John Houseman called director George Marshall, “one of the old maestros of Hollywood … he had never become one of the giants but he held a solid and honorable position in the industry.” He started as an extra and made his first short in 1915 with And the Best Man Won. His career was nearly six decades long and he worked the whole way to an episode of The Odd Couple in 1972, as well as acting in episodes of Police Woman and the Playboy movie The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder. Some of the more recognizable movies in his career include The Ghost Breakers, Papa’s Delicate Condition, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! and The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz.

Marshall is obviously not an Italian director, but L’Intrigo (AKA Dark Purpose) — co-directed by Vittorio Sala — feels like a giallo.

Art historian Raymond Fontaine (George Sanders) and his assistant Karen Williams (yes, that’s Shirley Jones in a giallo) have been brought to Italy by gallery owner Monique (Micheline Presle) to appraise the collection of Count Paolo Barbarelli (Rossano Brazzi). What they don’t know is that the count also has a deranged daughter named Cora (Giorgia Moll) who just might be dangerous to be around. Blame the skiing accident she just had for making her an amnesiac and quite angry that her daddy has found a new American love interest. Good thing — or bad for Karen — that she has a dog who can’t wait to eat a young lady.

Thanks to Suburban Pagans, I learned that costume designer Tina Grani (Blood and Black Lace) worked on this movie, which makes sense, as Jones is constantly the most fashionable young American in Rome. Cora also claims to be Count Paolo’s wife, and not his daughter, then she finds her way to the bottom of a cliff. That’s because Paolo caused her skiing accident and has felt guilt ever since, so he was killing her slowly. Once he met a new and interesting — and outspoken — new love, he got rid of the old one. She’s half his age and he has all the money, so men have never changed. They just get a new model every few years. Not as many outright kill the ex-wife.

This is a giallo as much as The Girl Who Knew Too Much is. By that, I mean that the genre had not found its strangeness yet and was still inspired by Hitchcock. It’s a good movie, but don’t go in expecting neon, black gloves and psychosexual murder.

An Italian comedy giallo parody of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? How did I never know about this?

Directed by Ottavio Alessi, who wrote Emanuelle In Bangkok and Emanuelle In America and made Top Sensation, which dares to have a love scene between Edwige Fenech and Rosalba Neri, then ends with a Bible verse, this stars Toto, whose real name was Antonio Griffo Focas Flavio Ducas Komnenos Gagliardi de Curtis of Byzantium, His Imperial Highness, Palatine Count, Knight of the Holy Roman Empire, Exarch of Ravenna, Duke of Macedonia and Illyria, Prince of Constantinople, Cilicia, Thessaly, Pontus, Moldavia, Dardania, Peloponnesus, Count of Cyprus and Epirus, Count and Duke of Drivasto and Durazzo. “The Prince of Laughter” had a career marked by tragedy, like spurned lovers committing suicide, the loss of a son at a young age and even an eye infection that could have been stopped had he cancelled a show and disappointed his fans. Instead, he went on and lost a percentage of his site for the rest of his life. When he died, there were no less than three funerals, including one given by a local organized crime leader where an empty casket was carried along the packed streets of the small town where he was born.

Step brothers Totò Baby and Pietro (Pietro De Vico) steal suitcases at the train station. One day, they find that one of their stolen cases has a dead body in it. They switch that with two German women, Inga and Helga (Ivy Holzer and Edy Biagetti), but that’s only the beginning of their problems. The women are having an affair with Baron Mischa (Mischa Auer, a Russian-born actor who was a famous silent movie actor in Hollywood before continuing his career in France and Italy), who finds out that our protagonists had the body and blackmails them into murdering his wife (Gina Mascetti).

When they attempt to kill her, she dies of fright instead, but Totò Baby begins to eat salads with marijuana instead of lettuce and becomes a serial killer. His step brother attempts to escape him, but is finally dragged to the brach — yes, like Baby Jane as he’s also put in a wheelchair and served a frog — the police catch them. Totò Baby is committed where he writes the story of his life on an invisible typewriter. After all, his father was a criminal, so he was evil from birth.

If you recognize the home of the Baron, it’s Casale di Santa Maria Nova in Rome, which is where Blood and Black Lace was made.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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!

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on January 4 at 7:30 PM ET at The Little Theatre in Rochester, NY. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

There’s no way to calculate the influence of Blood and Black Lace. It takes the giallo from where Bava started with The Girl Who Knew Too Much and adds what was missing: high fashion, shocking gore and plenty of sex. The results are dizzying; it’s as if Bava’s move from black and white to color has pushed his camera lens to the brink of insanity.

Isabella is an untouchably gorgeous model, pure perfection on human legs. But that doesn’t save her as she walks through the grounds of the fashion house and is brutally murdered by a killer in a white mask.

Police Inspector Sylvester takes the case and interviews Max Morlan (Cameron Mitchell!), who co-manages the salon with his recently widowed lover, the Countess Christina Como. Soon, our police hero discovers that the fashion house is a den of sin, what with all the corruption, sex, blackmail, drugs and abortions going on under its roof. Isabella was murdered because she had kept a diary of all the infractions against God that happened inside these four walls.

Nicole finds the diary and tells the police she will deliver it, but it’s stolen by Peggy. As she arrives at the antique store her boyfriend Frank owns, the killer appears and kills her with a spiked glove to the face. The killing is shocking. Brutal. And definitely the forerunner to the slasher genre.

Even after the cops arrest everyone in the fashion house, the murders keep on piling up. Peggy claims that she burned the diary, so the killer burns her face until she dies. Greta is smothered to death. And Tilde is killed in the bathtub, then her wrists are slit open, spraying red into the water and marking her as a suicide.

So who is it? Come on. You’re going to have to watch it for yourself.

The success of Black Sunday and Black Sabbath had given Bava the opportunity to do anything he wanted. His producers thought that this movie would be a krimi film along the lines of an Edgar Wallace adaption. Instead, Bava gave more importance to the killings than the detective work, emphasizing sex, violence and horror more than any film in this form had quite before.

Blood and Black Lace was a failure in Italy and only a minor success in West Germany, the home of Edgar Wallace. And in America, AIP passed on the film due to its combination of sex and brutality. Instead, it was released by the Woolner Brothers with a new animated opening.

Today, Blood and Black Lace is seen as a forerunner of body count murder movies and the excesses of later giallo films. To me, it’s a classic film, filled with Bava’s camera wizardry and love of color. It is everything perfect about movies.

How badass is Zé do Caixão or as we know him, Coffin Joe?

Can you imagine the audacity to not just create this character but to become him in the midst of a country where more than 60% of the population is Catholic?

Can you even comprehend how upset people were when José Mojica Marins become the long-fingernail-wearing amoral undertaker driven to continue his bloodline by having a son with the perfect woman while murdering and ruining everyone in his wake? How did they deal with a boogeyman who filled their head with doubletalk and Nietzschian statements?

As Coffin Joe would yell, “I challenge your power! I deny your existence! Nothing exists, but life.”

The first appearance of Coffin Joe is in this movie, a film in which the evil undertaker searches for his perfect woman who will bear him the child that will make him immoral. After all, his wife is infertile, so he decides to murder her with a spider. And not just on any day. On a Catholic Holy Day. And then he decides to break another Commandment, coveting Terezinha, the fiancée of his friend Antonio.

Joe and Antonio visit a gypsy who foretells that a tragedy will keep Antonio and Terezinha from being married. This causes Joe to scream at the woman about how the supernatural is a lie, then he makes her warning come true by strangling his friend before drowning him. The very next day, he starts to court Terezinha by giving her a canary. When she resists his advances, he beats her and then assaults her. She curses him and reveals that she will kill herself — one of the gravest sins in the Catholic Church — and come back to pull him into Hell. He laughs, but the next day, she has hung herself.

The police just can’t seem to figure out why all this death is happening in this small village, but Dr. Rodolfo does. Coffin Joe responds by tearing out his eyes with his long fingernails and lighting him on fire. Problem solved. He remains unpunished and even starts to fall for another woman, Marta. On their date, he sees the gypsy who warns him that he will be punished. That night, as he walks home, the cemetery calls him, the place where all of his victims are burning. He opens the grave of Antonio and Terezinha and they begin to open their eyes as their mouths are filled with worms and insects. Coffin Joe begins to scream, as he is trapped between life and death, finally paying for his crimes as the church bells ring at midnight.

This is just the start of how strange these movies would become. If you liked the last ten minutes of this, just get ready. It gets really good from here.

Arrow Video’s limited edition collection of the movies of Coffin Joe is something I’ve been waiting for and it does not let me down in the least. Each movie is packed with so many extras. At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul has commentary with José Mojica Marins, filmmaker Paulo Duarte and film scholar Carlos Primati in Portuguese with English subtitles, a new video essay by Lindsay Hallam, Damned: The Strange World of José Mojica Marins a documentary on Marins by André Barcinski and Ivan Finotti as well as Bloody Kingdom, Marins’ first short film with director’s commentary and excerpts from early works by Marins. You can get this set from MVD.