Martin Yakobowsky (Mark Benninghoffen) is a Chicago lawyer assigned to resolve a case close to where he grew up in Iowa, a place that he though he had left behind after his testimony in a triple murder case led to a man going to the electric chair.
As for the case, it’s between Polish farm workers — the same people Martin grew up with — and a state congressman. But while he’s back home, Martin becomes obsessed with the case he testified in, the murder of a call girl and her friends. He can’t remember what he saw years ago and he’s started to hear strange noises out of the storage room next to his hotel room. Was the girl he died his girlfriend? Did she die in that noisy room?
The 1940s atmosphere and being set in the U.S. — and filmed in Iowa and Illinois — don’t let on that this is an Italian giallo. Not only was it directed by Fabrizio Laurenti (who made Witchery and The Crawlers using the name Martin Newlin; Joe D’Amato may also have directed some of those movies), but it has a story by Fabio Clemente and Luigi Sardiello that was scripted by Pupi Avati.
Yes, that’s right. Pupi Avati.
This feels a lot like The House with the Laughing Windowsat least as much as it explores the memories that we have in our youth and how they aren’t always true as we get older. This also has one of the most sensual razor kills ever, if that can be possible.
I have no idea why more people aren’t talking about this, a film written by an Italian legend and filmed in America. I also can’t believe it took me so long to discover it.
Mara (Vanessa Gravina) had a memorable childhood vacation in Cortina, but the bad part is that when they returned home, her parents died in a car accident. Now, she’s married to a painter named Carlo (Stefano Abbati) who controls her life and when she refuses to make love to him, he drugs her and does it regardless. She fakes her death and moves into that vacation home from the past, meeting a couple named Sergio (Paolo Calissano) and Lluba (Isabel Russinova) who want her to live with them, as well as protect her when Carlo comes looking for her. Or perhaps not.
The Maurizio Vanni who directed this — thanks, Italo Cinema — is cinematographer Giancarlo Ferrando. He made this movie with Luciano and Sergio Martino assisting with the story, which was turned into a screenplay by Maurizio Rasio (who wrote Craving Desire for Sergio) and Piero Regnoli (who also scripted a Sergio Martino film, Foxy Lady). I would assume they watched Sleeping with the Enemy and then made this.
Trumpets of the Apocalypse is also known as Murder By Music and Perversion Story, even if it has nothing to do with Fulci’s movie of the same name.
Richard Milford (Brett Halsey) is a sailor on leave in London who learns that his sister Cathrin has tried to fly while on acid. He doesn’t believe that and investigates her death with her roommate Helen Becker (Marilù Tolo). It seems like the killer is The Romanian (Manuel De Blas) and the murder is all about some bad weed and a song that references the title. There’s a swinging club called the Mouse Hole, where we discover a face painted Romina Power.
Catharin’s music professor killed himself the same way a day before, so obviously our heroes are on to something. There’s also a hurdy-gurdy player whose instrument is his weapon. Alert Donovan…
Director Julio Buchs also made Alta tensión. He wrote this with Domenico Comanducci, Federico De Urrutia, José Luis Martínez Mollá and Mino Roli. I’m a fool for swinging sixties murder movies, much less Spanish-Italian co-productions, so I had a lot of fun watching this.
Paolo Sartoni (Robert Hoffmann, Spasmo) is an Italian journalist making his way in Los Angeles who takes a beating meant for his childhood friend Giulio Lamberti (Roger Fritz), who is now known as Lambert Smile, the advertising face of International Chemical, but he’s upset the company. Paolo decides to write the story of this assault, only to learn that Giulio is dead. The more he learns about his old friend, the more he discovers that America corrupted him and even caused him to leave his wife Luisa (Nicoletta Machiavelli).
Everyone that Paolo meets from the company are all horrible, including the President of the comapny, Donovan (Frank Wolff), secretary Mary Sullivan (Luciana Paluzzi, A Black Veil For Lisa), Giulio’s boss and new lover Vanessa Brighton (Dorothy Malone, who years later would be in the erotic thriller — what they called giallo in the 1990s — Basic Instinct) and her daughter Gloria (Romina Power, who accidentally had her swimsuit bottom removed by a cameraman and that scene is in the movie; her mother went to producer Goffredo Lombardo shouting and complaining about De Martino; I find this story hilarious because in the same year, she was in Jess Franco’s Marquis de Sade’s Justine), who makes a pass at Paolo. That’s when he learns that Giulio is still alive and will kill anyone — including Paolo’s editor Richard Salinger (John Ireland) — to keep his death a secret.
Bruno Nicolai did the soundtrack, which adds a lot for me. This is a fun film, made in America and filled with the sights, sounds and lovemaking of the late sixities.
Rino Di Silvestro said, “Sex is a natural thing, but it’s also something that gives you an uncontrollable desire, like murder for the serial killer who begs to be caught. We have an irresistible desire to make sex.”
He lived up to this because his movies were pretty much as scummy as it gets. I say this with no small amount of admiration. I mean, the guy made Women In Cell Block 7, Werewolf Woman, Deported Women of the SS Special Section, Baby Love, Bello di mamma, Hanna D. – La ragazza del Vondel Park and The Erotic Dreams of Cleopatra.
He directed and wrote this, which was also released as The Red Light Girls, Love Angels, Sex Slayer and Street Angels. It begins with Giselle (Gabriella Lepori, Five Women for the Killer) conducting her business — the world’s oldest — as another man watches. She soon stabbed and we see her dead body on the slab of a morgue. Her fiancee Michele (Elio Zamuto) had no idea she was a roadside prostitute.
Inspector Macaluso (Aldo Giuffre) leads the cops in the investigation, but mostly the movie introduces us to slices of life in the dark streets of Italy, like when Benedetta (Orchidea de Santis, The Killer Wore Gloves) is raped by a biker gang, which causes another gang to hunt them and murder their lead with, well, a beer bottle inserted in exactly where you think its going to be shoved in. There’s also a Satanic john, which I found funny, but it’s like almost as if the movie forgot that it was a giallo.
Did you know that Italian sex workers all hung out at a campfire and had parties when they weren’t working? Well, Di Silvestro did and according to Hysteria Lives, he got fan mail from the ladies he was depicting because of how realistic this movie was.
Also appearing: Krista Nell (So Sweet, So Dead — another giallo that has a secondary version called Penetration that has inserts…just like this film), Magda Konopfka (Satanik), Felicita Fanny (also in the director’s Werewolf Woman and Deported Women of the SS Special Section) and Lucrezia Love (Enter the Devil).
I have no idea why this starts almost like a documentary — a girl interviews on the street says she only fears “syphilis and solitude” — then becomes a dark giallo then is nearly a comedy mixed with soap opera before remembering that there’s a prostitute killer. It’s a mess and exactly what I expected, which is not a criticism. Di Silvestro seems to be trying to shock, upset and entertain you, often all in the same scene.
In this early giallo, it’s the home of British millionaire John Prescott, who dies at the beginning and brings together his seven potential heirs, all of whom could have killed him. They are Martha (Giovanna Galletti, the Baroness from Kill, Baby, Kill), his secretary Giacomo (Sergio Ciani, who was also Alan Steel; he started as Steve Reeves’ body double and appeared in Hercules Against the Moon Menand Samson and the Slave Queen), his mentally handicapped son Julien (Charlie Karum), nephew George (Ivano Staccioli, also known as John Heston; he’s in 3 colpi di Winchester per Ringo) and his wife Adriana (Aichè Nanà, whose dancing during a November 1958 private party at the Rugantino restaurant and nightclub on the Viale di Trastevere in Rome led to a national scandal and inspired a scene in La dolce vita), and niece Angela (Mary Arden, who not only was in Blood and Black Lacebut also wrote the American dialogue) and her boyfriend Armand (Ivano Davoli).
Prescott leaves behind a recorded will in which he tells each of the gathered guests just how much he hates them. In order to get his money, they have to live together for a month. Then, only three of them can claim it, so that means that at least four people need to be killed for his plan to work.
There’s a dagger with an A in the handle that figures into many of the murders — as the U.S. title was M… for Murderer, the site Euro Fever believes that the scenes with the knife were shot twice and there was an M on the murder weapon — and despite being produced by Walter Brandi (The Vampire and the Ballerina, The Playgirls and the Vampire) and having white nightgowns and candleabras, this leans more giallo than gothic, even if it all takes place in a castle. Italian gothiciallo?
Based on an Ernesto Gastaldi play, this is a movie that even has a flashback halfway through it to show you everything you’ve already seen. Despite that, I have to admit to loving this. It was directed by Angelo Dorigo and written by Sergio Bazzini and Roberto Natale.
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.
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.
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.
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