Editor’s note: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on Monday, January 20 at 8:00 p.m. at the Music Box Theater in Chicago, IL. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

Not all slashers are domestic, as we again test the “Is it Giallo or is it a slasher?” game with the Shaw Brothers-produced 1981 film Corpse Mania. It was directed by Chih-Hung Kuei, who would go on to create the strange Curse of Evil and the “I don’t have a word good enough to properly convey the level of strange” film The Boxer’s Omen.

Inspector Chang is beginning to figure out that all of the dead bodies in his area were visitors to Hong House, the brothel of one Madam Lan, and all fingers point to Mr. Li, a man who has already been jailed for defiling corpses, which really doesn’t seem like the kind of crime you get out of jail for due to good behavior. And he’s just bought one of Lan’s girls, the dying Hongmei. He pours flour and maggots all over her as she passes on, a feat that gives him a Category III boner.

Set in the 19th century, this starts with a house across from the brothel giving off the worst smell possible, leading the authorities to find a home filled with spiderwebs and a long-dead body that had been sexually used before it was murdered.

Sure, you might know who the killer is from the moment the movie starts, but give this points for his bandaged get-up, inventive stalking scenes and not shying away from the gore, including a scene where the killer gets a corpse ready for sweet lovemaking and then admires it the more it draws maggots.

From real maggots crawling all over its actresses and astounding blasts of blood to a dummy thrown off a roof that’s so fake that Lucio Fulci would stand up and laugh out loud, this movie has it all. Its fog and mood suggest a Hong Kong version of Blood and Black Lace with Bava taking a break from all the sexualized violence to deliver a kung fu sequence and an underwater throat slashing that reaches out for a gory glamour. As they said of his seminal Giallo, a pornography of violence.

After The Driller Killer and Ms .45, Abel Ferrara made this another New York City end-of-the-century trip into sleaze and death. He was joined by regular writer Nicholas St. John, who was fine doing the script for 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy but couldn’t deal with Bad Lieutenant.

Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger) and Nicky Parzeno (Jack Scalia) have a good thing going, getting their exotic dancers — Maria Conchita Alonso is one of them — booked into the best men’s clubs in the Big Apple. Matt used to be a boxer and was in love with one of the girls, Loretta (Melanie Griffith), but then he beat a man to death and became a shell of who he once was, and she found herself seeking solace between the shapely thighs of Leika (Rae Dawn Chong).

Someone starts targeting their girls, like Honey (Ola Ray, Michael Jackson’s girlfriend in the “Thriller” video), who is beaten and torn apart by someone. Detective Al Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams) isn’t much help, as he looks down on Rossi, Parzeno, and their girls. Leila is attacked and hospitalized, which lets Rossi get back with Loretta.

Unlike many Giallo, we see Pazzo (John Foster), the killer, early and know who he is throughout. He’s a young kid obsessed with martial arts. His attacks have ruined the dancing business, and once Leila dies, Loretta starts taking every drug she can, dying inside. Then, the killer attacks Ruby (Janet Julian) and Parzeno, as well as cutting the head off one of the girls with a sword.

Rossi turns to Carmine (Rossano Brazzi, Count Frankenstein from Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks), a crime boss who he has an accord with. He tells him that the only way to stop this is to murder the killer and get this over with. That’s simple, as the knife-wielding maniac is already stabbing Loretta, who was looking to score. Rossi remembers his days in the ring and punches the man’s face into putty, killing him. The cops seem happy about it, but that’s life in Fear City.

How Giallo is this? Well, the credits thank J & B Distillery.

Fear City was originally to be a 20th Century Fox movie, but because it contained so much sex and violence, they sold it to Aquarius Releasing—or Chevy Chase Distribution—the people who brought you Dr. Butcher, M.D. and 7 Doors of Death, which was The Beyond with edits.

Don Nakaya Neilsen is in the cast as a boxer. Trained by Benny “The Jet” Urquidez and Tom Stone—the man who cucked Elvis and wrote Enter the Ninja—he was a kickboxer who eventually became a pro wrestler in New Japan Pro Wrestling and did an MMA match with Ken Shamrock that was quite influential in Japan. He also got chiropractic treatments legalized in Thailand, so he lived a pretty eventful life before dying young at 58.

You can watch this on Tubi.

In the pre-internet, non-binging world of cable and video stores, the erotic thriller — more than even adult videos — was the acceptable dirty secret, whether consumed via Cinemax After Dark, the Playboy Channel or by renting videos out in the open with a piece of tape and a marker written message saying, “Must be 18 to rent.”

Yet today, the erotic thriller is nearly forgotten, replaced by Lifetime movies and more chaste streaming murder mysteries. The 80s and 90s were filled with these movies, and as someone who grew up in that era, I know people would furtively whisper their titles between classes. Night Eyes. Body Chemistry. Red Show Diaries.

This is nearly three hours long, but at no point was I bored. In fact, it could have been twice that length, and I’d have loved it even more. The film moves from film noir into the American films that started the trend of these films, such as Dressed to Kill and Body Heat, as well as Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction, all the Hollywood versions of these films that while controversial, had the gloss of being studio production. The joy of this film is it gets into the companies that made the authentic erotic thrillers and the filmmakers and actors who created them. People like Fred Olen Ray, Jim Wynorski and Andrews Stevens, as well as Monique Parent, Amy Lindsay and Nancy O’Brien.

Maybe it’s the fact that this is thirty years past when I’d watch these in between channels or on dubbed VHS tapes that were passed from friend to friend, but I felt like I was meeting old friends again. If you have the slightest interest in the genre, it’s definitely worth a watch. The scene where the multiple titles of the films and how it’s hard to keep track? I felt myself in that moment.

My only quibbles: Yes, noir is where so many of these movies get their start. Certainly Body Double. Yet so much of the erotic thriller genre owes itself to Giallo, mainly because so many of the old guard — Martino especially — returned to make erotic thrillers in the 80s and 90s. While I know this couldn’t be five hours long, if I could lobby for a sequel, the fact that Gregory Dark’s films weren’t mentioned is an oversight that demands to be corrected.

You can buy this from Yellow Veil Pictures on Vinegar Syndrome.

Check out the Letterboxd list of the movies covered in We Kill for Love.

Editor’s note: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on Monday, January 27 at 7:30 p.m. at the Music Box Theater in Chicago, IL (tickets here). It will also be playing at 5 p.m. at Tenth Ave. Arts Ctr. in San Diego, CA (tickets here) with All the Colors of the Dark and Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

Has a movie ever had a better title? Nope. Sergio Martino’s fourth entry into the giallo genre, following The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail and the previously reviewed All the Colors of the Dark, refers to the note that the killer leaves for Edwige Fenech’s character in Mrs. Wardh. And the title is way better than this film’s alternate titles — Gently Before She Dies, Eye of the Black Cat and Excite Me!

Martino wastes no time at all getting into the crazy in this one — Oliviero Rouvigny (Luigi Pistilli from A Bay of Blood, Iguana with the Tongue of Fire, Death Rides a Horse) is a dark, sinister man, a failed writer and alcoholic who lives in a mansion that’s falling apart (If this all feels like a modernized version of a Poe story like The Fall of the House of Usher, it’s no accident. There’s even an acknowledgment that the film is inspired by The Black Cat in the opening credits.). His wife, Irina (Anita Strindberg from A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Who Saw Her Die?), suffers his abuses, but never more so than when he gathers hippies together for confrontational parties. He makes everyone pour all of their wine into a bowl and forces her to drink it, then humiliates their black servant Brenda until one of the partygoers starts singing, and everyone joins in, then gets naked. This scene is beyond strange and must be experienced. Luckily, I found the link for you, but trust me — it’s NSFW.

The only person Oliviero seems to love is Satan, the cat that belonged to his dead mother. Satan is a black cat who talks throughout every scene. His constant meows led to my cats communicating with the TV. God only knows what a 1970s Giallo cat said, but his words seemed to speak directly to their hearts.

One of Oliviero’s mistresses is found dead near the house, but he hides her body. The police suspect him, as does his wife. Adding to the tension is the fact that Irina hates Satan, who only seems to care about messing with her beloved birds.

Remember that servant? Well, she’s dead now, but not before she walks around half-naked in Oliviero’s mother’s dress while he watches from the other room. She barely makes it to Irina’s room before she collapses, covered in blood. Blood that Satan the cat has no problem walking through! He refuses to call the police, as he doesn’t want any more suspicion. He asks his wife to help him get rid of the body.

Oliviero’s niece Floriana (Edwige Fenech, pretty much the queen of the Giallo) is in town for a visit, learning how Oliviero hasn’t been able to write one sentence over and over again for three years, stuck in writer’s block (and predating The Shining by five years in book form and eight years away from Kubrick’s film). Unlike everyone else who tolerates Oliviero’s behavior or ignores it, Floriana sees right through the bullshit. The writer is used to seducing every woman he meets, and she initially rebuffs him, even asking if it’s true that Oliviero used to sleep with his mother. He angrily asks if it’s true that she’s a two-bit whore. “Those would be two bits worth spending,” is her caustic reply.

Irina confides all of her pain to Floriana as the two become lovers. And another girl gets murdered — perhaps by Oliviero. Then, a dirt bike racer comes to drop off milk and hit on Floriana. I wondered when this film would get hard to follow and start piling on the red herrings!

After being questioned by the police, Oliviero comes home to choke his wife. He stops at the last second…, and then we’re off to the races! The motorbike races! The milkman loses when his bike breaks down, but he’s the real winner — taking Floriana back to the abandoned house that he lives in. And oh, look — creepy Oliviero is watching the action.

Meanwhile, Satan got into the coop and chowed down on several birds. Irina catches him, and they have quite the battle. He scratches her numerous times before she stabs him in the eye with a pair of scissors. An old woman watches and is chased away by Irina’s yelling.

She’s afraid that her husband will kill her once he learns that she killed Satan. And Oliviero keeps wondering where the cat is, especially after he buys the cat his favorite meal from the store — sheep eyes. That said — Satan might not be so dead, as we can hear his screaming and see him with a missing eye.

Floriana puts on Oliviero’s mother’s dress, asking if this is what the maid looked like before she died. Whether it’s the dress the forbidden family loves or just her beauty, he rips off her dress — at her urging, mind you — and begins making love to his niece. We cut to Idrina, caressing her pet birds, when Oliviero confronts her with scissors and questions about Satan. He almost stabs her before he ends up raping her inside the coop while Floriana looks on. She plays them off the other, even telling Idrina that she’s slept with her husband. She also tells her that Oliviero wants to kill her, so she should kill him first.

Idrina wakes up to the sound of Satan but can’t find him anywhere. She finds her husband in bed with Floriana, who is belittling him. With every sinister meow, there’s a zoom of the cat’s damaged eye. Finally, Oliviero attacks her for spying on him, slapping her around before he leaves to write. She walks the grounds of the mansion, seeing the motorcycle rider make a date with Floriana and catching sight of Satan, who runs from her. In the basement, she finds scissors and the hidden bodies of her husband’s lover and the murdered maid. In a moment of clarity — or madness — she stabs her husband while he sleeps. The sequence is breathtaking — a Giallo POV shot of the murder weapon intercut with the same sentence being typed over and over, interspersed with all of the abuses that Oliviero had wrought upon her. She stabs again and again before Floriana interrupts, asking her if it is easy. The sentence that the author had written again and again was him claiming that he would kill her and there was a space in the wall for her, so obviously, she had to kill him.

As for Floriana, all she wanted was the family jewels hidden in the house. They seal Oliviero’s corpse within the wall while Walter watches from afar. He’s played by Ivan Rassimov, who does creeping staring dudes better than anyone else — witness his work in All the Colors of the Dark. And it turns out that he’s the real killer! He’s been typing “vendetta” over and over again. Floriana asks if Idrina is planning to kill her before she runs off into the night, and then Walter appears to kiss Idrina. They were all working together — she told him where to find Floriana the following day. Holy shit — Idrina reveals her whole plot, revealing how she drove her husband crazy, making him believe that he could have been a murderer! She wishes that there was an afterlife, so Oliviero’s mother — who she killed! — could tell him how great her revenge was. She ends by hoping that her husband is still alive so that he can suffer for eternity.

Walter sets up an accident that takes out Floriana and her boyfriend as their motorcycle crashes, sending blood across the white heart of a billboard and out of her lips. He tosses a match on the gasoline-soaked highway, burning both of their corpses. He collects the jewelry and gives it to Idrina, who responds by shoving him off a cliff!

When she returns to the mansion, the police are there, as they are alerted to her stabbing Satan by the old woman. They come inside the house to write a statement but hear the sound of Satan’s meows. Following the sound, they find him inside a wall — with the corpse of her husband!

Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is superb. An intriguing story — only a few derailing giallo moments (like the killing of the girl in the room with the dolls and the B roll motocross scenes) — with great acting, eye-catching camerawork and some genuine surprises, it’s well worth seeking out and savoring.

Indian-American director Jag Mundhra was born into a conservative family where films were discouraged. He was a good enough engineering student to earn his master’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan but switched to a PhD program in filmmaking.

While his early and later movies were socially conscious, he’s probably best known for his erotic thrillers—he directed Night Eyes, so he can claim to be influential—such as Legal Tender and Tales of The Kama Sutra: The Perfumed Garden and horror movies like Hack-O-Lantern.

More than twenty years ago, Cindy watched as real estate agent Jason Laurence (Matt Roe, Puppet Master) threw her mother to her death. And wow, her mother was an exploitation actress, with a poster in her house that seems to be created from Vampire Circus.

Shannon Tweed’s character, Cindy, embarks on a revenge scheme that begins with involving Paul (William Katt) in a check-cashing crime caper. This involvement transforms Paul from a young idealistic businessman into a cynical crook. The question arises: if you had the chance to aid 1991 Shannon Tweed, much less bed her, wouldn’t you?

Throw in a solid supporting cast—Joseph Campanella, Stella Stevens, Karen Elise Baldwin—and plenty of saxophone, shake it up and add way better cinematography by James Mathers (Night Eyes 3, Syngenor, Silent Night, Deadly Night 5), and you get a movie that shows that the origins of the erotic thriller genre weren’t always quickly made tossable efforts.

What takes this beyond the norm is the scene where Tweed does a striptease wearing a black lace bodysuit, contorts in front of a yarn spiderweb, and stabbing a teddy bear while screaming, “Mommy!” That may have just been words on the page of Steven Iyama’s script, but Tweed transforms a simple turn of phrase into a memorable set piece that helps this transcend normalcy.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this on Monday, Jan. 20 at 7:00 p.m. at Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles, CA (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void. 

Umberto Lenzi, come on down! We’re eager for you to shock us, titillate us, and perhaps even thrill us a bit. Oh, and you’ve brought Carroll Baker with you! Please, show us the tale you’ve crafted!

Released in Italy as Orgasmo, this was released as one of the first X-rated movies in the U.S., which was definitely played up in all of the ads especially because it had Baker in the movie. She had left America a single mother with two children and her prospects weren’t great in Hollywood. In Italy, despite making movies that she said “What they think is wonderful is not what we might,” she found a career. Later, she would admit that it showed her an entirely different world and brought her back to feeling alive again.

What’s confusing is that Lenzi’s next movie was released as Paranoia in Italy and A Quiet Place to Kill in America.

I love this interview that she did with Tank Magazine, answering if she ever did any avant-garde projects: “Some of the films in Europe, of course, but a lot of them I haven’t even seen. The one I’m curious about is called Baba Yaga; it was a really far out, wild, cartoonish sort of thing. I play the title character, a 1,500-year-old witch, and all my sisters were witches, too. I didn’t have to be completely naked, but in every Italian film, there was a scene where you had to show your breasts. Usually, I was talking on the telephone or reading a book. One day they announced a nude scene – I couldn’t believe it. But the make-up artist and hairdresser were already there, dying the other girls’ pubic hair to match the hair on their heads.”

In this story, Kathryn West (played by Baker) is a glamorous American widow who moves to Italy just weeks after her wealthy older husband’s death. She settles into a huge villa, but her life feels lonely and boring until Peter enters the picture. His free-spirited nature shakes her out of her rut, and soon he moves in with his sister, Eva. However, things aren’t what they seem—they are not actually siblings, and their relationship evolves into a complicated love triangle. When Kathryn tries to break free from this arrangement, Peter and Eva keep her prisoner, constantly keeping her under the influence of drugs and alcohol while playing the same haunting song on repeat, driving her to the brink of insanity and suicidal thoughts. That’s what happens when you get gaslit and everyone is feeding you pills. Don’t worry — everyone pays for their sins by the end.

Caroll Baker started off as a Hollywood sex symbol before retreating to Europe where she’d make Baba Yaga, So Sweet… So Perverse and The Sweet Body of Deborah, amongst others. Eventually, she’d move back to America and become a mature actress. As for Lenzi, he’d go on to make Eaten Alive, Cannibal Ferox, Nightmare City and more.

If you appreciate melodramatic twists, layered narratives, and visually striking sex scenes, then it’s time to indulge in this film. You can find it as part of The Complete Lenzi/Baker Giallo Collection set from Severin, which also has So Sweet…So Peverse, A Quiet Place to Kill and Knife of Ice.

Also known as Thy Neighbour’s Wife, Sex Attraction and Poison, this stars Kari Wuhrer, who from 1988-1989 was the it girl on MTV’s Remote Control (but not the first or the last; the show has Marisol Massey in season 1, Wuhrer was replaced by Alicia Coppola and the last episodes had Susan Ashley in the role). By 1999, she’d been on the Swamp Thing TV show and appeared in several horror movies. By the time she was added to the cast of Sliders and had an album on Rick Rubin’s American Records, Shiny, she was at the top of the world.

This led to a disaster of an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s first talk show. It started when she insulted comedian Stephen Wright, and it only got worse from there.

She’s still acting — doing voice work often — but she never achieved those heights of the late 90s again, where man’s magazines like FHM and Maxim — remember those? — fawned over her. And hey, she’s in many of my favorite movies of that era, like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time. But after that? The Prophecy sequels, the Hitcher sequels, movies where she fights spiders and erotic thrillers.

Yes, back in 2000, this was a viable career path. If you had the internet, you had dial-up. Cable and video store softcore was still a thing.

Wuhrer is Ann Stewart, whose husband, Chris (Larry Poindexter), has burned out at work. When he doesn’t get the promotion he feels he is owed, well, he kills himself. Am I supposed to be like the kids and say he unlived himself? And this is after she slept with an old man named Ian McMillan (Michael Cavanaugh) just to ensure that he finally made a sale!

After her husband drives his car off the road to Deathsville, she becomes Anna Johnson and takes over as the live-in au pair for Nicole Garrett (Barbara Crampton), the woman who took her husband’s promotion. Will she turn daughter Darla (Melissa Stone) against her mother? Well, that’s already been done, but yes, she does. She also scuffs her knees in the laundry room pleasuring teen son David (Seth Adam Jones) and has her sights set on husband Scott (Jeff Trachta). Yes, if she has to sleep with every member of the family to get revenge, she will. After all, she had already killed the big boss, Mr. Slider (John Henry Richardson).

Even the way that she got this job comes from revenge. Ann wanted to kill Nicole and accidentally murdered their housekeeper, Karina (Peggy Trentini). This creates a job opening and a way for her to get close to her enemy, who doesn’t even know she is one.

Jay Andrews directed this, but come on, that’s Jim Wynorski, the same as co-writer Noble Henry. He’s joined by writers Sean O’Bannon (Mom’s Outta Site and Mom, Can I Keep Her?) and Al Sophianopoulos, who also write Interlocked: Thrilled to Death. I could be convinced that he’s also Wynorski. Just like the Giallo that inspired these erotic thrillers, they have filmmakers who have plenty of other names and come in so many titles.

And that’s why I already reviewed this as Thy Neighbor’s Wife. 

However, I am not sad. Why wouldn’t I want to watch Kari Wuhrer and Barbara Crampton fight one another one more time? Isn’t that one of life’s simplest pleasures?

Maybe Ann/Anna did Nicole a favor. The last housekeeper, Karina, was about to bone out Scott. Perhaps these two women are close to being one another, and it will take a near-death experience to finally understand her daughter, who is a vacuous cipher of a character.

This is the movie your grandmother would have bought you for Christmas if you asked for The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. She would say, “I don’t know all those erotic thrillers you kids are into today.”

You can watch this on Tubi.