Arrow Video continues its exploration of giallo with its fourth box set after the Black, Red, Yellow and White editions of Giallo Essentials.

In the early 1970s, when the giallo boom was at its peak, producer-turned-director Luciano Ercoli made  three standalone — but thematically linked — giallo films all starring his wife Nieves Navarro under the name Susan Scott. This set shares those movies in one convenient and well-priced edition.

The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970): Minou (Dagmar Lassander, The House by the Cemetery) loves her husband, Peter. But Peter is cold and only really seems to care about work. All she does all day is pine for her husband and take care of a turtle. Yep. You just read that correctly.

One night, a mysterious stranger attacks her, cuts open her clothes and then warns her: her husband is a killer.

The mysterious man is proven correct when a man who owed Peter money shows up dead. He demands that she come to his home, where he blackmails her into sleeping with him. Seeing as how he has recorded their tryst, he now has more material on her.

Even her friend Dominique (Nieves Navarro, All the Colors of the Dark, who was married to the director, Luciano Ercoli) can’t be trusted, as Minou finds photos of the blackmailer in provocative poses in her possession. When she finally gets the police to investigate, the man’s home is empty and Dominique tells the police he never even existed. Oh yeah. Dominique was once Peter’s woman before Minou. So there’s that.

Minou has a nervous breakdown and overdoses on tranquilizers before sobering up and learning that it’s all been a plot against her from the beginning. But come on — if you’ve watched any giallo, you knew that going in.

Despite its lurid title, Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion isn’t filled with sex or even all that much violence. It’s more about alcoholism and how women were taught that they had to have the skills to land a man, but not what to do with their lives to make them fulfilled beyond just a relationship.

Director Luciano Ercoli has some gorgeous shots in here that really take advantage of the space age 1960’s aesthetic. And a bossa nova score by Ennio Morricone keeps this film bouncing. It wouldn’t be the first giallo I’d recommend, but it’s not the last, either.

Extras include commentary by Kat Ellinger; Private Pictures, a documentary featuring interviews with Navarro, Ercoli and Gastaldi; an appreciation of the music of  70s Italian cult cinema by musician and soundtrack collector Lovely Jon; a Q&A with Lassander; the Italian and English trailers and an image gallery.

Death Walks On High Heels (1970): 

A man is stabbed on a train, leading the police to question Nicole (giallo queen Nieves Navarro) about diamonds that are missing. Her life turns upside down, as she begins to receive disguised phone calls asking about the diamonds and a blue-eyed masked man attacks her in her boudoir. She then remembers that her jealous lover Michel owns contact lenses in that color, so she runs away with an older eye surgeon to the coast of England. But Michel isn’t far behind…

The first of three giallo directed by Navarro’s husband, Luciano Ercoli, this is what the genre should be: shocking, lurid, bloody and oh so fashionable. It also makes a deft turn from what we expect from the form into an actual mystery film.

There’s a plot twist here that honestly shocked me, so I won’t spoil it. While the other two films in the Ercoli giallo trilogy are much better, this is still a quality film worthy of your time. Some critics decry them as Ercoli making movies just to feature his wife, but if you had a quality woman like Navarro in your life, I bet you’d do the same.

This comes with audio commentary by film critic Tim Lucas, an introduction to the film by screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, an interview with Ercoli and actress Navarro, Gastaldi explaining how to write a successful giallo, an interview with composer Stelvio Cipriani and Italian and English trailers. These extras are a sheer joy for giallo lovers and what an opportunity to hear from Ercoli, Navarro and Gastaldi.

Death Walks At Midnight (1972): Nieves Navarro is a true queen of giallo, appearing in All the Colors of the Dark, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, So Sweet, So Dead and Death Walks on High Heels. Here, she makes her third film with her husband, Luciano Ercoli.

In this one, she plays a fashion model named Valentina who agrees to help her journalist beau study LSD. But while she’s dosed and in the middle of a photo shoot, she watches a man brutally murder a woman with a spiked gauntlet. He thinks she’s just hallucinating and publishes her account, but she believes it’s real. And when the killer starts stalking her, she really starts to worry.

The entire opening of the film is one big acid freakout and everything that follows is the bad trip, the comedown and reality brutally intruding into drugged out bliss. This is a film packed with brutal violence and plenty of gore, but it makes sense. The movie demands it.

The end, when everything is wrapped up by the killer (killers?) is pretty great, as the many red herrings are discussed and the entire plot is finally explained to us. If everything before felt like a nightmare, this is bracingly cold water directly to the face.

Even better, Navarro portrays a heroine who doesn’t faint at the first sign of danger. She deals with the ineffectual police and indifference of her boyfriend with aplomb.

And yes — this film is packed with bonkers crazy fashion — a metal/glass silver wig and a strange sculpted wall feature prominently — so if that’s why you love giallo, you’ll be quite happy here. Me? I loved every minute.

This release comes with audio commentary by film critic Tim Lucas, an introduction by screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, an extended TV version, a reflection by Gastaldi reflects on his career in the crime film-writing business and Desperately Seeking Susan, a visual essay by Michael Mackenzie exploring the distinctive giallo collaborations between director Luciano Ercoli and star Nieves Navarro. If you love giallo — or are just getting into it — all of these extras will open deepen your love for the form; Lucas is one of the best commentary track experts there is.

This limited edition Arrow Video box set comes in rigid packaging with the original poster artwork in a windowed Giallo Essentials Collection slipcover. You’ll enjoy 2K restorations for all three films as well as reversible sleeves for each film featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by The Twins of Evil and Gilles Vranckx.

You can get this from MVD.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the April 25, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Directed by Arthur Hiller and written by Paddy Chayefsky — the winner of the 1972 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, as well as the narrator and the man who had control over the casting and content of this movie — The Hospital concerns a New York City medical center — Metropolitan Hospital Center, which is called Manhattan Medical Center — that is just as damaged as one of its lead medical experts, Dr. Herbert Bock (George C. Scott). His marriage is over, his children hate him and he’s been impotent for several years. And oh yeah, several doctors and a nurse have been murdered on his watch while the hospital takes over an apartment building so that it can expand, pushing citizens into the streets. Nobody comes here to be healed, just patched up and shoved back out. It’s enough to make Bock want to commit suicide, which is just what he was doing when Barbara Drummond (Diana Rigg) barges into his office, engaging him in a spirited discussion that ends up with him roughly taking her.

This changes his life — one can argue, as Quentin Tarantino did on the Video Archives episode, whether she actually exists — but he can’t leave behind the hospital or stop solving problems, like how his new lover’s father (Barnard Hughes) is either on his death bed, the killer or both. I mean, it’s a spoiler but if you watch this, it’s so obvious that in no way is it hard to see coming.

The film makes a wild swing in the middle from a black comedy about the American medical system into a murder mystery mixed with a romance that starts with pretty much an assault. Luckily, it has strong acting from Scott — as always — and Rigg answers the challenge of playing against him in her first American movie.

It’s also the first movie of Tracey Walter, who may be one of the few people in this movie to have an action figure, as he was Bob the Goon, a short-lived but long-beloved character in Tim Burton’s Batman.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the February 13, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

I know they made a remake of Straw Dogs in 2011, but there’s no way I can imagine people not being beyond upset with this movie. The violence probably wouldn’t upset all that many people, but the two graphic assaults of Susan George — much less the quick flash that she may not have been all that upset by the first — would be greeted by a procession of anger the likes of which no movie made today would be able to create. I mean, would director Sam Peckinpah have been able to make movies in today’s world? One could argue that he struggled to do it in the 70s.

Based on The Siege of Trencher’s Farm by Gordon M. Williams and written by David Zelag Goodman and Peckinpah, the story begins with David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) moving his wife Amy (George) back to her hometown of Wakely. Her ex, Charlie Venner (Del Henney), has a gang of horrible townsfolk like Norman Scutt (Ken Hutchison), Chris Cawsey (Jim Norton) and Phil Riddawa (Donald Webster) and each of them resents the meek academic American making love to one of their own.

David and Amy have moved into her father’s house, Trenchers Farm, and hired the four men to fix it up. As the house improves, their marriage falls apart, as she claims he left America because he was a coward afraid of conflict and that he treats her in a condescending manner. He withdraws into his study of stellar structures while she teases the workmen with her body.

Despite the men killing their cat, David still goes hunting with them. They pull the snipe hunting trick and abandon him, heading back to his home so that Venner can attack his wife. That coupling seems a bit too much like lovemaking by the end and as she holds her ex-lover, Scutt comes in with a gun and forces Venner to hold her down. By the time David returns, Amy says nothing.

The next day, David fires the men and Amy has a breakdown in church when she sees them. Things get worse — a local boy named Henry Niles (David Warner) ends up being seduced by a relative of Venner named Janice Hedden (Sally Thomsett). When the men chase them down, he accidentally kills her and goes on the run. After David accidentally hits him with his car, he takes the boy home, which brings the foursome back to begin invading the home.

Then David says, “I will not allow violence against this house.”

What follows is a Hoffman descending into the kind of barbaric behavior one expects in a Stanley Peckinpah movie.

Straw Dogs is older than I am and still packs such infernal power. We see ourselves cheering for David to finally rise up, but is too much well, too much? I guess not from the same man who made The Wild Bunch. I’ve been thinking this film over and over in my head and trying to figure out how I feel about it. It’s not ambivalence. I’m just seeking an answer.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the March 14, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here. You can read another take here.

Harry Garmes (George C. Scott) has left the world behind. His wife has left him after the death of their son. And after a life in organized crime, he’s content to be a nobody in a little fishing village somewhere in Portugal.

Then Harry gets a job.

It’s been nine years, but he still gets a job. Bring escaped killer Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) and his girlfriend Claudie Scherrer (Trish Van Devere) to France. Rickard is to kill French President DeGaulle under orders of the OAS.

Harry knows this will end bad.

He takes the job anyway.

Even the prostitute he sleeps with and gives all his money to, Monique (Colleen Dewhurst) turns on him.

Because Harry’s been dead a long time.

He just doesn’t know it.

Directed by Richard Fleischer (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fantastic Voyage, See No Evil, Mr. Majestyk, Mandingo, Conan the Destroyer and like, ten or more other movies I could mention) and written by Alan Sharp (The Osterman Weekend, Ulzana’s Raid, Damnation Alley), this was originally directed by John Huston, who went to war with a drunken Scott on set. Then again, Huston and his son Tony were rewriting the script over and over — Sharp also rewrote it six times — but after all that messing with the script, it wasn’t a movie anyone wanted to make. Huston left, Tina Aumont went with him and Fleischer was called in. He hated the script. That’s because it wasn’t the movie Sharp and Scott wanted to make.

The Last Run finished with a cost of a little over $2 million, only one week and $30,000 over the original schedule. Flesicher said, with no small pride, “I think it’s a miracle it got made. I’m the miracle.”

As for Scott, once his wife Dewhurst flew out with his kids, he fell in love with Van Devere, who he would later marry. So yeah. Scott is in this movie with two of his wives from three of his marriages (he was married to Dewhurst twice). In all, he was married five times, but he was with Van Devere from 1972 until his death in 1999.

Scott had just finished Patton, so he had some power on this film, and wanted to make a movie that reminded him of the ones he loved when he was young. I always liked that it seemed like he made every film personal.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the December 6, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Kevin Billington was the son of a factory worker who ended up marrying Lady Rachel Billington. He was also a director of plenty of TV movies, like a well-considered BBC version of Henry VIII. He ended up directing this international collaboration of French, Spanish and Italian producers. They paid Kirk Douglas an estimated $1 million dollars to star, which is about $7.2 million in today’s money.

Will Denton (Kirk Douglas) runs an isolated lighthouse to hide from a failed romance and the fact that he killed a man in self-defense. The only people he ever speaks to are the crew, Captain Moriz (Fernando Rey) and assistant Felipe (Massimo Ranieri). They watch over a very strategic trade route near the Tierra del Fuego archipelago at the southern tip of South America.

Yet in one horrible moment, it all changes, as Captain Jonathan Kongre (Yul Brynner) and his pirates — they include actors from Sergio Leone’s films, such as Luis Barboo, Víctor Israel and Aldo Sambrell — kill Moriz and Felipe, smash the lighthouse signal and start to loot everything they can. Surviving their attack along with an Italian sailor named Montefiore (Renato Salvatori), they begin to fight back.

Kongre has also made a change in his life. He always kills everyone on the ships that he takes over, but he’s fallen for one of the women on board, Arabella (Samantha Eggar). Denton tries to save her, but when Montefiore is caught and slowly killed, he puts his friend out of his misery, just as Kongre angrily gives the woman to his crew. Denton sinks the ship and it ends up with just the two men, battling each other to the death inside the lighthouse.

If you’re expecting a light hearted Jules Verne adventure, well, this is as rough as it gets. It’s about a broken man trying to just live out his days coming up against a sophisticated villain who loves murder and carnage. I mean, they kill Douglas’ monkey. That’s how horrible the bad guys are. They deserve everything they get.