A Perfect Murder Under the Law is also known as Cross Current here in America. It’s directed by Tonino Ricci, who you may know from Rush, Panic or Encounters In the Deep. Story writer Aldo Crudo also was behind War of the Robots and the ensuing script was written by José María Forqué and Arpad DeRiso (Death Steps In the Dark).

Marco (Phillipe Leroy, The Possessed, The Laughing Woman) is a rich man injured in a speedboat accident so rough that he needs brain surgery, which wipes his memory clean and makes him depend on his wife Monica (Elge Andersen, who retired from acting to explore the Andrea Doria wreck with her rich husband Peter R. Gimbel, who was the first diver to explore that doomed ship; together they made two documentaries The Mystery of the Andrea Doria and Andrea Doria: The Final Chapter; their ashes are now interred in the ship’s wreckage), business partner Tommy (Franco Ressel) and a girl named Terry (Rosanna Yanni, Count Dracula’s Great Love, Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror).

You know what happens next. Marco falls for Terry, Monica gets shot, Terry talks him into dumping her body but then he becomes convinced that he’s also killed his partner, the gardener and the gardener’s mother. Now they can be alone, right? Well, that’s when Monica shows up, back from the dead, which makes Terry drive his car right off a cliff.

We should have been clued in that something bad is about to happen because Marco’s business manager is played by Ivan Rassimov. He’s been behind the whole scheme, working with Monica to make the money while sleeping with Terry. This revelation upsets Monica, who kills them both.

See? A perfectly serviceable giallo. But wait…

Who is the black gloved person now following Monica?

Ah, it’s always nice to be surprised.

The Murder Clinic predates the Argento era of giallo, coming around the same time as the Bava instigation with The Girl Who Knew Too Much and the krimi films. Known in its native Italy as La lama nel corpo (The Knife in the Body), it was written by Luciano Martino (brother of Sergio and writer of Delirium and The Whip and the Body) and Ernesto Gastaldi (The Sweet Body of Deborah, All the Colors of the Dark, The Case of the Bloody Iris and so many more) with direction coming from Elio Scardamaglia (this is the only film he’d direct as he usually produced movies) and Lionello De Felice. It’s based on the book The Knife In The Body by Robert Williams, a former Tuskegee Airman who became an actor. He also wrote Turkey Shoot, which really means that his work was produced all over the world.

The story takes place in 1870s England, so this movie can also be considered a gothic horror film. Dr. Vance, the director of a mental hospital (Wiliam Berger) is restoring his sister’s face using patients as raw material, all while a masked killer uses the giallo weapon of choice, a strait razor, to kill other people within the hospital.

This isstoryould replay itself across many films — Slaughter Hotel, Faceless, Mansion of the Doomed (well, that owes a debt to Eyes Without a Face) — while the first scene, with a young woman being chased by a killer in the woods at night a, and scene where the killer stalks his prey in a room full of hanging sheets f, eel like they inspired Suspiria.

The Murder Clinic itself feels indebted to Bava, really taking to heart the color strategies of Blood and Black Lace.

This is a movie with an interesting release history. After Berger spent some time in an Italian prison — he had been wrongly accused of possessing hashish and cocaine — this was re-released with a line on the poster that said “William Berger, guilty or innocent?”

In the U.S., it was renamed to cash in on Romero’s zombie film. It played triple features with Curse of the Living Dead (Kill, Baby, Kill!) and Fangs of the Living Dead (Malenka) in the 70s as the Orgy of the Living Dead.

With a great location -— Villa Parisi, home of Blood for Dracula and Patrick Still Lives -— and appearances by Françoise Prévost (The Return of the Exorcist), Mary Young (who only appeared in this movie and Secret Agent 777) and Barbara Wilson (her only film and she really should have done more), The Murder Clinic is an early giallo worthy of being enshrined in your collection.

Life’s weird, because one of the best giallo films — and you could also call it neo-noir or krimi while you’re trying to figure out what it is — is the animated cat film Felidae from Germany. While the U.S. struggles to understand that cartoons can be for anyone, this film has incredibly adult situations all acted out by felines. So while it looks cute, let me warn parents out there that there are some incredibly violent and disturbing images in this movie for kids.

Francis is one of those cats that takes after his owner. Seeing as how he’s the fur son of Gustav Löbel, a romance writer and archeologist, he’s inherited a detached view of the world, like a Chandler character with a tail. They’ve just moved into a new house and the first thing he finds is the body of another cat. As he explores the murder scene, he meets the one-eyed and roughed up Maine Coon cat Bluebeard, who gives him the background of the neighborhood, which is a pretty wild place, seeing as how some of the cats worship a god named Claudandus and regularly kill themselves in his name. He barely escapes them and meets up with a blind cat named Felicity, who reveals more about this group of occult kittens.

Francis next meets the elderly Pascal, who is keeping track of each murder, at which point he learns that Felicity is the latest victim. He soon learns that the neighborhood once houses a laboratory devoted to creating a wound-healing formula that was tested on stray cats, with the lone survivor being Claudandus, who murdered the scientists and freed the strays, leading to his very name being holy amongst the alley’s cats.

Now, one of the cats will reveal himself to be this legendary figure and they’ve selected Francis to be their successor. Will he accept the power or stop this cycle of murder, which has aims of pushing past humans in the evolutionary ladder and taking over the world?

Director Michael Schaack went on to make several Pippi Longstocking cartoons, while writer Martin Kluger has mainly worked in German TV. Akif Pirinçci, who wrote the original novel, also had his book Die Damalstür filmed as the 2009 Mads Mikkelsen-starring movie The Door.

With wild dream sequences, mysterious allies, a cult, graphic murders and even a sex scene, Felidae has everything that most giallo does. And unlike some films like Your Vice Is a Locked Room that only have one cat — the black badass known as Satan — nearly every character here has fur. Sadly, the English dub has never been released on a wide basis, which is something that a boutique label like Arrow, Severin or Kino Lorber should fix.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Lara Winslet (Rachel Daigh) may be an expert geologist in volcanology, but when an accident at work leads to her falling inside a hole where no one can neither see nor hear her, she’ll need more than her intelligence to survive.

This movie proves to me why I never leave our movie basement because nature is frightening. Then again, you would think that a geologist would know better. Maybe she was obsessing on the affair she’s having with Adam (Neb Chupin) or how her father Nick (James Cosmo, Braveheart, Highlander, Game of Thrones) has been the one really raising her daughter. But really, she needs to get out of that hole and away from that snake.

If you enjoy human against nature movies, this is for you. Daigh is pretty much the only actor on screen for long stretches and handles herself quite well.

Director John Real (The Beginning: Feel the Dead, Obsessio), who co-wrote this with his sister and usual writing partner Adriana Marzagalli, has set up a challenge for himself shooting nearly all in one location with one actor, something many more experienced creatives would shy away from.

Breath is now available from Uncork’d Entertainment.

José Ramón Larraz may be best known for Symptoms, Vampyres, The House That Vanished, The Coming of Sin, Black Candles, Rest In Pieces, Edge of the Axe and Deadly Manor, but he also made this giallo.

Clive Dawson (Antonio Molino Rojo) returns to India with his new bride Brenda (Mary Maude, who also is in The House That Screamed and Terror) which upsets his old lover Shaheen (Rosalba Neri, Lady Frankenstein, Amuck, The Devil’s Wedding Night, The Girl in Room 2A, 99 Women) to the point that she kills herself, but not before placing a curse on the new marriage. This being the 70s — not the 30s as the flashbacks claim — incest rears its head as Brenda and Clive’s son Rupert soon find themselves realizing that they’re young, Clive is old and that he thinks he’s being chased by his ghost ex in the form of a tiger, so they should just have rough sex.

“I’ve satisfied all your desires. You’ve taken advantage of me,” says Shaheen, but the real mystery of this movie is why would any man leave Rosalba Neri. Outside of perhaps only Edwige Fenech, no one in this genre — maybe this world in 1973 — offers such a smoldering presence that is as much frightening in its intensity as it is arousing.

Act of Revenge is all about Annabella Allori (Margie Newton, Hell of the Living Dead, The Adventures of Hercules) and how she gets revenge for her brother and mother (Francesca Guidato Berger, whose husband Helmut is also in the cast). After opening a law firm in her hometown, people start dying.

And by dying, I mean that this is one of the few giallo — it’s closer to an erotic thriller, but by 1989 obsessives will take what we can get — where the protagonist murders someone with a skillful blowjob. Also: two women make love by pouring tea all over one another, which feels like the most unsexual sapphic moment ever.

Written and directed by Ninì Grassia, Act of Revenge predates the opioid crisis by making a pharmacist the target of revenge. I’m no lawyer, but I’m unsure if Annabella’s scheme couldn’t have been better set for the boardroom than the bedroom, but then we wouldn’t have this movie.

After some time, the giallo gives way to the softcore sexual thriller, a genre that sadly seems like it’s gone away. This isn’t the best example, but at least Newton is wonderful in it.