Decades ago, Matteusz Gdula invented an acting technique that made his students the best in the world. Of course, a bunch of them also died mysteriously and he ended up killing himself, so his method was banned. So why is there now a school devoted to his teachings? And why would they invite Stella (Susen Ermich), a driven if unaccomplished actress?

If you weren’t thinking Suspiria already — remote performing arts school, young girl unsure why she was asked to attend, mysterious past — the fact that Stella arrives just as Britt (Franziska Breite) is running away from something. To hammer it home, no one is warm to our heroine at all — not the students, not headmistress Yolanda (Teresa Nawrot), director Janowska (Magdalena Ritter) or Dr. Braun (Michael Balaun). Only Cecile (Julita Witt) — a young actress who teaches Stella how to open up her emotions while creating new emotions of her own that she doesn’t quite understand — is kind, but then why is her body covered with bruises?

Someone attacked Britt. Cecile disappears. And Lydia (Katja Lawrenz) has shown up dead. Maybe going to far off-performing schools run by dead people isn’t necessarily the best of higher education.

Then again, Stella is becoming a better actor. Instead of only using the pain in her past to become angry, now she can draw on it to become someone else. Perhaps this is the place for her. But at what cost?

Where films like The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears copy the look of the giallo, Masks goes further and understands the story and pacing of the best films in the form. Plus, the idea of a hidden part of the school where you must literally allow a mask to take over your mind so that you can become a role is a great one and the film does so much with it. It also understands something that the new school of giallo has forgotten: the kills must be as spectacular as your camera angles, your lighting and color theory. This is filled with genuinely shocking murders that stay within the giallo world without resorting to being torture porn.

Director Andreas Marschall also made German Angst and Tears of Kali, as well as music videos for Coroner, Moonspell and Sodom.

Whether you watch this as Calling All Police Cars or Without Trace, this is a movie that reminds us that men have always wanted to own the choices of women and their bodies. The film literally starts with the victim in a bikini posing for photos by a photographer who we’re led to believe is an older pervert. As she wanders the pool, surrounded by rich old men, she asks their drink orders and flirts with each.

As for the photographer, it ends up being her father and hey, Italian cinema, no one thinks this is weird. What follows is teenage prostitution, abortions that require the patient to be fully nude, a murder and a killer who is the giallo sauce in this poliziotteschi pasta.

It’s also about class, as if the father — Professor Andrea Icardi (Gabrielle Ferzetti) — wasn’t a rich doctor, the police would never handle the case so quickly and efficiently.

Director Mario Caino also made Nightmare Castle, Eye in the Labyrinth and Shanghai Joe. His films are always interesting yet he’s rarely mentioned within the usual names of the Italian exploitation directors. Antonio Sabato is good as the lead officer and Luciana Paluzzi (Thunderball, Tragic Ceremony, 99 Women) is also great as female inspector Giovanna Nunziante.

If you’ve already watched What Have You Done to Solange?, What Have They Done to Your Daughters? and Red Rings of Fear, you can consider this another part of the Schoolgirls in Peril movies.

Elizabeth (Abbey Lee, The Neon Demon) has just married Dr. Henry Kellenberg (Ciarán Hinds) and they’ve returned to his mansion, a place where only two other people live: Claire (Carla Gugino), the housekeeper, and Henry’s blind son Oliver (Matthew Beard). She’s living in opulence with only one rule: never go in that basement room. And for a while, it’s good enough. She has clothes and jewelry and luxury and yes, it’s enough. But every time, Henry goes to work and leaves her alone and one time he’s gone too long.

So she goes into that room.

It’s filled with clones of her.

Henry comes home, hacks her to pieces and Claire and Oliver help him bury the body.

At this point, Elizabeth Harvest has been a giallo and now, it embraces some fantasy to turn it into something else. Something fresh.

Six weeks later, we come back to the beginning of the movie, with Elizabeth returning home after the wedding, becoming bored by the trappings of the giant home and discovering the lab. And this time, when Henry attacks her, she actually turns the tables and kills him, a moment which gives Claire a heart attack and Oliver the chance to lock her up and force her to read his father’s diary to him.

The surprises don’t end there.

Director and writer Sebastian Gutierrez wrote Gothika and directed Rise: Blood Hunter, Women In Trouble and that movie’s sequel Elektra Luxx. This is much like the story Bluebeard but given a futuristic twist. There are also some great flashback scenes that are shot monochromatically and lots of arresting visuals. Sure, there’s a lot of talking, but the movie works.

If giallo survives into the next century — I would say that it has — it must embrace the future while referencing the past. Elizabeth Harvest makes a good effort.

That Tubi exclusive banner on movies is like a must be 18 years to rent sticker for my ancient brain because I keep watching these movies. Teardrop has two teachers — Chris (Jeff Branson, who was in the 2010 remake of I Spit On Your Grave) and Rebecca (Murray Gray) — who have brought three of their students — Josie (Rachael Thundat), Teala (Megan Lee) and Ross (Michael MacLane) — to the ghost town of Teardrop.

From the first meeting with hotel owner Denver (Bradley Fisher), you can tell that things aren’t going to end well. The whole town is infused with evil due to some hangings in its past and Chris just keeps coming back, again and again, probably dying over and over while dooming everyone who comes with him.

Sadly, none of the characters demonstrate a single unique angle: Josie uses her looks to get whatever she wants, Teala is an Asian hard working professional student and Ross is a white rapper who alternatively tries to connect and push away women. Chris is a writer whose failures have pushed him to teaching and then this town that he’s always felt drawn to, kind of like the Branson version of Jack Torrance while Rebecca starts to fall for him for no reason whatsoever. Also: edibles instead of smoking weed because it’s 2022.

Ah, it all makes sense to me now. Director Steven R. Monroe made those I Spit On Your Grave remakes as well as the film Complacent and, as most horror directors do these days, plenty of holiday streaming offerings. It was written by Spyder Dobrofsky who also alternates between horror and holidays.

Of all things, I liked the local girl — well, she can shapeshift, so I don’t want to be misgendering someone with that ability — who basically keeps telling the rapping kid that she’s dead and that he’s going to die too and even after she makes him puke all over the place — and lose his chain — he still considers going back to hook up. I grew up in a small town too, even if we weren’t all ghosts that had been lynched a century and change ago and I often wanted to tell anyone new to get out and go anywhere else.

Nobody ever listened.

La Orca told the story of Alice (Rena Niehaus, who also was in Angel: Black Angel and Damned In Venice so she had no issues with being in offensive films), who was taken against her will by three men, one of whom she fell in love with.

This is the sequel and wow, it’s…something. Alice sits around reading in the nude, which is intercut with slaughterhouse footage because Italian movies. Seriously, this movie looks Umberto Lenzi and Ruggero Deodato right in their eye stems and raises them to a level that made me skip lunch. Then, she decides to pursue an old lover of her mother’s — who is probably her father — while remembering the criminal who died because of her — and when they finally have sex, well — spoiler warning — he’s killed by a gigantic pane of slow motion glass in an ending I had to watch multiple times to make sure I actually saw it happening.

This film’s director was Eriprando Visconti di Modrone, Count of Vico Modrone, who upset his noble family by deciding to make movies. Often, he’d spend his own money and use unknowns, and he bombed as much as he was a success. But he made this, and it blew my mind multiple times because while not good, it sure is willing to show you some things that you definitely never needed to see.

Death Falls Lightly begins when Georgio Darica (Stello Candelli) comes home from a crime-related business trip only to find that his wife has been killed. So his lawyer suggests that he grab his girlfriend Liz (Patrizia Viotti, Amuck) and head off to a hotel, but when he gets there, the owner (Antonio Anelli) has also killed his wife, so he asks him to help bury her, but then George remembers that the hotel was abandoned. So is he going insane? Are these people real? Did he actually kill his wife?

The next part of this movie gets absolutely ridiculous in the best of ways, as people appear, get murdered and come back to life, all while someone commits suicide on a Satanic altar, invisible killers attack George, prog rock blasts and a monkey shows up out of nowhere. It also has the absolute dumbest of all giallo police, which is saying something. Like, there’s a very low bar for giallo cops and these ones may be the worst.

Director Leopoldo Savona also made Byleth: The Demon of Incest the same year, the same year I was born, which probably means something.

Carroll Baker got to be in plenty of giallo films — Knife of Ice, A Quiet Place to Kill, Orgasmo, So Sweet, So Perverse — and it reminds me of a conversation that I had with Mike Justice about how the globalization of mass media has led to a world where out of favor actresses could go to Italy and make some horror or giallo movies. Sharon Stone? You would be perfect right now instead of being a weird head on the end of a finger in a gambling app commercial.

Dr. Andrea Valenti (Gianni Garko, who was in a ton of films, like several Sartana sequels, as well as The Psychic, Devilfish and so many others ) is a surgeon who everyone loves, other than his lover Daniella (Paola Senatore, Emanuelle in America, Ricco the Mean Machine). After a fight, we’re led to believe that Andrea has killed her, cut her up and dumped the remains in a sewage plant. That’s when Baker, playing Evelyn, who is not only one of Andrea’s past lovers, but also the current lesbian love of Daniella as well as her half-sister because this is an Italy movie.

She goes to the police and tries to convince Detective Garrano (Ivano Staccioli, So Sweet, So Dead) that Valenti killed her sister, which seems like it could be true. After all, didn’t Valenti put his rich wife into a mental hospital after they had sex on their wedding night? What the hell is that about? Is he that amazing in bed? Is she so innocent that she was shocked by his member? Really, this is amazing.

But I digress.

The first wife is now sane and has left the asylum, yet no one knows where she is. As for the doctor, he’s already moved on to his secretary Elaina (Pilar Velázquez, A White Dress for Marialé). And then he starts getting blackmailed as someone has the photos of the murder. Or maybe accident is more the term, as whomever it was tripped and fell on the metal flower artwork in his house.

While Argento wouldn’t have art outright murder someone until Tenebre, this movie borrows a lot from him. The metal flower seems like something out of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and the tunnel of baby doll heads with a body at the end is straight out of Dario.

Director Gianfranco Piccioli produced lots of movies but only directed two other films: The Hokey-Pokey Gang and Double by Half.

By 1973, the giallo was starting to not be as popular as it once was. Then again, rumors of its demise were the same as disco, as the name of the genre may have shifted — erotic thriller — but the stories are the same. They’re still getting made today. Yet when this was made, it was definitely created to fit the exact format that everyone expected with a gloved and masked scalpal slashing killer.

All things being said, I have never seen another giallo that has an underwater scuba lesbian scene, so that’s perhaps one audacious reason to watch The Flower With the Petals of Steel.