American giallo? Why, it seems like a few years ago, we did an entire week of those movies. Well, we missed this one, directed by Ken Stein (who only directed one other movie, Mad Dog Coll) and written by Ray Cunneff (who wrote a movie called A State of Emergency about nuclear testing and visions of the Blessed Mother, so looks like I’ll be tracking that one down).
Welcome to a Los Angeles where it’s always raining, neon is everywhere, all you can hear and sax solos and Michael Chiklis wears a different baseball hat in every scene. Ray Sharkey (Du-beat-e-o in Du-beat-e-o and, of course, Wiseguy) is the burned out cop, David Beecroft (Creepshow 2) is the FBI agent and a scene where Sharkey and his police chief share a bottle of Wild Turkey in a bathroom stall.
In the midst of all this darkness and swearing and rampant sex — my favorite IMDB review of this basically takes a puritanical take on all this filth, which made me want to watch it over again — is a great looking film thanks to cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. What did the man who shot Schindler’s List have to do with this grubby movie? Well, he got his start shooting stuff like The Terror Within II, Grim Prarie Tales and even Cool As Ice — let that set in, two years before he won an Oscar, Kamiński was filming Vanilla Ice — before Steven Spielberg started using him.
Maria Ford plays an exotic dancer who gets killed. You’ll recognize her as she’s been in a ton of things — everything from Slumber Party Massacre III and Deathstalker IV: Match of Titans to the remake of The Wasp Woman, Night Calls: The Movie, Part 2 and kid movies like Beethoven’s Big Break and Casper Meets Wendy.
This really starts like a giallo, as The Rain Killer — named for his m.o. of killing women in the pouring rain — knifes three women in under five minutes while wearing a black overcoat, leather gloves and a hat. Sadly, this is an American film, so there are times where it decides to tell a story that somewhat makes sense. It turns out that all of the victims are members of a support group called The Sewing Circle and the FBI agent just so happens to be divorcing one of its members, his wife Adele (Tania Coleridge, who was in George Michael’s “Father Figure” video and played the drill model in Van Halen’s video for “Poundcake”). So you know — Sharkey hooks up with her because, well, that’s how movies work.
For a movie that is so influenced by giallo, isn’t it odd that Argento’s Trauma uses the same m.o.* — killer who murders in the rain — three years later?
Also known as Assassinio al Cimitero Etrusco (Murder in the Etruscan Cemetery), this is one of the few Sergio Martino giallo films that I had not seen. It was originally to be an 8 episode TV series called Il Mistero Degli Etruschi (The Mystery of the Etruscans) or Lo Scorpione a Due Code(The Two-Tailed Scorpion) before it was made into a full-length film, which was then cut down again to air as a two-part movie in Italy.
Working from a script by Ernesto Gastaldi and Dardano Sacchetti (with screenplay work by Maria Chianetta), Martino tells the story of Joan (Elvire Audray, Ironmaster), who foresees that her husband will die in the Etruscan tombs that they have been exploring. And with that, her husband Arthur dies in just enough time to get John Saxon a special guest star title.
Now, she wants to find the killer, working with her friend Mike (Paolo Malco, Escape from the Bronx, The New York Ripper) and going up against her father (Van Johnson), who may not be involved for altruistic reasons.
I always loved this Enzo Sciotti poster, which looks just like the one for The House by the Cemetery.
Everyone feels like they’re going through the motions here, which is kind of sad. It’s a great idea, mashing up ancient rituals and giallo murders. It should work, but it doesn’t. Even the Fabio Frizzi score sounds a bit like The Beyond, a much better film.
This is our second recap of Giallo Week. If you’re as big a fan of these movies as we are, please check out the Gialloholics Facebook group. There’s always great conversation there and fun people.
In the last 48 hours, we’ve watched the following:
WEDNESDAY
Night of Violence: Roberto Mauri directed this early giallo that has a great conceit: a killer who looks like several actors and no one knows who it is.
Circle of Fear: An early 1990’s Aldo Lado/Dardano Sacchetti cop movie.
Il Sorriso Della Iena: If you liked Silvio Amadio’s Amuck!and movies with lots of twists, this one is perfect.
THURSDAY
Im Banne des Unheimlichen: Under the Spell of the Uncanny (or The Zombie Walksand The Hand of Power) is a great Edgar Wallace film with a memorable skull-faced villain.
La Pelle Sotto Gli Artigli: The Skin Under the Claws is a science fiction zombie giallo with Gordon Mitchell in it. That sentence is pretty much why I watch movies.
Abuso di Potere: A great car chase, insurance fraud and a downer ending are all in this film.
The reviews on this feature film writing and directing debut by Disney wildlife documentarian David Fowler have been of the middling-to-hated variety. And I must admit that, after my first watch, I didn’t care for Welcome to the Circle either — and since I couldn’t find a positive in the film, I wasn’t going to write this review.
But obviously, there’s something happening here — or you wouldn’t be reading this — in the Don Coscarelli-mindfuck frames that I just couldn’t put my finger on my first go-around. For this film’s raison d’etre isn’t flying Chinese cuisinart harmony balls: it’s mannequins and masks and fucked up human-strung marionettes. And it wasn’t until Sam, our Mix Master General of the Movie-themed Drink Blender, rolled out another “Giallo Week” of even deeper Italian and Spanish obscurities*, and my sitting down for a two-day Nazisplotiation binge as I geared up for my review of Naomi Holwill’s everything-you-wanted-to-know-but-were-afraid-to-ask genre document Fascism on a Thread: The Strange Story of Nazisploitation Cinema, that the celluloid memory centers of my analog cortex streamed across the synapses in hallucinatory harmony.
There are just some movies that require a second run through the digital sprocket rollers. The FUBAR’d world of Welcome to the Circle is one of those films.
He’s a-pickin’ and I’m a-grinnin’: Just sum backwoods pseudo–giallo fun with the kids.
Now Giallo and Nazisploitation films may not — at all — be at the ambiguity-open-to-your-interpretation roots of Fowler’s retro-madness, but somewhere along the line, between the feel-good Disney docs, he’s ingested his share of films from both genres and they somehow bled into his Final Draft QWERTY-ing.
We’ve got the mannequin and mask creepiness of Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil and Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo. There’s Coscarelli’s they-don’t-make-any-sense surrealistic nightmares of the Phantasm franchise. There’s Bigas Luna’s snail-slithering corkscrews of Anguish. There’s the haunting of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls with his mannequin-like souls in their undead waltz. There’s the twisted, pseudo-Nazi ideology that makes no sense to anyone but its we-can-do-whatever-we-want followers. Then there’s those narrative time jumps (which seems to annoy the streamer-critics the most) where you don’t know if the character’s insane, trapped in a dream, or the owls are hootin’ down at the Ambrose Bierce bridge of reincarnation sighs.
A cult victim has to learn to swim on their own: Pseudo–Giallo WTFs with masked mannequins and dirt scuba-diving.
As the film begins, we meet Greg, a father who takes Samantha, his young daughter, on a bonding camping trip; they’re subsequently attacked by a bear. However, amid the film’s unfurling ambiguity and surrealism, one questions if the bear attack was even real — and if the attack was, instead, in human form, since cults need children to nurture.
Greg comes to wake in the warming bosom of The Circle, a backwoods cult led by a Matthew, a white-suited Ron L. Hubbard-type that deals in philosophical, circular logic: reasoning that means nothing to know one but the cult’s members — whose numbers are dwindling.
And here’s where those mannequins and masks come in . . . and time starts a-jumpin’.
As Samatha’s assimilated into the cult, she’s obsessed with wearing a happy-face mask given to her by the cult’s flower-child rhetoric-spewing handmaidens Sky and Lotus Cloud. In fact, anytime someone is absorbed into the cult — by their own will or by force — they “personality” is replaced by a doppelganger mask. And as the cult numbers dwindle — by escape or death (we think) — they’re replaced by doppelganger mannequins that, (again, we think; keeping with the film’s circular mindfuckery), represents the lost, human soul . . . or the zombie-like autonomic nature of man . . . and your own mindfuck opinions, may vary.
Also pulled into the time loops and identity shifts is Grady, a professional cult deprogrammer hired by a husband and sister-in-law to abduct the cult’s third hippy-handmaiden, Rebekah.
Then there’s the right-back-where-you-started multi-dimensional travel and whacked-out hallucinations of the Tallman “Space Gate” variety that occur in the rural lair-shack of perpetually reincarnating Percy Stephens, an evil Baron Munchausen-styled world adventurer — (cursed to?) a lair that, you always end up where you left. As with Rudolf Enich Raspe’s literary hero, Percy’s a master sportsman, world-class deep sea navy diver, and world traveler (and master B.S. artist) whose life experiences led to his creation of The Circle, a supernatural cult with twisted moral standards. (Luckily, Percy wasn’t a product of Nazi Germany — but he did subjugate some African natives along the way, at least according to the creepy, morphing black and white wall photos hung around the compound, and per everyone’s Ringu-jittery mindbending flashbacks — or this backwoods camp would be a backwoods Nazi-prison farm with Sploitation-atrocities o’ plenty.)
Does young Samantha escape and is Rebekah rescued? Yep. But Rebekah’s got a shite-eating-grin on her face as Samantha fans the pages of the self-made book, “The Adventures of Percy Stephens.” So, will The Circle, continue?
All in all, I’m glad I gave Welcome to the Circle a well-deserved second watch. And it’s well worth your streaming it the first time. But hey, we’re the guys who loved The Invisible Mother, She’s Allergic to Cats, and Under the Silver Lake — that almost everybody else hated and didn’t see. So what do us film reviewing schlemiels and schlimazels of Hasenpfeffer Incorporated in the backwoods of Allegheny County know? We’d tell you that the Giallo cycle was misunderstood by mainstream Americana, with the genre’s mixtures of murder, the supernatural, Entomology, and junk sciences (and, in The Circle’s case: junk philosophy) wrongly critiqued as “style over substance” and “lacking in narrative logic.” And you’d say, “Poppycock.”
And that’s your loss, for you just missed out on a great introduction to a new voice in horror with this debut work from David Fowler.
After a making its streaming debut in October 2020 on various online platforms, Welcome to the Circle makes its January 2021 debut as a free-with-ads stream on Tubi. You can learn more about the film at Artsploitation Films and follow the film at its official Facebook page.
* In June of last year, we had our first, month-long Giallo blowout, which we recapped with our “Exploring: Giallo” featurette with review links to over 50 films. Yep, the blood runs Tallman-yellow in our veins. And there’s nothing like starting off a New Year with Giallos; you can catch up on our reviews with our three-part “Giallo Week Wrap Ups”: Recap 1, Recap 2. and Recap 3.
Disclaimer: We did not receive a review request from the director or a P.R firm. We discovered this film on our own and we truly enjoyed the film.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies and publish music reviews and short stories on Medium.
Sichan Siv and Gilbert Tuhabonye escaped the killing fields of Cambodia and the massacre of Burundi’s children. Now, this film uses animation and the words of Sichan, Gilbert and twelve other survivors to make us confront a very haunting fact: the holocaust of World War II was not the end of the world’s genocide.
Directed by Paul Allen Hunton and funded by the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission, this is no easy watch. But it shouldn’t be.
Siv escaped Cambodia’s killing fields, leaving the country with only his scarf, an empty rice bag and two dollars to his name. He would go on to serve The White House as Deputy Assistant to President George H.W. Bush and at the State Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary. In 2001, he was appointed by President George W. Bush as an ambassador to the United Nations, serving until 2006. Gilbert is now a retired professional runner, a philanthropist, an author and a community leader in Austin, Texas.
The world can change, for some people, but we must figure out how to change the world for the better. The COVID-19 outbreak has brought us together at the same time as it has made us myopic about our own needs. The world is a smaller place now and we must understand that these stories are still happening.
Narratives of Modern Genocide is available on demand from Passion River Films. To learn more, visit the official site.
Directed by Andrea Bianchi (BurialGround, Strip Nude for Your Killer) under the supervision of Lucio Fulci, this is all about the filming of the movie Dirty Blood, which has been infiltrated by an actual killer.
It starts off quick, with a trucker axe chopping a woman’s hand off and blood spraying everywhere. And if you’re saying, “That’s in Cat in the Brain…” so are many of the effects from this movie.
To make Dirty Blood as realistic as possible, everyone involved is called in for a seance from Madame Ullrich, but when she tries to reach her spirit guide, she only encounters evil, which comes in the form of an earthquake that knocks everyone around*. Oh yeah — and Jennifer, the lead in the movie, has a cop boyfriend who has been hunting down the killer we saw in the beginning.
Exactly how much Fulci had to do with this movie is debatable. What isn’t is that this was Bianchi’s last horror film. From here on out, he’d concentrate on adult films, mostly using the name Andrew White, including the trans triangle film Mystifying Revelation and other movies starring Cicciolina and Rocco Siffredi. He even made Fleshy Doll, one of the very adult films I can think of inspired by Oscar Wilde.
The gore is fun**, but all in all, I’d much rather see the movie they were shooting in this than the movie they actually made. Look, someday a high-end blu ray label is going to do a box set of all these presented by Fulci films and try to convince you that they have something special about them. They really don’t, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t enjoyable for lovers of bottom of the barrel and Italian genre cinema, which come to think of it, is often the same thing.
*It also takes the form of non-stop Fulci zooms, spinning cameras and the medium appearing as if she has two gigantic golf balls in her mouth. It’s a completely ludicrous and awesome scene that made me actually come around on this movie. The earthquake is so strong that it pops the cork off a bottle of champagne!
**Seriously, a girl gets murdered and left behind on a merry-go-round and the psychic woman gets impaled on a cemetery fence right through the crotch of her Macy’s slacks Cannibal Holocaust style.
You can watch this on YouTube or get the DVD from Revok.
Translated as Abuse of Power and released internationally under the vastly improved title Shadows Unseen, this movie has an awesome poster and a great title that both say giallo, but the movie says poliziotteschi.
It all starts with a journalist who forks over a ton of cash for a ring, then leaves a bar with a mysterious woman before getting jumped and eventually shot. The cops assign Commissioner Luca Miceli (Frederick Stafford, Special Killers, Werewolf Woman and, if he hadn’t been tied up making the movie Topaz, perhaps a James Bond) to solve the mystery.
Marilù Tolo plays Simona, who falls for Luca and gets caught between him and the underworld. She was also in Django Kill, Bava’s Roy Colt and Winchester Jack and My Dear Killer. Spoilers — her death is really upsetting, even for the man who orders it.
Everything from that moment on is as tense as it gets, with a car chase that’s absolutely white hot in its intensity. The downer ending is totally expected as well, as I don’t think any film ended happily in 1972.
Director Camillo Bazzoni didn’t make many movies (the last Steve Reeves movie I Live for Your Death, the Aldo Ray war movie Suicide Commandos and Those Who Kill are a few others), but this is filled with enough twists and turns to make it interesting. The slight giallo elements help get it there, as does the score by Riz Ortolani.
A series of murders are happening — it’s a giallo, so go figure, right? — but in each case, there is decomposed flesh under the victims. There’s also a genius named Professor Helmut (Gordon Mitchell!) who is doing brain transplants from human to baboon and he thinks that could be the secret to cheating death.
That’s why this movie is really known asThe Skin Under the Claws, but it’s more romantic comedy with a giallo just begging to break though. Helmut dies early on and his organs disappear and the cops think the killer is a walking corpse, so there’s at least some horror in this one, but it takes forever to get there, what with Dr. Silivia and Dr. Gianni going to dinner, out sightseeing and anything and everything but solving the crimes that we came here for.
Alessandro Santini only directed three other movies — Beyond the Frontiers of Hate, Una Forca per 3 Vigliacchi (A Gallow for 3 Cowards) and Questa Libertà di Avere… le Ali Bagnate (The Freedom of Having…Wet Wings). He’s not shy with the nudity or the blood. And at least the ending is somewhat original and unexpected. Otherwise, as they say, for giallo lovers only.
The translation of the German title to this film — Under the Spell of the Uncanny — is way cooler than The Zombie Walks and The Hand of Power**, the other titles for this Edgar Wallace adaption. No matter — this movie looks cool as hell, a Blood and Black Lace influenced pre-giallo with a delightful skull-faced killer named The Laughing Corpse* who even has his very own poison filled scorpion ring.
There’s one bonkers scene that would never be in a movie made in 2020, where the hero repeatedly tries to look up the skirt of a gorgeous librarian, who is played by Ewa Strömberg. She of course would catch the eye of noted pervert Jess Franco, who would cast her in Vampyros Lesbos and She Killed In Ecstasy.
As for the movie itself, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Higgins takes on a case that starts with a man laughing from the inside of his own coffin and gets even stranger with the deaths of nearly everyone who know that man, all from the scorpion ring of that dashing masked killer.
The credits for this really shout mod while the heroes shout old school, but you know, I pretty much loved all of it. I haven’t really explored the Wallace adaptions, but the last two I’ve watched her been more than entertaining.
This is one of the few giallo I’ve seen where the killer uses a machine gun. Also, there’s a guy with green skin and no one makes a single mention of it, so 1968 Germany was way woke early.
*The voice of The Laughing Skull came directly from director Alfred Vohrer.
**That’s the title of the book that this was based on.
After a workplace shooting puts alcoholic Marcy (Siobhan Williams, Welcome to Marwen) on leave, she travels to see her sister in California. Yet halfway there, she decides to stop for a couple of days at the Bright Hill Road Boarding House, where she loses touch with reality and confronts her past.
Marcy may be clinging to sobrietry, but Mrs. Inman (Agam Darshi) leaves wine for her every night and the other tenant, Owen (Michael Eklund), may be pushing her further into the mistakes of her past. You know, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you black out and wake up in front of a deserted looking boarding house, don’t stay there.
This was directed by Robert Cuffley, who also made Chokeslam, from a script by Susie Moloney.
Bright Hill Road is available on DVD and on demand from Uncork’d Entertainment.
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