Directed and written by Luigi Batzella (who is also the Ivan Kathansky who made The Beast In Heat, the Paul Solvay who made Nude for Satan and The Devil’s Wedding Night and the Dean Jones who made God Is My Colt .45 but Joe D’Amato made a bunch of those as well, so he at least signed for them), Blackmail is all about bad girl Babel Stone (Brigitte Skay). She’s just been busted for drugs again and her father (Umberto Raho) has to bail her out. He’s probably wondering why the Italian title translates as The Strange Blackmail of a Respectable Girl.

Babel does have an excuse. When her mother died, her dad quickly got remarried to the much younger Stella (Rosalba Neri). If she was a son, she would probably understand. I mean, I get the need to grieve but Rosalba Neri, you know? Give your dad a rest.

She decides to get back at him — and make some money — that her friends Claudio (Benjamin Lev), Rick (Claudio Giorgi) and Eva (Nuccia Cardinali) will kidnap her. This seems a bit like Delitto al circolo del tennis but you know, the giallo directors never seem to trust hippies.

The whole plan goes wrong when they decide to hide at the home of Claudio’s sister Paola (Darla Abrem) and her husband Marcel (Lorenzo Piani) and they return home early, which means that they also have to get kidnapped.

You know how people thought that John Paul Getty III kidnapped himself? This movie is based on that, except that I doubt that that real life story had attacks on maids that end with sapphic interludes and Neri getting involved to make money off everyone. If you’re a fan of Skay — she’s also in Isabella, Duchess of the Devils, A Bay of Blood, The Love Factor and Four Times That Night — you’re probably going to want to see this. Beyond showing off her body for most of the running time, she plays a really ice cold manipulator and is the whole reason why this movie is a success.

Scandal In Black was directed by Antonio Bonifacio, making his directing debut after doing second unit on several Filmirage movies including Convent of Sinners, Delizia, Top Model, Zombie 5: Killing Birds and Pomeriggio caldo. He also worked with D’Amato and this movie’s writer, Daniele Stropa, on 1994’s Sul filo del rasoio.

We start the movie with a flashback, seeing how Angela Baldwin (Mirella Banti, Tenebrae) was assaulted when she was young. Then, we follow her to an adult theater where she shows up dressed in a short red dress and ensures that she’s seen before she goes to the bathroom and emerges with her body covered with blood, the victim of another attack.

The fact that his wife has been raped at a porn theater doesn’t seem to make her husband John (Andy J. Forest) all that happy, as he’s a diplomat whose career is moving upward. He wants to get rid of her and already has a new lover, her best friend, supermodel Eva (Mary Lindstrom). Seeing as how she lives with them, this makes things convenient for John. They want to get married but don’t want a scandal, so they start calling Angela as the man who attacked her and threaten her life.

Angela has even more problems because she’s been spied on by not only her maid Rosie (Laura Piattella), but also the projectionist (Franco Citti) at the theater who had a camera installed in the bathroom. He watched her attack herself, slamming her face into the mirror and slicing in her own flesh. Man, that scene is really hard to watch as is the moment when he attacks her, which is watched by a strange doll, reminding you that this is a giallo. And that theater also has Italian adult star Marina Frajese as its ticket taker (thanks Euro Fever for spotting her) as well as a posters for Top Model, Error Fatale and…Tucker A Man and His Dream?!? They’re showing Monique Gabrielle in Emmanuelle 5 in case you’re wondering!

There’s also a wild saw attack on the man who raped Angela when she was young that really goes hard. Unlike so many of the 1980s gialli that don’t seem like they could hang with the wonderful films of the early 70s, this really does seem like it has the twists and turns to make it. Sure, it doesn’t look as good as those movies, but unlike so many of the safe 80s movies, this has no problem being sleazy. Well done.

Dark Bar is a secret place where people can do drugs and have sex together and keep it a secret. However, Elisabetta (Barbara Cupisti, who was as close as you get to a giallo queen in 1989, showing up in Stagefright, Opera and The New York Ripper, as well as Eleven Days, Eleven Nights and Cemetery Man) plans on blackmailing someone and that gets her killed. Now, her jazz trombone playing sister Anna (Marina Suma) looks into her sister’s death which puts whoever killed Elisabetta after her.

This movie breaks the mold not only by having its black gloved killer have a gun as their murder weapon but also by the discovery of Elisabetta’s body in the next stall while the janitor makes love to someone else. It’s a great shot as sex is happening feet away from a grisly corpse.

This has Richard Hatch in it, which is an American star, sure. It also has a jazz score by Carlo Siliotto (The House of the Blue Shadows) which is a lot different from other gialli. Director and writer Stelio Fiorenza only shot three shorts and this movie, as well as working as an assistant director on Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind and Play Motel. He includes some cool touches, like a high heel telephone — what is it with late 80s Italian exploitation and weird telephones? — and Cupisti’s dress that is covered in eyeballs. And the Dark Bar itself feels like an Italian director who watched a few Lynch movies and decided that it should also be punk rock and I am all for all of these things. The bad guys all wear fedoras and are the henchmen of a blind woman who listens to sea shells and the tarot for what to do next.

It’s not good but it’s interesting which is sometimes better than good. It definitely has ideas and style. Style goes a long way in a giallo especially a late 80s one. I really wish someone would gather some of these — Vinegar Syndrome, if you really want your Forgotten Gialli set to live up to its name, release this — and share them with people who don’t want to hunt them down on Russian hack sites without subtitles.

CEO Sir Ronald Selmer‘s plane has blown up in flight, which brings together the Vice Presidents of his company —  Sir Arthur Dundee (Joseph Cotten), Paul De Revere (Leonard Mann) and Sir Harold Boyd (Adolfo Celi) — to discuss who will take over the company. The company pretty much runs the world, so each of them wants to be in charge, which means that anything can happen. And by anything I mean murder.

The smart money is on Selmer’s racecar driving nephew Paul — who even has a Keane painting in his office! — but someone sends his car off a cliff which brings in another family member, Superintendent Jeff Hawks (Anthony Steel), to solve the murders — yes, many murders — at the behest of Lady Clementine (Alida Valli, Suspiria).

There’s all sorts of wild moments along the way, like Sir Harold’s wife Gloria (Janet Agren) leaving a snooty fox hunt to be the roast beef in a man man sandwich in the stables, Sir Arthur trying to seduce and kill Sir Harold with one of his ladies — Polly (Gloria Guida) — and Sir Arthur’s pacemaker being short-circuited with a magnetic murder device.

Director and writer Giuseppe Rosati has a big cast and instead of making this an upper crust Agatha Christie thriller — she does get name-dropped — remembers that he’s Italian and that this whole movie should be sleazy. Well done! He directed this movie using the name Aaron Leviathan which is the best Italian Americanized name of all time. Giuseppe Rosati also made Those Dirty Dogs, Silence the Witness and The Left Hand of the Law.

The amazing Italo-Cinema points out that while this is set in London, it’s filmed in Italy, so if you see the graveyard from Antropophagus — which is set in Greece, I feel like I’m a world traveler — and some of the buildings from Suspiria.

The killer gets away with it! Come on! How many times have you seen that in a giallo? I kind of loved this but any time I see Joseph Cotten and Adolfo Celli in a movie, much less Janet Agren and Gloria Guida, well — I’m pleased.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Joe Brezy (Joe Dallesandro making his last movie in Italy) is the kind of person that’ll escape prison, kill a man with a rock and stab an old man with a pitchfork before most of us have our second cup of coffee. Then, he asks an old man for everything that he knows about the cabin where Liliana (Patricia Behn), her sister Paola (Lorraine De Selle, House On the End of the Park) and her husband Sergio (Gianni Macchia) are having a very tense vacation.

The next day, when Sergio goes hunting and Liliana goes shopping, Joe makes his way inside and forces her to help him dig out the fireplace. As each person returns to the house, he makes them dig as well, as he’s hid money there before he got sent to jail. Oh yeah, he also reveals that Paola and Sergio are having an affair and forces them to make sweet — well, not so sweet — love in front of her.

The captives come up with a plan to escape, but Joe ends up shooting everyone but Liliana, who he wants to take away from all this madness. Instead, she shoots him and that’s our movie.

This was written by Mario Gariazzo (Play Motel, Enter the Devil, Eyes Behind the Stars) and he intended to direct it, but Fernando Di Leo — whose company Cineproduzioni Daunia 70 produced many of Gariazzo’s movies — ended up making it instead. He wasn’t happy with the finished movie, saying that in Roberto Curti’s Italian Crime Filmography that it was a “disappointing film indeed, including my toying with Lorraine De Selle’s nude scenes. It’s mediocre, but not because I did wrong – I just wasn’t interested in it.” He added, “…you don’t always have the chance to do what you want, and often you know very well you’re making a bad movie, but you do it anyways.”

As for the soundtrack, Luis Bacalov brought music he had already used for Caliber 9 and The Designated Victim.

For being someone not known for his acting, Dallesandro is pretty good in this. That’s because he’s just seducing women and being a wildman. He’s used the right way and man, De Selle is the reason this all works. It’s a one room meltdown, primal violence and wanton lust.

You can watch this on YouTube.

François Gaillard and Christophe Robin referred to this movie as “glam gore.” Perhaps you’ve seen some of their other giallo-influenced movies like Blackaria and All Murder, All Guts, All Fun. As you can also tell by the titles of these three movies, they like Danzig a lot.

A woman gets the feeling that she will be killed and faints at an art show before her assistant drives her home just in time for a woman in black with an axe lives up to her nightmare and kills her. There’s also a priceless painting of a witch who was burned at the stake hidden on the estate and another killer with a spiked gloved from Blood and Black Lace or Death Walks at Midnight murders the first killer just in time for five friends to pay a visit. While the killer hides, they wait for the host — who is now dead — to come back. They decide to have a seance, which awakens an ancient evil and we’re off to a movie that is pretty much every late 60s to early 80s Italian horror and giallo movie all thrown together as well as the rose thorn beating scene from School of the Holy Beast just in case there wasn’t enough.

This is more a remix of the filmmakers showing you every horror movie they love, along with lots of nudity and practical FX. There are a lot of people hating on this online and saying that it’s mindless, but, well, of course it is. It’s like someone passing you a mixtape of some bands they like and some of their music on the other side, so when you hear their garage band, you know where they got the riffs and inspiration, but you have to admit that you appreciate how hard they go. I mean, it ends with a witch setting a priest on fire after an hour plus of bloody murders set to synth and if you don’t enjoy that, what hope can there be?

Director and writer Ninì Grassia made around thirty movies, including Legittima Vendetta, Omicidio al Telefono, Innamorata and Gatta Ala Pari with Bruno Mattei. He also made a few movies with adult actress  Ileana “Ramba” Carusio (Gatta alla pari, Un grande amore) and the movies First Action Hero, Italian Gigolo and Provocazione fatale.

Elena Aloisi (Marisa Mell) has lost her husband and would like her son Renato (David D’Ingeo) to remain alive as well, as he’s suffering from a heart condition. She also wants him to marry Giulia (Barbara Blasko) and give her a grandchild, even if that might kill him. Or maybe not, because while he avoids sex with Giulia, he’s sleeping with Claretta (Federica Farnese) while his wife and Dr. Gianmarco Serra (Gianni Macchia) are also twirling the Dum-Dum while the medical professional should be concentrating on keeping her husband alive.

Renato’s heart gets better, so the wedding plans get more intense, all while the maid Lizzi (Emanuela Castiglionesi) catches him in bed with his other lover and ends up becoming his third conquest to stay silent. Somehow in all this, Elena dies and the wedding plans slow, all while Giulia’s brother Ernesto (Marcello Montana) forces himself on Claretta — he already did the same with another maid by the name of Elvira (Alessandra Antonelli) — which causes Renato to smash his brains out and then make love to Giulia while stabbing her with scissors. He runs to a farmhouse where he and Claretta are married and as they consummate their marriage just as he has a heart attack and perishes. She gets all of the family money and the baby that Elena wanted so badly.

As you can tell, this is just as much as erotic thriller — actually a softcore movie — as it is a giallo. The whole point of it seems to be the numerous encounters between the different characters and less the murders, but I mean, there’s a scene where our protagonist — I guess? — stabs his fiancee with both a flesh and metal knife, as they say.

Have I seen too many gialli? Probably.

Milena (Anna Maria Petrova) has been shot to death after a night in a hotel with her politician lover. Her husband Peter Doncev (Fabio Testi), who is sleeping with someone else — spoiler its his ex and the director of the show that he was in, Julia Yancheva (Florinda Bolkan) — which leads the police into an investigation. Meanwhile, his sister-in-law Tonia (Serena Grandi, The Adventures of Hercules, Graffiante desiderio) comes to help him with his paraplegic daughter Ania (Anya Pencheva). Inspector Ivan Zanova (Paul Martignetti) takes the case, which somehow ends up — more spoilers — with Ania being the killer, as well as offing her dad, and then thinking that a puppet is now her dad. She’s confined to a mental hospital and we walk away.

This was directed by Flavio Mogherini, who also made a much better giallo, The Pyjama Girl Case, and was the art director of Danger: Diabolik. It was shot by Luigi Kuveiller (Deep Red, The New York Ripper), so with those names, I expected so much. But ah, the 90s, when gialli became erotic thrillers and movies were getting made in Bulgaria instead of the Eternal City of Rome. Written by Daniele Stroppa (Delirium, Blue Angel Cafe), this has the elements of what a giallo should be but just goes through the motions. That said, Grandi is gorgeous and could have been a giallo queen two decades before.

Sweets from a Stranger has the elements of a giallo — a masked and black-gloved killer is slicing sex workers with a razor and then killing them with a bolt gun — but it’s just about how the women decide to stop taking it and empower themselves, which may not have been what audiences were looking for.

It was directed and written by Franco Ferrini (Phenomena, Nothing Underneath, Dark Glasses), who worked on the script with Andrea Giuseppini and got the idea while writing Red Rings of Fear. It’s the only movie that he ever directed.

Stella (Mara Venier) and Nadine (Athina Cenci) are a high end call girl and an older experienced prostitute who learn of the death of Bruna, a mutual friend. They organize their fellow sex workers Lena (Barbara De Rossi, Vampire In Venice) and Angela (Marina Suma) with the goal of finding out who the killer is and stopping him while the police are fumbling in the dark.

Ferrini has spent a lot of time working with Argento — as has editor Franco Fraticelli — so the film looks good. The first kill is totally Bava with a woman being killed while surrounded by sculptures of angels. In fact, it’s nearly one of the scenes from Blood and Black Lace. Thanks for noticing, Giallo Files. Steal from the best, right?

Yet it’s also a serious movie that doesn’t exploit the woman and shows the reasons why someone would sell their body, as well as the abuse and trauma that often comes with this profession. It’s an intriguing way to use the giallo form to tell a story about real life. Of course, the first two girls are simply to get you in, using the exploitative nature of the giallo trappings to whet your appetite for more mayhem and then making you consider the actual people who are often only presents as victims.

You can watch this on YouTube.