April 26: American Giallo — Make the case for a movie that you believe is an American giallo.

This Italian/German/American — yes, I am cheating on the American Giallo theme — giallo comes from some of the same people who made 5 Dead On A Crimson Canvas. Shot in Florence, Italy, it concentrates on Roberta Parenti (Yassmin Pucci), who was once an artist but has now settled into being a politician’s wife and, if you’ve seen enough giallo, you know what that means. She’s exploring her sexuality after being assaulted in the past. Her husband forbids her from being an artist, which leads her into the clutches of a man killing the most beautiful women in the city. And he’s wearing the mask of a man within her artwork.

Directed by Giovanni Pianigiani, who wrote the story with Bruno Di Marcello, you may notice that unlike nearly every other giallo you’ve seen this isn’t dubbed and everyone is speaking English. Dubbing is something that throws off people not used to Italian movies. A lack of dubbing conversely threw me off.

But you know what made this work for me? Joe Zaso shows up and not just to be a producer. He plays Derek, a detective with an incredibly keen sense of smell to make up for his blindness. That’s the kind of character that can only exist within this genre and it’s absolutely great, as is the music by Marco Werba.

While this doesn’t push itself to have the Argento camera angles and Bava colors of so many modern giallo that try and tackle the look, if not the story and experience of 1970s yellow postered psychosexual murder movies, this gets the lunatic feel of those films right.

Also: I love that so many reviews are like, “This has some really gratuitous sex scenes.”

Tell me you’ve only told people you’ve watched giallo without telling me.

April 26: American Giallo — Make the case for a movie that you believe is an American giallo.

Jade was not destined to succeed.

David Caruso had left NYPD Blue after the second season of the show because he wanted a film career. Critics and the media were ready to attack him for that hubris, especially after his first post-TV film, Kiss of Death, also bombed.

Linda Fiorentino had a huge success in The Last Seduction and didn’t want to play a similar role, but ended up making the film.

After making $3 million for Basic Instinct, Joe Eszterhas was due for a fall, which was either going to be this movie, Sliver, Showgirls or all three. He got $1.5 million for this (and a total of $4 million for his next movie One Night Stand). The script changed so much that he threatened to take his name off the film.

William Friedkin was struggling as well with his last two movies being the tree demoness movie The Guardian and Blue Chips. He would say of this movie, in his book The Friedkin Connection, that it had “a terrific cast. A wonderful script. Great locations. How could it miss?” He’d add that Jade “contained some of my best work. I felt I had let down the actors, the studio, and most of all, Sherry. I went into a deep funk. Was it the Exorcist curse, as many have suggested, a poor choice of material, or simply that whatever talent I had was ephemeral? Maybe all of the above.”

Caruso is Assistant District Attorney David Corelli visits the murder scene of Kyle Medford, a wealthy businessman who set up several wealthy and powerful men like Governor Lew Edwards (Richard Crenna) with gorgeous women, including Patrice Jacinto (Angie Everhart). Corelli is told by Edwards and his henchman Bill Barret (Holt McCallany, who most people know from being on Mindhunter, but come on, he got laid and paid as Sam Whitemoon in Creepshow 2) to never let this info out; seeing as how his brakes are soon cut, that’s to be considered a warning.

The seductress who gets the most requests goes by the name of Jade. Seeing as how Anna Katrina Maxwell-Gavin’s (Fiorentino) prints show up on the ancient hatchet — yes, that kind of murder weapon points to this being a giallo — that killed Medford, so it seems like perhaps she could be Jade. She once dated Corelli before marrying his fellow DA Matt Gavin (Chazz Palminteri). Medford’s safe is filled with sex toys, drugs and video tapes and, oh yeah, bags filled with pubes. But back to those video tapes. Anna Katrina is on one of them.

It also seems like she may have killed Patrice, but her husband cuts the interrogation short. Why would she be on those tapes? Well, didn’t he have his own affairs? Of course, the governor sends his men, which also includes bad cops Bob Hargrove (Michael Biehn) and Pat Callendar (David Hunt), to kill Allison, who gets saved by Corelli — who was nearly seduced by her — and Gavin — who wanted to kill Corelli for perhaps sleeping with his wife. But all along, it had been Gavin who killed Medford to keep the secrets he and his wife keep, telling her to introduce him to Jade the next time they make love.

Biehn would say of the film. “”Well, on Jade, I had no idea what I was doing. I don’t think anybody had any idea what they were doing. It was a Joe Eszterhas script. To me, none of it ever really made any sense. I didn’t realize until the read-through that I was the bad guy in it. It was like a jumbled mess. And the movie came out a mess, too. It had great people on it, though. So a great cast, great director… everything but a script.”

Then again, how many giallo make no sense at all?

But this has an incredible car chase, murder set pieces straight out of Italy, lush production values, a gorgeous heroine/antagonist/who knows in Fiorentino and they threw a lot of money at this movie to make something that Sergio Martino did for about a tenth of the cost. I love it!

In his book Hollywood Animal, Eszterhas said, “”In the week after he was found not guilty and got out of jail, O.J. Simpson went to see two movies. Showgirls and Jade.”

That says something, right?

April 26: American Giallo — Make the case for a movie that you believe is an American giallo.

“Erotic mystery thriller.”

That’s 1994 for giallo.

Dr. Bill Capa (Bruce Willis) is color blind after an unstable patient named Michelle (Kathleen Wilhoite) jumps from his window and explodes on the street below, her bright green dress covered in deep red blood. This is a total giallo moment that can only happen in one of these movies but I love this movie for that. That and the fact that this movie starts with her literally sucking off a handgun. What kind of therapy session is that?

His friend Dr. Bob Moore (Scott Bakula) invites him to Los Angeles and to sit in on his group therapy sessions. But in a few days, Bob is dead and Bill is at the center of trying to find out why, all while cajoled by Lt. Hector Martinez (Ruben Blades). Martinez thinks that everyone could be the killer in that group, even Dr. Bill. And what a group of suspects he’s looking at.

There’s OCD-suffering lawyer Clark (Brad Dourif); suicidal ex-cop Buck (Lance Henriksen); Sondra (Lesley Ann Warren), who wants to sleep with everyone or steal from them; BDSM painter Casey (Kevin J. O’Connor) and Richie, who is a teenager drug addict with gender dysphoria. There’s also a reason why I’m not telling you who plays Richie, because it gives away the entire film.

What’s amazing is that it turns out that everyone in the group — including Dr. Bill — ends up involved with the same woman, Rose (Jane March). And her brother Dale (Andrew Lowery) has messed with her head to the point that she’s not even sure who she is any longer and oh yeah, they used to have a brother named Richie who killed himself after being sexually abused by his psychologist.

Director Richard Rush hadn’t directed a movie since 1980’s The Stunt Man. Despite a past making Hells Angels On Wheels, Freebie and the Bean, Thunder Alley and Psych-Out — and being paid to walk away from his last project Air America — Rush couldn’t get producer Andrew Vajna to agree with his vision for the film. They went to war in the press, with Variety on the side of Rush, The Los Angeles Times on the side of Vajna and the Director’s Guild trying to fix things. It took Rush having a massive heart attack before everyone calmed down.

The sex scenes in this movie are, well, volcanic. So much so that MAXIM Magazine — remember that? — picked one as the best sex scene ever. What’s wild is that Carmine Zozzora, who was Bruce Willis’ best friend and associate producer on the film, ended up dating and marrying her during the pre-production of this movie. Well, once filming started, you can imagine how he started to react to the making of those scenes. In the end, Rush kept his Best Sex Scene from MAXIM in his bathroom. He reportedly loved that thing.

Someone goes through a glass door as if they’re in an Argento movie, the group therapy session feels right out of Schizoid minus the wild eyes of Kinski and the sex scene lasts so long that they take a break to eat a steak and salad that Rose cooked naked (I mean, have you ever?) and then have sex again and hey, there’s Bruce Willis’ penis in the pool.

In 1994, people spent lots of money to make movies like this, absolute messes of movies that may not always work, but wow, they’re so vibrant and full of memorable moments even if flawed that we’d never see on screens today.

April 26: American Giallo — Make the case for a movie that you believe is an American giallo.

Neo-noir. Hitchcock influenced. Mystery thriller.

Or just call it a giallo.

Blow Out is even based on an Italian film — Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup — but switches photography for audio recording and trades future giallo star David Hemmings for John Travolta, a man who follows the path of many a giallo hero. Once he believes that he has recorded the sounds of a killing, he must become a detective as his need to know is too much.

In post-production on the low-budget slasher film Co-ed Frenzy, sound technician Jack Terry (Travolta) is searching for better wind effects and the perfect scream. As he takes his equipment into a park late at night, he watches a car fly off the road and with no hesitation, dives into the water to save Sally Bedina (Nancy Allen). As he sits with her in the hospital, he asks her to get a drink and is asked by associates of the man killed in the car — Presidential candidate Governor George McRyan — to get her out of the hospital.

Sally has used her feminine wiles to ruin men before, working with Manny Karp (Dennis Franz), a man who just so happened to film the accident. Jack wants Sally to work with him to solve the murder, but he’s blinded to her because, well, she’s gorgeous and he’s the hero, a man who left behind a government commission to stop police corruption after an exposed wire caused the death of an undercover cop named Freddie Corso.

This is the kind of conspiracy where you think there is one because there is one. Sally and Karp were just pawns in the schemes of  Burke (John Lithgow), who wanted to go beyond just getting photos of the politician with a sex worker and blew out his tire with a bullet. But now that he’s ruined that, he has to clear up loose ends and is killing any hooker who looks like Sally as the Liberty Bell Strangler.

He eventually lures Sally to meet him and we learn that Jack is the hero, but not a perfect one. He’s able to stop Burke but not before Sally dies. All he has left of her is her final scream, recorded as he tried to find her, and that’s what lives forever, or as long as Co-Ed Frenzy plays grindhouses. He covers his ears because he’s reduced someone he grew close to into just another piece of sound in just another movie.

I literally yelled at the screen.

Working again with Travolta and Allen, De Palma also gathered others he’d made movies with before. In this, he is different than Argento — an artist I often compare him to, as they have so many similarities such as the same age, following Hitchcock, marrying and divorcing their leading lady, having a middle-age career decline — who seemingly switched up crews between films. Here he’s working with De Palma filled the film’s cast and crew with a number of his frequent collaborators: Dennis Franz (Dressed to Kill, Body Double), John Lithgow (who was in the Tenebre ripoff shot in Raising Cain) cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond (Obsession) and Lazlo Kovacs (who came in when the parade scene footage was lost), composer Pino Donaggio (who also scored modern giallo Nothing Underneath) and editor Paul Hirsch (who worked on another giallo-tinged De Palma film, Sisters).

Pauline Kael said that this movie was one “where genre is transcended and what we’re moved by is an artist’s vision…it’s a great movie. Travolta and Allen are radiant performers.” Roger Ebert said that it was “inhabited by a real cinematic intelligence.” It sits with Rio Bravo and Taxi Driver as Tarantino’s top three movies. And yet it failed with the public. Today, however, it’s seen in a much warmer light.

The opening where Travolta wanders out of the recording studio and into the film office is a joy, as you can see posters for Island of the Damned (one of the American titles for Who Can Kill a Child?), Fantasex, The Food of the Gods, Squirm, Empire of the Ants, The Other Side of Julie, The Incredible Melting Man, Blood Beach, Without Warning and The Boogey Man.

I have no idea why I waited so long to watch this movie. It’s perfect — a film about making films, a movie where movies don’t play out like movies and a thrilling exploration of how De Palma can guide you through a film and into places you had no idea you would go.

April 25: Bava Forever — Bava died on this day 43 years ago. Let’s watch his movies.

According to camera operator Marcello Gatti, Henry Levin (That Man Bolt, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die) directed 80% of this movie, while Mario Bava did the second unit direction and supervised the special effects. Because Bava was also in charge of post-production and dubbing in Italy, Italian and French prints have the credit “A film by Henry Levin, directed by Mario Bava” while English language prints only credit Levin with direction.

The making of this movie was not without incident.

Star Donald O’Connor suffered a blood hemorrhage on his throat and had to be rushed to hospital at one point. He also was joined by director Levin and writer Henry Motofsky in crossing the Tunisian border into Algeria while scouting locations and being arrested for three hours. But the worst incident — according to the commentary track from Tim Lucas on the Kino Lorber blu ray — was that the use of a mosque as a shooting location caused a violent revolt which led to five deaths and the killing of a security guard at the American embassy that was cleared the location. Bava had literally spears pointed at his head and said that it was the most frightening moment of his life.

In the middle of all that insanity, this movie was made at the same time as two Steve Reeves films: Morgan, the Pirate and The Thief of Baghdad. The same crew — producer Joseph E. Levine, set designer Flavio Mogherini, cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli and Bava on effects — worked on all of the movies one after another.

The script is credited to Luther Davis (The Old Man Who Cried Wolf) from a story by Stefano Strucchi and Duccio Tessari, who was three years away from writing A Fistful of Dollars. The adaptation is credited to Silvano Reina, Pierre Véry and Franco Prosperi, who one day would make The Last House on the Beach, The Throne of Fire, The Green Inferno and White Cannibal Queen. He also wrote another film for Bava, Hercules In the Haunted World. He also did second unit directing for that movie, as well as Bava’s Erik the Conquerer and The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

Based on Antoine Galland’s adapted version of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, this film combines the feel of peplum with the tales of Arabian adventure. Aladdin must go up against the Grand Vizier (Fausto Tozzi) with the help of a genie (Vittorio De Sica, who would go on to direct films of his own such as Marriage Italian Style, Woman Times Seven, a sex comedy anthology starring Shirley MacLaine, and a segment in Le streghe). There’s also Prince Moluk in this, played by Mario Girotti. Six years later, you’d start to know him much better by his Americanized stage name, Terrence Hill.

While the actual movie is pretty simple and not all that exciting, the effects and ability to stretch the budget that Bava always showed are reasons enough to see this movie.

April 25: Bava Forever — Bava died on this day 43 years ago. Let’s watch his movies.

Often, we put Italian genre directors into buckets. Fulci was only the godfather of gore, which ignores his contributions to giallo, westerns and decades of comedy films in favor of the last fifteen years of his life. Similarly, Bava is often thought of for his contributtons to horror film when the truth is he did everything from peplum and Eurospy films to crime and science fiction movies.

By 1971, Bava had been through his successful mid 60s run of having American-International Pictures bring his movies to America, as well as his attempt at making a western, Roy Colt & Winchester Jack, and was a year from pretty much kickstarting so many of the themes of the slasher in A Bay of Blood and then having a small career resurgenace and reaching America again with Baron Blood.

Bava had a lack of confidence and when that was combined with his shyness, he rarely took advantage of opportunities which would have made his name more internationally known, including working in Hollywood. In interviews — which appear in Troy Howarth’s The Haunted World of Mario Bava — he comes across as pretty rough on himself, saying things like “I accept anything they give to me. I am too willing to accomodate any difficulty. This is not the way one creates masterpieces. Also, I’m too cheerful and the producers don’t like that: they want people who take things very seriously, and above all who take them seriously. But how can I?” and “I think of myself as one who manages to get along. I don’t care about being successful, I just want to go on and on.”

So when Bava needed another movie to make, this commedia sexy all’italiana was what it would be, the first of three collaborations between Bava and American producer Alfredo Leone. Instead of the simple titilation and dated jokes you expect from the form, instead Bava creates a racy Rashomon of a date gone wrong, which we learn has led to Tina Bryant (Daniela Giordano, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key) having her dress torn and John Price (Brett Halsey, The Devil’s Honey) with a cut on his forehead.

The first version of the story is Tina telling her mother (Valeria Sabel) that she was like Joan of Arc and John was the devil. After dancing at a disco, she went into his jet set swinger’s flat and when he offered to change into something more comfortable, he came out nearly nude and tried to assault her. She barely escaped and her expensive dress paid the price.

Or maybe John is right. He’s an innocent man who was trapped in the spider’s web, a woman who was more sexually voracious than him, someone who literally lives up to the film’s title, demanding four rounds of sexual congress and still being unsatisfied to the point that she injured him. For an Italian man, this is quite an admission.

But the real story? The perverted doorman (Dick Randall, who may be living up to his role; he made so many exploitation movies that he was involved in are to be worshipped including The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield; The French Sex Murders; Pieces and Slaughter High) thinks that the couple who keeps showing up in these stories — George (Robert H. Oliver) and Esmerelda (Pascale Petit) — are both gay and that John has been dating George and needs to bring a woman home to satisfy Esmerelda, who drugs poor Tina and takes advantage of her and then John does the same. This story is written through binoculars, as if someone was writing their own fan fiction of this movie and is shown to not be true.

What may be is what the scientist sees. John and Tina have fallen in love and decide to wait to sleep together. He tries to take her home but the front gate of his apartment building is stuck. The doorman is drunk and looking at a dirty magazine, so when John tries to lift his date over the gate, her dress is torn and she accidentally scratches him. He tells her to tell her mom that he tried to attack her so that she doesn’t get in trouble for ruining the dress. She tells him to tell his friends that she was insatiable. The scientist says that the truth is in there somewhere, but he does know that before John took her home, they went and watched the sun rise together.

For someone known for horror and murder, the truth is that nobody shoots a gorgeous woman quite like Mario Bava. He is approaching them not as objects or things to be exploited, but instead from his place of shyness. They are perfect creations to be placed upon a pedestal and fawned over, explored and shown to others for their glory. Giordano, Petit and Brigette Skay (Zeta One, Isabella, Duchess of the Devil) have never looked more irrestiable.

He’s also less interested in the sexy parts of this movie — not that they’re skipped, mind you — and more the foibles of modern society and how women and men are supposed to play the games of love and sex. Every man wants a Tina who is a lady in the street and a tigress in the sheets, but every man is also worried that when the fantasy arrives that they have been roleplaying their whole lives in solo acts that they will be able to measure up. And when the woman wants more than them — four times that night — it can hurt them more than any words or physical attack could.

There’s also a different look at the characters and nearly a different film in each segment. Tina’s is chaste and John’s is slightly saucy, while the doorman is pretty much a Dick Randall movie, which makes him playing the character an intriguing bit of meta commentary.

Written by Charles Ross (Caught In the Act!, Nympho: A Woman’s Urge) and Mario Moroni, this would be a lesser film in anyone else’s hands. But when you see the way that Bava frames the scenes, how the colors threaten to explode out of the screen and even the minor moment when Esmerelda uses a swing to attempt to seduce Tina — and the camera gets closer and closer to her through the scene itself and a repeating POV shot — that makes you realize that you’re getting what is a master class in how to really make a sex comedy.

Bava probably shrugged, realized he did too much and wasn’t paid enough, and started looking for his next job.

April 25: Bava Forever — Bava died on this day 43 years ago. Let’s watch his movies.

After the success of Hercules, Galatea Film began production on films made for the international market. They hired Riccardo Freda to make this movie, but he left before it was done, supposed to allow Mario Bava — the cinematographer and special effects artist on this — the opportunity to direct and earn more money. This same situation — Freda leaving and Bava finishing the movie — also happened during I Vampiri (The Devil’s Commandment). 

There are different stories over who did what. Freda told Luigi Cozzi that he “left it when there were just two days of shooting left. I did shoot it yes, but it’s Bava’s type of film. I don’t enclose it in my body of work. The only thing I remember with pleasure about it are the statues that decorated the sets: I sculpted them myself,” while Bava referred to this as his first film and claimeed that Freda left the movie”because everything was falling to pieces. I managed to carry it out, patching it up here and there.”

Cozzi would come back to this interview thirty years later, setting the record straight by stating that “the director of Calitiki il mostro immortale is Riccardo Freda, full stop. Mario Bava did take care of the cinematography, the special effects and directed the scenes with the miniatures (that is, mostly the tanks….) and in addition to that he filmed some shots of soldiers with flame throwers. That’s all, and of course it cannot be enough to say that Bava directed that movie.” That said, in the last two or three weeks of filming, Bava directed and shot over 100 special effects shots.

Honestly, the answer depends on who you ask and when you ask them.

A group of archarologists discover a large statue of Caltiki, a supposed Mayan goddess who demanded human sacrifices. When one of them descends into a pool, he finds skeletons covered in gold and jewels. He keeps going back for more before he’s melted into a skeleton himself.

Now, Caltiki is a made up deity. But man, who cares, because soon a blob like creature emerges and tries to devour everyone. The monster was created from cloth and tripe, which is the stomach of a cow. It made a horrific smell, so no one wanted to be around it.

Anyhow, the blob-like organism attaches itself to one man’s arm and, of course, replicates and feeds on radiation. It’s about to have a buffet, because a radioactive comet that last appeared in our orbit during the time of the Mayans is about to come back and every little blob will become gigantic unless the smart brains in this can figure something out. How do you destroy a blob in the world of this movie? Flamethrowers. It’s that simple.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 24: Do You Like Tubi Originals? — I do. You should find one and write about it. Here’s a list to help.

I feel like I’ve watched everything there is to watch about Keith Raniere and Nvixm, yet here’s another documentary about how a self-help multi-level marketing company suddenly started branding women, destroying lives and getting involved in human trafficking.

If you’ve seen as many of these as I have had to sit through — I adore my wife but my life is mostly Dateline and 48 Hours day in, day out — then you will know that somehow, really attractive women somehow fell for Keith and wanted to have him neg them and teach them the joys of volleyball. Hollywood actress women. Normal women. Business women. A lot of women.

That wasn’t enough for Keith, who should have realized he was doing pretty good, and he still wanted more, liek scamming the Dalai Lama and to have women brand his initials on their hips.

Keith even said, “I’ve had people killed because of my beliefs” and several of his ex-girlfriends have disappeared, died from being shot in the head or cancer that was later found to perhaps be poisoning.

If you’ve seen The Vow and all the other shows, you’ll learn the same information here. But aren’t we all true crime maniacs by now? If you have more of that sweet sleaze reality narcotic high, well, here it is.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 24: Do You Like Tubi Originals? — I do. You should find one and write about it. Here’s a list to help.

Directed and written by Sunu Gonera, this is the story of Joshua (Charles Mnene) who dreams of a better life and tries to get there through BMX racing until his knee is destroyed. For some time, he lives in a shelter run by Mambo (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) before learning that it’s all a very Oliver Twist situation. He also falls for Olivia (Simona Brown), a dancer from a world of wealth that he has never known.

Made in Cape Town, South Africa, Riding With Sugar looks beautiful and has a story with plenty of heart, too. The idea that even a fellow refugee and a man who was once a professor in their home country of Zimbabwe could use Joshua makes this quite emotional. I really loved seeing a part of the world that is not well-represented in film and the use of color in this brings even more drama and power to an already strongly written and realized movie. It seems like it’s going to just be a crime movie from the way that it looks from the poster and description, but this film is about more than that.

You can watch this on Tubi.