EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this film on January 20 at 11:59 PM CT at The Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, TN. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Alice Cespi (Florinda Bolkan, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin) watched a strange film in her childhood called “Footprints on the Moon,” where astronauts were stranded on the moon’s surface. Now, as an adult, the only sleep she gets is from tranquilizers and she starts missing days of her life. Get ready for a giallo that skips the fashion and outlandish murders while going straight for pure weirdness.
After losing her job as a translator, Alice find a torn postcard for a resort area called Garma. That’s where she meets a little girl named Paula (Nicoletta Elmi, Demons, A Bay of Blood) who claims that Alice looks exactly like another woman she met named Nicole, who is also at the resort. Slowly but surely, our heroine starts to believe that a huge conspiracy is against her.
This is the last theatrical film of Luigi Bazzoni (he has directed some documentaries and wrote a few films since), who also directed The Fifth Cord. There are only two murders, but don’t let that hold you back. There are also abrupt shifts in color and a slow doomy mood to the entire proceedings. It’s unlike any other giallo I’ve seen and I mean that as a compliment.
Klaus Kinski also shows up as Blackman, the doctor who was behind the experiment that Alice saw as a child. He’s only in the film for a minute or so, but he makes the most of his time, chewing up the scenery as only he can. And cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, beyond working on The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, also was the DP on films like Apocalypse Now, Reds, Last Tango in Paris and Dick Tracy.
This isn’t like any of the films that came in the wake of The Bird with the Crystal Plumageand it’s a shame that its director didn’t make more films in the genre.
Here’s are two drinks to enjoy with Footprints.
To the Moon
.25 oz. Kaluha
.25 oz. Bailey’s Irish Cream
.25 oz. amaretto
.25 oz. high proof rum
Stir with ice and strain into a chilled shot glass.
Footprints On the Amber Moon
3 oz. whiskey
Raw egg
Dash of Tobasco
Pour whiskey into a glass, then crack a raw egg and drop into the glass. Don’t break the yoke or the ghost of Klaus Kinski will haunt you.
Add some Tobasco, do a count down and ignite the engines.
A Game of Crime comes from the time before Argento and at the nascent time of giallo on film, following The Girl Who Knew Too Much by just a year. Directed by Romano Ferrara, who also wrote and directed Planets Around Us, Intrigo a Los Angeles and Gungala the Virgin of the Jungle, as well as writing Spy In Your Eye, Paolo e Francesca and Gungala the Black Panther. This was written Ferrara and Marcello Coscia, who also wrote forty films including Yeti Giant of the 20th Century and Red Rings of Fear, and Sandro Continenza (School of Death).
Paolo Morandi (John Drew Barrymore, Death On the Fourposter, War of the Zombies) is a gambler in the middle of a run of the worst luck, which means he owes big money to an organized crime boss at the same time that his girlfriend Christine (Ombretta Colli, Snow Devils) has gotten pregnant. He’s also sleeping with Anna (Luisa Rivelli), the wife of his boss Davide (Jean Claudio), who he plans to rip off to pay for an abortion and get ahead of his debts.
Just when Davide suspects that his lover is cheating him and Paolo has taken his cash, he has a heart attack, which places him in the care of Elisabeth Buckner (Lisa Gastoni, War of the Planets). It’s simple for Paolo to kill the man now and all the money goes to Anna, who now has to take care of her husband’s brother Cario, who has been left an invalid after an accident. None of this adds up to Commissario Perrotti (Umberto D’Orsi), who is on the case.
At one point, the characters discuss books and one says that they like anything but giallo, as they are too far fetched. How meta!
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on January 15 at 7:00 PM PT at Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Also known as Florence! The Killer is Still Among Us and The Killer Has Returned, you have to admire the chutzpah — or the gall — of a film to have the disclaimer “This film was made as a warning to young people and with the hope that it will be of use to law enforcement to bring these ferocious killers to justice,” after you’ve just watched 83 minutes of a killer graphically mutilating women and their most intimate of parts, as if this were some bid to outdo Giallo In Venice or The New York Ripper.
Based on the true story of the Florence serial killer “The Monster of Florence,” this was written by Ernesto Gastaldi (The Whip and the Body, All the Colors of the Dark, My Name Is Nobody) and Giuliano Carnimeo (who directed four of the Sartana films under the alias Anthony Ascott, as well as The Case of the Bloody Iris, Exterminators of the Year 3000 and Ratman).
Directing this movie — and helping with the script — would be Camillio Teti, who produced The Dead Are Alive and Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s attempt at a non-mondo, the ironically named Mondo Candido.
Much like a scene out of Maniac, a couple on lover’s lane is blown away mid-aardvark by a gloved killer. What separates the uomini from the ragazzi is that the killer then uses a knife and a tree branch to do things that made me turn my head from the screen for an extended period of time.
Christiana Marelli has been studying the killer in criminology class to the displeasure of her boyfriend, the cops and her teachers. This leads to her being stalked via phone and in person by the killer. Of course, seeing as how Alex, that formerly mentioned boyfriend, is never around during these killings, you can see why she starts thinking he could be Il Mostro.
The film moves from the giallo into the supernatural as our heroine attends a seance where the medium has a vision of the killer decimating a camping couple, soon developing the same wound that the victims just received.
What does Christina do? Run to the theater to see if Alex is there or not, proving that while he is waiting for her, he certainly could still be the killer. If I were her professor, I’d have given her a zero out of thirty.
After all this, she just sits down to watch a movie with him and it ends up being the same film we’ve just been watching. That’s either a huge cop out or just how you expect a giallo to end.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on January 15 at 7:00 PM CT at Music Box Theatre in Chicago, IL. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Émile (Jacques Perrin) has an interesting reason for being a killer. He sees what he does as a public service, taking unhappy women away from this world with his white scarf. Inspector Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar) is on the case but the ways that he goes after the killer are just as morally suspect. There’s also Anna (Eva Simonet), a gorgeous woman who feels that she’s the next victim. Maybe she even wants to be that person. And then there’s the thief (Paul Barge) who lurks at each scene and takes what cash and trinkets are left from each dead woman.
Directed and written by Paul Vecchiali, this giallo comes from the same year as Argento’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. It may not have the same visual madness as that film but it does have a villain who looks like a hero, a child of a man damaged by seeing a murder when he was young using the same knit white scarf that he uses to snuff out lives today. The women that he murders would have just killed themselves regardless, he reasons on the phone to Dangret, so he was saving them. The breakup that Anne has just emerged from has left her feeling that life is worthless; she volunteers to Dangret to be the lure.
Unlike most giallo, we know who the killer is from the start. Yet each kill is so planned, so precise, such a murder set piece as the women give themselves to Émile. He isn’t getting any sexual thrill from killing these women, unlike so many black gloved killers. These are mercy killings. It seems like the person he really wants is the cop.
You can also get this from Altered Innocence, a partner of Vinegar Syndrome.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on January 12 at 7:30 PM ET at The Little Theatre in Rochester, NY. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Emilio P. Miraglia followed up The Night Evelyn Came Out of Her Grave with this giallo freakout — starring the magnificent Barbara Bouchet (Don’t Torture a Duckling) — that combines gothic horror with the high fashion we’ve come to expect from early 70’s Italian horror.
A curse haunts the Wildenbrück family once every 100 years — two sisters have always become the Red and Black Queen, feuding until one of them dies. Then, the survivor is haunted by sixth deaths, with the final death — the seventh death, referenced in the title, being the surviving sister. Kitty (Bouchet) and Evelyn are the next two sisters to be so cursed, battling even in childhood, stabbing each other’s dolls with daggers.
These catfights have continued for years, ending when Kitty, now a fashion designer, accidentally takes it too far when she battles Evelyn. Third sister Franziska (Marina Malfatti, The Night Evelyn Came Out of Her Grave, All the Colors of the Dark) and her husband hide Evelyn’s body while Kitty pretends that her sister has gone to America.
All is well and good until the Red Queen rises, wearing a red cape and white mask, killing all of Kitty’s co-workers at Springes Fashions with the same dagger that was once used to slice up baby dolls. But is it really Evelyn, back from the dead (Emilio P. Miraglia sure liked Evelyn’s that rose from the dead)? Or something much more down to earth?
Miraglia only directed six films, with this being his last one. There are some moments in here that aspire toward art, like the Red Queen chasing Kitty through her dreams, ending in a long hallway run and her superimposed form attacking like a ghost. And the film flirts between the gothic castle era of Italian horror and the fashionista giallo look — all while containing plenty of deep red gore and plenty of skin, courtesy of a 20-year-old Sybil Danning (Howling II, Battle Beyond the Stars, Young Lady Chatterley 2). It’s not always art, but sometimes, it totally is. There are the requisite twists and turns of the genre, along with some really regrettable moments — like when a character goes from rapist to rescuer across two scenes and an ending where the hero and heroine both need saving.
Death Carries a Cane (1973): If death carries a cane, isn’t it weak? With that thinking, aren’t the alternate titles — Dance Steps on the Edge of a Razor, Maniac At Large, The Night of the Rolling Heads and Devil Blade — so much cooler?
Well, that’s because whoever the killer is, he or she has a limp. That’s what Kitty (Nieves Navarro, billed here under her boring Americanized nom de plume Susan Scott) sees when she watches a murder through a coin-operated telescope. That’s just the first of many killings and it just might be her boyfriend Alberto, who has the misfortune of having a limp and a cane when that’s what’s being profiled. I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, defund the giallo police.
Director Maurizio Pradeaux also made another Grim Reaper referencing giallo, Death Steps in the Dark, which has a scene where the protagonist has to wear drag to escape the police.
Naked You Die (1968): Naked…You Die (AKA The Young, the Evil and the Savage) is a pretty fun early giallo with good direction by Antonio Margheriti.
Yet it was very nearly was a Mario Bava movie.
According to Tim Lucas’ Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, Bava was hired by Lawrence Woolner — the distributor of Hercules in the Haunted World and Blood and Black Lace in America — to direct a movie about a killer stalking a school. Cry Nightmare was going to be the title and Bava wrote the script with Brian Degas and Tudor Gates (Barbarella, Danger: Diabolik).
Lamberto Bava told Lucas that “Just a short time before the filming was to begin, Mario Bava had an argument with the producers and he abandoned the film.” As for Margheriti, who met Woolner when he distributed Castle of Blood, he said “I think Mario was busy at that time, working on Diabolik or something.”
Either way, locations were already secured, cast and crew had been hired and a theme song had already been recorded.
The drowned body of a woman is placed in a truck going to St. Hilda College. There, only seven students, two teachers — Mrs. Clay (Ludmilla Lvova) and Mr. Barrett (Mark Damon — Headmistress Transfield (Vivian Stapleton) and gardener La Foret (Luciano Pigozzi) are present.
Soon, the killing begins with Betty Ann being strangled and found by Lucille (Eleonora Brown in her last film until coming out of retirement in 2018), who is having an affair with Barrett. When she tells him to come see the body, it’s already gone, so they decide to leave the school.
The killings kick into gear with Cynthia (Malisa Longo, Ricco the Mean Machine) being killed in front of the gardener, who is soon killed as well and Denise (Patrizia Valturri) too. There’s also amateur detective Gillie (Sally Smith) on the case and Inspector Durand (Michael Renne from The Day the Earth Stood Still) trying to stop the killings.
All the girls wear similar uniforms — and outfits that change scene by scene — and nobody wonders why an older teacher can play Big Bad Wolf with Little Red Riding Hood and get away with it.
The aforementioned theme song “Nightmare” by Powell and Savina (Don Powell, who played Emanuelle’s father in Black Emanuelle 2 and did that film’s soundtrack, along with Carlo Savina, who composed the music for The Killer Reserved Nine Seats, Lisa and the Devil, Fangs of the Living Dead and so many more) and performed by Rose Brennan owes royalties to Neal Hefti.
Perhaps even wilder is the fact that the movie informs us that Gillie may be the daughter of James Bond.
Giallo would change in a few years to be bloody, sleazier and stranger. That said, this is a great example of an early version of this style of movie.
The Bloodstained Shadow (1978): One of my favorite things about giallo are the alternate titles. As if The Bloodstained Shadow isn’t a great name, this movie also goes by Solamente Nero (Only Blackness), which is a way better title. The other thing I love about this genre is that just when I think I’ve seen every good one, I find another to enjoy.
This is the kind of movie that tells you exactly where it stands in the first minutes, as a killer strangles a girl in a field before the credits even start. That murder has never been solved. Years later, a college professor named Stefano has a nervous breakdown. To recover, he comes home to visit his brother Don Paolo, who has become a priest that hates all of the immorality in their small town.
Oh what immorality — there’s a gambler, a psychic, a combination atheist/pedophile and an illegal abortionist with a mentally challenged son who lives in a shack top the list, along with your typical sex and drinking that happens in any town.
Meanwhile, murders have been piling up and whoever is behind it, they’re leaving notes to the priest, warning him that if he reveals who the killer is, he’ll be next. That’s because on Stefano’s first night back home, Don Paolo saw the killer murder the town psychic in the courtyard.
Stefania Casini (Suspiria) also appears as the love interest, Sandra, who helps Stefano come back to normalcy. Well, as normal as a town filled with murder can be. I’m kind of amazed that she wears a belly chain all day. When you get to the love scene, you’ll know what I mean.
There’s also some amazing religious imagery in this one, like a skinned and bloody animal that has been placed in the sacristy to warn the priest that he’s getting too close, or the communion scene that reveals who the real killer is.
Finally, Goblin plays some great music in here, created by composer Stelvio Cipriani. It’s really a great package, thanks to director Antonio Bido, who directed one other giallo, Watch Me When I Kill. I love how the past childhood trauma that the brothers endured continues to permeate their lives as they try to grow up. This is a very adult giallo and by that, I mean that it doesn’t need nudity and gore to tell its tale.
The first in a series from Vinegar Syndrome, these sets allow you to discover three giallo films that have been rare until this release.
The Killer Is One of 13 (1976): Not a lot of nudity and little blood, this giallo is closer to Agatha Christie than Edward Wallace. That said, it does have Paul Naschy in it and it’s directed by Javier Aguirre, who made Count Dracula’s Great Love.
Patty Shepherd (Edge of the Axe) stars as Lisa, who has gathered twelve of her husband’s closest friends and informs them that she believes that one of them is the killer. That said, there are really seventeen suspects when you add in the butler, chauffeur, maid and gardener.
The Police Are Blundering In the Dark (1975): A young nude-model is stabbed to death with a pair of scissors, the third in a series of victims who had all had their photos taken by Parisi, a potentially mentally unhinged individual who claims that his camera can photograph people’s thoughts.
Director and writer Helia Colombo made one giallo and here it is, rarely seen outside of Italy until today. It really has the best title because if you think about it, the police never do a great job in these films.
Now, reporter Giorgio D’Amato meets his friend Enrichetta at the photographer’s villa, but when he arrives, he learns that she’s the model we watched die at the beginning of the movie.
She’d been begged by Parisi — who is in a wheelchair and looks quite frail — to come to speak to him about his magical camera. And just like Clue — you know, but with plenty of graphic murder and no short supply of nudity — we meet the suspects, ranging from Alberto the butler to the photographer’s lesbian wife Eleonora, his niece Sara and the sexed-up maid Lucia, who is the next to be killed.
I have no idea why that camera figures in, but maybe the filmmakers thought that Four Flies On Grey Velvet was going to force everyone to have science fiction photography as part of their plot, so they ripped it off. There’s also little police involvement, but it’s not like there’s an actual rule that giallo titles have to make sense. I prefer when they don’t.
This is all about a gorgeous inn in the country that seems like the perfect place for Daniel (Heinrich Starhemberg, who was also the executive producer, which means that he gets to be the hero and have a love scene with Lys) to do some writing. However, from the moment he meets Veronica (Ágata Lys), nothing will be as it seems. She’s always taking care of her wheelchair-bound husband who is never seen and who lives in one small room.
All of the other guests are busy making love, which seems to be perfect for the film’s other character, a razor-slashing black-gloved killer. As he kills each couple, whoever they are also gets rid of the luggage of each person, as if they weren’t ever there. One of them is Antonio Mayans, which made me happy to see him.
You can get all three movies on blu ray in a great box set from Vinegar Syndrome.
Director, writer — with Vincenzo Cerami — producer and star Roberto Benigni is Loris, who works with mannequins at a department store. He’s barely surviving, owing money to people everywhere and unable to pay rent. At a party, he’s told that there’s a woman who will sleep with anyone. He approaches the wrong woman which gets him named the number one suspect in a series of murders.
Commissioner Frustalupi (Laurent Spielvogel) doesn’t have enough evidence, so he uses undercover officer Jessica (Nicoletta Braschi), who poses as his roommate with the help of police doctor Paride (Michel Blanc). She’s told to be as sexy as possible to inflame his desire and make him try to murder her, including dressing as Little Red Riding Hood. Jessica easily deducts what everyone else should have. Loris is a moron and someone else, someone close to him, is the killer.
For a movie that is inspired by the giallo, this may be the most successful of all of them, as it’s one of the most successful Italian movies ever made.
Usually, I find myself put off by Benigni, but this movie is pretty fun, including him accidentally chasing a woman with a chainsaw.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on January 8 at 7:00 PM PT at 10th Avenue Arts Center in San Diego, CA. Opera will also be playing. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
While working undercover, Cody (Kay Lenz) and her partner Sergeant Heineman (Greg Evigan) are too late to save Angel (Michelle Foreman), a dancer who has been thrown off a bridge and set on fire. Of course, this means that Cody must become Sunny, dancing at the Rock Bottom for its owner Ray (Norman Fell).
As she gains the trust of the dancers, they’re all being killed one by one. Cody keeps dancing at the club, defying the orders of her superiors, sure she can catch the killer. Is it Pocket, the one handed creep? Is it Angel’s lover Roxanne (Pia Kamakahi)? And how does Roxanne’s brother Eric fit in?
In a New York Times article, Shea explained how she was inspired by a trip to a strip club: “I didn’t want to go because I felt it was humiliating to women. But I finally got myself there. I sat down and began watching these acts and they’re performing as if they really cared.”
So — spoiler: Roxanne is dead. Eric is Roxanne, taking over her life as he was sure Angel would take his sister away. You can imagine that this is incredibly problematic, as they say, but it’s also a Roger Corman movie. In fact, Corman was convinced that only a woman could be a convincing woman on stage. Shea surprised him and showed him up by fooling him. She would later explain: “He [Corman] turned every shade. He was purple by the end.”
Also, as this is a Corman movie, all the songs that are danced to in this film were added in post-production. They had been filmed with popular songs, but those songs had to be replaced in post, because clearing licensing would be too expensive.
Shea worked with real exotic dancers, teaching them to act. Debra Lamb was one of them and she has been in plenty of movies since this, including Deathrow Gameshow, All Strippers Must Die! and Point Break, often displaying her fire-eating skills. Shea works as an acting teacher to this day, with students including Christina Applegate, Alison Lohman, Sophia Lillis and Drew Barrymore.
She also claims that this was the first movie to show pole dancing.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on January 8 at 10:00 PM PT at Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Before Fulci became known as the godfather of gore, he made movies in nearly every genre. This is the next to last film he’d make — Silver Saddle follows it in 1978 — before 1979’s Zombie announced to the world that he was here to tear eyeballs, unleash bats and provide dazzling if incomprehensible odes to mayhem.
Fulci is no stranger to the Giallo, with some of his most important films being A Lizard in a Woman’s Skinand Don’t Torture a Duckling and the unappreciated Perversion Story. The title refers to the film’s exploration of the duality of human nature, a theme that Fulci often revisits in his work. Here, he’d team up again with writer Roberto Gianviti and begin his long partnership with writer Dardano Sacchetti, who sought to lend a touch of Argento to the original script’s traditional mystery.
What emerged was a film shrouded in mystery and darkness—a rumination where death is inescapable and always close, a world where doom hangs over every moment, captivating the audience with its enigmatic atmosphere.
The film is set in Dover, England, in 1959, a time of social change and upheaval. A woman commits suicide by literally diving from the Cliffs of Dover. Forgive the harmful effects — Fulci tends to use wooden bodies in his films for some reason, much like the end of Duckling. The main point is that her daughter Virginia may be living in Italy, but she can clearly see her mother’s day.
Today, Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill, Scanners) lives in Rome and is married to a wealthy businessman named Francesco (Gianni Garko, Sartana himself!). As she drives him to the airport for his next business trip, she begins to see visions. An older woman is being killed. A wall is torn down. And a letter is under a statue. How strange is it that the house she is beginning to renovate looks precisely like the one in her visions?
When she tears down the wall that looks like the one in her dreams, she finds the skeleton of her husband’s ex-lover and the police want to charge him with the murder. Virginia becomes the detective of the story, obsessed with saving her husband with the help of psychic researcher Luca Fattori. Soon, they believe that the real killer is Emilio Rospini (Gabriele Ferzetti, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service).
So who is the woman? Why was her body in that room, which was once her husband’s bedroom? Why is the woman’s face on the cover of the magazine that Virginia buys? That’s because Virginia’s visions aren’t the past but premonitions of the future.
Meanwhile, she’s given a wristwatch that plays a haunting theme every hour in the house. This eerie soundtrack, composed by Fabio Frizzi, adds a layer of suspense and tension to the film and was reused to incredible effect in Kill Bill. The growing knowledge that the victim isn’t dead yet—and that Virginia may be that victim—darkens every frame of Fulci’s epic.
Quentin Tarantino was so in love with this film that he intended to remake it with Bridget Fonda sometime in the 2000s, but this never happened.
Perhaps just as interesting as the film is the life of its star, Jennifer O’Neill. Possibly best known for her long career as a Cover Girl model, she has been married nine times to eight husbands (she married, divorced, and remarried her sixth husband, Richard Alan Brown). By the age of 17, she’d already attempted suicide so as not to be separated from her dog, had a horse break her neck in three places and married her first husband. She’s also had a horrible history with guns, having accidentally shot herself in 1982 and being on the set of the TV show Cover Up in 1984 when co-star Jon-Erik Hexum accidentally killed himself. While waiting for a delay, he had been playing Russian roulette with a prop gun and was unaware that the discharge could still cause damage. Placing the gun to his temple, he fired and caused so much damage to his brain that he died six days later.
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