Fifteen years ago, Francesca disappeared, leaving her father, the well-known storyteller, poet and dramatist Vittorio Visconti behind. Ever since, the community has been haunted by a killer who wants to clean the city of the impure and the damned. The police are baffled and now, it seems like Francesca has finally returned.

The Onetti Brothers have made a career of emulating the field of giallo. With films like Deep Sleep, What the Waters Left Behind and Abrakadabra, they’ve copied the look and feel of early 70’s Italian detective horror, yet transplanted to Argentina in 2015. Hell — they even got the gloves and bottles of J&B right. Luciano Onetti co-wrote the script, directed the film, handled the cinematography and even wrote the sctore, while Nicolas wrote the script and produced.

Any movie that starts with a small girl killing a bird with a long needle and then jamming it into her infant brother’s eye is one that’s going to cause you to sit up and take notice (or, if you’re a normal person, turn off such lunacy).

This movie feels like a relic unearthed from 1972, a giallo that may not be at the level of Argento or Martino, but still can stand on its own.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Back when he was a child, The Being — the bad guy in this movie who has that name because there’s no way the creators of this film didn’t see Halloween and say, we need The Shape — was made fun of for his white eyeball-less eye and then fell out of a tree. That’s the kind of traumatic — trhaumatic? — adolescent experience that makes you strangle dogs and make love to corpses. Such is life in Italian slasher scum movies.

Yes, it’s another in the long series of films where my wife wanders in just as a nude woman is being photographed in a park, only to be mercilessly dispatched by a killer. She looks at me in disgust and says, “Your movies…”

Director Gianni Martucci was also behind 1988’s The Red Monks. Here he’s basically making an American slasher, complete with characters you learn nothing about other than the fact that you can’t wait to watch them die.

That said, the killer plays with Duplo blocks when he isn’t popping the heads off of obviously stuffed cats. And the film is quite literally packed with disco music. I think that more slashers could use some disco, but that may just be the result of me loving Prom Night so much.

This isn’t available in the U.S., so let me save you some time and attach the YouTube link below. It’s not exactly great, but it’s certainly not boring.

Pathos: Segreta Inquietudine, the original Italian title for this movie, means Passion: Secret Anxiety. That pretty much sums it up, as this giallo feels closer to one of those Cinemax After Dark films that mixes up murder with softcore sex. Well, this movie also has Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue” in it, which is a first for any giallo I’ve seen.

This is the only movie that writer/director Piccio Raffianini’s ever made, which is pretty astounding, because the guy obviously had talent.

Diane (Virginia Hay, The Road Warrior and also the blue skinned Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan from Farscape) is a photographer whose favorite model — and lover — Tegan (Teagan Clive, who was also The Alienator) shows up bound and dead, just like the adult photos that our heroine is famous for. Imagine — a Skinemax The Eyes of Laura Mars and you’re not far off.

Lieutenant Arnold (Dario Parisini) is on the case and suspects both Diane and her ex-husband, particularly after other people close to her are tied up and stabbed, as if they were doing some knifeplay and then gave their lives up.

Eva Grimaldi, who was in Demons 5 and Ratman, is in this. And look out! There’s Kid Creole, from Kid Creole and the Coconuts, probably the last dude I expected to see walk on to a giallo film. What is happening?

I love the first club that shows up in this film, with little people dancing, muscular folks dancing, mirrors covered with coke, quick cuts and improbably synth Gershwin songs.

Obsession: A Taste for Fear is a completely deranged film, one that supposes a world where everyone wears sunglasses at night, where colors come straight out of the brainstem of Dario Argento, where softcore porn photographers are huge celebrities, cops shoot laser guns, hovering cars are a dime a dozen and no one bats an eye.

Imagine if Rinse Dream made a giallo and had the money to get legitimate recording artists to appear on the soundtrack. Now, do some lines. And then, you will have just some of the strangeness that is this movie, which demands to get a release from a botique label so that maniacs other than just me can obsess over it.

I am consumed by near-constant nerves and worries, pains that can only be assuaged by late-night viewings of only the rarest and most deranged examples of film. So when I see a movie with the titles of Hot Lips the Killer, Le Calde Labbra del Carnefice (The Hot Lips of the Executioner), La Muerte Llama a las 10 (Death Calls at 10) and The Killer Wore Gloves — because it’s a giallo and dammit the killer better wear gloves — then all my being up at 3:15 AM like the haunted bastard son of Ronnie DeFeo all pays off.

Peggy (Gillian Hills, A Clockwork Orange, Blow-Up) is worried that she hasn’t heard from her boyfriend Michael for months as he’s been covering the dangerous war in Vietnam. She’s also rented out the loft in her apartment to a friend of a friend of a friend named John Kirk Lawford, whose body shows up dead. And where’s our heroine On the way to meet Michael at an abandoned airplane hangar when a gloved killer — the movie MUST live up to its title, right? — tries to kill her. And now, another man shows up with the name John Kirk Lawford and a whole bunch of money shows up in our heroine’s apartment

Peggy wears the type of outfits — and lives in the type of bonkers apartment, complete with a fabric Frankenstein’s monster hamper — that only exist in 1970’s giallo. Let’s face it. Our girl has a giant egg in the middle of her flat.

Poor Peggy. Every man in her life is absolutely horrible and despite people shooting at her and showing up dead all around the place, she never informs the police or seeks any help. Oh to be a giallo heroine, constantly having to wear leather mini-dresses and have all manner of skeevy men offering you money for sex, just plain sex or sex with lots of violent death as a side dish.

Director Juan Bosch also wrote Secta Siniestra, in which a woman pregnant with the Anti-Christ is menaced by Satanists — you’d think they’d want to make that pregnancy go a little simpler, am I right? — and directed Exorcismo, which stars our favorite Spanish actor Paul Naschy.

A Spanish movie imitating an Italian film based on German krimi movies taken from a British author starring an actress from the UK. If you ever wondered, “Why can’t we all just get along?” then you haven’t been watching much mid-70’s giallo, hmm?

Riccardo Freda was the first director of an Italian horror movie, 1956’s I Vampiri. He left the production midway to have it completed by Mario Bava, which he would also do on the film Caltiki – The Immortal Monster. He’s also known for Iguana with the Tongue of Fire, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock and The Ghost.

Before Michael became an actor — when he was but a child — he stabbed his father to death. Today, he’s visiting his mother for the weekend and has brought along his girlfriend Deborah (Silvia Dionisio, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man) and the crew of his latest movie. The sins of the past, however, are waiting for all of them.

Martine Brochard (Mannaja), John Richardson (The Church, Frankenstein ’80), Anita Stringberg (who is in everything from A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin to The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, Who Saw Her Die?, The Antichrist, Almost Human and Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key) and the always welcome Laura Gemser (Black Emanuelle herself!), who is menaced by some of the largest and most fake spiders this side of Fulci.

In the early 70’s, this film’s writer, Fabio Piccioni, wrote a comic book story called The Cry of the Capricorn, which he sold to Dario Argento. Elements of that story would appear in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red.

Piccioni would reuse elements of this story again years later, along with scriptwriters Antonio Cesare Corti and Riccardo Freda, to help create this film, which is also known as Fear and The Wailing.

For what it’s worth, none of the actors recall this picture very fondly. Gemser referred to it as a nightmare and said that Strindberg almost stabbed her with a real knife, while the chainsaw that decapitates Brochard’s character nearly killed the actress.

While this isn’t the best giallo you’ll find, there’s still plenty to enjoy here, even if it’s just ogling Ms. Gemser. There’s also the best reason why the cops don’t get involved — a character says that they meant to call them, but forgot.

This is available from Raro Video and on Amazon Prime.

I wish that Francesco Barilli had made more giallo. His two additions to the genre as a director, Hotel Fear and The Perfume of the Lady In Black, are both movies that descend into insanity and grapple with the issues of their female protagonists being abused until they violently turn the tables on their tormentors. He also wrote Who Saw Her Die?, another example that doesn’t follow the Argento giallo format.

Sylvia (Mimsy Farmer, Autopsy, The Black Cat, Body Count) is an industrial scientist who is trying to deal with a series of flashbacks related to the suicide of her mother — the literal lady in black, whose scent has haunted Sylvia since she was a child — and nearly every single person around her, each of whom want to kill her or use her or watch her or just — look, reality is out the window.

Imagine Rosemary’s Baby filtered through the Italian horror sensibility and the way that the 1970’s ended every movie with tragedy and you have some idea of this film. By the end of the movie, Sylvia’s hallucinations include a tea party filled with dead bodies and her own self as a child, who begins to tell her what to do.

Man, all movies should be this good. The ending was so disquieting that I’m still disturbed by it. You should do yourself a favor and watch it right now.

You can get it from Raro Video USA.

Originally simply the girlfriend for the superhero Neutron, Italian comic book character Valentina took over her series in 1967 and never looked back. Creator Guido Crepax moved her stories away from science fiction and into a world of the erotic tinged with hallucinations, dreams and BDSM.

Director Corrado Farina had previously made a documentary on Crepax before this movie, Freud a Fumetti. That artist had drawn the storyboards for Tinto Brass’ Deadly Sweet, a filmmaker who felt that Crepax’s visual style was near impossible to put on the screen.

Of recent comic adaptions — one would assume Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik amongst them, Farina would disparagingly say, “None of the filmmakers who embarked on that task had been able to deepen the relationship between the language of comics and that of film.”

In this film, Farina was committed to showing the fantastic side of Crepax and not just the erotic.

Valentina Rosselli (Isabelle De Funes) is no stranger to controversy. Her photos are guaranteed to shock and she’s unafraid to get into trouble. One night, her car gets into an accident with a mysterious blonde (Carroll Baker!) who announces herself as Baba Yaga and says that their meeting was destiny.

After taking a garter belt from Valentina’s home, Baba Yaga worms her way inside our protagonist’s head, controlling her via a teddy bear in bondage gear. Yes, you read that correctly. Baba Yaga also has a bottomless pit in her home, which is probably a common thing amongst Italian witches.

Valentina’s lover — the director Arno — is played by George Eastman. That was enough to get me to watch this movie.

Sadly, we may never see the complete vision that Farina had for this movie. After completing shooting and post-production, he left for a vacation. When he came back, the producers had hacked away half an hour directly on the negative of the film. Although he and assistant director Giuilio Berruti tried to save the movie, Farina felt that he could never get back what was lost.

You can get this on DVD from Blue Underground.

Also known as Sexy Party and Crime in the Mirror, this early giallo — well, it’s a mystery film with some sexual elements and style — is all about Ricky inviting his friends over for a weekend party at his parent’s castle. Because you know — all of our parents have castles.

Leave it to Serena and Anthony (John Drew Barrymore, War of the Zombies and father of Drew) to take over the party — seriously, the interrupt the movie with a dance break — and a game called shattering illusions that put everyone at odds with one another. Then, Anthony goes into a trance and predicts how everyone will die before he goes insane and runs from the castle.

One of these people is the killer. And while you figure out who that is, there’s all manner of relationships and perversion — well, as much as you can show in a movie from 1964 — to get on the table. And oh yeah — Maria Pia Conte from The Arena — is in here, as is Michael Lemoine, who went from being in movies for Jess Franco to making his own films, like Seven Women for Satan and eventually out and out hardcore pornography by the 1980’s.

There’s also a dice game where people lose their girlfriends to other guys. Man, Italy in the 60’s was way swinging in more ways that just fashion and music. This came out a year after The Girl Who Knew Too Much, so don’t expect the way giallo works in the 70’s, but you’ll still find something to enjoy here.

You can watch this movie on Amazon Prime or just check it out on the YouTube link below.

Corrado Farina was once a copywriter in advertising before he began to direct his own commercials. He moved on to direct documentaries as well as two feature films — Baba Yaga and this strange campire film. After this, he mainly worked on documentaries and wrote novels. That’s a shame, because both movies are pretty good.

Farina referred to this as a conceptual movie. It concerns a man who is given a promotion at the car company that he works for. However, that promotion comes from a place and a person that he didn’t expect.

This film was influenced by German philosopher Herbert Marcuse and his critique of capitalism and communism One-Dimensional Man. In story, consumerism is a form of social control, just like vampirism. Nosferantu is still out there, sucking blood, but now he’s being much more polite about it — he’s Adolfo Celi playing Giovanni Nosferatu and not Max Schreck.

In the modern world, the vampires use advertising — a subject that Farina obviously knew plenty about — and business to control their victims. There’s even Harkers and Van Helsings on the Nosferantu payroll now. And instead of draining blood from their necks, Giovanni derives pleasure from shooting targets that moan with each shot.

Co-writer Giulio Berruti would go on to direct Killer Nun if you’re interested in playing seven degrees of giallo and Italian genre filmmaking with me. Let’s keep the game moving — Geraldine Hooper, who plays Nosferantu’s androgynous secretary, was also in Deep Red and Emmanuelle in Soho.

You have to love a movie where business meetings take on the sinister trappings of the occult ritual. The symbols may have become logos and the mantras may have become concept statements, but the intent is so much the same.