A wealthy industrialist named Johann Wallenberger has showed up dead outside a haunted house ride and is missing all of his money. His insurance company sends its top man, Chris Buyer (Robert Hoffman, Death Carries a Cane). He decides to go undercover by dating the dead man’s daughter Catherine, but before long, he’s in her family home as her mother loses her mind and her sister Barbara starts to seduce him. And oh yeah — more people start dying, which could be anyone from a blackmailer to a family member to even someone else from Chris’ company trying to ruin his good name.

Director Alfonso Brescia is well-known to us here — we did an entire breakdown of his five post-Star Wars science fiction films — and you can trust the man who made The Beast In Space and the underrated Iron Warrior to make something interesting.

I love that this movie has more than one ending and more than one killer. It plays with the form a bit and keeps you guessing. I’m also all for Adolfo Celli showing up in every movie that I watch.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally posted this on March 26, 2018. To celebrate the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Giallopalooza on September 17 and 18, we’re posting an article on each of the eight films that will play at this incredible event.

London. The 70’s. Professor of Italian Enrico Rosseni (Fabio Testi, The Four of the Apocalypse) is on his boat, making out with Elizabeth (Cristina Galbó, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, The House that Screamed) and trying to get her to go further than she has before. Right when it seems like he’s going to finally conquer her, she looks up to see a woman being stabbed on the shore.

After angrily rowing to the shore, Rosseni and Elizabeth find no evidence of a crime. He accuses her of being too religious, like all the girls at the school her uncle sent her to. The next morning, while he dresses and argues with his wife Helga, he hears about a horrid murder on the banks of the Thames river. He drives to where he and Elizabeth were and finds tons of cops. And there are even more at the school where he works!

The victim was one of Elizabeth’s friends, so she wants to tell the police what they know. However, he doesn’t want the affair exposed. However, his pen has been found near the body and he shows up in the crime scene photographs in the newspaper.

More murders. More clues in Elizabeth’s mind. More priests doing evil things. More anger from Helga. More of Rosseni trying to solve the crime. And all he has is one clue: Who is Solange and what was done to her?

The movie takes a turn when Elizabeth is killed inside the apartment that Rosseni has rented for the two of them to continue their affair. And at that point, Helga starts being much nicer to our hero. As their relationship improves, her makeup grows softer, her clothing gets more fashionable and her hair comes down. How strange to find a giallo about a relationship coming back together as the result of murder!

What happened to Solange (Camille Keaton, I Spit on Your Grave)? She was given an abortion that all of the murdered girls were there for. In a kitchen, no less. And all of those girls were involved in doing drugs and dating older men.

So what do the cops do? Oh, just set up a sting operation with all of the surviving girls. And of course, Solange just happens to show up, walking through the park. Here’s the second of course — the cops bungle everything and the killer takes Brenda, asking her the story of Solange, as he did every other victim.

This is one well-put-together film, thanks to Massimo Dallamano, who was the cameraman for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. Joe D’Amoto was the cinematographer and added plenty to the film. And you can’t deny the power of having an Ennio Morricone score!

This film is an interesting combination of the German krimi film and the Italian giallo and gave way to Dallamono’s Schoolgirls in Peril trilogy, which includes What Have They Done to Your Daughters? and Rings of Fear.

I always love seeing what titles films get released and re-released under. What Have You Done to Solange? has so many, including an attempt to sell it as a teen comedy entitled The Rah-Rah Girls! You can learn more at the amazing Temple of Schlock site. And for an awesome police report of the events of the film, head to The Giallo Files.

So who was the killer? No spoilers here.

Also known as The Sensuous Doll and Sweet Spirits (or in Italy, La rossa dalla pelle che scotta AKA The Redhead with Hot Skin), this one is…well, I don’t even know if I’d call it a giallo. I’d actually say that it has to fit in there because what else would you call it? A mannequin movie?

Farley Granger is John Ward, a starving — and drunken — artist who transforms a faceless mannequin that he gets from a gaggle of hippies (is that the right word for a group of them?) into a work of art that eventually becomes a real living and breathing woman that he starts to abuse, so she starts sleeping around. Seeing as how that woman is Erika Blanc, you can see how much I hate our protagonist.

Of course, by the end, he’s offering up his soul for one more night in her bed. So is this a supernatural film? Whatever it is, it’s way darker than the 80s would make a mannequin film. Or two on the move.

Do you think Farley Granger muttered to director Renzo Russo (The Kinky Darlings), “You know, I deserve better than this. I was in two Hitchcock movies!”? I’m sure that Erika Bella was like, “Yeah? I was in The Devil’s Nightmare and A Man for Emmanuelle! So there!”

I’d like to think so.

Translating as Hot Delusion or Hot Frenzy, this film was also released as Delirium and has nothing to do with the 1987 giallo Delirium AKA Photos of Gioia. Instead, it stars one-time Mr. Universe and the former husband of Jayne Mansfield Mickey Hargitay as Dr. Herbert Lyutak, a man who is a psychological consultant to the police and the serial killer they’ve been chasing.

Just when he decides to let his wife Marcia (Rita Calderoni, who was in Nude for Satan and The Amazons) in on the secret, someone starts providing him with alibis and covering up for him, which is good, because Herbert can only perform in the bedroom when he’s beating his wife or murdering other women.

I mean, not good. Good for the story.

There’s also a dream sequence where Marcia and the maid engage in a sapphic encounter while Mickey remains in chains, flipping out and chewing chunks out of scenery that may nearly choke the entire cast. It’s awesome.

The American cut adds in a Vietnam subplot, where Herbert is now a PTSD-damaged ‘Nam vet and Calderoni the field nurse who fell in love with him. It also has two more murders, so there’s that.

Director Renato Polselli has the type of scuzzy credits that mark him as a talent to look into further, like The Vampire and the Ballerina, The Reincarnation of Isabel AKA Black Magic Rites (also starring Hargitay and Calderoni), Revelations of a Psychiatrist on the World of Sexual Perversion and Mania.

Writer/director Nello Rossati isn’t an Italian filmmaker that gets brought up all that often. He does have some interesting films in his resume, including 1987’s Django Strikes Again, the only official sequel to a western genre all on its own. He also made Bona parte di Paolina, one of the few Napoleon-sploitation films that I can think of, as well as Ursula Andress making a comeback by slumming it in a commedia sexy all’italiana called The Sensuous Nurse, a poliziotteschi with the wild name of Don’t Touch the Children!, a movie called Io zombo, tu zombi, lei zomba that I really need to track down as its a sex comedy horror movie about four zombies running a hotel, a giallo-adjacent called Le mani di una donna sola in which a lesbian countess seduces married women until insane asylum escapees chop her hands off, an I Spit On Your Grave-esque film called Fuga scabrosamente pericolosa that stars Andy Sidaris villain Rodrigo Obregón, the all over the place genre buffet that is Top Line and this movie, which is a giallo from right in the middle of the golden era of the form.

Antonio (Silvano Tranquilli, who has been in plenty of giallo, like Black Belly of the Tarantula, The Bloodstained Butterfly and So Sweet, So Dead) is the kind of workaholic husband that falls asleep on date night before fulfilling his duties as a husband. Is it any surprise then that he comes home, finds a dead body in his yard and his wife Anna (Eva Czemerys, The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive; The Killer Reserved Nine Seats; Women in Cell Block 7) has a gun on the dining room table?

As she tells the story of how she left her husband’s bed for their neighbor Massimo, who is always surrounded by other women, loud classical music and a Satanic air. After he abuses her for being rich and continually calls her a cat in heat, then starts abusing her and luring her into all manner of kinks.

The whole time that his wife is telling this story, Antonio is trying to hide the body from neighbors. Yet what if the body is still alive? And how would this couple make it all work after a night of revelations like this? More importantly, is it a giallo when no one really dies?

You may think to yourself while watching this that it looks way better than you’d think, particularly during the LSD orgy sequences. That would be because the director of photography was Aristide Massaccesi, who you may know by one of his many, many names. I often just use the name Joe D’Amato and soon enough, he’d be making movies that put the sex quotient of this movie to shame. You may also notice that the assistant director is someone of some renown: Lamberto Bava.

If you’re new to the giallo, maybe start somewhere else. If you’re starting to think you’ve seen it all, check this one out.

If you’re the daughter of Frankenstein and you need a serum to make you eternally young, there’s only one man’s whose blood will work. That would be Santo. And that’s all we really need to get this movie rolling, right? Also, to make things even more awesome, Dr. Freda Frankenstein has several monsters in her employ, including the half-human, half-ape Truxon and a very Universal Monsters looking version of her father’s creation that she has named Ursus*.

She also kidnaps Santo’s girlfriend Norma and hypnotizes her into cutting out his eyes with a knife because life is cheap in Mexico and our hero has already turned down the evil woman’s advances.

I have a weakness for the female side of the Frankenstein family tree — witness Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter and Lady Frankenstein — and this film has that plus lucha libre and ends with Santo fighting Japanese wrestler Yamaguchi for the title.

After this, Santo would battle Dracula, a wolfman and Dr. Frankenstein himself. Gina Roman, who played Freda, was also in La Venganza de las Mujeres Vampiro as the dreaded Countess Mayra.

*They’re both played by Gerardo Zepeda who was also in El Topo, Night of the Bloody Apes, Santo and Blue Demon Against the Monsters — in which he played Ciclope and a zombie — and so many more movies.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The five “Champions of Justice” in this film are Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras, Rayo de Jalisco, Fantasma Blanco and Avispon Escarlata. Sure, we’ve seen Blue and Mil before, but let’s get you up to speed on a few of the others.

Rayo de Jalisco started wrestling in 1950 but didn’t find success — and the gimmick that would get him said fame — until the early 60s. Once he put on the black mask, he quickly won both the NWA World Middleweight Championship and Occidente Welterweight Championship. He was named best wrestler of 1963, as well as forming a tag team with Blue Demon, the man who would take his hair 26 years later in Plaza de Toros Monumental (the same arena where Los Brazos lost their masks to Los Villanos).

Fantasma Blanco is actually Coloso Colosseti, who wrestled as El Internacional (he lost that match to Tinieblas), El Enterrador (that hood was lost in ring to The Tempest), Batman, Maskaraman and Tårzan.

As for Avispon Escarlata — the Scarlet Hornet — he was created for this film and echoes the Green Hornet. He’s played by Manuel Leal, the man who is also Tinieblas. He was a bodybuilder who was scouted by Dory Dixon and the Black Shadow for wrestling, yet before that, he was already in movies, playing Frankenstein in Santo y Blue Demon contra los Monstruos and Satan in Las Momias de Guanajuato. As Tinieblas, he shows up in The Champions of Justice — why he was that role in the first in this series and switched in this one is beyond me — as well as The Castle of Mummies of Guanajuato, Macabre Legends of the Colony, El Puño de la Muerte, La Furia de los Karatecas, El Investigador Capulina and Las Momias de San Ángel. The character was originally intended to be the faceless enemy of the man of a thousand faces, Mil Mascaras! Instead, he became a comic book hero — he had his own book for years — and even has a mascot, the Ewok-like creature known as Alushe*.

One of his nicknames is El Gigante Sabio (The Wise Giant) and he even has a column called Pregúntale a Tinieblas (Ask Tinieblas) where people send him questions to answer. Perhaps that’s one of the many reasons why people thought that he and the respected Mexican commentator Dr. Alfonso Morales were the same person. On August 21, 1970 when Tinieblas made his debut, Dr. Morales was not there. They were both tall men, so the joke for years was that they were the same man.

The main story here is that a team of rat-men — yes, the same miniature henchmen from the original, but now looking like rodents — are trying to take over the world for a Mexican superscience villainess in hot pants named Gatussy. I’m not certain if these guys were men who became rats or rats who became men, yet most of the film is about them swarming all over our heroes.

If you have an issue with a movie about cool lucha dudes riding motorcycles and watching their women go-go dance in between fighting miniature rat men, you should really examine your life.

*Alushe was based on a Mayan mythical elf born in the year 1767 in the city of Anahuac in Xibalba, the Mayan version of hell. When he made his debut in 1988, he was already 221 years old. He was also bribed with candy, money and women by Pierroth Jr.’s group Los Boricuas and suddenly became a Puerto Rican rudo for some time before rejoining Tinieblas. A second Alushe debuted shortly afterward and the original became the blue monkey KeMonito entering into a threeway mascot feud with Mije and the dreaded evil dancing Zacarías el Perico. Man, how much better is lucha libre than pro wrestling?

You can watch this on YouTube.

You know, I can’t get enough of luchadors fighting mummies. I really can’t. They could have made hundreds of these movies and I’d watch every single one.

This time around, the evil Count Cagliostro (Tito Novaro, who also directed this movie) and a scientist have succeeded in bringing the mummies of Guanajuato — yes, the same ones from Las Momias de Guanajuato — back to life. Beyond wiring the undead with electronics that allow them to be controlled, they also have an army of karate-chopping little people.

Luckily, humanity has El Rayo de Jalisco (who didn’t appear all that often in movies), Mil Máscaras and Blue Angel* (who would team with Superzan and Tieneblas to fight a very similar set of bad guys in the following year’s El Castillo de las Momias de Guanajuato) are on our side.

Not only does Mil have a convertible, fight mummies in a cape and know tons of attractive women, he lives in the kind of space age seventies apartment that would not be out of place in a giallo. Well done, man of a thousand masks!

*According to Cool Ass Cinema, Blue Angel was bodybuilder Orlando Hernandez. The character was created by producer Rogelio Agrasánchez Sr. as a replacement for Blue Demon.

You can watch this on YouTube.