance
Death Laid an Egg
Death Smiles on a Murderer
Devil in the Brain
Die Screaming, Marianne
The Embalmer
Eyeball
Five Dolls for an August Moon
Footprints on the Moon
Formula for a Murder
Identikit
Idu Saadhya
I Know Who Killed Me
Il nascondiglio
Knife + Heart
Lanetli kadinlar
Last Night in Soho
A Lizard in a Woman Skin
Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods
Mania
Maniac Mansion
Murder Obsession
My Dear Killer
The Night Child
The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave
No One Heard the Scream
Orgasmo
The Perfume of the Lady in Black
Perversion Story
Pensione Paura
Rage
The Red Queen Kills Seven Times
Short Night of Glass Dolls
Spasmo
Stagefright
Strip Nude for Your Killer
Tightrope
Who Saw Her Die

Oh, yes, there’s more!

We started off the New Year in January 2021 with MORE Giallo films. You can catch up on our reviews with our three-part “Giallo Week Wrap Ups”: Recap 1, Recap 2. and Recap 3 (clickable pics, who knew!).

And even more yellow!

In the Summer of 2022, Arrow began their release of the four-part box set, Giallo Essentials: Red, Black, Yellow, White, and Blue, which we reviewed in full. Oh, it’s true: the films in these boxes are the ones to watch! You can learn more about the February 14. 2023, release of the White Edition (covering films from 1971 to 1975) at Blu-ray.com, which will also direct you to the technical aspects of all the sets.

Argh! More?

As you know, B&S About Movies is based in Pittsburgh, so . . . we had to do a feature of Yinzer-based Giallo flicks set in our home town.

And did you know a lot of “Bond Girls” went yellow?

There also other “essentials” to watch by way of Drive-In Super Monster-Rama‘s September 2021 presentation of “Giallopalooza” —which was two big nights of classic, fully restored Giallo thrillers from such maestros as Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and Sergio Martino!

Noooo! No More Yellow!

Yes! In addition to the above Arrow box sets, the fine folks at Vinegar Syndrome have their five volume Forgotten Gialli box sets to build your movie library. While we didn’t unbox it: here’s the link to Volume 1 of the set at Vinegar Syndrome; click the images to get to the rest.

a

Then, in January 2023, we teamed with American Cinematheque to review all of the ’70s bred Gialli showings on their “Cinematic Void” schedule—most from 35mm restored prints. You can catch up with all of those films, with our announcement-post about the series. Search “Cinematic Void” to populate a listing of those reviews.

* Be sure to read our explorations of the Halloween franchise with “Watch the Series: Halloween” and “Ten Slashers to Watch Instead of Halloween,” as well as our “American Giallo Week” of reviews of ’80s slasher variants.

** Be sure to read our exploration on The Maestro Bava with our “Ten Bava Films” and and “Bava Week.”

+ Be sure to read ourexplorationn of The Maestro Argento with our “Ten Dario Argento Films.”

++ Be sure to read our exploration of the ongoing influence of Freddy with “Ten Movies that Totally Ripped Off A Nightmare on Elm Street.”

*+ Be sure to examine our “No False Metal” week of films.

+* We go a bit deeper on the film noir cycle with our recent reviews of Don Okolo’s neo-noir Lone Star Deception, along with the radio romps Dead Air and Power 98.

The End?

The French Sex Murders (1972)

Posted on by

Casa d’appuntamento (The House of Rendezvous) was known as this title and as The Bogey Man and the French Murder due to it starring professional Humphrey Bogart impersonator Robert Sacchi.

After a week of giallo where I feel like I kept writing, “Why is this movie so boring and listless,” here comes this film to save me. Rosabeli Neri (Lady Frankenstein), Anita Eckberg (Screaming Mimi) and Barbara Bouchet (Don’t Torture A Duckling) all in the same film? What did I do to deserve this, giallo gods?

After Antoine is blamed for killing one of Madame Collette’s (Eckberg) high class call girls named Francine (Bouchet), he is sentenced to die via the guillotine. He swears that he will have his revenge and escapes, but a motorcycle accident takes his head clean off anyway.

Then a professor steals his head for an experiment before getting killed. Now the ladies of the night are getting killed one by one…and it just may be a headless man taking them out.

This was directed by Ferdinando Merighi, who was the AD on In the Folds of the Flesh. He used the name F. L. Morris here. Who edited this? Oh, just Bruno Mattei. It’s also the film debut of Evelyne Kraft, who would go on to star in The Mighty Peking Man and Lady Dracula.

Producer Dick Randall wrote this movie and he certainly made his share of cheap, trashy and totally wonderful films, including The Girl In Room 2A, Slaughter High, Mario Bava’s sex comedy Four Times That Night and The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield. The sleazy American writer in this movie shares his name, which was no accident.

I realize this isn’t a great film. But it’s certainly not boring, what with hooded figures running around a brothel, decapitations and falls off important French landmarks. As Italian Bogie would say, ” Ti sto guardando, ragazzo.”

You can get this for yourself at Vinegar Syndrome, as well as the first volume, which has León Klimovsky’s Trauma, Killer Is One of 13 and The Police Are Blundering in the Dark.

Slaughter Hotel (1968)

Posted on by

How can you pass up an Italian Giallo written and directed by the man whose pen ignited the spaghetti western genre with his screenplays for Clint Eastwood’s A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More?

How about if that film starred Klaus Kinski?

Yeah, I knew that get your attention. But we’re all horny here, so you also get Margaret Lee from Double Face, Dick Smart 2.007 and Special Agent Super Dragon, and Lady Frankenstein herself, Rosabla Neri. (Huba-huba! Schwing!)

Fernando Di Leo’s original goal was to transition out of westerns into his preferred genre of film noir. But as the black-and-white film noir of old already gave way to the yellow blood of new, Di Leo ended up writing and directing this giallo about a cowl and caped murder stalking the wealthy female inmates of a sanitarium.

Of course, all of the women are diagnosed as nymphomaniacs (and in need of a triangle-of-death shave . . . if you know what I mean), so they’re seducing the staff—everyone from the isolated villa’s gardener to the doctors. And since we’re in a remote medieval villa converted into a hospital, the joint is well-stocked with weapons of mass giallo on the walls and along the hallways. And the heads fly by scythe, bodies are impaled by iron maiden, and nurses are hacked to pieces by axe, by mace, by bow-and-arrow, and bye-bye in quick succession.

In between the blood baths, there’s plenty o’ soft core red herrings of the lesbian interracial variety flipping and flopping; the women—as with all giallos—would turn a gay man straight and leave a straight man shriveled. Are they all attired in designer sun dresses, pant suits and chunky heels—running around in the grass? Of course they are! (Hey, Paul Naschy!) And did you know any variety of phobias can be cured with a nude massage of one’s butt cheeks? That a nurse bubble-bathing a female patient is just what the doctor ordered?

This was known in its homeland as The Beast Kills in Cold Blood, aka Cold Blooded Beast. But once the U.S distributors Hallmark Releasing and American International Pictures took their puritanical scissors to it, it was retitled as Asylum Erotica and Slaughter Hotel to play as the undercard on numerous Drive-In triple bills until the late-70s. The most explicit and obscure cut—The Dissatisfied Erotic Dolls of Dr. Hitchcock—was a bogus attempt to market it as a sequel to Riccardo Freda’s 1962 burgeoning giallo The Horrible Doctor Hitchcock—and features even more sexually explicit scenes added after the fact (as if it need more?).

If Di Leo stuck to the genre, today he’d be revered as Argento and Bava: the cinematography is lush, the shots are imaginative, and the soundtrack is acid trip, nausea-inducing top notch. And Di Leo certainly knows how to put the “sleaze” in Eurosleaze with those multiple, long and lingering triangle of death shots. And the “artsy” Richard Speck-style slaughter at the end has to be seen to be believed. Yikies.

If you want this on DVD for your collection, your best bet is to go with the uncut, Italian subtitled (or dubbed; it’s well done) version that runs at 97 minutes—and avoid the 74-minute U.S. versions at all costs. The even dirtier “Dr. Hitchcock” version is all but lost. You can watch a really clean print of the 97-minute version for free as an age-restricted stream (you’ll have to sign in) on You Tube. To say it’s X-Rated is an understatement. But the Italians made this—so it’s “art.”

About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

Knife of Ice (1972)

Posted on by

Inspired by the Poe quote about a “knife of ice which penetrates the senses down to the depth of conscience,” Lenzi and Carroll Baker would team one more time for the story of Martha Caldwell, who watched her parents die in a train accident at the tender age of thirteen. Now an adult, she’s still mute from the shock of what she had seen. Even worse, there’s a black gloved Satanic killer stalking the countryside and she seems like the next most likely victim.

Jenny Ascot (Ida Galli, The Psychic) is a famous singer in town to see her cousin Martha. However, hours after the killer stalks the two of them, she’s dispatched. Yet every time the police arrest someone, the murders continue.

You have to love a giallo that has a Manson influenced killer, much less one played by George Rigaud (A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, The Case of the Bloody Iris, All the Colors of the Dark).

This is a classy giallo compared to much of the sheer lunacy that I watch. But don’t judge it for it’s lack of sleaze. It’s a well-told film crafted by an expert at this type of movie.

You can get this as part of Severin’s The Complete Lenzi/Baker Giallo Collection.

Eyes of Crystal (2004)

Posted on by

Franco Ferrini, who wrote Opera, Phenomena, Nothing Underneath, Dial: Help, The Church and Sleepless (as well as many more films) joined up with Gabriella Blasi and director Eros Puglielli to turn the Luca Di Fulvio novel The Empailleur into a modern giallo.

While hunting a cultured, intelligent and vicious psychopath — yes, I realize that sounds like The Silence of the Lambs — Inspector Amaldi must face the moral decline of humanity and his own dark past.

A young couple and the pervert watching them have both been killed, leading Amaldi and his partner Freese down all manner of paths with no success. At the same time, a college student is being stalked and turns to the young inspector for help.

Amaldi struggles with his temper and the need to punish the guilty while slowly realizing that he is hunting a serial killer who is taking the parts of a doll and replacing the parts of his victims that he has taken away.

Unlike so many modern giallo that attempt to simply emulate the past and not move into the future, Eyes of Crystal pushes past comparisons to Se7en to become a movie worthy of its own study. The human doll is a sinister concept, as is what happened to a doll in the past. Unlike other giallo, the cops aren’t fumbling in the dark or buffoons. They’re also dealing with perhaps just as many demons as the killers they face every day.

Bonus genre points for casting Simon Andreu (Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, Death Walks on High Heels) as a dying cop also haunted by his past, which he remembers as an inferno that destroyed the orphanage where he grew up, a place that has just been robbed of some very peculiar surgical instruments.

If only this movie had reignited a trend that would lead us to more Italian thrillers quite this good!

A Quiet Place to Kill (1970)

Posted on by

Umberto Lenzi and Carroll Baker made quite the giallo duo. Their 1969 pairing Orgasmo had been released internationally as Paranoia and this film, known as Paranoia in Italy, was retitled A Quiet Place to Kill. That’s not the end of the confusion, as this year Severin will release this on their Lenzi/Baker box set and Mondo Macabro also released An Ideal Place to Kill, another Lenzi film that you may also know as Oasis of Fear.

Would it simplify things if we used this movie’s Spanish title Una Droga Llamada Helen (A Drug Named Helen)?

Baker plays race car driving Helen, whose life is beyond a mess. How else can you explain why she’d accept an invitation from her ex-husband’s new wife Constance Sauvage to stay at their palatial home? And what if Helen and Constance soon bond over the fact that they hate Maurice (Jean Sorel, The Sweet Body of Deborah) and murder him on a sailing trip?

Of course, this being a giallo, things don’t work out that well and Constance ends up dying at sea. Her daughter shows up and that’s when things get worse for all involved. This is a classy giallo, filled with lush camerawork and a solid script from Marcello Coscia (The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue), Bruno Di Geronimo (What Have You Done to Solange?), Rafael Romero Marchent (the director of Santo vs. Dr. Death) and Marie Claire Solleville (Orgasmo).

Helping out on this film’s cinematography? None other than Aristide Massaccesi himself, the man of many names who most know as Joe D’Amato.

You can get this as part of Severin’s The Complete Lenzi/Baker Giallo Collection. Baker and Lenzi made four movies together, but I really wish they had made many more.

Damned In Venice (1978)

Posted on by

Ugo Liberatore’s Nero Veneziano (Venetian Black) is a strange movie. It’d be easy to just say it’s a ripoff of Rosemary’s Baby or The Omen, but it really is an odd demented little film unique to itself.

Mark (Renato Cestie, who other than being in Fulci’s Challenge to White Fang and Torso, made a career of playing neglected boys who die of some disease by the end of the movie) is a blind boy who is given to disturbing visions. His parents have died and now he’s stuck living with his gorgeous sister Christine (Rena Niehaus, who is in the fantastically scummy Arabella L’angelo Nero) and their strict religious grandparents. That won’t last long because Mark causes an accident that leads to the old lady spectacularly going up in flames.

Yes. The hero of the movie just set his grandmom ablaze. It gets weirder.

Mark and Christine must now go live in Venice — look for Olga Karlatos in several roles — to live with another near-death relative, this time an aunt and her suicidal husband. They soon die and Christine decides that she’s going to start a brothel when she isn’t having a virgin birth.

Some people comment on how brutal she is to her brother. If you have to put up with Mark, you’d abuse him as well. All he keeps doing is claiming she’s having the Antichrist, with the father being the mysterious boarder named Dan that no one can see.

Can Christine’s ex Giorgio save the day? How about Father Stefani? Or Mark just trapped in the predestined end of all there is? And man, how rough is that scene with the baby?

Bonus points for having Ely Galleani (Five Dolls for an August Moon, Baba Yaga) and Lorraine de Selle (Emanuelle In America) as two of Christine’s friends.

If you loved Don’t Look Now for all the canal scenes but wanted things to somehow be even more downbeat, this movie is your jam. I have no idea what the ending of this movie is all about, nor do I even know what large pieces of this movie are attempting to do. That is the wonder of near-lost Italian ripoff cinema and we should all be so lucky as to be confused at 2:17 AM by a movie just this out there.

Tulpa (2012)

Posted on by

I’ve often bemoaned the death of the giallo as much as I’ve worried about it’s return over the last few years. So many movies are influenced by it to the point of slavish devotion that keeps them from becoming their own unique films. Or even worse, they are more inspired by American films like Basic Instinct and look boring and lifeless when they should be neon-hued punches to the face.

I’m pleased to report that Tulpa is the movie that I’ve been looking for.

Lisa Boeri (Claudia Gerini) is obsessed with her career, but in the evening, she visits the club Tulpa to unleash her darkest fantasies. The club, led by a Tibetian guru — well, that’s a first — allows her to indulge in all manner of aardvarking potential, but then her lovers start getting killed the day after she makes love to them.

Once those murders start uniting her day and evening hours, she decides to track down the masked killer on her own.

Tulpa was written by Giacomo Gensini and director Federico Zampaglione, whow also made the film Shadow together, along with Dardano Sacchetti, the Italian writer who wrote, well, just about any genre film worth a damn out. I’ll give you three, but he has a huge list of credits: The Beyond, Shock and The Cat o’Nine Tails. So yes, this is a movie with an eye toward the past and the future, as well as an ear. That’s because the soundtrack, by Zampaglione and Andrea Moscianesca, sounds like Goblin.

I had a blast with this film and it felt like a real discovery. And that’s why I spend so much time writing about movies, in the hopes that I can help you do the same.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

The Girl In Room 2A (1974)

Posted on by

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mitchell Hillman is a freelance writer who has spent most of his time in print writing about music, movies, art, and pop culture. He is also a professional artist, occasional pop-up chef, and suffers an addiction to curiosity and discovery. Over the last year he has watched over 300 Giallo and Giallo related movies, finding that they influence not only how he thinks about film, but also art.

The Girl in Room 2A (1974)
‘La casa della paura’
Directed by William Rose

I promised myself that if I ever found a better transfer of this particular Giallo, I’d have to watch it again. The first time I saw it was like watching a muddied copy of a copy from VHS. I came across a much nicer transfer recently and thought I’d indulge myself. It’s got a great story going for it and it’s a completely underrated entry into the genre in my estimation. Perhaps it’s because it’s the crowning achievement in William Rose’s otherwise unremarkable catalog of films that it’s overlooked, but it has charm and mystery and something that sticks with you somehow.  Of note the original Italian title translates to “House of Fear,” but there were several of those in English already, so we get The Girl in Room 2A.

It’s got a pretty brutal opening sequence, with Bruno Pisano’s soundtrack sinister intensity backing it as we see a young women leave a dark boarding house, only to be abducted off the street, thrown in a car, drugged, subsequently tortured, murdered and thrown from a cliff.  It’s a harsh start that leaves you wondering, but it all comes together in the end. Next we see Margaret leaving a women’s prison, and after missing a bus and calling her social worker while being followed by a strange man, she checks into the boarding house run by the strange Mrs. Grant. Nothing is right about the house, from Mrs. Grant, to the blood red stain in her room, to the strange footsteps outside her door as she tries to nap. The creep vibe is everywhere. 

Mrs. Grant invites Margaret to tea and a sedative, while explaining the death of her husband, and her loneliness in the house with her son. She then lays down a heavy speech about how justice and vengeance must prevail over forgiveness and her tone is more than a little worrisome as she talks about the felon that killed her husband. Margaret doesn’t go for any of that. Her first night is a creepy one as she envisions a red clad masked person coming into her room, but does it happen? We don’t know, she may have been dreaming, she was sedated after all.

We then cut to a villa in the countryside where the creepy son from the boarding house is hanging out with a writer named Mr. Johnson who wants to document what the group seemingly led by “Mr. Dreese” is doing. Dreese shows up and it’s the man that was following Margaret, who immediately turns on the writer with a Nietzschean speech about how “everyone must feel the pain of his own sins,” echoing Mrs. Grant’s sentiments from earlier.  Frank, the creepy son is sent back home, by Dreese while Johnson is locked in the parlor. He is subsequently tortured by two other men, and the caped stranger in the red mask from Margaret’s vision. Johnson jumps to his death out the window to escape the torture and they drive his car off a cliff in a fiery cremation.

This sets the stage for all that is to come. On the one hand you have the creepy house and Margaret’s ever-escalating post-prison life trauma, and on the other a weird cult adding a folk horror flare to the whole affair. It’s a pretty detailed intense story and while it could be better acted or shot with a better budget there’s something appealing about it and something deliciously appalling about it. Whether it’s Margaret’s uncomfortable interactions with Mrs. Grant’s strange son Frank, or the stain that keeps returning to the floor, which she dutifully cleans up repeatedly, there’s always something going on that will become clear in the last act. Rosalba Neri is always a delight and here she plays the social worker who arranged the housing arrangement for Margaret.  After confessing her discomfort, Neri promises to help find her new housing and loans her some money, before going out of town. 

Margaret continually professes her innocence, but also seems like the only genuinely decent person here, except perhaps for the social worker.  When she bumps into Jack on the street, the interaction is suspicious and brilliant, he’s looking for his sister who supposedly killed herself while staying at Mrs. Grant’s place. He ends up renting the place across the alley from her. Once Jack is introduced to the story, the movie really picks up. It turns out that a lot, or maybe all of the “troubled girls” who have stayed in 2A have died or gone mad–but what exactly is the connection to the cult that’s hell-bent on maintaining the war of “Good and Evil.” As the two become lovers, they also begin to investigate just what is going on at the Grant house in earnest.

Both times I’ve watched this I thought this would be an amazing film to reboot, there’s much more of a horror aspect to it than the usual gore laden bloodbath. It’s got a great story at the heart of it and I’d just love to see it treated to a decent budget. Everyone is creepy,  it seems that only Margaret and Jack are on the level, but you can never be sure about anything.  There are many elements that are just sheer fun, like Frank’s strange workshop or Mrs. Grant’s odd gatherings discussing vengeance, of course. It’s not a top tier Giallo by any means, but it probably fits inside the Top 100 or Top 150 due to its peculiar originality and rather complex story. The intertwining story between all the players is what keeps you going and the finale more than pays off in the end, and in this case, somehow, I didn’t see it coming. You might not either, which makes its 90-minute weight (and wait) worth it.

You can get this for yourself at Vinegar Syndrome, as well as the first volume, which has León Klimovsky’s Trauma, Killer Is One of 13 and The Police Are Blundering in the Dark.

Deep Sleep (2013)

Posted on by
After murdering his latest female victim, a killer is blackmailed with mysterious envelopes filled with evidence of all of his kills. However, as we hear no dialogue and only see things from the killer’s point of view, we are forced to be part of his crimes.

Directed, written and scored by Luciano Onetti and produced by Nicolas Onetti, this movie is the start of their giallo tribute films. Each one has grown in ability and style, but even at the beginning, with the handcuffs of an incredibly simple story, a first person camera and a slavish devotion to Argento, this is well above any of the spate of giallo-influenced films of this century.

Even the blood looks like it came out of an Argento film. That’s how far this goes. So, you know, if you hated Deep Red, there’s no way that you’ll like this.