Angela (Marina Giordana, Beast with a Gun) and Marco (Christian Borromeo, Murder Rock) live in a huge house in the country — I will resist making Blur references — and because this movie’s title in English is That Strange Desire to Love, you can guess that they are a couple despite being related. Oh Italian exploitation movies…

Don’t blame me. Blame Mario Imperoli (Mia moglie, un corpo per l’amore, Like Rabid Dogs) and the man he wrote this with, the infamous Luigi Montefiori, better known as George Eastman.

The problems arise when a teacher named Claudia (Beba Loncar), a teacher is sent to instruct them under the orders of Father Don Giuseppe (Philippe Leroy). There’s also Rocco (Eastman), a handyman who has been made mute by a car accident who is also in love with Angela. The giallo element comes in when Angela uses Rocco to get revenge on Claudia for daring to make love to Marco. Upset by his guilt — and the sound of a car accident that Marco keeps replaying — Rocco kills himself and that means that Angela and Marco can embrace once again.

Also: George Eastman is so strong in this movie that he can lift a car.

Somehow, this is probably as tender and well-thought out of an Italian exploitation incest movie as you’re going to get. I realize that sentence makes no sense.

Thanks to Severin Films for including a quote from this site in the sales copy: 

“A SIGNIFICANT MOVIE… One of the first zombie films made in color, it mostly played Southern drive-ins and Mexican cinemas before disappearing for over 40 years.” B&S About Movies

Extras on this release include an audio interview with distributor Samuel M. Sherman, an interview with author/filmmaker C. Courtney Joyner on Barry Mahon and a trailer.

You can get the blu ray from Severin.

The Dead One is a significant movie because it’s one of the first two zombie films made in color — the other is Dr. Blood’s Coffin — and it was made outside of the Hollywood system in New Orleans. It mostly played in Southern drive-ins, in Mexico and the UK before it disappeared for 41 years.

Shot in Eastmancolor and Ultrascope, a form of Cinemascope from Germany, The Dead One has a cool looking zombie and otherwise would be an unremarkable film other than the fact that it’s a Barry Mahon film and stands out from the rest of his output, which is either falls into the disparate genres of nudist films, roughies, propaganda movies or childen’s films.

Actually, the poster for this would like you to know just how remarkable this movie is, saying that The Dead One is “The Greatest VOODOO Film Ever Made – Filmed on Location in New Orleans Where VOODOO was introduced to the New World.”

A zombie is haunting the plantation of Kenilwort and commanded by Monica Carlton (Monica Davis, who is also in Mahon’s 1,000 Shapes of a Female, Rocket Attack U.S.A. and She Should Have Stayed In Bed), the mistress of the decaying plantation.

This is probably the most restrained Mahon film I’ve seen. It played double bills for a long time, a filler for drive-ins that would run late into the night while what happened in the steamed up cars looked a lot like the other movies Barry was known for making.

Third Hypothesis on a Case of Perfect Criminal Strategy is better known by the name Who Killed the Prosecutor and Why? It was directed by Giuseppe Vari (Rome Against Rome) and written by Thomas Lang. Carlo (Lou Castel) and girlfriend Olga (Beba Lončar) started with a fashion shoot on a remote beach but have already dropped the camera — and most of their clothes — when two cars show up. Men throw the body of a dead man — who turns out to be a prosecutor — into the other car, cover it with gasoline and light it up. state prosecutor. Instead of going to the police, Carlo decides to find out who did this and blackmail them with the photos he’s taken.

After talking to his pornographer Uncle Fifi (Massimo Serato), Carlo speaks to Don Salvatore (Fortunato Arena) about buying the photos. When he refuses, the photographer goes to the media, but his buyer Roversi (Carlo Landa) is soon killed, which means that both Carlo and the newspaper’s editor Mauri (Antonio La Raina) decide to figure out who is killing people who want these photos. Maybe they should have just gone to the police and Inspector Vezzi (Adolfo Celi). If they did, we wouldn’t have a movie, so that’s how it goes, I guess.

So how is this a giallo? Whoever wants the photos has gained some of the negatives and is killing anyone else who has seen them, as mentioned before, but they have black gloves, we never see them and their murders are in the style of the genre.

If that isn’t enough for you, some cuts of this movie have hardcore inserts, which is the definition of gratuitous.

Valerio Barigozzi (Johnny Dorelli) is a giallo writer who also writes the Countess Esmerelda column in the newspaper. One day, he accidentally gets a letter from a serial killer that reveals the next victim. He starts to get even more letters and each killing moves him up into the editorial office, but it also makes him more of a suspect.

Unlike most gialli, the killings aren’t important or even shown as murder set pieces. We only see the end result. The real villains are those using these murders to advance their careers, like our protagonist. Like many a gialli, there is a score by Ennio Morricone.

Directed by Luigi Zampa and written by Sergio Donati, this even winks at the giallo genre by showing the posters for Spasmo and Death Walks On High Heels outside of a theater (as well as Carrie, Destruction Force and The Beast In Heat).

Don’t come to this expecting the black gloves and razor of the giallo. Instead, see how far someone will go to be somebody. It feels very much like Zodiac years before Robert Graysmith wrote his book and reminded the public that a very real killer was mailing confessions and clues to the San Francisco Chronicle.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Eglima sto Kavouri (Crime In Kavouri) was released as He Murdered His Wife, The Rape Killer, Death Kiss (the name it played as on Commander USA’s Groovie Movies), Vai killer! (Go Killer!) and The Wife Killer, this Greek movie was directed by Kostas Karagiannis (Dangerous Cargo, Land of the Minotaur) and written by Thanos Leivaditis.

Jim (Larry Daniels, the American name for Lakis Komninos) has a good looking wife named Helen (Dorothy Moore) who gives him a yacht but since he already has a new love named Laura (Jane Paterson), he decides to kill her. To do that and not be arrested for it, he works with Mike (Vagelis Seilinos), a pantyhose-masked serial killer who has been stabbing couples on lover’s lanes. The plan? Mike roughs up Jim and kills Helen, then both men split up the money she’s worth. And some heroin, too.

Mike believes that Jim will kill him when the job is complete, so he finds someone that looks just like Helen and kills her, which is a plan, I guess. He keeps the real Helen in his basement but you know that she’s going to get out and ruin all of his planning. But let’s salute Vagelis Seilinos for going all out as he acts as a chloroform carrying choke-out killing machine.

Daniels and Moore were also in the Karagiannis film Tango of Perversion, which is pretty strange. This is a 70s furniture having giallo but in Greece instead of Italy and for that, it’s worth your time.

You can watch this on YouTube.

I Know That You Know That I Know stars its director, Alberto Sordi, as Fabio Bonetti, a banker who has been married to his wife Livia (Monica Vitti) for more than twenty years. All he cares about these days are football and watching TV. And then they meet a private detective (Giuseppe Mannajuolo) who has been filming them for two weeks, as he has been hired by the rich Vitali to watch his wife Elena (Micaela Pignatelli), but accidentally filmed them.

That’s when he shares what he has learned: their teenage daughter Veronica (Isabella De Bernardi) is on drugs, Livia is cheating on Fabio and, well, Fabio has days to live thanks to a mystery disease. That’s when Fabio decides to change his life. He’s never shown love to his daughter, who dresses in his clothes to shock him. He chose football matches over his wife and pushed her into another man’s bed. So he decides that before he dies, he’s going to fix his family.

Written by Sordi with Augusto Caminito (The Designated Victim) and Rodolfo Sonego (Vacanze di Natale ’91), this raises the same question I always have for American sitcoms. How could Monica Vitti — she was Modesty Blaise! — end up with Alberto Sordi? Some guys have all the luck.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Piero Zuffi was an Italian set designer and painter who worked for a decade at Milan’s historic opera house Teatro alla Scala. He also worked as a production designer on several movies, directed and wrote this movie — with Ennio Flaiano — and wrote one other, General Della Rovere.

So yeah, this is a poliziotteschi with giallo leanings, but when you’ve watched more than four hundred gialli, you start hunting for things you haven’t seen. Also released as Red Hot Shot and The Syndicate: A Death In The Family, this is the story of NYPD detective Frank Berin (Michael Reardon) who is trying to learn who killed a pharmaceutical company owner named Mac Brown (Vittorio Duse), gunning him down right in the middle of Wall Street. There are no leads or suspects, so Brown’s daughter Monica (Barbara Bouchet) goes on TV and offers a reward of $250,000 for any information.

Berin is no fan of the Brown family, as he’s always felt that they ran the heroin trade in the Big Apple, but his case ended when his main witness Fanny (Susanna Martinková) was blinded. And Monica is worried that whoever killed her father is coming after her. That killer could be her fiancee, Don Carbo (David Groh).

What’s kind of strange is that Michael Reardon was in two acting roles. This movie and a bit part on the Burt Reynolds’ TV show Hawk. And that’s it. This movie is near impossible to find and Reardon died in 2006. This was given an X rating for some reason, so it never really played, but it’s astounding thanks to Berin going wild with its look, filling it with a great Piero Picceroni score, parties in mirrored rooms, numerous flashing light shows, old rich people gorging themselves on a nonstop menu of food while near a swimming pool and a scene where drug addicts nearly take on the look and feel of Romero’s zombies. And perhaps strangest of all, Bouchet is a brunette!

There are giallo elements in this and yes, there are tons of plot holes and the story isn’t all that great, but there are so many weird elements in it that I think you really have to see it. Speaking of the soundtrack, it’s been released several times, but this hasn’t come out on DVD or blu ray. In a world where every movie has been rereleased so many times, let’s get this out and into peoples’ hands!

You can watch this on YouTube.

Human Cobras is the story of Tony Garden (George Ardisson), who was exiled from the United States but now has to return after the death of his twin brother John. He takes his brother’s wife — and his ex-lover — Leslie (Erika Blanc) with him to get revenge, which takes him all the way to Kenya after finding a clue written in blood. Blood drawn from a razor-wielding killer because, yes, this is a giallo.

They get there and start looking for John’s business partner George MacGreaves (Alberto de Mendoza) but the killer has followed them. So while Tony is romancing Clara (Janine Reynaud), Leslie is taking a bubble bath or being stalked by the black-gloved villain.

Directed by Bitto Albertini using the name Albert J. Walkner, this has a Ernesto Gastaldi and Eduardo Manzanos Borchero script that’s better than the direction. Oh Bitto, you are better off making movies like the two Black Emanuelle movies and Escape from Galaxy 3 than trying to make a twist and turn giallo. Imagine if Get Carter had Eurospy elements and wanted to be a giallo while also having some ghost moments where Blanc thinks she sees her dead lover, then drop that later subplot. It also has a hero, of sorts, who has no issue with dumping a woman’s body in a waterfall or going elephant hunting, which knowing this is an Italian film, you can imagine that yes, elephants were really killed. That said, Luciano Martino produced it, so it has some quality to it and there’s a role for Luciano Pigozzi as a New York City gangster who gets shook down by our protagonist.