Head Down, Feet Up is about a killer who has picked teachers as his target. An artist named Andrea (Corrado Pani) gets involved when he tries to save one of them and catches a look at the killer’s face. Like the typical giallo hero, he decides to become the investigator of the case. And seeing as how the police won’t listen to him and he’s become the primary suspect, he has even more reason to solve the crimes.

Director and writer Ugo Novello only directed this one film, but was a second unit director on La muerte incierta and a production manager on several movies. This is a rare comedy giallo — the title refers to the protagonist’s affinity for yoga — that also has a subplot where Andrea gets his girlfriend (Marina Malfatti, All the Colors of the Dark) pregnant and she has an abortion without telling him. It also has a scene has a dream where the professors are all being murdered. When he tries to warn one, the gay teacher believes that Andre wants a date.

This also has an ending where nothing is solved other than Andrea finally being able to nail one of the yoga poses that has been too difficult for him. What an odd movie.

Directed by Alex Infascelli (Almost Blue) and written by Niccolò Ammaniti and Antonio Manzini, Il siero della vanità (The Vanity Syndrome) begins with a riot on a TV show called The Sonia Norton Show. As the show’s psychologist leaves the studio, he is knocked out and disappears. He’s not the last Italian TV celebrity to go missing and Sonia Norton (Francecsa Neri) declares that whoever is taking them is in the midst of “an unprecedented attack on the heart of the nation.”

Police detectives Lucia Allasco (Margherita Buy) and Franco Berardi (Valerio Mastandrea) are assigned the case. Allasco is barely recovered from a past investigation in which a colleague was killed and she nearly lost the ability to walk, surviving with a limp.

Those who have been kidnapped — psychologist Michele Benda (Marco Giallini), a fallen Miss Italy named Azzurra Rispoli (Barbora Bobulova), transsexual Rocco Piccolo (Luis Molteni), the singer of the one-hit wonder “Il cuore in soffitt” (“The Heart In the Attic”) Ester Bonanni (Maddalena Maggi), ostrich breeder Domenico Calaciura and a magician named Daniel (Rosario J. Gnolo) who claims to be the son of Houdini — were all on the same episode of The Sonia Norton Show ten years ago.

It turns out that Daniel had taken all of these people hostage and staged an entirely repeated episode of the show so that he can perform Houdini’s Torture of the Chinese Pagoda without a mistake. Somehow, Rocco escapes but is hit by a subway train, which shows Lucia where Daniel is hiding. She barely escapes with her life when he drugs her.

When he does succeed in the performance, he’s caught by Franco, who is followed by Sonia Norton and crew who are doing the show live. They start a whole new episode with the survivors of Daniel’s revenge, all except for Lucia, who limps away from the spotlight.

Sonia’s show is based on one of Italy’s most popular — and trashiest — TV shows, Uomini e Donne (Men and Women). Like The Bachelor, contestants try to find their true love over a three month process. Contestants are called tronistas and the competitions for their love must put on extravagant demonstrations of their character. They are graded and then selected or denied a private date with the tronista. After a series of private dates, each date is played back for the men and women to confront each other in front of a live studio audience, mediated by host Maria De Fillipi.

As much an indictment of Italian pop culture as a giallo, this second effort finds Infascelli moving away from the wild visuals of Almost Blue and working to tell a more understandable story. It’s interesting, but I miss the strangeness of his first effort.

Alex Infascelli has made some intriguing films. The first of his I saw was his documentary S Is for Stanley, which is about Stanley Kubrick and his personal chauffeur and assistant Emilio D’Alessandro. He also made a few other giallo movies, including Almost Blue and The Vanity Syrum.

Written by Infascelli with Vincent Villani, Olivia (Chiara Conti) and her friends Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), Nicole (Mandala Tayde), Christina (Olga Shuvalova) and Summer (Claire Falconer) have travelled to a farmhouse where they will undergo a purification ritual and only drink water. No phones, no food, just them and water. Of the friends, Olivia is the one who is most often made fun of, as she’s too sweet. But what a secret she has. Inside her body is her unborn twin Helena, who has left behind teeth in her shoulder. While in the middle of the madness that the water brings on, she tears out those vestigial teeth with her hands. And then it gets worse.

Featuring effects by Sergio Stivaletti (The Wax Mask), this feels like a new take on the f giallo, a movie where what should be a peaceful time of meditation is transformed into horror inside a glass-walled villa. I have no idea exactly how it got to where it got, as it could have been polluted water, the hidden twin, witchery or just plain mental illness. A lot of it feels like an art film with giallo leanings — hey, that sounds good — and some reviewers have outright hated the acting and the fact that nothing occurs for long stretches of time. But when it gets going, it really hit with me. Hopefully you will get the same thing out of it.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Divorce attorney Sara Lancetti (Nancy Brilli, Hannah from Demons 2) is planning her wedding to Max Altieri (Giulio Scarpati), which comes just in time for someone to start sending her threatening letters and phone calls, sounding like Night Killer, and always with yellow roses. If she goes through with her marriage, the person sending them says that they will kill her.

When talking with whoever this stalker could be, she realizes that he is one of the many men in her past. Seeing as how she doesn’t want to tell Max about her life before him, she starts to investigate them to see who wants her dead. As she meets each man — hoping to listen to their voice and compare them to the phone calls — she feels something for one old lover, inflames the passion in a sensitive ex named Daniele (Claudio Bigagli) and even learns a secret that has nothing to do with the potential killer from a third.

Can Sara find the person who is after her before she marries her true love? Is he her true love? Will she have any passion with any of the many exes that she’s finding and reconnecting with? I mean, it is an erotic thriller. Or giallo, because they are so close.

Directed by Gianpaolo Tescari and written by Silvia Napolitano, this has an interesting idea, even if the execution isn’t as exciting as the films of the 70s.

Assassination in Rome AKA El secreto de Bill North (The Secret of Bill North) was directed and co-written by Silvio Amadio, who also made Amuck! and Smile Before Death. It was co-written by Giovanni Simonelli, who also wrote Jungle Raiders, Seven Deaths In the Cat’s Eye and Django Shoots First.

Dick Sherman (Hugh O’Brien) is an American reporter who has settled in Rome, covering scandalous celebrity stories. A dead body is found at the Trevi Fountain — already famous from La Dolce Vita and Three Coins in the Fountain to movie watchers — which sets this whole mystery off. There’s also American Shelley North (Cyd Charisse), on vacation in Italy with new husband Bill (Alberto Dalbés) when he goes missing. Decades ago, she and Dick had an affair and she calls to him for help, which doesn’t work all that well with Dick’s current love interest Erika (Eleonora Rossi Drago, Camille 2000).

There’s also a MacGuffin that everyone needs to find that keeps getting stolen, lots of gorgeous parties and even a trip to Cinecittà studios where a peplum is being filmed. Known in Italy as Il segreto del vestito rosso, which is more of an Edgar Wallace-style title, this is an early giallo before the genre had been fully formed, arriving just a few years after The Girl Who Knew Too Much. It has some style and huge society parties, plus Dick’s office bar is bigger than the one in my house and everyone smokes inside, making me love everything about this movie, even if by the end Dick doesn’t seem all that moved by all the death that surrounds him.

Also: The poster and U.S. title for this looks like a Eurospy film. If it had come out a few years later, it would have had an animal name and had a poster with Cyd Charisse’s $5 million dollar legs in full view.

Professor Riccardo Dossi (Chris Avram) is having an affair with Benedetta (Anna Gael) — the young daughter of his best friend — and being blackmailed by his daughter Lilla (Angela McDonald) and her boyfriend — and Riccardo’s tennis coach — Sandro (Roberto Bisacco). It’s as much a crime of manners and trying to explain the rich and their issues in the late 60s as it is a giallo, but man, it looks great, the world that these people live in is gorgeous and Gael barely can keep her clothes on.

Gael was also Anna Abigail Thynn, Marchioness of Bath; Ceawlin Thynn, 8th Marquess of Bath; Viscountess Weymouth; the Dowager Marchioness; the Honorable Lady Thynn. Yes, beyond starring in movies like Therese and Isabelle, Dracula and Son and Zeta One, she met Alexander Thyn, Viscount Weymouth, in Paris in 1959. They had an affair that lasted for ten years until they were married in 1969. She was 15 when they met.

Unknown to the wealthy Riccardo, the three students want to execute — morally, that is — capitalists and weaken the system. They do it through sex, which is the weapon that no old white man can resist. Except that after he gets blackmailed at the tennis club — man, the heat of bourgeois — he takes the young girl home and balls her, only to have her overdose during the act. What’s a rich man to do? And what if she’s faking the big death, if not the little one?

Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, this was directed by Franco Rossetti, who was one of the writers of Django and also the director of Emanuelle and Joanna, an Italian softcore movie with Sherry Buchanan in the cast. This was written by Ugo Guerra, Franco Rossetti, Francesco Scardamaglia and Moravia.

The band that recorded the soundtrack, The Rage Within, get their name from the English title for the film, even if the literal translation would be Crime at the Tennis Club. Composed by Phil Chilton and Peter L. Smith, the music was made to take over the storytelling, as there are long stretches without dialogue. Quartet Records, who have re-released it on vinyl, described it as “Think of it as Zabriskie Point, but without the star power of Pink Floyd.”

Directed by Eriprando Visconti (Oedipus orca) and written by Luciano Lucignani, Fabio Mauri, Roselyne Sesboue, Lisa Morpurgo and Visconti from the book by Michele Prisco, A Spiral of Mist starts with Fabrizio (Marc Porel) killing his wife Valeria (Carole Chauvet) with a shotgun.

Maria Teresa (Claude Jade), his cousin, believes there’s no way he could do it. She hopes that her lawyer husband Marcello (Duilio Del Prete) can convince Judge Renato Marinoni (Stefano Satta Flores) that Fabrizio is innocent.

In flashback, the movie shows us the unhappy marriages of both women and how Valeria tried to set up Maria Teresa with another lawyer, Cesare Molteni (Roberto Posse). Today, Maria has a child that really was the child of her driver (Flavio Andreini) and housekeeper Armida (Anna Bonaiuto), as her husband is impotent.

The oral sex scene between Chauvet and Porel is really hard to watch because it’s unerotic and as disturbing as a sex scene can get. Supposedly, Chauvet actually was doing it for real while Porel’s wife was watching, which caused a major uproar. Or that could be IMDB BS. This movie has just as much male frontal nudity as female, which is rare for a movie from any county.

A Spiral of Mist is more about the disintegration of relationships and expectations of love than it is a giallo, but it does have some elements of the form.

Directed by Jorge Grau (Let Sleeping Corpses Lie), who co-wrote the story with Juan Tébar and based it on a story by Guy de Maupassant, Violent Bloodbath also goes by the titles Death Penalty, Night Fiend,  Penalty of Death and The Private Life of a Public Prosecutor.