This is the seventh Forgotten Gialli set from Vinegar Syndrome. You can check out my articles on the others here:

• Forgotten Gialli 1
• Forgotten Gialli 2
• Forgotten Gialli 3
• Forgotten Gialli 4
• Forgotten Gialli 5
• Forgotten Gialli 6
• Forgotten Gialli 7

This box set has the following movies:

Rings of Fear (1978): This is the third entry in a loosely linked series of films that are known by the pervy and wonderous title of the Schoolgirls in Peril trilogy, a run of movies that take the already queasy obsessions of giallo and crank them into something even more uncomfortable. These are films where the camera lingers just a little too long, where morality is nonexistent and where the punishment for youthful sexuality is swift, brutal and usually wrapped in plastic. 

The series starts with What Have You Done to Solange?, directed by Massimo Dallamano, one of the absolute high-water marks of the giallo form, a movie that balances sleaze, sadness, and a genuinely upsetting mystery in a way most of its imitators can only dream about. He followed that up with What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, which dials up the nihilism and leans harder into the idea that the world is an uncaring machine designed to chew up the young and spit them out. Sadly, Dallamano would die before this movie was made, but his fingerprints are all over it thanks to his screenplay credit, which means you still get that same mix of procedural grit and moral rot.

This time around, the film wastes no time getting to the good stuff. A teenage girl’s corpse is found wrapped in plastic, which feels like a grim premonition of Twin Peaks and the whole Laura Palmer thing by over a decade. Inspector Gianni DiSalvo, played by Fabio Testi with the kind of weary, seen-it-all expression that giallo cops are contractually obligated to have, starts digging into a group of schoolgirls known as The Inseparables. You know right away that any group with a name like that is going to be nothing but trouble.

These girls attend one of those prestigious all-girls’ schools that only seem to exist in Italian genre cinema — the kind of place where education is secondary to whispered secrets, coded glances, and the constant threat of violence lurking just outside the gates. Among them is Fausta Avelli, played by Barbara Bach, who had already been orbiting the genre in films like Don’t Torture A Duckling, The Psychic and Phenomena — basically a resume that screams “you’re in for something good” You also get Helga Liné, one of those faces that shows up in everything from classy Euro-thrillers to absolute bottom-shelf horror like So Sweet…Perverse and Nightmare Castle to The Vampires Night Orgy, Horror Rises from the Tomb and Black Candles. If European exploitation cinema had a frequent flyer program, she’d have lifetime platinum status.

Then there’s that ending. You get one killer casually offing himself like it’s just another item on the to-do list, and just when you think the movie is winding down, it pulls the rug out and reveals who’s really been behind everything. It’s mean, it’s cynical, and it’s exactly why you sat through all the recycled sleaze in the first place. In true giallo fashion, justice doesn’t feel like justice. It feels like just another ugly secret getting buried along with the bodies.

Reflections In Black (1975): A mysterious woman, dressed all in black, including stockings, is killing other beautiful women with a razor. Tano Cimarosa — usually an actor — directs this film, where we soon learn that all of the women are connected to affairs that they had with another woman, which was quite shocking in 1975.

Inspector Laurina (John Richardson) and his partner, Sergeant Panto (director Tano Cimarosa), are on the case, but, as always, defund the giallo police. Who could the killer be? Leondra (Dagmar Lassander, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire and The House by the Cemetery), a politician’s wife? Lesbian photographer Contessa Orselmo (Magda Konopka)? Former Miss Italia Daniela Giordano (Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key)? Drug dealer and denim lover Sandro (Ninetto Davoli)?

This is really just for those who have to see every giallo ever made. Which would be me. Probably you, too, if you’re reading this. I mean, you’re going to buy this set, right?

A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services (1972): Cristina (Paola Senatore*, Emanuelle in America, Ricco the Mean Machine) is a call girl, and for that, every man that has ever partaken of her services must pay, in some sort of role reversal for every other giallo and slasher.

Much like how his leading lady was known for westerns, so was director Demofilo Fidani, who made movies like Coffin Full of Dollars (how’s that for a title?), Django and Sartana Are Coming… It’s the End, One Damned Day at Dawn…Django Meets Sartana!, His Name Was Pot… But They Called Him Allegria and His Name Was Sam Walbash, But They Call Him Amen. As you can tell, many of his films were titled and treated like either sequels or — let’s be fair — rip-offs of better-known characters and movies.

So when everyone else started making giallo, Fidani was sure to follow.

You know how people on Twitter like to use the term problematic? Well, they’d lose their brains all over those, which presents leaving home to enter the sex industry to be a loveable lark, even when your clients get their throats slit the minute they leave her flat. It’s also a film that wants its cake — Vitelli is gorgeous and frequently involved in increasingly kinkier situations — and eat it too, as the whole moral of the story is that the world is falling into decay because of all this sex. So let’s show some more sex! And violence!

Also known as Caresses à domicile (Caresses at Home), the funny thing is that her life gets better when she leaves her father’s house — well, despite the fact that her daddy gave her everything that she ever wanted — to live with a friend, Paola (Simonetta Vitelli, who is the daughter of the director). So there’s not really any drama here, other than you know, all the murder.

*Sadly, she became addicted to heroin late in her career. After making two softcore films for Joe D’Amato, she made her one and only hardcore film, Non stop… sempre buio in sala. She was then arrested for drug smuggling, went to prison and disappeared.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ1fSPQu6cw

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome.

1 hour and 45 minutes of absolute malarky. Yes, Wheeler Dixon and Sidney Paul are back, making another video that could be interchangeable with the others they made, but I don’t care. I’ve watched them all.

While they also dropped UFO: Top Secret and Attack from Outer Space the same year, this one leans much harder into the science of space travel. It features an extensive, purely theoretical sequence about a manned mission to Mars, detailing the terrifying risks of retro-rocket failure and the math required to keep a tiny ship from being swallowed by the sun’s gravity. There’s also a surprisingly detailed look at the then-new Space Shuttle program, framed as the practical future of reusable space travel.

The film spends a significant amount of time showcasing archival footage from the U.S. Air Force, including the 1959 Corpus Christi sighting and the famous Tremonton Film of 1952, which depicts a cluster of five glowing discs moving at speeds estimated at over 3,000 mph. Each of these is called out by case number, like Project Blue Book, which we have at hand whenever we watch 70s alien documentaries.

This time around, there’s less about aliens wanting to eat us and more fuzzed-out space rock. Sure, there’s plenty of rambling, but I just love the feedback and rocking breakdowns in these songs. And man, that rambling. The narrator suggests that life might not be limited to little green men but could exist as crystalline formations or even as entities that live within the sun’s solid, cool core. 

One of the most convincing clips they show is a 1967 snippet from a Western movie set in Camarillo, California (there are also rumors that you can see a UFO during Rio Grande). While filming a close-up of an actor, a humming, white dot drifts across the background, performing erratic maneuvers that the crew can’t explain. 

Yet, unlike the rest of their movies, this has a rare moment of skepticism when it’s pointed out that some famous saucer photos bear a striking resemblance to the underside of a standard infrared chicken brooder.

You can watch this on YouTube.

I’m sad that I only have a few Wheeler Dixon and Sidney Paul paranormal docs left, but instead of being upset that it’s over, I will be happy that I had the experience.

The film begins with a classic Dixon/Paul flourish: A young boy walking down a city street at night. The narration immediately pivots to the jugular: Will he be attacked by a ghost? Will he, as all Dixon/Paul films eventually ask, be eaten by an alien? What walking horror from the realms of nightmares will bring him the endless embrace of death? It’s a lot of pressure for a kid just trying to get home, but the film insists that the lights of the city are not a comfort that can dispel the aura of gloom.

The narration also informs us that photos of ghosts are hard to come by, so this starts to ramble into UFOs and Bigfoot. It’s not what I signed up for, but here I am, fully buckled in. In the same way this film cannibalizes a hundred stock photos and library films, music supervisor Jim Cookman dives into a sonic fever dream. We get fuzzy blues rock, synth dibble-dabbles, somber piano plinking and sound effects that sound like they were rejected from a sub-Outer Limits TV show.

This has it all and by all, I mean ectoplasm coming out of the mouths of 1920s Spiritualists (which the film tells us is a very dangerous procedure), the red eye of Jupiter, the Abdominable Snowman, ghost towns created by Manifest Destiny, so many goats, a ghost pony that haunts an English churchyard and moments where the stock footage, voiceover and music don’t line up, but I kind of love these films for that. So many people refer to them with terms like bad, boring, inept and incoherent. 

That’s so wrong. Where else would we learn about a train haunted by a phantom so horrible that passengers were routinely beheaded? Who would let this train keep operating? Or the claim that earthquake survivors work tirelessly to limit “ghost activity” after a disaster? Did you even comprehend that? I didn’t. This leaves me, as all of Wheeler Dixon’s work does, with a thousand questions and zero answers.

I also adore that someone on IMDb presented the following factual errors:

• Rasputin was not “killed by the Palace Guard” as the narration states, but rather by Prince Felix Yusupov. The prince shot Rasputin in the yard of the Yusupov palace and not in “an abandoned wing of the palace” as the film states.
• H.G. Wells and Orson Welles were not contemporaries and did no collaborative work.
• Mary, Queen of Scots, was not known as “Bloody Mary.” That was Mary I of England.
• A frame from the Patterson-Gimlin film, shot in Northern California and purportedly showing Bigfoot, is shown in black-and-white and described by the narrator as a photo of Bigfoot “striding across the icy tundra of the Himalayan mountains.”

Keep in mind, this is a movie that asks whether UFOs are flown by ghosts or whether ghosts are really the living dead from outer space. Facts are in short supply.

Bonus points for the appearance of the Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu, who is apparently responsible for destroying crops with desert winds.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Wheeler Dixon and Sidney Paul made so many of these movies, and you may get confused because they all seem so similar. Yet you must go down this corridor and expose yourself to each of their films.

What connects these films? The fact that they continually remind us that aliens want to eat us. How do they know this? They’re so sure of it. They even say that alien civilizations might view Earth as “nothing but a slaughterhouse, an alien food breeding ground.” Paul calmly asks frightening queries, like “What will save us then?” and “Are we being watched by creatures from outer space?”

This movie is washed out; it has wild folk music mixed with library sound effects, and a rambling narration that seems to ask you questions every few moments, and I always find myself having a conversation with it. Yet this is the kind of thing that totally speaks to me, a nearly lost film that has never come out on DVD, even, one that’s hiding on YouTube and feels way stranger than any of the Ancient Aliens shows that litter cable.

There are a hundred or more ideas in here. If one of them were true, it would destroy your mind. Do aliens live inside the sun? Are ancient cave drawings and burial tombs in Greece and Peru blueprints for fuel thrust systems and a pressurization chamber? And, as always, when are extraterrestrials going to treat Earth as if it were Golden Corral?

It exists in a strange limbo, too psychedelic to be a serious documentary and too earnest to be pure fiction. Because this film relies heavily on public-domain NASA footage, military archives, and stock science clips, it feels like a dream of 20th-century progress reinterpreted through a lens of impending doom.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Part documentary. Part dramatization. All bullshit. I say that with love. This is yet another movie of a time and place where we got obsessed over things like the Bermuda Triangle, something we could care less about today for some reason.

Director Donald Brittain mainly made documentaries and shorts, this being the lone paranormal film he worked on. He was joined by co-director Laurin Render (who also composed the music with W. Michael Lewis, who did the music for Enter the Ninja, The Killing of America, In Search Of and Blood Beach, where he wrote the club music) and writer Alan Landsburg, who created In Search Of and wrote the books that Manbeast! Myth or Monster? and The Outer Space Connection were based on.

Planes will be lost, as will the rescue ships went after them. Such is the power of the brutal Bermuda Triangle. What if it also informed us of high-profile cases such as Flight 19, the disappearance of the USS Eagle and other unexplained disappearances, as well as reports of mysterious personality changes and strange weather patterns?

Here’s one mustery I can solve: it’s cinematographer was Brianne Murphy, who also directed the movie Blood Sabbath. Her career found her doing a bit of everything, whether that meant beinga production assistant on The Gay Deceivers, a dialogue director on The Incredible Petrified World, shooting stills on the Cheech and Chong movie Nice Dreams, working in the costume department for Teenage Zombies, being a DP on In the Heat of the Night and Highway to Heaven and directing six episodes of Acapulco H.E.A.T. and the Ami Dolenz movie To Die, To Sleep. She was also the first woman to be invited into the American Society of Cinematographers.

She worked with J. Barry Herron on this and man, his career went everywhere from shooting aerial photography on Chatterbox (what did that movie need that for?) and Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo to underwater work on The Love Boat, Strange Brew, Big Trouble In Little China and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives and being the DP or cinematorapher on The Young Graduates, In Search of Ancient Mysteries and Orca. He even directed two episodes of Airwolf and wrote one of Acapulco H.E.A.T.

Anyways, back to the BS. The idea of a time dimension or parallel world was popularized by pilot Bruce Gernon in 1970. He claimed to have flown through a tunnel-shaped”cloud (which he called Electronic Fog) and emerged miles ahead of where he should have been, having traveled through what he believed was a time hole. This story fueled the theory that the Bermuda Triangle isn’t a graveyard, but a gateway.

Some legends suggest that the pilots of the famous Lost Patrol of Flight 19 didn’t crash but were transported. There is a long-standing legend that ham radio operators in Florida intermittently eeceived the final transmissions of Flight 19 decades after they vanished, with some versions of the story claiming the voices sounded calm and elsewhere. That was further legitimzed by the fact that this is how Close Encounters of the Third Kind ends. There are also many accounts of ghostly radio transmissions from ships like the SS Cotopaxi or the Cyclops, where listeners claimed to hear voices long after the ships disappeared.

There’s also the Raifuku Maru, which was the 1925 disappearance of the Japanese freighter, which left one final message: “Danger like dagger now… come quick!”

So yeah. Maybe no one cares because scientists claim they figured it all out. Geologists and oceanographers generally point to more grounded explanations for the disappearances, like methane hydrates, which are large pockets of gas rising from the ocean floor that could theoretically sink a ship by rapidly reducing water density. The Gulf Stream is also pretty dangerous, as it’s an extremely fast and turbulent current that can quickly erase any evidence of a crash or sinking. Or Hexagonal Clouds in the triangle could drop high-velocity air bombs that create 170 mph winds.

But totally aliens, you know?

The film serves as a feature-length spiritual successor to the Leonard Nimoy-hosted series In Search Of. Produced by Alan Landsburg, it utilizes the same formula: ominous narration, grainy reenactments, and a synth-heavy score that makes even a calm ocean look terrifying.

You can watch this on YouTube.

If there was a Mount Rushmore for the 1970s In Search Of aesthetic, Richard Martin would be carved right into the granite alongside Leonard Nimoy and Sunn Classic Pictures. Following his deep dives into the Bermuda Triangle and Bigfoot, Martin took his cameras beneath the waves for The Lost City of Atlantis, a paranormal documentary that, today, would air on basic cable but, back in the day, you’d have to go to a theater or drive-in to see. Or you could wait and see it on a rainy Saturday afternoon on a UHF station. Today, just turn on YouTube.

Before the internet ruined everything with things like facts and sourced data, we had the glorious era of the theatrical documentary. These were movies that promised to solve the mysteries of the universe for the price of a matinee ticket and in return, you got a deep, authoritative voice telling you that everything you know is a lie and that Greek philosophers were actually talking about a high-tech continent that sank because they played God with crystal energy.

Come with us to Bimini Road in the Bahamas. We’re going to spend a lot of time underwater looking at limestone blocks and we’ll be told that they aren’t natural formations but rather the paved highways of a sunken empire. It’s the kind of photography that looks incredible on a big screen, but, when viewed today on a grainy YouTube upload, looks mostly like some very confused divers poked at some rocks while a synthesizer soundtrack tried to convince you that the fabled land of Mu was behind one of these reefs.

You can’t talk about Atlantis without bringing in the Sleeping Prophet Edgar Cayce. The film leans heavily into Cayce’s predictions that Atlantis would rise again in the late 60s. Sure, it didn’t happen. Or, did it? The movie tells us that we just aren’t looking hard enough. It’s a wonderful bit of narrative gymnastics that connects the pyramids of Egypt, the Mayan ruins, nd the deep ocean floor into one giant, cosmic conspiracy.

What makes this film so watchable today isn’t the science; it’s the vibe. It’s the grainy 16mm footage of experts with massive sideburns and turtlenecks sitting in wood-paneled offices, talking about things to come that never did.

You can watch this on YouTube.