Kristine Peterson was a member of the staff at Zoetrope Studios during the filming of Apocalypse Now before making the kind of movies that I love, like Deadly Dreams and Critters 3, as well as being an assistant director on Exterminator 2, Chopping Mall, The Supernaturals and Tremors. The script comes from Jackson Barr, who is really Jack Canson. He used that name to write the series’ second and third movies, Seedpeople, Subspecies and Trancers II. Peterson worked with Thom Babbes to push the script further, as this was a direct-to-video cash-in on Fatal Attraction. They went for the carnal content to be darker and dirtier than what played on big screens.
Tom Redding (Marc Singer) is a human sexuality researcher living a blessed life. He’s rich from his work; he has a great wife named Marlee (Mary Crosby), and might be the next director of the clinic he works for.
Then, he meets Dr. Claire Archer (Lisa Pescia).
Her theory is that sex is all about power, and she can prove that by breaking down all of Tom’s defenses and seducing him, dominating him, unlike every other woman he’s ever been with. As you’d expect, Tom wants this affair to end and for him to be able to go back to his safe family life. Dr. Claire is willing to send porn to his house as a first salvo before things eventually reach her using propane tanks to nuke his home.
For as much as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct — a movie similar to this one, coming out two years after — are seen as the movies from which the well of erotic thrillers springs from, Body Chemistry establishes the template from which many films would copy. Saxophone and fog-filled love scenes, evil women who introduce fallen men to a world of dirty love, and good women who want their man back in their safe vanilla beds. What they miss is the kink that this has, including a shower scene that makes it appear that Dr. Claire is taking Tom from behind, supplanting his role as the male dominant partner. That’s pretty wild for today, much less nearly thirty-five years ago.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this on Saturday, Jan. 25 at midnight at the Coolidge Theater in Brookline, MA (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Mara Cecova is a diva and the star of a new way of performing Verdi’s Macbeth. But when she’s hit by a car as she argues with the director in the middle of the street, her role goes to her understudy, Betty. Ironically, in his book Profondo Argento, director Dario Argento claimed that the person playing the role of Betty, Cristina Marsillach, was the most challenging actress he would ever work with.
Despite her initial worries, Betty succeeds instantly on her opening night. At the same time, a black-gloved killer sneaks into one of the boxes to watch before murdering a stagehand with a coathanger. Everyone, grab your barf bags and motion sickness pills; Argento is behind the camera!
Of all the powerful shocks in Opera, perhaps the one that means the most to the viewer is that we share Betty’s torture — she’s repeatedly gagged, tied up and forced to watch the killer at work again and again as he tapes needles under her eyes. They’ll be shredded if she blinks too long or shuts her eyes. It’s like Fulci’s wettest dream ever. In the same way, we are nearly complicit with the crimes we are forced to watch, mainly because they get more and more artfully composed.
Throw in the fact that Betty believes that the hooded killer is the same person who murdered her mother; she follows the Giallo path for a protagonist and confides in someone else rather than the police. Her reason? The killer may know who she is.
Inspector Alan Santini (Urbano Barberini, Demons) is on the case because there are so many clues, like the fact that the producer’s pet ravens were found dead after the show. As for Betty, she runs from the police and calls her agent Mira (Daria Nicolodi, Argento’s former wife and the writer of Suspiria and star of Shock) for advice.
Betty’s costume gets cut to ribbons, so she asks the wardrobe girl for help. While she works on the dress, they find a gold bracelet they can almost read. But here comes the killer and his needles again, forcing her to watch him kill one more time. The wardrobe girl accidentally swallows the bracelet, so of course, we watch as the murderer slices her throat open to get it back.
Betty runs back to her apartment, where Santini is waiting. He promises to send a detective named Soavi to watch over her (yep, The Church director Michele Soavi), but she doesn’t trust the man and leaves her apartment. That’s when her agent answers the next knock on the door by looking through the peephole. What follows is the grandest kill in the entire film — which is saying something — as we follow the bullet POV-style out of the gun and directly through her eyeball. Again, Fulci is somewhere wringing his hands.
Nicolodi had just ended a long relationship with Argento and did not want to be in this film. However, the shocking and complicated murder of her character changed her mind, even if she had to deal with an explosive device being put on the back of her head to achieve the final shot.
Betty escapes the killer again and runs to the opera house, convinced there is a connection between the murderer and her long-dead and abusive mother. The next night, as she performs, the producer unleashes what is left of his ravens, hoping they’ll find the killer. Oh, they do alright — tearing his eyeball out of his head — FULCI ARE YOU THERE, IT’S ME DARIO — and rewarding you, the viewer, with POV shots that threaten you with vertigo. I’m getting dizzy even typing this.
I don’t want to give away the killer or even the second ending where the killer isn’t dead. I want to talk about the sheer Argento-ness of the final scene, where Betty wanders into a field and releases a lizard, giving him his freedom. Argento claims that Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon inspired this ending. Of interest is that the director does NOT like the Michael Mann movie Manhunter. Me? Well, I love that movie. But I’d love to see Argento’s take. There was also a thought to another ending where Betty would fall in love with the killer.
Your enjoyment of this film comes down to how much you like shocking bloodshed and Argento’s arty side. He based the movie on his own failed staging of Macbeth, basing the role of the nervous producer on himself. And the idea of pins under the eyes? It comes from a joke about how Argento hated it when people looked away during the death scenes in his films.
Believe it or not, Orion Pictures planned on releasing an R-rated version of this in the US called Terror at the Opera with eleven minutes of mayhem removed and the Swiss Alps epilogue. Argento refused, and Orion lost money at a fast clip, so the movie only saw a limited video release.
Opera is something else — filled with style and brutality. I loved it, but remember my warning about how much you can handle.
I got the notice for this movie in my email and my curiosity instantly was alerted: “Before the End transcends “rock doc” in the same sense that Jim Morrison was more than a rock star. Featuring unprecedented content, from shocking corroboration about Morrison’s early life to harrowing revelations about his stardom and fresh evidence that contradicts his professed death, Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison is proudly unauthorized because it “seeks the unvarnished truth.””
Jeff Finn has spent nearly forty years seeking out what the true story of Jim Morrison is, beyond the expected — the Oliver Stone movie that everyone saw in the 90s, Danny Sugerman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive that was part of the burnout starter pack in my hometown — and has gone more profound than, well, just about anyone else. He’s conducted more than a thousand interviews, more than a hundred on video, as he’s tried to figure out not just who we know who Jim Morrison is, but who he really was, from people who actually knew whoever he was at a specific moment of time, whether that’s family, high school friends, college roommates or film school classmates, Lovers, band mates, just about anyone who had a moment that they connected with Morrison, Finn has met them and learned something from them.
Where so many are content to move forward from Morrison’s birth — like how we never know what happened to Jesus from childhood to when he was an adult, a fact that has to delight Morrison, wherever he is, to no end — to the sex, drugs, rock and roll, public indecency and leather-clad Lizard Kill era of Morrison fronting The Doors. Yet Finn knows this is just part of the story and just one destination on a long midnight drive.
This doc came into my life at the right time, as I consider that I have aged past when I needed rock to tell my truth, or so adults would like me to believe. I worry for today’s youth that they will have no mysterious superstars to become obsessed about like I did in my teen years, devouring pre-internet conspiracy books about Morrison. Did he really die? Why did he use codenames like Mr. Mojo Rising? How many bands got some fame just by playing with the notion that Jim Morrison didn’t fade away? Those stories will take you down some excellent rabbit holes — Jim still has a photo ID on record at the Bank of America, he was a military MK Ultra experiment, and even he was a clone. Some of these stories strain your grasp of reality, but when the actual story is that he went to Paris and died, with no one seeing the body, how can you not expect mythology to fill in the gaps when reality is so sloppily constructed?
Told in three parts, each a little over an hour, Finn’s film has a strange impact on you. The more you listen to his deep voice, the longer you watch the interviews, and you start to follow him through the journeys down, as he says, the rabbit holes and the deeper warrens beyond those rabbit holes. By the time he introduces you to a source named “Mr. X,” who may or may not be Morrison — I don’t even know if the filmmaker is sure — you’ll be hooked. You may not become a true believer, but even if you walk away from this questioning the story about who Jim Morrison is — or was — he’s achieved his goal. It’s just as much reinventing the Jim that you believe you know and getting a more richly realized portrait of him as a human being, not just an artist. Someone who may have gone through childhood abuse, someone who moved often, someone who may have even been neurodivergent when we didn’t have the words yet to explain what that meant.
This has led me to consider who we all are. We all have a different story for each person we meet. The goal of any documentary is to inform you of a point of view, but it’s also to get you to think more critically. Before the End succeeds because it made me think of the idea that each person is only who every other person experiences them as. The difference here is that Morrison remains well-known years after his death. Supposed death, right? Each person here knew a moment in his life, and Finn knows all of their stories and the research he’s done for decades. What emerges is one of the richest pictures of Morrison I’ve seen in any media.
Before the End is streaming in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia on Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play and YouTube TV. You can learn more at the official Facebook page.
A dozen years in the making, Before the End’s cryptic tagline sums up the three hours plus docu-mystery film: “One Man. Countless Myths. And in between lies the truth.”
It was created by Jeff Finn, who has been working for decades not just to tell the story that the world knows of Jim Morrison and the Doors but striving to break “the decades-long hermetic seal on the traumatic formative years that forged a brief hellacious life.” Finn labored to explain his theory of “Morrison the nonconformist as neurodivergent” and show the difference between the rock god we put on our walls as the Lizard King and James Douglas Morrison, an introverted outsider.
He’s not in this alone. Finn conducted hundreds of interviews over the decades, including UCLA classmate Philip Oleno and Richard Blackburn, UCLA roommate Ron Cohen, UCLA professor Dick Adams, Florida State University roommates Bryan Gates and John McQueen, FSU professor Ralph Turner, Alameda High School swim coach Ash Jones, childhood friend Jeff Morehouse, Paris-era acquaintances Philippe Dalecky and Gilles Yepremian and Morrison’s cousins, Ellen Edwards and David Backer. He also spoke to past lovers such as Anne Moore, Gayle Enochs, Judy Huddleston and Suzanne Roady-Ross; friends Mirandi Babitz and Salli Stevenson; and industry people like Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman, The Doors booking agent Todd Schiffman, roadie Gareth Blyth, screenwriter Randall Jahnson, rock critics Ellen Sander and Richard Meltzer, as well as conducting exclusive interviews with Jim’s brother Andy Morrison, Morrison’s enigmatic Paris-era assistant Robyn Wurtele and “Mr. X,” a mind-blowing anonymous source.
I had the luck to sit with Finn for nearly an hour and learn what led to this project and why telling Morrison’s authentic story is so important.
B & S About Movies: I’ve just been through this three-and-a-half-hour journey with you as I watched the docs. It’s interesting now to meet you in person. I’ve always been passionate about what Jim Morrison’s life was about.
Jeff Finn: After watching the entire three and a half hours, I’ll gladly pay for any therapy bills you may incur. I should finish my own therapy bills if and when I can afford that, then we’ll move on to yours. (laughs)
B&S: How did you go from loving the music to deciding, “I’m going to make something of this?”
Jeff: How much time do you have? It’s been with me my whole life. It can be argued that whoever your favorite performer is, they’ve probably been with you through the trajectory of both of your lifespans. We pick things up by osmosis.
The Door’s music is some of the earliest I remember hearing. I was in my cousin’s garage, who was much older and had a Mustang — not as awesome as Jim’s Mustang, but, you know, pretty cool, and it was blue for what it’s worth — and I remember he had the transistor radio on the workbench in the garage. At the same time, he’d be working on that Mustang, which was always falling apart. I remember hearing those songs through that tiny transistor radio, and they just haunted me. You fast forward through various progressions, and here we are.
B&S: The Doors are a very obsequious band. Most have heard “Light My Fire” or seen the Oliver Stone movie, but that’s the surface, and there’s so much below the surface for those ready to go there.
Jeff: Those very first nascent songs, I distinctly remember. And I was like, you know, four or five years old in the early 70s. I will be 58 in a couple of weeks in February, but as a little kid hearing “Riders on the Storm” in the dark, I thought of it as a five-year-old kid in my own tiny way. It’s Halloween music. It just had that eerie suspense, that edge, which I loved. I still love it. My favorite Doors albums to this day are the first two and then parts of the third. I like to think of their music as a progenitor to what became goth rock and post-punk, an influence on everyone from Joy Division to The Pixies.
B & S: There have been different versions of Doors fandom over the years after their heyday, from those who got into the Greatest Hits reissue in the 1980s to those who watched the movie. Yet you’ve stayed with it even when it may no longer be in fashion.
Jeff: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting riffing on the music, which is so fun. It’s ironic. As you know, there’s next to no Doors music in Before the End. Because, again, it’s about Jim Morrison. First and foremost, The Doors are a part of that story and a significant part but just a part at the end of the day in my doc, which is about Jim’s span of his life.
I had a band in the 1990s in Chicago; I was the singer and lyricist for that band, Peep, like P-E-E-P. It stood for People Eat Elvis Presley, but…long story somewhat short, I was in that band, and a guy approached me at one point after a show and said, “I need you to be my Morrison. I want you to be my Morrison.”
And I had long hair then, so I don’t know. But I was flattered. He was putting together a Doors tribute band. And, you know, in my early 20s, I was, you know, not cocky, but I was. And I later joked, you know, I probably could have made some damn good money if I’d done that. Yeah. As opposed to my band. (laughs)
There was a silver lining. When we broke up, I was like, what the hell do I do now? That band was a massive part of my life. Nine Inch Nails’ first label nearly signed us. So, it was a big deal at the time. And when it fell apart, I was crushed. And I regrouped and thought, what the hell do I want to do now? I dove headfirst into making the inroads to writing a book about the honest Jim, the human Jim. And this was 1996. I didn’t even have a computer! Now, we’ve come full circle with the doc and the book.
B & S: Interestingly, The Doors have tried to replace him with different singers over the years. But as much as I like Ian Asbury in The Cult, he’s not what I want for The Doors.
Jeff: I’m sure some people love that, just like some people love the two albums — Other Voices and Full Circle — they released after he left the planet. But for me, the mold was broken. You can’t go back and try and repair it.
B&S: What was the reaction of some of the folks you interviewed for the doc when they watched it?
Jeff: It’s great. I’m in touch with several of them; some have even become friends; it’s just an absolute hoot to get their reaction. And it’s fantastic for me, and I’d like to think for them because this doc was a tangible chance for me to give these people a voice. Youse people who knew who loved who knew and person as opposed to the persona. You know, these have only been names in books. These people knew him, Randy Maney and Bill Thomas, who went into high school with Jim in Alexandria, Virginia. They’ve been mentioned in a couple of books here and there, but this is the first time you get to see and hear these people and their side of it. And I think that’s wonderful. I was honored to be a part of that.
B&S: It was nice to hear their perception of what he was like when they knew him. You gave a rich picture of his life that other books and docs haven’t, as they only concentrate on the stage persona.
Jeff: Oh, thank you, man. I appreciate it. You know, I’ve said this a million times. I’ll say it a million more if I’m allowed while the planet is still spinning. With all due respect to the countless biographies, articles, books and what have you, everyone’s just in a rush. Let’s give to the sex, drug and rock ‘n roll. Let’s get to The Doors. His formative years end up being half a footnote.
I don’t want to call it laziness on the part of those biographers, but you know it’s hard to get granular, as I always say, to drill down, way down into who Jim was—going deep into his childhood. And that’s a thorny path, you know? It requires real effort and the turning over of stones, no pun intended. And I did that. And that’s partly why it took so long, you know, that’s not quickly done, at least for me.
I’m a one-man band. I’m a one-man production company. I don’t have a crew. So, you know, the pace was glacial, as I always say.
B&S: I think what’s interesting, too, is that a lot of stories that you would hear about his past vary from interview to interview, where it felt like he was almost playing games within interviews or playing different roles where facts, like his relationship with his father, would change. As a result, we’ve all created our own concept of who Jim Morrison is.
Jeff: I say this in every interview because it’s the truth, you know, I’ve been called a Jim Morrison expert for many years, and I appreciate that, but it’s silly because, you know, it’s just like how Jim said about film: “There really are no experts on film.” It could be argued that there are no experts on any person because I’m always humbled and grateful to learn new facts about Jim, which I do every day. It’s been 39 years, as of October 2024, I’ve been doing this research.
B&S: You’re speaking with people who knew a 3D, real Jim Morrison at one point in time and not the legend we created.
Jeff: I appreciate you watching the whole thing and absorbing it. I connected with over a thousand people who knew Jim in whatever way, from intimate lovers to his cousins, his brother Andy Morrison, his sister Ann, to people who just may have worked on, you know, one album for The Doors in 1970 or whatever. And of those thousand-plus people, everyone had their own Jim.
They’re very proprietary in that regard and fiercely so. Like, I got into almost arguments with people. I don’t want to argue with anybody. Life’s too short. But, like, they’d feel, “It’s not my Jim. You’re not showing my Jim.” I said, “Well, with all due respect, you know, I’m showing everyone’s Jim, at least everyone I connected with.” So, yeah, it’s fascinating, the psychology of it.
B&S: Without giving too much of the movie away, “Mr. X” is fascinating. Who is he? Even if he’s not Jim Morrison, he knows him at a level more than a super fan. Is he playing with you and giving you the answers you expect? For example, when someone is looking for a UFO, is it easier for them to see one? I watch so many documentaries lately, like Exit Through the Gift Shop or F for Fake, where there’s a point where the filmmaker lets you in on the joke that they’ve been manipulating you.
I get the feeling that you’re not doing that. So is “Mr. X” playing a character so that he can be part of a legacy? Yet he feels so unassuming and natural that no one can act that well. It feels like you are trying to lead him into a revelation, and when it does, it’s so close to what Jim would say it blows your mind.
Jeff: The part I found fascinating was that you’re trying to do almost gamesmanship as you interview him. I mean, it was like Alice in Wonderland, going down the rabbit hole. Years before I even met “Mr. X,” I was down the rabbit hole. And as I’ve said countless times, you know, real-life rabbit holes, there’s not just one hole that goes down. It goes down into the warrens. (laughs)
Meeting “Mr. X” was a rabbit hole unto itself. It was an entirely new production of Alice in Wonderland, to the point that, as I say in the document, I literally had to rebuild the entire production from scratch.
That’s how vital his storyline was to me. For all intents and purposes, I was done with the doc and told the fans about it on Facebook. Then I met “Mr. X” and had to hit the brakes. That’s when people started getting really shitty, and the haters and trolls came out, saying that I would never finish. One guy wrote, “I’ll be dead before your movie’s done.”
B&S: Have we reached the end of the cult of personality where we want celebrities to live past their deaths? Elvis, Morrison, Andy Kaufmann and Tupac feel like the last people who live past their end.
Jeff: I have people who say to me, “You’re stupid for even thinking he’s not dead.”
If I’m being honest, I can just come right back and say, “You’re being stupid for taking — at face value — a controlled narrative that’s been out there for 53 years.” Every show, over a thousand nights, Jim would scream, “Wake up!” That’s what I’m trying to do with my doc: get people to — in my own small way — shake themselves out of their complacency or stop taking the information about Jim at face value. Bill Siddons came back from Paris. He said there was a sealed coffin. Jim was dead at the end. And everyone, the mainstream media, the masses, they bought it. By and large, they had the hook in their mouth, and it was like, whoo! Exit, you know, stage right.
Jim was brilliant, and he would look deeper. So, I’m asking everyone else to follow Jim’s lead and dig deeper. Look further, question authority, question your own authority, and question everything until you know the real truth, which, in my view, is different from the truth.
It’s the real truth that I’m after.
B&S: Just a few years after they argued that Paul was dead, people quickly accepted this truth: They were questioning authority. They quickly accepted what they were told.
It anticipates that the sixties generation will become their parents. We will go from The Beatles being bubblegum to Sgt. Pepper, and then within ten years, the Bee Gees remake Sgt. Pepper and it’s total bubblegum.
Jeff: I think Jim Morrison was anticipating punk. Even John Lydon, Johnny Rotten has said, you know, he respected Morrison, and that’s saying a lot because, in the early days of the Sex Pistols, Lydon was like, fuck everybody. But he didn’t say it about Jim. And that’s a lot. And Jim directly inspired Iggy Pop.
My daughter likes to tease me because I’ll be like, “What’s going on with your generation? Where are The Doors of today? Where are people today? Why aren’t they rising up and forming bands and, you know, the way it was in the late 60s, early 70s and protesting?” And I’m sure they’re out there. I’m probably unaware of them, but I keep my ear to the ground and haven’t seen anything. It could be just as Jim said, an incredible springtime, that moment in the late sixties, it couldn’t be replicated.
There is Pussy Riot; I mean, they’re brilliant, and it could be argued that they’re edgier than Jim and his prime with The Doors. But even Pussy Riot’s been around for over a decade. Kathleen Hanna, she’s amazing. But she’s my age. Where are the 22-year-olds of today rising up against the obligatory powers that be?
I hope that my docu-mystery, as I call it, will inspire Gen Z or the TikTok generation to dive in and discover Jim and form a connection with him via empathy. I’ve been fascinated to find that the TikTok movement has embraced the Menendez brothers of all people. It’s like they are literally drilling stone to go into the sexual abuse that was at the core of that case. And that was totally whitewashed. Who could have ever fathomed that we would reach this point? The youth is doing it in a way, maybe not through rock bands but through social media. I hope they do the same with Jim; take a deep, long, hard look at who he was.
B&S: Better than the fact that the people of my generation only know him through Oliver Stone.
Jeff: I think Oliver Stone’s a brilliant filmmaker. JFK, Natural Born Killers. I think his documentary work on the Kennedys that came out recently is amazing. But that brilliance is not displayed in the movie he made in 1991. And you know what? He made his film, and it was his vision and more power to him. But we don’t have to like it. I certainly don’t.
I was the first one in line for that when it came out. And I was just so disappointed because it just clearly presented a one-dimensional view of Jim as this dark, narcissistic, self-absorbed asshole. And that’s not to say Jim didn’t have his asshole-ish moments. Of course, he did. And many people, we all have a dark side. But they never even showed him with a pen, like holding a pen or pencil and writing a lyric or a poem.
I was doing man-on-the-street interviews in Virginia, outside the library Jim went to as a child, asking people if they knew who he was. One young man replied, “He was an asshole.” And he knew that from the movie.
So, I’ve done a lot of damage control regarding Jim’s legacy from the fallout of that biopic.
It comes back to what we said before. Everybody has their version of him. That’s not the version that I want people to understand. I don’t wish to only the dark side. I don’t want people to like him because he was calm and did drugs. The notion of Jim as an introvert, as being neurodivergent decades before the phrase was even coined, is not what we generally think of when we think of Jim Morrison. They think of the guy in the black leather pants screaming into a mic, the guy who invented stage diving, the guy from the Oliver Stone movie.
I want them to know the Jim that Gayle Enochs, one of his lovers, knew. A man who drank wine and read poetry. A contrast to this rock god.
B & S: Everyone has an outline of Jim Morrison, and your work has filled in some of the colors.
Jeff: I’ve said that a million times. It’s like these black-and-white presentations. Nobody’s black and white. We’re all made up of gray matter, literally. There are nuances to people, and those nuances just get blown out.
In almost everything that’s recorded about Jim, because they’re in a rush to get to the rush, the rush that we get from the, you know, from rock and roll. And again, is that legit? Of course, it is. The music is huge, but there’s so much more to him and everyone than just a black-and-white perception. That’s what I mean when I get granular and go into the gray areas of nuance and what shaped and forged him in his formative years. What brought him to the point of, you know, becoming Jim Morrison of The Doors, you know? , he lived 21 years before The Doors formed. And those 21 years are usually glossed over or just ignored. I went deep into them because they are hugely important to history.
Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison will make its global TVOD/Digital release on January 13, 2025, following Morrison’s 81st birthday. It will be available on all the major platforms like Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play and YouTube TV, with more to follow.
Editor’s note: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on Monday, January 13 at 7:00 p.m. at the Music Box Theater in Chicago, IL. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
I loved this movie! It was such a madcap blast that it completely took me by surprise. Arthur Anderson (played by Michael Craig) is a wealthy Englishman whose two previous wives have died under mysterious circumstances—one in a car crash and the other after falling from a building. Now, his third wife drowns under questionable circumstances. Fortunately, his housekeeper’s testimony keeps him free and clear, although the police keep an eye on him.
On the very night he is acquitted, Julie Spencer (Carroll Baker) breaks into his house in a twist that feels like a giallo-style meet-cute, and she becomes his fourth wife. But is she trustworthy? What about him? Why do Arthur Anderson’sAnderson’s wives keep dying with such frequency? And will Inspector Dunphy (José Luis López Vázquez) be able to uncover the truth behind these mysterious deaths?
This movie cleverly borrows elements from Rebecca and Vertigo without being overly derivative. I also absolutely adore that when we first meet Julie, she’s sleeping in a tent inside an abandoned mansion—because that’s completely normal, right? And is that Marina Malfatti (from The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, All the Colors of the Dark) lurking in the background, donning a cape as part of her casual rainy evening attire with sunglasses at night?
Exploring Spanish Giallo has been a fantastic journey for me. I’ve enjoyed delving into Eugenio Martín’s works, including Horror Express, as well as It Happened at Nightmare Inn. Plus, Carroll Baker starring in a Giallo is almost a genre in and out of itself.
While there’s no clear hero, I still enjoyed every minute. This film is called Death at the Deep End of the Swimming Pool and The Fourth Mrs. Anderson. It was only available on a Greek VHS before Severin released it. The package includes a trailer, a deleted scene, and an interview with Eugenio Martín biographer Carlos Aguilar, maintaining their consistently stellar presentation.
Want to see one of the drink recipes from a past show? We have you covered.
We’ll start the show with Blood Stalkers, a 1976 regional horror film where two couples make the wrong vacation plans and end up stalked by backwoods maniacs. You can watch it on YouTube and Tubi.
Each week, we watch movies, discuss them with our online chat room, look at each film’s ad campaign, and have a themed mixed drink. Here’s the first one.
The Night Daniel Died
1.5 oz. Malibu
1 oz. vanilla vodka
2 oz. pineapple juice
1 oz. half and half
1 oz. lime juice
Add all of your ingredients to a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake until chilled.
Strain into a glass and savor.
Up next, we’re welcoming Ron Ormond into our lives with The Exotic Ones, a movie that combines gore, music, and girls. You can download it from the Internet Archive.
For this movie, we’re making a tribute to its swamp thing.
Sleepy LaBeef
2 oz. Chambord
1 oz. Midori
1 oz. Malibu
2 oz. pineapple juice
2 oz. cranberry juice
Pour Chambord as the first layer over crushed ice, then layer Midori over it.
Mix your Malibu and juices in a shaker, then carefully pour it over the layers. Stir to create a marbled texture.
We’re so excited to get back to watching movies with you!
Alan J. Pakula took the paranoia at the start of the 1970s and made this film, as well as The Parallax View and All the President’s Men, movies shaped by and that shaped the zeitgeist. He didn’t stop making important films, as he’d gone on to make Sophie’s Choice, Presumed Innocent, The Pelican Brief and Dream Lover, which has some tones of Giallo.
A chemical company executive has disappeared, and the only clue is obscene letters that were due to be sent to a call girl named Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda). The company hires a detective, John Klute (Donald Sutherland), to determine where the man has gone.
There’s a john who is so disturbed that two of his past clients have either committed suicide or become addicts. Bree had seen that man but can’t remember him. That is, once she finally opens up to Klute, who has been listening to her phone calls and following her, learning that she’s an actress who does sex work to pay her bills. One of the girls she knows, Arlyn Page (Dorothy Tristan), can tell Klute that his client may be the killer.
Fonda, a feminist, didn’t want to play this role. She wanted to drop out and ask Pakula to hire Faye Dunaway. She consulted with friends and, after some soul-searching, took on the role. Despite the controversy of her Vietnam protest, it became one of the best-known roles of her career, winning a Best Actress Oscar.
I like the end of this, as Bree keeps working everyone, saying that she’ll be back to see her therapist next week and that she would go mental living in a domestic world. Yet for all we see, Bree and Klute might be destined to be happy together. That’s a big win for a movie that follows a lot of Giallo beats and is filmed as if it’s surveillance footage. Sutherland and Fonda dated for a while; he was her date to the Oscars that year.
Bree’s apartment wasn’t real but was built on a sound stage. That said, Fonda did sleep overnight in it sometimes, and it even had a working toilet. She decorated the place as if Bree was a romance novel reader and had a cat. There’s also a hidden autographed photo of JFK. Fonda had a friend in Lee Strasberg’s private class who occasionally slept with the President, and in her head, she imagined that Bree did, too.
Editor’s note: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on January 18 at 7:30 PM ET at The Sie Film Center in Denver and will be co-hosted by Theresa Mercado of Scream Screen and Keith Garcia, Artistic Director – Sie FilmCenter. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Knife + Heart is a true anomaly when it comes to Giallo. It’s from France, a country more given to fantastique films than Giallo, although movies like The Night Caller, Without Apparent Motive, and The Night Under the Throat exist. And its victims aren’t gorgeous women but the actors of the gay porn industry, changing the psychosexual dynamics of the form.
Instead of featuring the sounds of a band like Goblin or a score by Morricone or Orlandi, Knife + Heart has music by Anthony Gonzalez of M83, director Yann Gonzalez’s brother.
A young man is killed by a masked man whose very sex conceals his murder weapon to open the film. Then, we meet Anne (Vanessa Paradis), an adult film director recently abandoned by her girlfriend and editor, Lois. The man killed in the opening was the star of several of her films; now she must find an actor to take his place. That leads her to Nans, who agrees to be in her movie despite identifying as a straight man.
The new film — Homocidal — will be her version of the murders, which continue targeting members of her cast. The police either can’t — or won’t — help. But the movie finished, and as the group celebrates its completion with a picnic, the killer strikes again, just as Anne pretty much assaults Lois in an attempt to get her back.
The true killer is a man whose father caught him making love to another man. He killed his lover and castrated his son, who was also burned in a fire before being brought back from the dead by a blind crow — the fact that this movie isn’t called Call of the Blind Crow speaks to its non-Italian origins — and seeing one of Anne’s movies brought his memories back.
This being a giallo, there’s also a bird expert with a disfigured hand that looks like he has, quite literally, chicken fingers. Plus, the entire end of the movie is explained via voiceover. The fact that so much of this movie is given to style over substance means it lives up to the film that inspired it.
While the murders are in your face, the sex is nearly hidden from view. Anne is an intriguing protagonist — drunken and bitter instead of the normal virginal giallo and slasher ingenues that save the day. She instead brings the killer closer with each scene that she directs.
Back when they were child chess prodigies, David Willerman (Charles Bailey-Gates) and Peter Sanderson (Christopher Lambert) had a significant match. This match, which ended with Peter victorious and David stabbing him with a pen, had a profound impact on both their lives. It led to Peter’s father leaving and his mother committing suicide, and David’s obsession with his chess board, which he kept in the group homes and orphanages he grew up in.
When Peter grows up, he ascends to the status of a chess grandmaster and becomes a widower, left to raise his daughter, Erica (Katharine Isabelle), alone. The plot thickens when his latest lover, Debi (Kehli O’Byrne, Ginger Snaps), is discovered dead. The police, led by Police Captain Frank Sedman (Tom Skeritt), Detective Andy Wagner (Daniel Baldwin), and psychologist Kathy Sheppard (Diane Lane), launch an investigation, with Peter as the prime suspect. However, the mystery deepens as David, the potential missing link, enters the picture.
Directed by Swiss-born Carl Schenkel and written by Brad Mirman (Body of Evidence), this film, a part of the Giallo genre, features all of Peter’s lovers showing up with their faces painted like clowns and drained of blood. It also takes a page out of The Cat o’ Nine Tails by having Peter’s daughter Erica being best friends with his blind coach, who is played by Ferdy Maine (the devil from Night Train to Terror).
I always wonder how the Giallo police work. In this example, Sheppard goes from psychoanalyzing Peter to being a skewered queen. See, I can make sex jokes about anything! But seriously, defund the Giallo police. Sleeping with a suspect? Well, they were married in real life at the time.
It’s not the best Giallo-adjacent movie I’ve seen, but it’s not the worst. I did like how excited Lambert was when he won at Battle Chess.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this on Saturday, Jan. 18 at midnight at the Coolidge Theater in Brookline, MA (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Initially intended for Michelangelo Antonioni, this film had the potential to be another Blow-Up. However, Carlo Vanzina and Enrico Vanzina created it with only a limited connection to the novel that inspired the title. The book, written by fashion journalist Paolo Pietroni under the pseudonym Marco Parma, generated significant controversy upon its release for naming prominent figures in Italy’s fashion industry.
The plot of this film, unlike any other, revolves around a serial killer prowling the streets of Milan, targeting glamorous models with a deadly pair of scissors, a weapon suggested by the renowned writer Franco Ferrini, known for his collaborations with Dario Argento. The initial choice of a gun as the killer’s weapon was quickly discarded, as it didn’t quite fit the unique essence of the Giallo genre.
Meanwhile, Yellowstone Park ranger Bob Crane (played by Tom Schanley) senses that his sister Jessica (Nicola Perring) is in distress. His journey takes him across the world, where he unexpectedly finds himself mingling with the rich and famous. Can he rescue her, or will he find himself in the crosshairs of the killer? And will Donald Pleasence ever turn down a film role?
One thing is certain: Barbara (Renée Simonsen), a model and friend of Jessica’s, is interested in Bob, but there are hints that she might also be obsessed with Jessica.
I often think about the connection between Dario Argento and Brian De Palma. This movie shares similarities with its murder scenes set in Italy and its modern American methods of death, which are reminiscent of the drill in Body Double and the psychic elements in Sisters.
Unlike many Giallo films, this one made a significant impact in Italy, sparking a small wave of comeback films set in the fashion world and the sequel Too Beautiful to Die. While I prefer that sequel and certainly think it surpasses the third film, the Vanzina brothers’ The Last Fashion Show, I’ve come to appreciate this film over time.
Never forget that this has one of the most amazing moments in Italian exploitation movies: Donald Pleasence going to town on a Wendy’s salad bar.
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