Valerio Barigozzi (played with fantastic sleazy neuroticism by Italian pop crooner turned actor Johnny Dorelli, How to Lose a Wife and Find a Lover) is a struggling giallo novelist who makes his day-to-day bread writing an agony aunt advice column under the nom de plume Countess Esmerelda for a Rome daily paper.
One afternoon, instead of the usual heartbreak missive, Valerio opens a letter that reads like a nightmare. It’s a cold-blooded confession from a serial killer detailing who is going to be killed next. When the victim turns up dead exactly as described, the paper has the scoop. Suddenly, the anonymous butcher realizes Valerio is his perfect sounding board. As more letters arrive with advance notice of upcoming slaughters, Valerio doesn’t call the police. Instead, he rides the body count straight to the top of the masthead, leveraging death into promotions, a corner office and all the perks of being a celebrity.
There’s just one problem: as the killer’s exclusive pen pal, Valerio quickly becomes the prime suspect in the eyes of Inspector Marchi (played by the legendary Renato Scarpa, whom you know as the tragic priest in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and the inspector in Suspiria).
Directed by Luigi Zampa—a veteran master of the commedia all’italiana who spent decades poking a stick at Italian political corruption and hypocrisy (The Traffic Policeman, To Sick to Care)—Monster takes the tropes of Italian thriller cinema and turns them entirely inside out. Written by Sergio Donati (the brilliant scribe behind Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown, and Maurizio Lucidi’s The Designate), the script treats the murders as secondary background noise.
In fact, you won’t get set-piece suspense or stylish J&B-soaked butcherings here; Zampa only shows us the grisly end results. The true monsters aren’t the psycho in the shadows, but the media vultures, executives, and opportunists using dead bodies to climb the corporate ladder. Despite subverting the genre, Zampa and Donati shower the film with deliberate winks to euro-cult moviegoers. In a glorious theater marquee sequence, the camera lingers on posters for Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo, Luciano Ercoli’s Death Walks on High Heels, Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Destruction Force and Luigi Batzella’s notorious The Beast in Heat.
Best of all, Ennio Morricone provides a score that completely flips expectations and weaves a brilliant, jaunty, sarcastic lounge-jazz soundscape that heightens the film’s cynical black comedy.
Monster feels uncannily prophetic. Decades before David Fincher adapted Zodiac or Robert Graysmith wrote his seminal 1986 bestseller about the real-life killer mailing cryptograms to the San Francisco Chronicle, Zampa and Donati captured the terrifying symbiosis between an attention-seeking killer and a sensationalist press all too eager to feed the flame.
The Radiance Films release of this movie has a 2K restoration from the original negative by Radiance Films. Extras include audio commentary by giallo experts Rachael Nisbet and Peter Jilmstad; interviews with stars Sydne Rome, Renato Scarpa, Enzo Santaniello and makeup artist Pierantonio Mecacci; an interview with Italian cinema expert Richard Dyer; a trailer; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow; a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Roberto Curti, author of Italian Giallo in Film and Television: A Critical History, and archival interviews with Luigi Zampa and Johnny Dorelli. This limited edition is limited to 3000 copies and comes in full-height Scanavo packaging with a removable OBI strip, leaving the packaging free of certificates and markings. You can get it from MVD.
