Gerd Oswald made the noir films A Kiss Before Dying and Crime of Passion, making him the perfect director for this film. Of course, he’d also direct Agent for H.A.R.M., but let’s stick with his mysery work for now.

Virginia Wilson (Anita Ekberg, two years before La Dolce Vita and as stunning as perhaps any human being has ever or will ever be) is just trying to take a shower at the beach when an escaped mental patient stabs her dog and attacks her. Luckily, her stepbrother Charlie blows him away.

Now she’s the one inside the sanitarium, but not for long, as Dr. Greenwood convinces her to fall in love with him, fake her death and become an exotic dancer at Gypsy Rose Lee’s El Madhouse nightclub. It’d be paradise if it wasn’t for that serial killer following her.

Most of the music in this movie is recyled from On the Waterfront. The book that inspired it, written by Fredric Brown (who also wrote the original Star Trek episode “Arena”), was the inspiration for one of the best known giallo films of all time, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. The script was written by Rober Blees, who also was the scribe for Frogs, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and High School Confidential! 

Red Norvo and his Red Norvo Trio, which is actually a quartet and Charlie Mingus played bass in the group before he became a composer, shows up as well. You can also see Red back up Dean Martin for “Ain’t That a Kick In the Head?” in the original Ocean’s 11. The jazz vibraphonist — along with his wife Mildred Bailey — were known as Mr. and Mrs. Swing.

This movie was exactly what I needed to watch. It’s quick, has some great musical numbers and Eckberg was already carrying herself like a star.

Let me tell you, when I read about this movie — about Brigitte Nielsen playing a music video director who is obsessed with finding love and making a movie about Billie Holiday while taking care of her jewel-covered turtle — I knew I had to track it down.

It’s running on our site during giallo week and it’s not particularly a giallo. But I honestly have no idea what kind of movie this is. That said, it does have Tomas Arana (The Church), David Warbeck (The Beyond) and Geretta Geretta (Demons) in it, so there’s that.

To top that off, writer and director Ivana Massetti was pretty much the same person as the lead character in this film, a female director in a time where that was quite rare. She had the idea to experiment here and make a film with hardly any dialogue. Or story, to be honest.

Domino wants love, so when she gets a phone call that promises her that romance is possible and that love can be real, she starts to see the world with much different eyes. She can certainly do better than having a mannequin for a lover, right? But what if that voice on the other end of the phone is a lie?

I guess it has some giallo feel as she’s being stalked by a man and wants to turn the tables on him. There’s also a dream where she speaks to the ghost of Holiday. Honestly, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether this movie is art or pretension, because I tend to love things that make no sense and any time I recommend them to people, I get the strangest looks.

Shh — I loved this insane, gorgeous and yet completely inane film. You can watch it on YouTube and decide for yourself.

One of two movies that Argento directed outside of Italy — Two Evil Eyes is the other — and he chose American writer T. E. D. Klein to write the script. Instead of the familiar Rome that we’ve seen in so many giallo, we’re in Minneapolis.

Tom Savini created the effects, but Argento decided to make the movie about more suspense and less blood and guys. He did invent the killer’s unique weapon, which the crew called the “Noose-o-Matic.”

Aura (Asia Argento, in a role based on her half-sister Dana, who sadly died in a scooter accident not long after this movie was made) escapes from the mental hospital where she’s under treatment for anorexia. She meets a man named David who lets her stay with him, but she’s soon taken back to the hospital. There, staff members keep getting decapitated by a killer named The Headhunter. And before you know it, her parents are killed as well, sending Aura and David after the real killers.

The actual murder plot here is pretty convoluted and that’s saying something for Argento. Props to him, though, for getting Piper Laurie in this as Aura’s psychic mother and Brad Dourif as a doctor with a past connected to the murders. He also got Frederick Forrest for this and for that, he and Laurie would sit and laugh at how bad they thought that the movie was during each day’s shoot.

Sadly, this movie is missing something. Could a score by Goblin instead of Pinal Donaggio have helped? More gore? Less recycling the past and more of a look toward the future? Or maybe a script that made more sense?

Still, it’s Argento, who has a great movie still in him. We hope for it and we look for it within every effort, hoping that this is the time that he delivers. Then again, how many directors have made at least three bonafide classic films and a few really close ones? I’ll watch everything he makes and keep that same hope.

Also known as Florence! The Killer is Still Among Us and The Killer Has Returned, you have to admire the chutzpah — or the gall — of a film to have the disclaimer “This film was made as a warning to young people and with the hope that it will be of use to law enforcement to bring these ferocious killers to justice,” after you’ve just watched 83 minutes of a killer graphically mutilating women and their most intimate of parts, as if this were some bid to outdo Giallo  In Venice or The New York Ripper.

Based on the true story of the Florence serial killer “The Monster of Florence,” this was written by Ernesto Gastaldi (The Whip and the Body, All the Colors of the Dark, My Name Is Nobody) and Giuliano Carnimeo (who directed four of the Sartana films under the alias Anthony Ascott, as well as The Case of the Bloody Iris, Exterminators of the Year 3000 and Ratman).

Directing this movie — and helping with the script — would be Camillio Teti, who produced The Dead Are Alive and Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s attempt at a non-mondo, the ironically named Mondo Candideo.

Much like a scene out of Maniac, a couple on lover’s lane is blown away mid-aardvark by a gloved killer. What separates the uomini from the ragazzi is that the killer then uses a knife and a tree branch to do things that made me turn my head from the screen for an extended period of time.

Christiana Marelli has been studying the killer in criminology class to the displeasure of her boyfriend, the cops and her teachers. This leads to her being stalked via phone and in person by the killer. Of course, seeing as how Alex, that formerly mentioned boyfriend, is never around during these killings, you can see why she starts thinking he could be Il Mostro.

The film moves from the giallo into the supernatural as our heroine attends a seance where the medium has a vision of the killer decimating a camping couple, soon developing the same wound that the victims just received.

What does Christina do? Run to the theater to see if Alex is there or not, proving that while he is waiting for her, he certainly could still be the killer. If I were her professor, I’d have given her a zero out of thirty.

After all this, she just sits down to watch a movie with him and it ends up being the same film we’ve just been watching. That’s either a huge cop out or just how you expect a giallo to end.

I really like 1988’s Too Beautiful to Die, a movie that was sold as a sequel to this movie. Perhaps it’s better that I watched that first, because while I like the premise of this movie, the execution leaves something to be desired. That’s a shame, because it really sets up something great.

Anthony Franciosa is a welcome presence at the start of this film, playing a detective who is able to quickly make major leaps in deductive reasoning. However, if you are expecting a film on the level of another he starred in, Argento’s Tenebre, I must sadly tell you that this is not that movie.

If you’re hoping that Fashion Crimes is a modern update of Blood and Black Lace, you’re always going to be disappointed.

Gloria is a fashion model on her way home, but she ends up watching a man kill a woman in an old villa that was once owned by a German countess. However, when the cops come the next morning, it’s been empty for twelve years. So what did she see? Was there a murder? And why is she being targeted, with other models getting killed to try to teach her a lesson?

Perhaps playboy-typed psychiatrist Gianmarco Contini (Miles O’Keeffe) can help. Seeing as how he’s one of the owners of the scene of the crime, I’m going to say that he may also be the killer.

Giancarlo Prete, Scorpion from Warriors of the Wasteland, is in this too. It also uses the music from Joe D’Amato’s Top Model, which is also known as Eleven Days, Eleven Nights, Part 2: The Sequel.

I was kind of hoping that this would be a missing 80’s giallo on the same order as Obsession: A Taste for Fear. Instead, it looks like a 1990’s made for TV movie with no flair or fashion sense.

Fatal Frames feels like the most 80’s movie I’ve ever seen, yet it was made in 1996. It’s also the longer giallo I think I’ve ever seen, taking nearly two hours of meandering to get to anything worthwhile, throwing in red herring after red herring, including turns by David Warbeck as a cop, Angus Scrimm as a ghost, Linnea Quigley as a parapsychologist, Alida Valli as a Countess whose home feels like it was lit by Argento (after all, she was Miss Tanner in Suspiria) and Donald Pleasence as an FBI agent. This would be his last movie and his voice was dubbed as he wasn’t around to do any dialogue.

I’d like to say that Mr. Pleasence went out on a high note, but after a career of never saying no to anything, this would not be the movie I’d choose for my epitaph.

Alex is a music video director who has come to Rome and has perhaps brought a serial killer — The Video Killer — with him. That very same killer took out his wife and now he’s a person of interest. His only interest is getting closer to Stefania Stella, who is playing herself here. She’s a pop star — and the wife of director Al Fiesta — whose nickname is the Napoleonic Madonna.

Fiesta would also direct The Hermit and Gipsy Angel, as well as contributing music to the Claudio Fragrasso films After Death and Robowar.

This movie feels like one that has been on for weeks and not hours. It just goes on and on, looking foggy and blue lit, which are things I normally love, but this feels like when your parents caught you smoking and forced you to smoke the whole pack until you got sick.