After The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat o’Nine Tails, Argento had one more movie left in his “Animal Trilogy.” Luigi Cozzi (Starcrash) would both write and assistant direct the film and the results are…interesting. It’s a lot funnier than his other giallo and was considered his swan song to the genre until his movie The Five Days failed at the box office.

Rock drummer Roberto Tobias is being stalked and as he finally catches up to his pursuer, the man pulls a knife. A struggle ensues and Roberto accidentally stabs the man while another masked figure laughs and takes photographs.

The next day, Roberto reads about the man’s death — Carlo Marosi — and gets a letter with a photograph of him murdering the man. He begins having reoccurring dreams that he’s being decapitated. Even worse, he wakes up to a masked man attacking him, who tells him that he won’t kill him because he isn’t finished with him.

Roberto’s wife Nina (Mimsy Farmer, Body Count, Autopsy) returns home and he confesses the murder to her and tells her that he can’t go to the police to stop the harassment. He does turn to his artistic friend “God” Godfrey (Bambino from They Call Me Trinity) and a con artist named the Professor (Oreste Lionello, The Case of the Bloody Iris and the Italian voice for Woody Allen) for help.

Whoever is behind Roberto’s stalking and harassment is a troubled soul who had a horrific childhood and spent some time in an insane asylum. Roberto’s maid Amelia knows who it is, but she pays for it with her life, as the killer uses a straight razor to slice her apart.

Later that night, Dalia (Francine Racette, Donald Sutherland’s wife, so well done Donald) comes to stay with Nina and Roberto, despite him wanting her not to be there. It also turns out that our hero never really killed Carlo, who has been working with his blackmailer, who dispatches him with razor wire.

Roberto then hires Arrosio, a flamboyant investigator who has never solved a case, but hopes that this is the one that he will solve. Amelia’s murder has been discovered and the cops are on the case, so Nina says that she’s leaving town, feeling unsafe in her own house.

It turns out that Dalia has always loved Roberto, so they have sex. As you do. Look, it’s a giallo. Other strange things are afoot, like Roberto’s cat getting kidnapped and beheaded, Nina getting an inheritance, strange photos of Nina and Dalia’s family and more nightmares.

That’s when giallo science intrudes: the killer was in a mental institution called Villa Rapidi, where they were considered dangerous until their father died. This knowledge — and discovering the killer’s identity and finally cracking a case — leads to Arrosio’s death.

Dalia then notices that Roberto and someone in a photo with his wife look quite similar. Just as she puts it all together, she’s stabbed and killed.

Ready for more giallo science? The police perform an optographical test that takes a photo of the retina to show the last image that Dalia saw before she died. Even Argento — a man who made a movie about a girl who can physically speak to insects and becomes friends with an orangutan — thought this idea was stupid until Carlo Rambaldi showed him how the special effect would look.

The last image that Dalia saw? Four flies on grey velvet. No one knows what this means.

Roberto waits for the killer to come for him but then Nina arrives. He tries to get her to leave because the killer is coming when he notices her necklace: a fly. As it swings, he sees it: four flies. In true giallo fashion, the killer is someone who we obviously didn’t ever consider.

A fight breaks out and she repeatedly shoots her husband as she explains how she was placed in the asylum by her abusive stepfather — who raised her as a man — and was only cured when the man died. When she met Roberto, what she felt wasn’t love, but the madness that her stepfather caused within her. She finally would get her revenge by using Roberto as the replacement for the man she couldn’t get back at.

Nina runs away as Godfrey arrives to save Roberto, but she rams the back of a truck. She’s decapitated as the car explodes.

Deep Purple almost did this movie (several members of the Beatles were considered for the role of Roberto), but their schedule didn’t allow it to happen. Ennio Morricone, who worked with Argento on The Bird with the Crystal Plumage worked on the film, but had a huge argument with the director about the score. Goblin would come in and work with Argento for the first time here. Morricone and Argento finally reconciled and worked together on The Stendhal Syndrome.

This film wasn’t commercially released for the home market until 2009, other than an incredibly hard-to-find French VHS version. That’s because the rights to this film in America are owned by Paramount Pictures, which had chosen not to release it. Shameless did put out a UK release that is all region a few years back.

This is one strange giallo. The ending car crash took twelve cars to get right and combined with the music in the scene, it’s really unsettling. This is also one of the first movies to use high speed cameras to shoot bullet time, years before Hong Kong movies and The Matrix. I love the killer’s rant at the end of the film, particularly because big chunks of it are still in Italian! This might be hard for you to find, but it’s worth tracking down.

The second in Dario Argento’s “Animal Trilogy” with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Four Flies on Grey Velvet, this film isn’t one of the director’s favorites and it failed to follow up on the success of the first film in the United States, although it was very popular in Italy. It’s filled with a lot more humor — it still has plenty of shocking moments — and kind of meanders around. But there’s still so much to enjoy.

Franco “Cookie” Arno (Karl Malden) is a blind man who is obsessed with solving puzzles. One comes to him in real life as he walks at night with his niece Lori. They overhear a man plan to blackmail someone, then that man breaks into the Terzi Institute. We meet our second hero, the reporter Carlo (James Franciscus) when he investigates the affair.

The head of the institute, Dr. Calabresi, looks at his files in his office and phones someone who agrees to meet with him. He tells his fiancee Bianca (Rada Rassimov, the sister of Ivan, which you can tell by her eyes) that whatever was taken could be a big step forward. As the doctor waits on a train platform, he’s pushed off a train platform. This brings the two heroes together and starts a string of murders, as anyone connected to the mystery is quickly killed.

It turns out that the Terzi Institute is able to isolate the chromosomes that point to evil tendencies within people and they have a miracle drug that can change that. Carlo also becomes involved with  Professor Terzi’s daughter Anna and they’re followed by both the police and the killer.

From milk being poisoned to dead bodies being searched in the middle of the night inside a crypt, the noose tightens around our heroes’ necks, with even Cookie’s niece being kidnapped and in danger. And oh yeah — his girlfriend and her adoptive father have had an incestuous relationship for years.

There’s a rooftop battle that may or may not take out one of the protagonists — the movie doesn’t even tell us — and finally the killer is knocked down an elevator shaft, his hands bleeding as he tries to grab the cable to stop him. It’s one of the few moments of sheer awesome in this film, but hints that greatness is in the future of Argento’s films.

You can watch this movie for free on Vudu and on Amazon Prime.

Toshiya Fujita comes back to finish off the Stray Cat Rock series with one last tale. In this one, Meiko Kaji also returns to play Furiko, a girl in love with Ryumei. They want to live together as hippies, but his politician father Mayor Araki wants him to be a businessman. So he does what any dad would do: have a gang of bikers abduct his son. However, Ryumei kills one of them in self-defense and Meiko ends up being blamed for the crime. What’s a girl to do?

Furiko escapes prison whole her hippy friends stage all manner of scandalous behavior for the press while the boss Piranha plays spaghetti western music. It’s all for money, which seems alien to the hippy ideal, but what do I know? So does holding them up for more money.

The gang argues about Furiko killing the man and realize that it was all for her man’s sake. She took the fall while he returned home. As soon as she busts out, she goes to find him. But now he’s gone straight and his family kidnaps her.

So that means that the gang of hippies leave Shinjuku and bicycle up to the countryside to save Furiko. The trailer those hippies live in is pretty happening and they mostly pose on top of it and show off for reporters who come by.

I mean, they had nothing better to do after Nekuro had sex with a jackhammer and died of an orgasm induced heart attack. What is going on with this installment of Stray Cat Rock!?!

If you can guess that Ryumei’s father runs the town and that even if he loves Furiko that everything is going to end badly, you’ve been watching the Stray Cat Rock series. I did love the sacrifice that Piranha makes at the end so that his gang can live, though.

After this movie. Meiko Kaji moved to the Toei studio and started work on the Female Convict 701 Scorpion series. It’s just as well as she’s an afterthought in this movie and deserved way better.

Should you watch the Stray Cat Rock series? How do you feel about motorcycles and random music numbers? Enjoy 1970’s fashion? Want to get to know people only to have them killed by the end? Then by all means, it’s time to get into them.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime or get the entire Arrow Video box set.

Hammer had already made two adaptions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — The Ugly Duckling and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll. But what if they combined that story with the historical Jack the Ripper and Burke and Hare cases? And what if Jekyll turned into a female Hyde? Now we have a movie!

Dr. Henry Jekyll (Ralph Bates, Lust for a Vampire) has been trying to cure all known illnesses but his friend Professor Robertson (Gerald Sim, Dr. Phibes Rises Again) laughs that by the time his experiments are discovered and used, he’ll be long dead and unable to enjoy his achievements.

Jekyll then abandons his altruistic aims and starts looking for the elixir of life, which he feels uses female hormones that he takes from the bodies of women supplied by William Burke and William Hare, real life murderers that killed people and sold them to doctors for anatomy lessons. Never mind that those murders happened sixty years before the timeline of this film.

Meanwhile, Susan Spencer lives above him and they’re attracted to one another. However, he’s too absorbed by his work to do anything about it. Soon, he’s created a serum that not only changes his character, but transforms him into a gorgeous and amoral woman (Martine Beswick, who is in the first two Bond movies, plays the Queen of Evil in Seizure and was Xaviera Hollander in The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood) that he calls Mrs. Edwina Hyde. Susan instantly hates her, but her brother Howard (Lewis Fiander, Who Can Kill a Child?) falls for her.

Dr. Jekyll soon learns that his serum requires more female hormones than Burke and Hare can acquire for him. And when they’re finally caught, he’s forced to commit the crimes that the rest of London believes were those of Jack the Ripper. Jekyll hates what he has become, but Hyde loves it, even killing the Professor when he dares question her.

The male and female sides of his/her/its body all go to war with one another with Susan as the prize. Seriously, this is a movie that demands to be remade today.

Sadly, Caroline Munro was nearly Mrs. Hyde, but dropped out when she realized that the film required nudity. That said, Martine Beswick is pretty great in this. She was initially asked to do full frontal nudity and wouldn’t talk to director Roy Ward Baker (Asylum, The Vault of Horror) for a week.

Pedro (Paul Naschy!) used to be an acrobat, but he had an accident and now all he does is limp around rainy London and get into fights. Meanwhile, a murderer starts redoing the crimes of Jack the Ripper. Could it be Pedro? Once his second wife is killed, he becomes a target for both the police and the mob that controls prostitution.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5hx7fr

Basically, this is a Spanish movie trying to be an Italian giallo shot in England starring Paul Naschy, who doesn’t become a werewolf. A true multicultural affair if there ever was one!

The thing is, despite having a limp and supposedly being unable to work, Naschy’s character routinely dishes out beatings to criminals.

That said, a man calling himself Jack is killing all manner of girls of ill repute and then calling the inept police and sending them heads in hat boxes 24 years before Seven. This is a giallo in name only, as there’s rarely any high fashion, other than lothario teenager and Ripper suspect Winston’s wife. This lady serves her guests cakes via a hostess cart, all while holding a poodle under one arm and wearing a dress that looks like it was Carol Burnett-style made out of the curtains. This is one lady that knows how to party! Too bad her husband is more interested in blackmailing the students that he’s sleeping with. That said, one of them, Sandy, wears quite the fetching black furry jacket.

There’s also an amazing moment where one of the hookers, Belinda, screams about all of the men that have screwed her over. So there’s that.

But if you were expecting something out of the Argento, Martino or even Lenzi giallo camp, you may wish to look elsewhere. It also may try hard to be sleazy, but it doesn’t feel like a real maniac is in the director’s chair. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the Italian maestros, who so artfully make everything look like a neon red dream.

There are, however, numerous b roll travelogue shots of 1971 London with people either mugging for the camera or doing their best to avoid it with a stiff upper lip.

Hammer hit all the monster cues before 1971: vampires, mummies, werewolves, lesbian vampires, you name it. By 1971, it was time for something different. Something that mixed the Hammer sophistication audiences had come to expect with plenty of the gore they now wanted. Peter Sasdy was tapped to direct — you may know him from films like Taste the Blood of Dracula and Countess Dracula. To me, he’ll always be the guy behind the criminally unknown Welcome to Blood City and the criminally awesome The Lonely Lady.

The infant daughter of Jack the Ripper witnesses his last murder, as the killer murders his wife (and her mother, of course) when she catches on to the fact that her husband has blood all over himself and that he’s just returned in the middle of the night from Whitechapel.

Strangely, while we see Jack the Ripper’s face clearly — it’s a mess of syphilis scars — and hear his voice and people recognize him, no one ever says who he is. Ever stranger, the actor who played him has gone uncredited and all Hammer records as to who played him have vanished. Even director Peter Sasdy wouldn’t reveal who it was!

Fifteen years later, his daughter is fully grown and possessed by the spirit of her father, entering into trances where she’ll kill people and not remember what happened afterward. That’s a career danger, as she’s now the adopted daughter of a phony spirit medium and that kind of job requires one to go into said trances. To top it off, the old phony then tries to sell her adopted daughter’s virginity!

But it all works out. After all, a psychiatrist wants to help her and is convinced that he has the cure. Dude, this is a Hammer movie. This isn’t going to end well for anyone!

The second Hammer film about Jack the Ripper (after 1950’s Room to Let), this was paired in America with the superior Twins of Evil, which is probably my favorite vampire movie ever. This is a combination Gothic horror/proto-slasher/giallo/possession film that is pretty much ahead of its time. And hey! Someone gets their eyes put out with knitting needles. So there’s that.

You can watch this with an Amazon Prime subscription.

Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage has scores of imitators that rose in the wake of its success. There were scores of gorgeous women being murdered, jazzy soundtracks blaring and movies with animals in their titles. And then, every once in a while, there’s a giallo that rises beyond the pack and asserts itself as a true work of art.

Giornata Nera per L’Ariete, or Black Day for the Ram, may appear to be an animal title, but it really refers to astrology (which kind of gives away some of the film). It’s better known as The Fifth Cord.

Director Luigi Bazzoni doesn’t have a huge list of films to his credit, but between this film, The Possessed and Footprints on the Moon, his take on the giallo form is unlike anyone else’s. This is more than a murder mystery. It’s a complex take on alienation and isolation at the end of the last century.

Based on David McDonald Devine’s novel — but based in Italy, not Scotland as in the book — The Fifth Cord starts with a man barely surviving a vicious attack on the way home from a New Year’s Eve party. We even get to hear the words of the killer:

“I am going to commit murder. I am going to kill another human being. How easy it is to say, already I feel like a criminal. I’ve been thinking it over for weeks, but now that I’ve giving voice to my evil intention I feel comfortably relaxed. Perhaps the deed itself will be an anti-climax, but I think not.”

Writer Andrea Bild (Franco Nero!) is assigned to report on the case and to put it bluntly, he’s a mess. Ever since his separation, he’s been drowning his life in whiskey and women.

Soon, the attacker strikes again and this time, whomever it is succeeds and leaves behind a black glove with a finger missing (Evil FIngers is an alternate title). That one finger missing turns into two, then three and comes with evil phone calls. Andrea has to take on the giallo role of the investigator before he becomes either the fifth victim or is arrested by the police — it turns out that he was at that very same New Year’s party, as was every single one of the victims.

The story itself is rather basic, but the way that it’s told is anything but. Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography places The Fifth Cord in an industrialized Rome that’s rarely seen in giallo, eschewing the historic architecture we’re used to seeing. I’d compare it to a less flashy Tenebre, but this was made a decade before that movie.

If you come to these movies for the fashions, well, you may be slightly disappointed. But if you love the decor, look out. I’ve never seen more spiral staircases in one movie ever before. The house with the giant fireplace was also used for Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet, but looks so much more impressive here. And I loved how the modern architecture gives little room to run in the closing moments.

This movie has never looked better than on its recent Arrow Video release. It’s jaw-dropping how gorgeous the film appears and the Ennio Morricone soundtrack positively emerges from the speakers. I expect great things from this company, but they continually surprise and delight me at every turn.

This release includes a brand new 2K restoration from the original camera negative with the film in both English and Italian with optional subtitles. There’s also a commentary track by critic Travis Crawford; Lines and Shadows, an incredibly informative video essay on the film’s use of architecture and space by critic Rachael Nisbet; interview with author Michael Mackenzie and film editor Eugenio Alabiso; and even a brand new interview with Franco Nero, who looks amazing at 77 years old. They even found a previously unseen deleted sequence!

This is one of my favorite releases so far this year and has my highest recommendation. You can get it directly from Arrow Video or from Diabolik DVD.

This movie is also available on Vudu.

NOTE: Arrow Video sent is this for review, which has no bearing upon our review.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but no one ever will do portmanteau movies quite like Amicus. This 1971 offering claims that “TERROR waits for you in every room in The House That Dripped Blood” and it’s directed by Peter Duffell, who mainly worked in British TV. All four stories are based on the words of Psycho author Robert Bloch.

Movie star Paul Henderson bought a country estate where every previous tenant has died or disappeared mysteriously. Now, a Scotland Yard inspect is here to get to the bottom of things.

In Method for Murder, a horror writer (Denholm Elliott, Marcus Brody from the Indiana Jones films) and his wife are haunted by the villain of the novel he’s currently writing.

Then, in Waxworks, Peter Cushing and Joss Acklund (the bad guy from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) all in love with a mannequin.

Sweets to the Sweet is all about a widower (Christopher Lee!) battling a governess over how to best raise his daughter, who may or may not have evil powers.

Finally, in The Cloak, we learn that Paul Henderson (Jon Pertwee, the third Doctor Who) found an evil cloak that transformed him into a vampire. Ingrid Pitt shows up, which delights me more than words can say.

Despite its title, there’s no blood in this one. There is, however, plenty of fun. If you’re bored by a story, just hang out for a bit. And if you like what you’re seeing, there are plenty more Amicus films we can recommend.

You can get the blu ray of this movie from Shout! Factory or watch it on Amazon Prime.

You can listen to our podcast about this movie right here!

Marianne (Susan George, Tintorera…Tiger Shark) has been on the run from her family and the criminals they’ve hired, because on her 21st birthday, she inherits millions of dollars from her mother and the legal papers that will incriminate her father, the Judge (Leo Genn, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin).

After being chased by those criminals away from her go-go dancing job, Marianne meets up with Sebastian, who takes her to London and tries to marry her. She’s not all that into it, so she plays with him and writes the name of his best man Eli on the wedding certificate. She starts to fall for Eli at the same time that she learns that her father had hired Sebastian to bring his daughter back to him.

Meanwhile, Marianne’s sister Hildegard has been in love with her father — and I mean in love in the most sexual of sense — and wants to kill her sister. Of course, she also gets with Sebastian and tries to put the moves on Eli.

Your enjoyment will depend on how much you like 1970’s kitsch and the directorial style of Peter Walker (Schizo, The Comeback).

Want to see it? It’s on Shudder.

I like to play this game where any time the title of the movie is mentioned, I scream and cheer like I’m Pee Wee sitting on Chairy. Good news for me — What’s the Matter with Helen? says it’s title more than once, leading to me wondering if I should invest in the paper bags full of confetti that Rip Taylor always seems to have to throw around.

Two young men are going to jail for life after murdering an older woman. Then, we see their mothers — played by Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds — as they bravely face an angry mob and drive away. As they make their way home, an anonymous phone call takes credit for the attack which bloodied up Winters’ character Helen. Reynolds character Adelle then reveals her plan to pack up her cardboard standup of herself and move to California to start a dance studio. Soon, the two ladies have changed their last names and gone west.

This is a movie packed with odd situations and even odder characters, like elocution teacher Hamilton Starr and a tramp who continually bothers Adelle. And oh yeah — Helen is madly in love with her friend and becomes insanely jealous to the point that she often sticks her fingers into metal fans when she isn’t listening to Sister Alma (Agnes Moorehead) on the radio. Alma is obviously Aimee Semple McPherson, the 1920’s and 30’s celebrity whose Foursquare Church’s faith healing radio broadcasts were the forerunner of modern televangelism and charismatic Christianity.

Adelle falls for Lincoln Palmer (Dennis Weaver), the father of one of her students. He’s rich as it gets, rich enough to pay for gigolos to dance with her while he watches in yet another one of those moments that would get explored in a modern movie and are just another creepy aside in this one.

Between Helen murdering people who break into their house, then trying to be forgiven by Sister Alma all while having flashbacks to her husband being run over by a plow, her madness soon overtakes the film and things proceed to a rather sudden and shocking conclusion. There’s also an extended miniature golf sequence and numerous rabbit murders, as well as the reveal that Helen may have been right to kill at least one of the intruders.

This movie happened when director Curtis Harrington (Night Tide, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?) and producer George Edwards approached writer Henry Farrell (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) became a hit. was a hit, hoping to get a screenplay. Hagsploitation was in, baby, and these dudes wanted in on the action!

According to Debbie Reynolds, Shelley Winters’s psychiatrist had warned her not to take this movie, as she was about to play a woman having a nervous breakdown while she was actually having one. She claims that Winters became her character to the point that the studio considered replacing her with Geraldine Page, who had plenty of hagsploitation cred after starring in Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?

Winters also totally caught the lesbian undercurrents — well, they’re not so well hidden, so let’s say overcurrents — in the movie, but the scenes where she really played it up were left on the cutting room floor.

It’s worth noting that this was an Oscar-nominated film — for Reynolds outfits, that is. If you have a Debbie Reynolds crush, good news. This is the movie for you. This is also the movie for you if you love musical numbers about animal crackers.

Every single person in this one is disreputable, even the children, who are forced to dress as showgirls and purr songs like “Oh, You Nasty Man.” This posits What’s the Matter with Helen? as a forerunner of calling out the blatant sexuality of child beauty pageants years before Jon Benet was murdered.

I’ve always wanted to see this movie, despite its trailer and poster giving away the ending. What were they thinking? That said, there’s enough weirdness here to sustain my interest, even if I knew how it was all going to turn out.

Want to see it? Shout! Factory has recently released it on blu ray.