Directed by Vicente Aranda (The Blood Spattered Bride), who wrote the story with Antonio Rabinad, based on the short story Bailando para Parker by Gonzalo Suárez, Exquisite Cadaver starts with a girl committing suicide by laying down headfirst on train tracks.

We meet a man (Carlos Estrada) who is the publisher of pulp horror — giallo — and someone who has become quite successful as a result. He gets a severed human hand in the mail, which he buries in a park. Another package is sent, this time with a torn dress and a photo of a woman. He also gets a telegram, which his wife (Teresa Gimpera, Hannah Queen of the Vampires) reads and it ends with the promise of sending a forearm. He lies and says its for work, but as she follows him, she notices that he is also being stalked by a woman in a black veil.

The woman is Parker (Capucine, The Pink Panther), who lures the man to her house where she gives him LSD. He staggers through her villa, following the sound of her voice, which leads him to a woman’s body inside a refrigerator. He passes out and wakes up at home, his wife having been called by Parker to get her husband.

The man reveals to his wife that he had an affair with a woman named Esther (Judy Matheson, The House That Vanished; is it too soon to talk about ’72?) who told him “I’d die so that my love for you will last. So that indifference will not kill it” before she laid down on the train tracks, as we saw as the movie began. Except that a detective that the man’s wife hired saved Esther.

As she tried to get her life together, Esther fell for a doctor before meeting Parker, who she soon began an affair with. Parker was in love with her, trying to save her, but Esther never stopped loving the man, finally killing herself. Parker then made this plan to get revenge for her lost love, even cutting. her corpse to pieces, sending each one until finally, the head arrives. The man looks for his wife but she is gone, leaving for Paris and a new relationship with Parker, who has seduced her.

After filming ended, Aranda gave Matheson the silver hand pendant that her character wore in the film. She still has it to this day and even established a trademark of wearing it in her subsequent films.

As for the director, he had an accident on the set which led to him directing much of this movie from a stretcher.

Thanks to Theater of Guts, I know that this was released in the U.S. by Gadabout-Gaddis Productions, who released The Man from Nowhere, Find a Place to Die, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, One On Top of the Other and Marta. According to the site, it played drive-in screens as late as 1983 as a double feature with Twilight Zone: The Movie.

The title Exquisite Corpse comes from the game created by Surrealism founder André Breton that has a collection of words or images collectively assembled by several creators who have no idea what has come before other than a line, which is added to until a complete art piece emerges. The name comes from the phrase that was part of the first work created by the game, “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.”

The Spanish title, Las Crueles (The Cruel Ones), is meant to sound like Les Diaboliques. It was not the title preferred by Aranda.

Forget the claim that this was based on a story by Peter Bryan. No, this is director Antonio Margheriti and writer Giovanni Simonelli coming together to make a giallo in the wake of the animal films of Argento but getting to having an orangutan get involved way before Dario did that (yes, I get that this movie has a gorilla suit, but the dialogue calls it an orangutan).

Dragonstone Castle is a crazy place filled with crazy people and that’s just the way I want it to be. It’s also where Corringa (Jane Birkin, who was in Blowup and Kaleidoscope but may be best known for her marriage and work with Serge Gainsbourg, including the song “Je t’aime… moi non plus,” a song written for Brigitte Bardot, whose husband Gunter Sachs demanded that the version she sang on not be released. Gainsbourg claimed it was an “anti-fuck” song about the desperation and impossibility of physical love, but it sure sounds like — and it was rumored — that Gainsbourg and Birkin are making love while recording lyrics which include phrases such as, “Je vais et je viens, entre tes reins” or “I go and I come, between your loins” and “Tu es la vague, moi l’île nue” or “You are the wave, me the naked island.”) has just arrived, seemingly moments after someone has been killed by a black-gloved killer with a razor.

Corringa used to spend summers there with her mother, Lady Alicia (Dana Ghia). She reunites with her and her aunt, Lady Mary MacGrieff (Françoise Christophe), who is rich in title only, having lost much of her money, as many aristocrats did in the late 60s. There’s also a priest (Venantino Venatni), Dr. Franz (Anton Diffring), a French teacher named Suzanna (Doris Kunstmann) and Lord James MacGrieff (Hiram Keller) who has the same name as the orangutan, which is not confusing at all.

And oh yes, an orange cat who likes to watch people die.

Mere seconds after her first dinner in the house, Corringa finds that her mother has been suffocated, possibly by Lord James, who she finds in a passage under the castle after following the orange cat. If that’s not enough, the cat also jumps on her mother’s coffin during her funeral, a sign that someone is a vampire, and to make that even more true, the legend says that if one MacGrieff kills another, they become a fanged blood drinking undead killing machine.

If you’re wondering when Luciano Pigozzi shows up in this Antonio Margheriti film, that would be now, but he’s soon killed by the razor-using madman. Or woman, right? Corringa now dreams of that her mother is a vampire and the cat wakes her at night. She’s soon sleeping with James — oh Italian horror families — and someone unlocks the simian beast from his cage. Also, the priest and the French teacher are sleeping together, but he’s soon also slashed. And Lady Alicia’s coffin is empty.

Ah, so many twists and turns. That’s why Margheriti is so good at movies like this, which flirt with horror and the gothic as well as giallo. Plus Serge Gainsbourg shows up as a police officer.

The Riz Ortolani soundtrack is almost a greatest hits of Margheriti’s horror films. You can hear bits of The Virgin of Nuremberg and Castle of Blood.

Dr. Michele Azzini (Luis Dávila) is living the life of Riley. He’s engaged to a gorgeous co-worker, Dr. Paola Lombardi (Anita Strindberg, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key), and has just been offered an even better job in a cardiology clinic in Madrid. This angers his boss, Elena Carli (Luciana Paluzzi, Thunderball, The Green Slime, The Klansman), who owns his current place of work along with her husband Dr. Roberto Carli (George Hilton, Sartana as well as several giallo films).Despite her offering him a stake in the business, Azzini still plans to leave until he’s murdered.

Inspector Nardi (Fernando Rey) is on the case, trying to learn just who killed the doctor. And at the same time, Elena’s heart is giving out and she has to get a surgery that takes up the closing moments of the movie. And because this is an Italian movie, that’s a real open heart surgery that we get to watch, conducted by Dr. Martinez Bordiu who is thanked in the credits.

Directed by Tulio Demicheli (Ricco) and written by Pedro Mario Herrero and Mario di Nardo, The Two Faces of Fear is a movie that really never gets going, but at least it has Strindberg, Paluzzi and Hilton in the cast, as well as that realistic surgery scene.

Directed by Brunello Rondi (Run. Psycho, Run), who wrote the story with Luciano Martino and Francesco Scardamaglia, this is about Andrea (Lino Capolicchio), the son of a rich publisher. He rebels by living a life of excess as a way of dealing with the death of his mother when he was a very young man. Beyond sleeping with anyone and everyone, he really wants to cuck his father and to have sex with his stepmother Mireille (Erna Schürer, Strip Nude for Your Killer) and her gal pal Carole (Colette Descombes, Orgasmo).

A giallo with no murder, this is about one man trying to ruin everyone through his desires — and need to film all of his fantasies — as well as him learning what happened to his mother, who he only sees in glimpses wearing white.

Also known as Schocking, there’s a scene where Andrea dresses a black girl in a Klan hood to, well, shock you. Aren’t you scandalized? There’s no real hero or heroine here, unless you like the spoiled rich man who loves to use his camera to film women make love to other men, then burn the film while they watch.

It looks nice, though, and the Giorgio Gaslini score is solid. He also did the music for So Sweet, So Dead; Five Women for the Killer and was the original composer for Deep Red. When Argento didn’t like the music, he contacted Goblin, although some of the original music is in the movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

A festival in Naples is in trouble. The scaffolding outside the theater has crashed down, then a postcard arrives and says that anyone involved will be killed. Journalists Michele Giuffrida (Lello Arena) and Lisa Sole (Maddalena Crippa) start to track down who sent that warning.

Whoever that killer is, they have it out for Italian saxophone player James Senese, who plays himself, and actor Massimo Troisi, who also wrote the script, also playing himself. How dare they appear in the Nuova Napoli festival?

You don’t see many movies where people playing themselves get killed, but that’s what happens as Senese is hit by a car and Troisi is strangled and has a pizza jammed into his mouth. As to who is behind it all, it’s the person you would least expect, which is how so many giallo movies operate. The killer is also stuck on the song “Funiculi, Funicula” which was written in 1880 by Luigi Denza and Peppino Turco to celebrate the first funicular railway on Mount Vesuvius.

No Thanks, Coffee Makes Me Nervous is about a time when Naples was becoming known for new things and changing, which is something the killer is against. The first movie of director Lodovico Gasparini, it was written by Michael Pergolani and Troisi.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Zelda Adams, Lula Adams, John Adams and Toby Poser — known as the Adams Family — have made several films: Rumblestrips, The Hatred, Halfway to Zen, Knuckle Jack, The Shoot, The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender. Together, the family has directed and written this tale, which is the story of a family of murderous sideshow performers.

The sideshow that travels the country is filled with strangeness. There’s Mr. Tipps (Sam Rodd), who has made a deal with a demon for a heart that he uses in his act. And that act? He cuts off his own fingers and then Eve Axon (Zelda Adams) sews them back on. She never speaks, only sings, and is the near-silent witness to the madness of her parents, Seven (John Adams) and Maggie (Tobey Poser) who have war and childhood trauma-caused PTSD that fuels them as they murder their way across the gray backroads of an anachronistic Depression-era setting that still has modern tattoos and fashions.

As Maggie murders, Eve films the madness while Seven blindfolds himself. Shot in their neighborhood — Lulu shows up as an axe girl — this feels bleached out and fuzzy, with a soundtrack by the Adams’ band H6LLB6END6R. The Axon Family is on their way to a Buffalo horror show and things get darker as they go.

Any movie that starts with a legless man nearly dragging himself across the stage to read a poem about the demon Abaddon is going to get your attention. I’m excited that this movie is on Tubi — previous Adams Family films were on Shudder — as it allows them to reach a big audience with this color-shifting road movie. While there are some similarities to what has come before, this feels new and strange. In their notes for the film, the family said, “Creating our own supernatural mythologies is important and joyful for us – here shifting the biblical story of the fallen angel, Abaddon, into a love story that devolves into a family story (always and also built on love, in all its frailties), but refracted through the muddy, bloodied, cracked lens of personal traumas, unfortunate compulsions, and bitter victories.”

Some of the CGI is a bit off, the juxtaposition between soundtrack and film may put some off, but by the end of this, you’ll be captivated by something truly different. I can’t wait to see what this family does next.

You can watch this on Tubi.

When this was submitted to censors as Eros e Thanatos, censors wouldn’t let it play. Director and writer Marino Girolami (the director of My Friend, Dr. Jekyll; he used many names over the years. As Frank Martin he directed Zombie Holocaust and as Franco Martinelli he made Special Cop in Action and Violent Rome. He used the name Dario Silvestri to direct God Was in the West, Too, at One Time.) cut the film down, including a scene where the killer caressed the body of a victim. All of that showed up in the fumetti release. This film was consider lost for some time, as it wasn’t even released during the boom of VHS releases.

Franco Adami (Umberto Liberati) is charged with murder after a prostitute that he’s seen shows up dead, her body nude and strung up. Defense attorney and alcoholic Montani (Folco Lulli) tries to argue his case with Adami claiming that flashbacks to animal violence let to him killing the lady of the evening. Montani needs some evidence that this is possible, so he meets with the director of an asylum (Daniele Vargas) and meets two patients with similar cases.

Usai (Silvio Bagolini) was a man obsessed with a young girl named Francesca (Caterina Barbero, who was 18 when this was made, which is I guess a little bit less upsetting but still, this has upskirts and full frontal nudity of a teenager shown) who he gets to tutor. Because of his childhood — he had a doll and his father didn’t want his male son to have baby dolls, so he beat him — he can’t stop his thoughts, which end with him killing her and her parents finding her nude and dead by his side just like a human version of a doll.

Gilberto (Piero Lulli) took the sermons he listened to in church — plus the abuse from other students and the priests — and started to kill sex workers to punish them for their immoral acts. He’s Donny Kohler ten years early, using fire to murder women who he believes are sinners.

Montani presents this evidence and not only does it end with Franco going to a mental home instead of prison, he’s able to convince the editor of the paper to take back the things they said about his client. That’s when we learn that Montani is a drunk because his son killed a boy his age and then committed suicide in jail, so he understands the place that Adami was in.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Following the death of her grandfather, Valentina Garbini (Caterina Barbero) and her husband Pierre (Maurizio Bonuglia) have settled into the old family home, sharing it with her cousin Marta (Lisa Seagram, who mostly did TV in America, including three episodes of Beverly Hillbillies as Edythe Brewster, the new wife of the oil man who helped Jed Clampett get rich. They stay in the cabin that has been relocated to the side of the mansion for their honeymoon. She was also Lila, who poisoned Batman and Robin on their TV show with lilacs, and later ran an acting school in Hawaii, Actors 2000). The cousins are oppposites, as Valentina is free with her body while Marta is virginal. The one time that Marta tried to lose her innocence to a local man, her grandfather beat her with a whip.

This changes when Valentina dies. Pierre is fingered by the police, but Marta hides the murder weapon to keep her cousin’s husband by her side, as the suspicion now is on Valentina’s friends. Now, Marta can get what she wants — a man — and the entire mansion. Things don’t end up working out for her, but that’s the morality coming in, I guess.

Also known as The Mill of the Virgins, this was directed by Gianfranco Baldanello (The Uranium Conspiracy, Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, Danger!! Death Ray) and written by Augusto Finocchi and Vittorio Metz. It was edited by Bruno Mattei.

You can watch this on YouTube.

An Italian comedy giallo parody of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? How did I never know about this?

Directed by Ottavio Alessi, who wrote Emanuelle In Bangkok and Emanuelle In America and made Top Sensation, which dares to have a love scene between Edwige Fenech and Rosalba Neri, then ends with a Bible verse, this stars Toto, whose real name was Antonio Griffo Focas Flavio Ducas Komnenos Gagliardi de Curtis of Byzantium, His Imperial Highness, Palatine Count, Knight of the Holy Roman Empire, Exarch of Ravenna, Duke of Macedonia and Illyria, Prince of Constantinople, Cilicia, Thessaly, Pontus, Moldavia, Dardania, Peloponnesus, Count of Cyprus and Epirus, Count and Duke of Drivasto and Durazzo. “The Prince of Laughter” had a career marked by tragedy, like spurned lovers committing suicide, the loss of a son at a young age and even an eye infection that could have been stopped had he cancelled a show and disappointed his fans. Instead, he went on and lost a percentage of his site for the rest of his life. When he died, there were no less than three funerals, including one given by a local organized crime leader where an empty casket was carried along the packed streets of the small town where he was born.

Step brothers Totò Baby and Pietro (Pietro De Vico) steal suitcases at the train station. One day, they find that one of their stolen cases has a dead body in it. They switch that with two German women, Inga and Helga (Ivy Holzer and Edy Biagetti), but that’s only the beginning of their problems. The women are having an affair with Baron Mischa (Mischa Auer, a Russian-born actor who was a famous silent movie actor in Hollywood before continuing his career in France and Italy), who finds out that our protagonists had the body and blackmails them into murdering his wife (Gina Mascetti).

When they attempt to kill her, she dies of fright instead, but Totò Baby begins to eat salads with marijuana instead of lettuce and becomes a serial killer. His step brother attempts to escape him, but is finally dragged to the brach — yes, like Baby Jane as he’s also put in a wheelchair and served a frog — the police catch them. Totò Baby is committed where he writes the story of his life on an invisible typewriter. After all, his father was a criminal, so he was evil from birth.

If you recognize the home of the Baron, it’s Casale di Santa Maria Nova in Rome, which is where Blood and Black Lace was made.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Salvatore Samperi, who wrote the story with Dacia Maraini, Kill the Fatted Calf and Roast It is about a cursed family. Maurizio Degli Esposti plays Enrico, who has left his Swiss boarding school to come home for his father’s funeral. That’s when he remembers just how strange his family is and starts to wonder if his dad’s death really was an accident or if his older brother Cesare (Jean Sorel) did it — he did watch him and his cousin Verde (Marilù Tolo) inject it — and if his family really is doomed.

All of the family’s servants had been let go before the father’s demise and the most faithful of them, Talia (Aleka Paizi) has been put into a mental home. This is the same place where Enrico’s mother was committed in the past and where she presumably killed herself. Even though that happened in his childhood, Enrico feels a closeness to her and constantly listens to tapes of her voice. This is all the evidence that Cesare needs to try and put Enrico into that same clinic. Our protagonist’s mistake is being in love with Verde, who could be just as bad as his brother, and who he feels a love beyond family — yes, the incestual love that Italian horror seems to flirt so much with — and it’s even odder because she reminds him of his mother, so it’s like double family obsession. When he gets pneumonia, she should be taking care of him, but she may also have her own sinister plan.

After Arcana, this is the second movie I’ve watched where Maurizio Degli Esposti is in love — really in love — with his mother. To give you another reason to watch this strange giallo, the Ennio Morricone soundtrack is great.

You can watch this on YouTube.