Professor Riccardo Dossi (Chris Avram) is having an affair with Benedetta (Anna Gael) — the young daughter of his best friend — and being blackmailed by his daughter Lilla (Angela McDonald) and her boyfriend — and Riccardo’s tennis coach — Sandro (Roberto Bisacco). It’s as much a crime of manners and trying to explain the rich and their issues in the late 60s as it is a giallo, but man, it looks great, the world that these people live in is gorgeous and Gael barely can keep her clothes on.

Gael was also Anna Abigail Thynn, Marchioness of Bath; Ceawlin Thynn, 8th Marquess of Bath; Viscountess Weymouth; the Dowager Marchioness; the Honorable Lady Thynn. Yes, beyond starring in movies like Therese and Isabelle, Dracula and Son and Zeta One, she met Alexander Thyn, Viscount Weymouth, in Paris in 1959. They had an affair that lasted for ten years until they were married in 1969. She was 15 when they met.

Unknown to the wealthy Riccardo, the three students want to execute — morally, that is — capitalists and weaken the system. They do it through sex, which is the weapon that no old white man can resist. Except that after he gets blackmailed at the tennis club — man, the heat of bourgeois — he takes the young girl home and balls her, only to have her overdose during the act. What’s a rich man to do? And what if she’s faking the big death, if not the little one?

Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, this was directed by Franco Rossetti, who was one of the writers of Django and also the director of Emanuelle and Joanna, an Italian softcore movie with Sherry Buchanan in the cast. This was written by Ugo Guerra, Franco Rossetti, Francesco Scardamaglia and Moravia.

The band that recorded the soundtrack, The Rage Within, get their name from the English title for the film, even if the literal translation would be Crime at the Tennis Club. Composed by Phil Chilton and Peter L. Smith, the music was made to take over the storytelling, as there are long stretches without dialogue. Quartet Records, who have re-released it on vinyl, described it as “Think of it as Zabriskie Point, but without the star power of Pink Floyd.”

Directed by Eriprando Visconti (Oedipus orca) and written by Luciano Lucignani, Fabio Mauri, Roselyne Sesboue, Lisa Morpurgo and Visconti from the book by Michele Prisco, A Spiral of Mist starts with Fabrizio (Marc Porel) killing his wife Valeria (Carole Chauvet) with a shotgun.

Maria Teresa (Claude Jade), his cousin, believes there’s no way he could do it. She hopes that her lawyer husband Marcello (Duilio Del Prete) can convince Judge Renato Marinoni (Stefano Satta Flores) that Fabrizio is innocent.

In flashback, the movie shows us the unhappy marriages of both women and how Valeria tried to set up Maria Teresa with another lawyer, Cesare Molteni (Roberto Posse). Today, Maria has a child that really was the child of her driver (Flavio Andreini) and housekeeper Armida (Anna Bonaiuto), as her husband is impotent.

The oral sex scene between Chauvet and Porel is really hard to watch because it’s unerotic and as disturbing as a sex scene can get. Supposedly, Chauvet actually was doing it for real while Porel’s wife was watching, which caused a major uproar. Or that could be IMDB BS. This movie has just as much male frontal nudity as female, which is rare for a movie from any county.

A Spiral of Mist is more about the disintegration of relationships and expectations of love than it is a giallo, but it does have some elements of the form.

Directed by Jorge Grau (Let Sleeping Corpses Lie), who co-wrote the story with Juan Tébar and based it on a story by Guy de Maupassant, Violent Bloodbath also goes by the titles Death Penalty, Night Fiend,  Penalty of Death and The Private Life of a Public Prosecutor.

Afrika is a rarely discussed giallo directed and written by Alberto Cavallone (Soffio Erotico) and one of the few where homosexuality is explored outside of a comedy character.

Professor Philippe Stone (Ivano Staccioli) is in the middle of being in love with his wife (Jane Avril) and his attraction to young men like his secretary Frank (Andrea Traglia), who he has made a part of his family. Frank even becomes a woman, but Stone ends up cutting him out of his life, which causes the now her to kill herself with the help of his sister (Kara Donati). You feel for Frank because of he/she lived a life filled with horrible moments, like being assaulted by two men and a woman when he was just a teenager. He’s just looking for love from the older European, but much like how the white man colonized Africa but really stripped it for its resources, that’s what is happening to him/her.

At the end, the police simply say, “Let’s close this squalid story as the suicide of an abandoned woman. We don’t say a word about everything else.”

Cavallone said, “It wasn’t a film that the public could like… and in fact it didn’t like it.” He also said in another interview, “I wanted to talk about Africa and homosexuality. I was interested in exploring the problem, trying to make people understand this type of relationship, which was seen at the time as a taboo relationship. And above all I was interested in making an African story in which Africa could be a backdrop to bring the characters closer together. The whites in an Africa that had now decolonized were the soldiers of General Custer.”

Finally, a word on how the movie was horrific to make: “Working in Ethiopia was a nightmare, my operator and I were put in a security cell several times. “

To make Italian male audiences not feel so weird about this confrontation with male love, there are numerous scenes of Avril nude, including her dancing with an African tribe. To remind us all this is an Italian movie, there is a scene of soldiers killing two women and real footage of cattle being slaughtered.

Years ago, Blaine Richtefield (Lorenzo Lamas) killed Diego Padilla’s (Ryan Padilla in the present, Andres F. Croci-Valdes in the past) father and mother over their farm, which was the last place he needed to own all of the land in a Texas town. He’s saved by Richtefield’s driver Silas and sent to China to be raised by Silas’ father Bingwen Hsing (Craig Ng) alongside that man’s daughter Xin Yi (Alyssa Leanne So in the present, Brylee Hsu in the past). The older man trains the boy in martial arts and tells him that Silas saved him because he reminds him of the daughter, Catherine, that he could not save.

Directed by Jose Montesinos (Five Star Murder), who co-wrote the script with Jacob David Smith, Prepare to Die has Diego sailing back to America to confront Richtefield and get revenge. He has to start fighting from the minute he’s on the boat as two men to rob him, He nearly kills one of them when one throws his mother’s necklace overboard.

Meanwhile, Richtefield and his henchman Ryan Fruitwood (Quentin “Rampage” Jackson) have an entire storage locker full of women under their control, just to show you what horrible people they are. He also has the law on his side in the form of the sheriff (Michael Madsen).

Diego comes to town and goes to a bar where he plays pool against William Freeman (Rylan Williams) which turns into a fight against two of Richtefield’s henchmen. He gets outside and even more are waiting, which causes Diego to come outside and watch. When he learns that Richtefield is involved, he saves Freeman. He loses his cool and starts choking the life out of one of them before the cops arrive. They also meet up with Bianca (Paula Rae-Taylor), who tries to steal Freeman’s truck because it has Richtefield’s name on it. That’s when it comes out that he used to be his boss. She’s been trying to find her sister, who is one of the girls kidnapped by Richtefield.

They also run into James Swiftwater (Andrew Pinon), whose land they are staying on. He makes sure that no one sneaks around Richtefield’s land. Nobody likes working for the guy but they are all forced to. Swiftwater claims that Freeman brought drugs into his community and cost his brother his life. Freeman is trying to make amends, as he lost his sister too. Everyone has made mistakes working for one bad person in the middle of it all.

Of course, it all comes down to Richtefield fighting one on one with Diego, as well as everyone getting the revenge they want. Not everyone makes it out alive which makes it weird when everyone goes and eat afterward, as if someone major in the cast didn’t just die and they didn’t just kill so many people. I mean, I’ve never had to get bloody revenge before, so perhaps it does make you hungry.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed by Guillem Morales, who wrote the story with Oriol Paulo and produced by Guillermo Del Toro, Julia’s Eyes isn’t an Italian movie made in the 60s or 70s, yet it has the giallo in its heart.

This starts with a blind woman named Sara (Belén Rueda) being haunted by an unseen presence. She decides that she has to hang herself to escape her life, but changes her mind at the last minute. As she prepares to get down, someone kicks the chair out from under her. As this happens, her twin siser Julie (also Belén Rueda) senses her death.

Sara and Julia both have the same degenerative eye disease, as Julia is slowly losing her sight. She tells her unbelieving husband Isaac (Lluís Homar) that her sister, whose eye surgery didn’t save her vision, couldn’t have killed herself.

As a giallo heroine, Julia must investigate the case herself. She meets her sister’s neighbor Soledad (Julia Gutiérrez Caba), a blind woman who tells her that everyone will leave her, including her husband, as her son Angel (Pablo Derqui) did to her. She also tells her that her sister had a boyfriend, which leads her to a hotel where a janitor named Créspulo (Joan Dalmau) tells her that men in the shadows are watching her and are tired of being ignored.

Things get worse. Isaac disappears and Créspulo is killed. When the police take Julia, whose eyesight is nearly lost, home they discover Isaac has also hung himself, leaving behind a suicide note stating that he had been in an affair with Sara. As surgeons work to repair her eyesight, Julia now must move into her dead sister’s apartment and attempt to keep her eyes bandaged for two weeks, which is how long the donor eyes will take to adjust to her body. She will have an assistant, Ivan (Dani Codina) to take care of her and ensure that she doesn’t remove her bandages.

Days before she gets to see again, someone breaks in and drugs her. She barely fights him off and learns from a neighbor’s daughter that that man was Ivan. She also says that he was the one who ruined Sara’s operation, kidnapped Isaac and forced him to write the note before killing him and has an entire room filled with photos of Julia and her sister. She tears off the bandages to find that the room that she is in is definitely filled with those photos and the young girl is dead.

Obviously, spoiler warning from here on out.

Ivan is really Angel, who killed and replaced the assistant. He believes that only blind women can love him, as they depend on him for their care. Soledad appears and shows that she is not blind, so Angel goes all Lucio Fulci and attacks her eyes with a needle. The police arrive just in time for Julia to find him in the dark, at which point he slices his own throat.

Julia’s vision lasts just long enough to come to the morgue, where they have been keeping her husband’s body, and say goodbye. The eyes that were donated to her were his, and now as teh result of Angel, no longer work.

Remade in 2022 as the Hindi movie Blurr, Julia’s Eyes has enough of the past while looking — well, you know what I mean — bravely to the now and beyond. It’s a thrilling movie and one that I hope more people watch.

You can watch Julia’s Eyes on Tubi.

Also known as Il bel mostro, A Strange Love Affair, Two Girls in My Bed and A Handsome Monster, Love Me Strangely is based on the novel Un beau monstre by Dominique Fabre. It was directed by Sergio Gobbi, who wrote the script with Dominique Fabre and André and Georges Tabet.

The antagonist for everyone in this movie is Alain Revent (Helmut Berger), a man who dominates women so horribly that when his wife can’t find something he’s hidden from her, she dives out a window. Along with another horrible man, Dino (Alain Nourey), they begin to psychological destroy his second wife,  Nathalie (Virna Lisi). By the time a police officer named Leroy (Charles Aznavour) gets involved, they’ve already driven her to anoerxia.

Helmut Berger is well-known for roles where he destroys women and with this movie and Bluebeard, Lisi gets put into the role of victim. There a line in the novel that this movie comes from, “Taking a woman without destroying her is not really possessing her,” that sums up its villain. Can the police officer save her? Does she even want to be saved? Much like The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, so many heroines of 60s and 70s European films could be saved if they just came out and admitted that they liked consensual BDSM and got on with their lives instead of constantly looking for cruel men.

La Gabbia (The Trap) is based on a story called L’Occhio, which was written by filmmaker Francesco Barilli (The Perfume of the Lady In Black, Hotel Fear), who was trying to direct the movie himself. He couldn’t get producers to pay for the film unless Shelley Winters was in the lead. He sold the idea to Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, who also made Identikit.

The screenplay was written by Concha Hombria, Roberto Leoni and Alberto Silvestri, along with Lucio Fulci, who didn’t direct as he was coming back from hepatitis.

Barilli is quoted in Troy Howarth’s Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and his Films as saying, “Lets’ talk frankly here, that movie sucks…” Fulci used profanity when asked about Griffi, who he felt stole his chance to direct this movie. He ended up directing The Devil’s Honey, which is pretty much what this movie could have been.

That said, this does have an Ennio Morricone score, so that helps.

Michael Parker (Tony Musante) is an American in Italy who is dating Hélène (Florinda Bolkan). 15 years ago, he dated Marie (Laura Antonelli), who has finally found him again. Amazingly, she’s his girlfriend’s landlady. What are the chances? He thinks they can just have a quick affair, but she won’t let him go. In fact, she puts him in a cage. And to make things even weirder, her daughter Jacqueline (Blanca Marsillach) soon falls in love with him.

When Hélène returns, she can no longer find him. She’s used to him wandering from woman to woman, but he always comes back. As for Marie, Michael once taught her the ways of love and then left. She never found a man who satisfied her in the same way and now, she refuses to even let him go to the bathroom outside of her sight. Also: Jacqueline could be his daughter.

Made in the brief time before giallo would become the erotic thriller, this has Michael being held so close to his girlfriend, finally paying for his years of seducing women and leaving them alone. Of course, I would rather have seen what Fulci had done with this movie. Or Barilli, come to think of it.

You can watch this on YouTube.