Submission of a Woman was directed and written by Alessandro Lucidi, who directed two comedies, La maestra di sci and Il marito in vacanza but mostly was an editor. He’s the son of Maurizio Lucidi (It Can Be Done, Amigo; The Designated Victim).

Luisa (Daniela Poggi. The Gestapo’s Last Orgy) is an actress who wants to move past the sexual roles she keeps getting hired for and instead spend more time with her husband Giorgio (Gianluca Favilla) and their child Francesca. She’s also getting calls from someone (Paolo Lorimer) who has already killed one woman and has selected Luisa for his second victim. Then, the killer attacks, easily stopping her husband before she locks herself and her baby inside the home, a place where the man who wants her dead has already cut the phone line.

This movie starts by stealing the vampire beginning of Body Double and then has a theme song that songs like “Laura’s Theme” from Twin Peaks. But for some reason, I stuck with this and while rape revenge is one of my least favorite genres, this ends up being watchable. That’s more than you can say for a lot of gialli made in the 90s.

You can watch this on YouTube.

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Colt is a much better title than the American one, The Masked Thief. It’s an Italian Western with giallo moments directed by one of my favorite scumbags Mario Bianchi using the name Frank Bronston.

Sheriff Bill Nolan (Craig Hill) is investigating a masked killer who kills with a long knife. When Toni Pickford (Agata Lys) survives being assaulted by a similar masked man and his gang of criminals, she remembers his face and claims that Bill is behind the crime. Years later, another man is killed by the gang and claims that it’s Bill. The truth? Nolan has an outlaw twin brother, Mace Casidy (also played by Craig Hill).

The giallo portions feel added at the last moment, like the POV opening and the masked killer. That said, the idea of a giallo knife maniac in the Italian West is a good one, as is the idea that people in town aren’t sure if they can trust the man who is the law any more. None of these thoughts really play out as this movie flies through 77 minutes of running time.

Bianchi would make another giallo-ish Western, Creeping Death, as well as a truly aberrant run of movies. Seriously, if you want to wallow in the darkest muck of Italian exploitation, seek out his movies like La bimba di Satana, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Nightmare In Venice and The Murder Secret before using the names Martin White, David Bird, Nicholas Moore and Tony Wanker in the adult world.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I’ve read two translations for this movie’s title, The Man In the Cat’s Eye and The Cat with a Man’s Face. Either one is great. It’s a 2009 short that has its bloody heart filled with all that is giallo along with a stated influence from David Lynch’s Lost Highway.

Directed and written by Marc Dray (who is also from France, which so much modern gialli like Blackaria and Knife+Heart have come from), I Gatto dal Viso D’uomo starts with a man named Octavien (Jean-Philippe Lafargue) stopping to pick up a female hitchhiker and from there on, everything is hard to define between what is real and what is inside his mind. There’s also a murderer by the name of Il Gatto (François Remigi) who is on the loose, breaking into the homes of lonely women and killing them.

Of course, you’ll spot how much Argento is all over this movie, as several of the murders take directly from The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red. What I liked in this is that the film is more about the mind of the killer and less a police procedural. Also, Dray understands the language and form of the giallo and doesn’t feel like he’s either making a slavish remake of the past or an art project like Amer that goes nowhere.

You can get the soundtrack to this movie by Abberline here. It’s really wonderful.

Soft Hands or The Hands of a Single Woman is about Countess Eugenia Fabiani (Marina Hedman, La bimba di Satana) and her deserted cottages overlooking a series of cliffs in Southern Italy. English writer Tom MacLaglen (Vanni Materassi) has come there looking for inspiration. He is joined by his wife Sara (Bibi Cassanelli). They’ve reached what may be the end of their marriage after he forced her to have an abortion, which causes her to no longer allow him to touch her.

This allows Eugenia to pursue Sara, leaving behind her servant Fosca (Christiana Borghi) who finds herself in the bed of the husband as well as working up a lunatic and a blind man. This is not a good idea, as Dr. Oscar (Edoardo Spada) and his two nuns run a mental hospital. Of course, one night, five of the patients — lured on by the idea that all of these sexualized women are so close after watching them on the beach — escape and attack, taking Eugenia’s hands. These men may as well be out of a horror movie.

This is one weird film. Director and writer Nello Rossati may have never made a normal picture, as he also made the comedy zombie movie  Io Zombo, Tu Zombi, Lei Zomba; the 1972 giallo La gatta in calore; the seemingly post-apocalyptic western Django Strikes Again, a Napoleon film named Bona parte di Paolina; Ursula Andress slumming it in The Sensuous Nurse; the crime movie Don’t Touch the Children!; a female revenge movie by the name of  Fuga scabrosamente pericolosa and the delirious weirdness that is Top Line. He wasn’t going to let me down here, because this is at times comedy and other times outright horror.

The title of this movie translates as The two cats o’ nine tails… and a half in Amsterdam. As you can see, this references the names of two Argento movies, Four Flies On Grey Velvet and The Cat O’Nine Tails.

Investigative reporter Ciccio (Ciccio Ingrassia) and photographer Franco (Franco Franchi) are working in advertising when they get sent to Amsterdam to look into the murder of a diamond seller. They meet an organized crime player named Big Bon (Luigi Bonos) who is arrested as soon as their plane lands. However, he told them to find Thea (Elisabeth Sennfors), a model that he knows, who can help.

None of this has anything to do with Argento or giallo once you get past the murder mystery that sets up all of the unconnected comedy scenes and the title. Well, Luciano Pigozzi is in it as a killer, but otherwise unless you have a Letterboxd list of giallo films to add to, you can probably skip this.

Director and writer Osvaldo Civirani also made The Devil Has Seven Faces among many other films throughout his long career. The comedy duo of Franco and Ciccio also show up in another of his works, Two Sons of Trinity. Speaking of those guys, they were in several films directed by Lucio Fulci (including 002 Operazione Luna, Oh! Those Most Secret Agents!, The Two Parachutists, The Long, The Short, The Cat, How We Got into Trouble with the Army, How We Robbed the Bank of Italy and How We Stole the Atomic Bomb) and Mario Bava’s Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs.

The Terror With Cross-Eyes was directed by Steno, whose sons are Enrico and Carlo Vanzina, who together kicked off a new wave of giallo in the 1980s with Nothing Underneath. In this film — written by the director with Giulio Scarnicci and Raimondo Vianello — is about Mino (Enrico Montesano), Giacinto (Alighiero Noschese) and Mirella (Isabella Biagini) staging a murder to become famous. The problem is that when they arrive at Mirella’s apartment, there’s already the dead body of her roommate Margaretha (Maria Baxa).

As they watch the police take the body away, they run, only to be pursued by Commissario Pigna (Francis Blanche). Like good giallo protagonists, they decide to investigate the murder themselves and find that there are connections to organized crime. Anyone that has come close to Margaretha is also being killed by — as the title says — a man with crossed eyes.

Italian comedy is not usually comedy for foreigners. Consider this a crime comedy then with some small hints at giallo. This was lost for some time — and according to Mark David Welsh that may be because of a controversial Manson Family joke — but now it’s online and easier to watch. Sadly, it doesn’t have much to recommend, unless you — like me — are a giallo completist.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Six years after committing a murder and getting away with it — they used to pick up strangers at bars and play sex games with them while taking pictures, but one of them accidentally dies — Lea (Marília Branco), Andrea (Roberto Bisacco) and Vanni (Daniel Sola) get a photo of them that proves they are guilty. They pay the blackmail — they’re all rich enough now — but the messages keep coming. Who is it? Is it one of the three? Old friend Carletto (Lino Capolicchio) who is back in town? So cosa hai fatto l’estate scorsa?

The English translation of this movie is Shame on you, swine! and the film really shows how empty and pointless the lives of the idle rich are. They would have hated Carletto even if they didn’t think he was the one holding their past crimes over their collective heads; he’s a left wing radical artist who hates the capitalism that has given them whatever life they sleepwalk through.

Directed by Mauro Severino, who wrote the story with Giuseppe D’Agata, this film comes before the giallo form was set by Argento. At this point, they could be anything from a Hitchcock ripoff to a movie like this that uses crime and sleaze to poke at the ways of Milan in 1969.

Based around the nursery rhyme “Giro giro tondo” (“Ring Around the Rosie”), this Ennio Morricone soundtrack makes this even better.

You can watch this on The Cave of Forgotten Films.

Years after the story in Tremors, Val McKee has moved away and married Rhonda LeBeck. Oh well — Kevin Bacon did Apollo 13 instead and Reba McEntire went on tour.

As for Earl Basset (Fred Ward), he wasted his money on an ostrich ranch. The good news — I guess — is that the monsters haven’t gone away.

A rich man named Carlos Ortega (Marcelo Tubert) is upset that Graboids are killing his men on the oil fields. He offers Earl $50,000 for monster he kills, money that interests the man picking Earle up for this mission, Grady Hoover (Christopher Gartin). He also finds out that he gets $100,000 if they captures one alive.

Along with geologist Kate Reilly (Helen Shaver) and her team of Julio (Marco Hernandez) and Pedro (José Rosario), who are studying the monsters, Earl and Grady use remote control cars with bombs to wipe out Graboids before they get overwhelmed. That’s when they call in Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) to help them wipe them all out.

Well, that seems easy until they meet a new mutation that they call Shriekers. This version of the beasts can replication without a mate when they eat food and while they can’t hear, they can sense through their infrared sensors.

Originally created to be direct to video, this kept getting delayed — for two years — because every time they played it in theaters for test screenings, it did really well. The fans wanted it to be in theaters and it finally ended up playing there — at the TCL Hollywood Theatre, the Alfred Hitchcock Theater and the National Theatre in Tokyo, Japan — before being released on video.

This was directed by S.S. Wilson, the co-creator of the franchise and inspiration for the character of Burt Gummer. He was also the narrator. He also wrote Heart and Souls, Wild Wild West and Short Circuit. He also directed Tremors 4: The Legend Begins and wrote the script with his usual writing partner Brent Maddock.

There’s a reason why they made so many of these movies. They’re fun and filled with great looking kaiju. It’s a perfect video era watch.

The Arrow Video release of Tremors 2 has a new 4K restoration from the original negative by Arrow Films, approved by director S.S. Wilson. There are two commentaries, one by director/co-writer S.S. Wilson and co-producer Nancy Roberts and the other with Jonathan Melville, author of Seeking Perfection: The Unofficial Guide to Tremors.

There are also interviews with special effects designer Peter Chesney and CG supervisor Phil Tippett. It also includes an on-set featurette, outtakes, trailers, an image gallery, an illustrated perfect bound booklet featuring new writing by Jonathan Melville on the Tremors 2 scripts that never got made, and Dave Wain & Matty Budrewicz on the history of the Universal TV sequel division, a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Frank, a small fold-out poster featuring new Shrieker X-ray art by Matt Frank and limited Edition packaging featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Frank.

You can get the blu ray from MVD and the 4K UHD from Arrow Video.