The sequel to Finis Hominis (The End of Man) finds the good side of José Mojica Marins, Finis Hominis, leaving the mental ward yet again to set the world right. The last time he got out, he almost became a world leader. This time, he wants to do something easier: fix all of the social, religious and political unrest in the world.
How would he do this? Well, start small. He walks throughout the streets of Brazil and stops the war between two criminals, Skull and Chico, by stealing Skull’s son and making them work together. The people in another community go wild and decide to bring Satan back in a cemetery, even eating live chickens — yes, do not doubt the animal deaths in the movies of Italy or Brazil — and drinking their blood right out of their necks until Finnis Hommis stops it all, as well as a wedding, then the doctors realize that he’s loose. The footage also goes from black and white to color seemingly at will and probably based on what film stock and cameras Marin could get that day.
It’s sad that Coffin Joe and Finnis Hommis didn’t ever battle — maybe inside Marins’ brain? — because they would have just yelled at one another about morality and the ways of mankind.
Directed and written by Marins, the man who is also Zé do Caixão,
Arrow Video’s limited edition collection of Coffin Joe may never escape my blu ray player. When the Gods Fall Asleep has new interviews with Virginie Sélavy on surrealism in Marins’ work and Jack Sargeant. You can get this set from MVD.
I’m going to get it out of my system so this entire article isn’t about me gushing about Sue Lyon, but I am not made of stone. With only two previous acting roles, she was cast in the lead of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita at just 14 years old. The book’s writer, Vladmir Nabokov, who also wrote the screenplay and said that she was the “perfect nymphet.” Compounding his cringe was that he wanted the 12-year-old Catherine Demongeot to play the role. Man, dudes were weird about this movie — Otto Preminger would not permit Jill Haworth to take the lead nor would Walt Disney let Hayley Mills, even not allowing her to see the movie — and I would like to think things are different, but no, they aren’t.
Now back to me waxing on and on about Sue Lyon.
After winning the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer—Female and releasing a single on MGM — “Lolita Ya Ya” which was written by Nelson Riddle — Lyon would later say that her life fell apart early: “My destruction as a person dates from that movie. Lolita exposed me to temptations no girl of that age should undergo. I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to stardom at 14 in a sex nymphet role to stay on a level path thereafter.”
She signed a seven-year professional services contract to Kubrick, producer James B. Harris and production company Seven Arts Productions, making The Night of the Iguana, 7 Women, The Flim-Flam Man and Tony Rome before being released from her deal. She went to Italy in 1970 to make Four Rode Out and Evel Knievel before two of her marriages — the first to African American football player Roland Harrison in 1971 just four years after interracial marriage was passed by the Supreme Court and another in 1973 to imprisoned murderer Cotton Adamson — ruined her box office appeal, at least to people in the U.S.
At this point, she started making Spanish genre movies like this and Murder in a Blue World, a wild ripoff of A Clockwork Orange starring a Kubrick ingenue. She also made the TV movie Smash-Up on Interstate 5 and Charles Band films such as Crash! and End of the World as well as the baffling The Astral Factor and the last movie she’d make, Alligator.
In this film, Lyon draws on her sex appeal as she plays Angela, a woman who has married a rich older blind man named Arthur (Fernando Rey) for his money. It’s a pretty good deal because she gets a life of luxury and also gets to take advantage of the attractive young hired help in Marc (Christian Hay), who actually set the whole thing up.
You know who isn’t happy with this motorcycle-riding, tarot-dealing blonde American taking her man Marc? One of the other servants, Natalie (Gloria Grahame, Mansion of the Doomed).
Lest you think that this is all high class, inserts with Claudine Beccarie were added to the French version. And hey, when else can you see a classic film noir actress like Grahame act in a quasi-giallo with Anne Libert, the Queen of the Night from A Virgin Among the Living Dead?
Based on the novel Macchie di belletto by Ludovico Dentice, directed by Romolo Guerrieri (The Sweet Body ofDeborah) and written by Franco Verucci, Massimo D’Avak and Alberto Silvestri, Un Detective (AKA Detective Belli) stars Franco Nero as Commissioner Belli.
He’s a corrupt detective hired by the rich Avvocato Fontana (Adolfo Celi) to look after his son Mino (Maurizio Bonuglia). There’s also a dead record producer named Mr. Romanis (Marino Masé), a model and singer called Emmanuelle (Susanna Martinková, Colpo rovente), an illegal alien trying to get in a relationship with Belli by the name of Sandy (Delia Boccardo) and Fontana’s mysterious and gorgeous wife Vera (Florinda Bolkan).
Also known as Ring of Death and released with the amazing title Tracce di rossetto e di droga per un detective (Traces of Lipstick and Drugs for a Detective), this is a tough movie filled with gorgeous people. As much a giallo as an early poliziotteschi, this has Nero beating suspects, ignoring the rules and doing things like driving Sandy directly into high speed traffic while interrogating her and that’s his love interest! And, well, Mino’s too.
This is a hard boiled detective movie made in Italy with Franco Nero being incredible. You need to watch it.
The TV mini-series Seagull Island is 3 hours and 36 minutes long. The movie that they hacked it into is an hour and forty two minutes. As you can imagine, a lot gets lost, but this is not a unique thing. Yor Hunter from the Future and The Scorpion With Two Tails were also originally made as TV miniseries that were edited.
Barbara Carey (Prunella Ransome, Who Can Kill a Child?) has come to Rome to visit her blind concert pianist sister Marianne Saunders (Sherry Buchanan, Eyes Behind the Stars). It turns out that she’s the third blind girl to go missing recently, so like many a gialli heroine, Barbara investigates the case along with British Consulate Martin Foster (Nicky Henson). Her detective work takes her to the private island of millionaire David Malcom (Jeremy Brett), a place filled with secrets and, yes, the bodies of women without their eyes.
This is the kind of movie where the sounds of seagulls causes a woman to get so upset that she jumps right out a window and where ineffective cops literally have waiters in the squad room ready to bring them hard boiled eggs.
This aired on the CBS Late Movie on May 27, 1983. It’s not the only giallo that CBS played, as The Bird With the Crystal Plumage also aired on that venerable late night movie destination.
As for this movie, it makes me wonder. A spoiler, but why don’t rich people with deformed children look into a support group or working with a professional instead of doing it on their own and getting beautiful women killed? Then again, so many gialli would never be made if these fictional families got it together.
Olga’s (Serena Grandi, Delirium) life is one that will forever be damaged by childhood trauma, as her father killed himself before her eyes. Now, along with her husband Paolo (David Brandon), she is finally going home. This starts with a hell of a dream sequence, as Olga remembers her mother covered in blood and her shooting her father in the face. This memory or vision or way of dealing with her father’s suicide is why she has blamed herself for it since she was young. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Carlo Ferranti (Dobromir Manev), believes that confronting her past will help her heal. After all, she has a good marriage and a supportive partner, right?
She gets the opportunity to see her old friends like Isabel (Daniela Poggi) and Sheila (Florinda Bolkan), as well as experience the club where she once danced and sang. But one night, while staying at her family’s home, Olga is attacked by a mysterious intruder. Only Inspector Michael Manning (Stéphane Ferrara), a police officer she once had an affair with, believes her. Everyone else thinks that Olga has finally lost her mind.
The stalker remembers that our heroine used to be an exotic dancer called Olga O — yes, not much of a name change or disguise — and keeps using that name as he chases her on motorcycle and leaves those messages. Yet she also feels drawn to danger and if that feels like, well, a strange vice, that’s because this is co-written by the man who wrote so many gialli — including The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh — Ernesto Gastaldi. Along with Daniele Stroppa and Maria Cociani, he’s put together a pretty good plot that makes one look to the past but enjoy what they are currently watching. What helps is that the cinematographer was Luigi Kuveiller (Deep Red, A Quiet Place In the Country, A Lizard In a Woman’s Skin), who definitely knows how to shoot a giallo movie, and the director Antonio Bonifacioas picked up a few things from working with Joe D’Amato. I also liked his Appuntamento in nero and this improves on that.
By the end, Olga is seeing dead bodies in her bed, unsure of who to trust and may even have tried to kill herself. Is there anyone who can save our heroine? I really enjoyed Olga’s Strange Story and it was worth the time that it took for time to find it.
This Saturday at 8 PM EST, Unkle Spooky and Mike Justice will join Bill for two wild movies. You can join them on the Groovy Doom Facebook and YouTube pages.
Up first — and this is a first! — is director Mike Justice’s The Trouble With Barry. You can tell Mike what you think of the movie live and in-person. Or at least via char. You can watch it on Tubi.
This week, I’m breaking with tradition by serving two drinks. Yes, each week we watch movies, talk about them, check out their ad campaigns and have matching cocktails.
The first is the actual cocktail that Barry enjoys throughout the movie!
Jealous Eyes was directed by Bruno Gaburro (Malombra, Fashion Crimes), who its OK to be jealous of yourself because he was once married to Erika Blanc. It was written by Roberto Leoni (who wrote Santa Sangre the same year and also was the writer of American Rickshaw and My Dear Killer).
Also known as Blue Chill, this is an erotic thriller in which Chris (Donald Burton) loses a friend and moves into his apartment to compose a song in memory. That means that he’s blowing his sax at all hours of the day and night, so this movie has not just 80s sex sax but also straight up saxophone. He meets Eva (Dalila Di Lazzaro, who is the female monster in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and also shows up in Frankenstein 80, which is pretty much all it takes to get me obsessed; she’s also the headmistress in Phenomena) and he can put away his sax — am I getting paid for using that word so much or is this a search engine optimization trick? — and start hearing it on the soundtrack as they start having some adult naptime. Have hot pudding for supper. Moistening the Pope. You know. The sex.
She claims that her husband Senator Verani (Gérard Manzetti) and her stepson — who this being an Italian movie, she is also sleeping with — are busing her and that Chris needs to kill them both. Look, when you just start dating someone and pillow talk turns to “you need to kill for me,” you are in a giallo. Or a neo-noir. Or an erotic thriller. As you can imagine, when they are killed, Eva tries to get him to confess to the crime. But ah, perhaps she tried the same thing with his friend. And doesn’t he have a song to write?
Gaburro edited footage from this movie and Alcune signore per bene into 1993’s Rose rosse per una squillo (Scandalous Liasons). This is how I get into these gialli rabbit holes, because I just read what Alcune signore per bene is about: “Sexual infedelity, blackmail, murder and suicide plague a fashion house and its nymphomaniac owner…” And it has Eva Grimaldi and Florence Guérin in it? Time to start looking.
The Price of Death comes as the Italian Western has given way to the giallo. Therefore, this is nearly a last gasp and an acceptance of the shift. It’s also very much a Eurospy, as the hero, Silver (Gianni Garko) is a dandy who lives with several gorgeous women and always is surrounded by luxury.
Now, we all know and love Garko as Sartana — in all but Sartana’s Here… Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin in which George Hilton plays the role — but the character of Silver first appeared in Killer Caliber .32 in which he was played by Peter Lee Lawrence and is also in Killer Adios, even if his name is Jessy in that film. The character is the coolest man in the West, always calm and collected, a detective, bounty hunter and unstoppable gunfighter.
That said, Silver dresses in brown instead of black, but he still uses miniature hidden guns. He’s pretty much Sartana, but it’s not like that’s a bad thing.
This starts with a very giallo POV of a killer hunting down and stabbing a Carmen Morales (Franca De Stratis) on the same evening where three masked men shot and kill several people at a bar. Sheriff Tom Stanton (Luciano Catenacci) kills two of the men but the third escapes. Everyone thinks that Chester Conway (Klaus Kinski) has to be the criminal, including Judge Atwell (Alfredo Rizzo), who sentences him to hang. In response, Conway’s lawyer Jeff Plummer (Franco Abbina) hires Silver to prove the innocence of his client after a trial where only Conway’s ex — Polly Winters (Mimma Biscardi) — stood up for him.
Silver is already working for the Morales family, looking for her killer, and he gets no help from the law and plenty of stares and murmurs from the townsfolk, who include Doc Rosencrantz (Luciano Pigozzi) and Reverend Tiller (Giancarlo Prete), proving the strength of this film’s cast.
Silver come across as Derek Flint mixed with Sherlock Holmes, training with martial artists, rescuing people and discovering that everyone in town is either sleeping with each other or working with one another to make money off one another. He also learns that while Conway is innocent of one crime, he may also be the man that he’s looking for.
Director and writer Lorenzo Gicca Palli also wrote Killer Caliber .32 and created Silver. He also directed and wrote Blackie the Pirate and two Zorro movies, so he definitely gets how to do an adventure movie. His other names that he worked as are Enzo Gicca and Vincent Thomas. I wish he’d made more movies with Silver, who deserves to be in as many films as Sartana and Sabata.
According to this review on the essential Spaghetti Western Database, there was a softcore scene shot for this movie with Biscardi and Dominique Badou, who doesn’t appear in the film, and a hardcore scene with Pietro Torrisi (who I just found out was in Check-up érotique, a porn directed by Renato Polselli!) and an unknown blonde actress. According to the book Wild West Gals, “illegal or semi-legal soft or hard-core versions of genre movies were often edited by producers and sold under the counter.” I would assume that some scenes like this also appeared in fumetti magazines like Cinesex and often aren’t in the actual movie.
Directed and written by Luigi Batzella (who is also the Ivan Kathansky who made The Beast In Heat, the Paul Solvay who made Nude for Satan and The Devil’s Wedding Night and the Dean Jones who made God Is My Colt .45 but Joe D’Amato made a bunch of those as well, so he at least signed for them), Blackmail is all about bad girl Babel Stone (Brigitte Skay). She’s just been busted for drugs again and her father (Umberto Raho) has to bail her out. He’s probably wondering why the Italian title translates as The Strange Blackmail of a Respectable Girl.
Babel does have an excuse. When her mother died, her dad quickly got remarried to the much younger Stella (Rosalba Neri). If she was a son, she would probably understand. I mean, I get the need to grieve but Rosalba Neri, you know? Give your dad a rest.
She decides to get back at him — and make some money — that her friends Claudio (Benjamin Lev), Rick (Claudio Giorgi) and Eva (Nuccia Cardinali) will kidnap her. This seems a bit like Delitto al circolo del tennis but you know, the giallo directors never seem to trust hippies.
The whole plan goes wrong when they decide to hide at the home of Claudio’s sister Paola (Darla Abrem) and her husband Marcel (Lorenzo Piani) and they return home early, which means that they also have to get kidnapped.
You know how people thought that John Paul Getty III kidnapped himself? This movie is based on that, except that I doubt that that real life story had attacks on maids that end with sapphic interludes and Neri getting involved to make money off everyone. If you’re a fan of Skay — she’s also in Isabella, Duchess of the Devils, A Bay of Blood, The Love Factorand Four Times That Night — you’re probably going to want to see this. Beyond showing off her body for most of the running time, she plays a really ice cold manipulator and is the whole reason why this movie is a success.
Scandal In Black was directed by Antonio Bonifacio, making his directing debut after doing second unit on several Filmirage movies including Convent of Sinners, Delizia, Top Model, Zombie 5: Killing Birds and Pomeriggio caldo. He also worked with D’Amato and this movie’s writer, Daniele Stropa, on 1994’s Sul filo del rasoio.
We start the movie with a flashback, seeing how Angela Baldwin (Mirella Banti, Tenebrae) was assaulted when she was young. Then, we follow her to an adult theater where she shows up dressed in a short red dress and ensures that she’s seen before she goes to the bathroom and emerges with her body covered with blood, the victim of another attack.
The fact that his wife has been raped at a porn theater doesn’t seem to make her husband John (Andy J. Forest) all that happy, as he’s a diplomat whose career is moving upward. He wants to get rid of her and already has a new lover, her best friend, supermodel Eva (Mary Lindstrom). Seeing as how she lives with them, this makes things convenient for John. They want to get married but don’t want a scandal, so they start calling Angela as the man who attacked her and threaten her life.
Angela has even more problems because she’s been spied on by not only her maid Rosie (Laura Piattella), but also the projectionist (Franco Citti) at the theater who had a camera installed in the bathroom. He watched her attack herself, slamming her face into the mirror and slicing in her own flesh. Man, that scene is really hard to watch as is the moment when he attacks her, which is watched by a strange doll, reminding you that this is a giallo. And that theater also has Italian adult star Marina Frajese as its ticket taker (thanks Euro Fever for spotting her) as well as a posters for Top Model, Error Fatale and…Tucker A Man and His Dream?!?They’re showing Monique Gabrielle in Emmanuelle 5 in case you’re wondering!
There’s also a wild saw attack on the man who raped Angela when she was young that really goes hard. Unlike so many of the 1980s gialli that don’t seem like they could hang with the wonderful films of the early 70s, this really does seem like it has the twists and turns to make it. Sure, it doesn’t look as good as those movies, but unlike so many of the safe 80s movies, this has no problem being sleazy. Well done.
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