EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie first appeared on this site as part of the Midwest Weirdfest coverage on February 28, 2022.

Director-writer Chad Ferrin’s (The Deep Ones, Exorcism at 60,000 Feet) Night Caller pulls from so many films, feeling like a modern U.S. version of a late in the game giallo, which is not a bad thing.

It gets the genre names to get you into the movie part down, including Steve Railsback, Lew Temple, Bai Ling and Kelli Maroney in the lineup. And it really lays on the color switches, the gore and the weirdness throughout.

Clementine (Susan Priver) is a phone psychic for Jade (Bai Ling), except that both of them have some level of psychic ability for real. When James Smith calls in, Clementine knows right away that he’s a killer and she can see his murders inside her mind, a talent her mother had and her father (Robert Miano) has worried about enough that he makes her carry a gun. Yet when the cops try to help, they end up dead and now the danger really begins.

With references to Maniac and literally showing Dementia 13 and Patrick, this feels like a straight to video VHS movie and again, that’s a good thing. It’s not perfect, but it’s quite willing to go absolutely for it, getting scalping, necrophilia and violent murder — not to mention misogynistic dialogue out of an 80s movie — into it.

The best part? Bai Ling is absolutely berserk. She should be in a real giallo, because I would pay money for that now. Let’s try to make that happen.

Night Caller is available on a number of digital and cable platforms, including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, iNDemand and DISH from 123 Go Films.

Based on Dana Moseley’s Dead of Summer, this movie fits into one of the many subcatagories of the giallo which I ineloquently refer to as women slowly going insane. Maybe F-giallo is a better term?

I thought that the gorgeous and doomed Jean Seberg only made one giallo, The Corruption of Chris Miller. She gives a truly once-in-a-career performance here as Joyce Grasse, a woman left all alone in a fabulous apartment in Morocco. As a sandstorm rages outside her windows and a man keeps staring into the windows, she listens to messages from her husband and gradually slides into depression, her only companion — before the maid arrives — is a blow up doll she finds in her husband’s room. Does it look a bit too much like her?

After watching her neighbors have sex, she decides that she should seduce a nieghbor boy, which ends awkwardly as he runs from her. As her sanity gets more fragile, a doctor (Luigi Pistilli, A Bay of Blood, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key) appears.

Director Neio Risi purposefully made this movie one that doesn’t tell you anything. Is Joyce insane? Is she trapped in a world of her own making? Has she killed her husband? Why are men both fascinated and frightened by her? Was her husband more interested in the young boys he met in this foreign country than her?

For some, this movie would be slow moving. I watched it as a hang out film, seeing Seberg fall apart over the running time, as she sits and stares into space and just lies there and listens to “Crimson and Clover.” The transfer I saw had massive audio issues, warping all of the dialogue and sound design, which somehow made this even more haunting, so as she searched for Tommy James and the Shondells to remind her of what love is, the voice came back as if from the void, vibrating and angry and maybe even afraid.

My Wife, A Body to Love gets at one of the major issues of the May and September romance. Paolo (Silvano Tranquilli, Castle of Blood) is married to the much younger Simona (Antonella Murgia) and when his stamina isn’t enough, she’s cheating on him with Marco (Peter Lee Lawrence, who was mostly in Italian westerns). The strange thing is, Paolo thinks life is a game and decides to just let this one act itself out. In fact, he even permits her to have sex with Marco but not fall in love.

Or does he? As all three go on a beach vacation, he suddenly starts thinking differently about his wife. He keeps telling her how he’ll stay in control of her and allow her to have sex with men of his choice. You get the idea that — look, the sex scenes are pretty chaste, so don’t get too excited — that he savors making love with his wife after the men she sleeps with and gets off when she tells him how much better they were than him.

But he’s in control, he keeps telling her.

Maybe he’s telling himself.

Go figure — the fantasies of men are impotent when faced with the reality of a woman who finds agency and discovers she can do well enough by making her own way.

Mario Imperoli died young — he was only 46 when he expired in 1977 — and he made a great crime movie, Like Rabid Dogs, as well as the sex comedies Blue Jeans, The Sweet Aunts and Monika, the crime films Canne mozze (written by George Eastman) and Sawed Off Shotgun, as well as the incest drama Quella strana voglia d’amare (also written by Eastman).

The Girl in the Yellow Pyjamas AKA The Pyjama Girl Case is more than just a giallo. It’s based on a true story, the 1934 Australian cold case that concerns the murder of Linda Agostini. Born Florence Linda Platt in a suburb of South East London, she left the UK behind for New Zealand after a broken romance, then went to Australia where she worked at a cinema and lived in a boardinghouse. Post-murder gossip claimed that she was a heavy drinker, a jazz baby and someone who entertained plenty of much younger men, which became an issue when she married the Italian expatriate Antonio Agostini. He moved her to Melbourne to try and get away from the bad influences that he felt existed in Sydney, but four years later she disappeared.

Her body was found inside a burning grain sack left behind on the beach. Her head was wrapped in a towel, her body was badly beaten and she had been shot in the neck. But what defined the case were her intricate silk pajamas, complete with a Chinese dragon design, a look that was not the type of clothing favored by your average Australian housewife.

Her body was kept in a formaldehyde bath for a decade and the public was invited to attempt to identify the body. In 1944, dental records proved that the girl in the yellow pajamas was Agostini. Meanwhile, her husband had been in an internment camp for four years during World War II due to his Italian heritage and sympathies toward the Axis. When he returned and was questioned by police commissioner William MacKay — a man he had once waited on — he immediately confessed to killing his wife.

There’s still some controversy over whether or not he actually confessed. There’s just as much as to who the pajama girl was. Regardless, her husband only served three years on manslaughter, as he claimed the shooting was an accident, and was extradited to Italy. Historian Richard Evans wrote The Pyjama Girl Mystery: A True Story of Murder, Obsession and Lies in 2004 and claims that police corruption meant that the case needed to be solved as quickly as possible, as the public sentiment had turned against the cops.

The giallo that is based on the case is really well made and has an intriguing split narrative. On one hand, we have the retired Inspector Thompson (Ray Milland) investigating the case and dealing with his own mortality. Meanwhile, we see Glenda Blythe (Dalila Di Lazzaro, Frankenstein 80, the monster’s bride in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, the headmistress in Phenomena, perhaps the other woman in Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren’s marriage) struggle with the relationships in her life, including her husband Antonio Attolini, her lover Ray Conner (Howard Ross, The New York Ripper) and her mentor Professor Henry Douglas (Mel Ferrer). As the relationship with her husband starts to fall apart, she drifts into prostitution and in a harrowing scene, makes love to two men while one’s teenage nephew tries to not make eye contact with her.

Other than the Riz Ortolani score — Amanda Lear sings on two of them! — this isn’t a fashion-filled bit of fun. This is a dark and dreary journey through the end of a woman’s life and the elderly man devoted to finding out the answers to who and why, even if he knows that discovering that truth won’t change the fact that he’s closer to the end of his story than the beginning. At least he cares more than the modern police, who simply embalm her nude body, put it on display and allows people to stare at it.

I read the other day that giallo films were meant for the people outside of Rome, for provincial tastes that demanded a morality play. I’m not certain that’s entirely true, but this movie aspires to art and a heartbreaking moment as we reach the close and realize that the two stories are truly connected in the bleakest of ways.

Yes, somehow, I’ve never seen Wild Things.

When Kevin Bacon, who acted in it, refers to the script as “the trashiest thing he had ever read” it’s even more amazing that I have never seen this movie.

High school guidance counselor Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) is accused of rape by two of his students, the popular and wealthy good girl Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards playing a teenager at 27) and poor tomboy Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell playing a teenager at 24).

He hires lawyer Kenneth Bowden (Bill Murray) to defend him from these charges. When the case is tried, the girls confess to lying as Suzie was upset that Sam didn’t bail her out on a drug charge and Kelly was upset that her teacher was having an affair with her mother (Theresa Russell). Sam gets an $8.5 million dollar settlement, but it was all another lie, as the three were working together.

Sergeant Ray Duquette (Bacon) knows something isn’t kosher. But as he follows the triad, he learns that they have an ever twisting relationship and even murderous intent toward one another. I’m not spoiling anything else — I mean, the movie is 24 years old — but for a film that seems mostly discussed for its male nudity and threesome scene, it ends up being a not half bad mystery.

I like Roger Ebert’s take on the movie: “lurid trash, with a plot so twisted they’re still explaining it during the closing titles. It’s like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir.”

Director John McNaughton is the director and co-writer of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which was his first film, and that alone should tell you he knows what he’s doing. The script comes from Stephen Peters, who wrote the novel that The Park Is Mine is taken from.

There are so many twists in that script that Bacon said, “To determine their motivation in each scene, the cast had to gather with the director, writers, and producers to establish the sequence of events. We’d sit in rehearsals trying to piece together what was going on in the script, whom we were lying to about what, and it’d just get so complicated we’d have to stop and rest.”

The Arrow release of Wild Things has new 4K restorations of both the Original Theatrical Version and the Unrated Edition from the original camera negatives by Sony Pictures Entertainment, as well as exclusive new audio commentary by director John McNaughton and producer Steven A. Jones and another commentary by director John McNaughton, cinematographer Jeffrey Kimball, producers Steven A. Jones and Rodney Liber, editor Elena Maganini and score composer George S. Clinton. There are also interviews with McNaughton and Denise Richards, as well as a making of, outtakes, a trailer, an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Anne Billson and Sean Hogan, a double-sided fold-out poster, six double-sided, postcard-sized lobby card reproductions and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sam Hadley. You can get it from MVD and Arrow.

You can also get a Limited Edition SteelBook housed in deluxe rigid packaging, both featuring newly commissioned artwork by Sam Gilbey from Arrow.

Amy Chen (Amy Chang) is a food critic haunted by a past breakup that has led to her developing an eating disorder as her co-worker Peter (Jae Shin) attempts to heal her stomach and get her to fall for him, which may happen when they have to act together in an ad for a pho restaurant.

Angel Li (Yi Liu) is in a loveless marriage with an American businessman named Howard (Erik Lochtefeld). She’s just scored the role of a lifetime, playing a spurned woman who jumps off a bridge, all while she falls for a writer named David (Ludi Lin).

Nina Wong (Celia Au) came to America thanks to her family paying a high cost which she must pay by selling her body as an escort. But can her relationship Ian (Roger Yeh) help her escape the constant toll of selling herself?

Based on a Chinese short story, In A New York Minute is an Asian and Asian American-led film that explores love in three different stories.

First-time writer/director Ximan Li — who co-wrote the script with Yilei Zhou — has created a great interconnected film that comes together quite well. It doesn’t get overly dramatic and allows you a window into lives and experiences that you wouldn’t get to have otherwise. Isn’t that what all great movies should do for their viewers?

In A New York Minute is available on digital from Gravitas Ventures.