MY DEAR KILLER (1972), WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS (1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Here are two police-thrillers that just barely make it into the domain of "the giallo" thanks to killers who sometimes employ unusual murder-methods.

KILLER's director/co-scripter Tonino Valerii had written a couple of scripts for metaphenomenal films in the 1960s, but this was his only giallo. He brings to the film decent but not outstanding visuals, and so the story seems far more concerned with the heroic policeman's mystery-solving and not with the nature of the serial killer.

KILLER certainly starts off with a bang. The first murder victim is seen standing beside a country swamp, one surrounded by excavation equipment. Some unseen person takes control of a "claw" machine and uses it to slice off the victim's head. Detective Peretti (George Hilton) is assigned to the case, and as he seeks to make sense of the peculiar killing, others begin dying as well. This leads Peretti to delve into a cold case that involved the kidnapping of the little daughter of a rich man. The kidnapper collected his ransom but killed off both the little girl and her father. 

I must confess here that for some reason I decided to read the summary on Wiki, as I usually do not, because I found it a little hard to follow who was who-- even though most of the possible suspects consisted of the rich man's family and their servants. It soon becomes evident that the unknown killer is assassinating everyone whom he thinks might possess a clue to his dastardly deed. Because I read the summary, it seemed to me like Valerii barely made an effort toward implicating the other suspects. But I can't claim this time that I pegged the killer in advance.

I liked Hilton and other members of the cast, which includes Helga Line (in a very brief role), William Berger, and Marilu Tolo (who has a brief upper-body nude scene). But even though the photography looks good the mise-en-scene is pretty slow. The killer's only other atypical weapon is a rotary saw, but in other scenes he just uses a knife or a club. No competition for Argento here.

  Massimo Dallamano's DAUGHTERS is much more effective, for all that the killer is really just a mob-enforcer (mostly seen in a motorcycle-outfit) who occasionally uses very bloody methods of rubbing out targets. He's also working to eliminate all potential witnesses to a crime that involves an older range of victims: high-school age girls who, overconfident of their own abilities to suss things out, get pulled into a sex ring. 

The story centers upon two investigators: Inspector Silvestre (Claudio Cassinelli) and female district attorney Stori (Giovanna Ralli). Though there are one or two moments where Stori's gender is raised as a dramatic problem, both characters are seen to be forthright and conscientious in the efforts to expose the conspiracy. Dallamano, who had previously contributed a decent giallo in WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO SOLANGE?, focuses almost exclusively on the "police-thriller" aspects of the story. I found Dallamano's narrative drive far more compelling that it was in SOLANGE, as well as the way the script (co-written by Dallamano) develops the insidious operations of the corrupt sex ring, run by ambitious men who get off on their ability to control their underage victims absolutely. If it weren't for the presence of the bloody-handed assassin, DAUGHTERS wouldn't be a giallo at all.         

THE BLOODSTAINED SHADOW (1978)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

For what it's worth, this is the first giallo I've come across in which the setting was that of a small/mid-size town with a rural atmosphere, as opposed to being either in a big city or at some ritzy manor out in the country. Despite the less intense setting, director/co-writer Antonio Bido-- who only helmed one other horror-movie, the slightly earlier WATCH ME WHEN I KILL-- generates ample tension despite the lack of extreme gore or artsy murder-methods.

Young Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) seeks a rest-cure in a small island-town near Venice, though the viewer is not told what he's resting up from. On his way there, he shares a train-ride with a pretty if enigmatic young woman, Sandra (Stefania Casini). Stefano, reaching his destination, is welcomed by his older brother Don Paolo (Craig Hill), the Catholic priest of the community. Though everything seems like a typical low-key rural town, Paolo makes mention of some of the covert scandals to which he, as a priest, has been made privy.

In contrast to convention, it's not the visitor to the town who witnesses a violent murder that night, but the resident priest, who looks out his window and sees a killer in black gloves and a black overcoat assaulting a woman. Paolo rouses Stefano, but by the time they get outside, neither figure is present. However, the next day the cops find the woman's dead body; that of a local medium already mentioned in Paolo's gossip. Some mention is made of an unsolved murder in the village from many years back, though no connection is offered. Later, Paolo receives a note threatening him if he doesn't keep his nose out of things.

Stefano's little problem is still not explained, though the audience sees him having a few weird flashbacks to some forbidding experience. He meets Sandra again and she invites him to dinner, where Stefano meets Sandra's stepmother. Meanwhile, one of the local mothers appeals to Paolo to speak to piano teacher Pedrazzi (Massimo Serato, the only name I recognized), accused of getting handsy with underage students, even though the grey-haired eminence already lives with a twenty-something young man. In what is almost certainly meant to be a clue, Pedrazzi calls the righteous priest a "hypocrite." 

Other victims are targeted, though the only connection may be that some or all victims may have sought the services of the lady medium--with the exception of Paolo, who's almost crushed by a falling statue. Stefano eventually sleeps with Sandra, though the sex is kept at a pleasant PG level. Sandra is also briefly menaced, though the killer isn't explicitly seen. It's arguable that Bido provides a few too many red herrings, as is seen with a local female abortionist with a demented adult son, who seem to be added for shock value. Still, I liked both the atmosphere and the score by Goblin, famed for working on various Argento movies. Considering that the killer doesn't use any exotic weapons, Bido provides a fair amount of variety in terms of the killings.

            

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR (1965)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

I've argued in a separate essay that BLOODY PIT OF HORROR is more than just another dumb horror flick about a menace in an old castle. Though its writers and director were probably innocent of any desire to make PIT "arty" in any way, I find it likely that they were aware of how routine many similar old-castle flicks had become even in the short period of Italy's investment in horror cinema. After all, PIT was being shot at the same Palazzo Borghese castle that had hosted two generic flicks, THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA and THE PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE. Whatever behind-the-scenes crew might have been in both of these as well as PIT, the only obvious point of continuity is the lead male player, Walter Brandi.

There's nothing very notable about the victims here than in the earlier two films. Since the "old dark house" flicks of the silent era, there was an established trope in which a group of vulnerable individuals get trapped/stranded in some house where a mystery killer seeks to knock them off one by one. In this case, PIT, like the two 1960 movies, ups the level of pulchritude seen in old dark house films. This time the group is led to a remote castle by Parks, a publisher of crime and horror books. I have no idea if Italian publishing houses actually went around looking for locations at which to shoot photos, and since one guy in the party dresses up in a skeleton costume a la Italian comics-villains like Diabolik and Kriminal, it's possible Parks is publishing fumetti, not "real books." Frankly, the location-scouting thing sounds more typical of movie companies, like the one making this film. In any case Parks brings with a couple of male assistants, his star writer Rick (Brandi), his secretary Edith (Louise Barrett), and four gorgeous models. Of the persons in Parks' party, only two get anything like two-dimensional characterization. Edith, despite not ever having seen the castle before, feels strangely drawn to it. Rick occasionally tosses out wry remarks about his association with this farrago, and we later learn he was a reporter and fell into writing horror books because it seemed easy.

Parks orders his people to break into the castle, thinking it deserted. The unnamed "master of the house" (Mickey Hargitay) and his whole two servants (both strapping men in outfits like those of Venetian gondoliers) order the group to leave. However, from a secret vantage the master sees and recognizes Edith, whereon he changes his mind, permitting the crew to remain for the night, as long as they keep clear of the castle's dungeons.

Now, it's likely dire things might have happened to the visitors even if they'd obeyed the injunction. But of course Parks can't pass up a chance to take dungeon-pictures, so he and his crew invade the dungeon and set up sexy scenarios. It's all fun and games, until someone loses a head when one of the torture-machines kills him.

There's no mystery about who the killer is, even after it's disclosed that the castle once belonged to a medieval torturer, The Crimson Executioner, killed by authorities in his own domicile. Once Edith eventually gets a look at the castle's owner, she tells Rick she was once engaged to actor Travis Anderson, renowned for having played "muscle men in costume films," Anderson, says Edith, left her without explanation, or even cancelling their engagement, and evidently purchased the castle because he admired the accomplishments of its medieval master. By this time, though, Anderson and his henchmen have already killed a couple more victims, and as in the persona of the scarlet-clad torturer, Anderson begins using his specialized devices to wreak havoc on Parks and the terrified models. He takes Edith prisoner as well, trying to get her to embrace a hanging mannequin with poisoned barbs attached. Meanwhile, Rick, the only one free, has a couple of running battles with one of the henchmen (not sure where the second one went). After the henchman thinks he's killed Rick with an arrow, the guy reports to his leader in the dungeon. However, Rick's death is a fakeout, and he shows up in the dungeon, beating down each of the two men in succession. (Nice of them not to gang up on the writer.) The Executioner conveniently runs into the "poison mannequin" and is semi-literally hoist on his own petard. Rick and Edith alone survive the ordeal, implicitly with some romance for both in future.

Now, there's one minor sociological motif in PIT: that of purveyors of sexy/violent fiction get subjected to real horrors. But no one in the audience was likely to agree with the villain was justified in visiting these dooms on foolish innocents, even though they trespassed on private property. PIT doesn't possess, or claim to possess, internal logic. But given all the lovingly constructed torture devices Anderson has at his immediate disposal, clearly he's been at least fantasizing about subjecting victims to torture-scenarios for quite some time. One device is a huge spider-web with arrows rigged to fire if anyone touches the web-strands: Rick tries and fails to rescue one model (Moha Tahi) from this web of sin. Another is the poison mannequin, which Anderson calls "the Lover of Death." Curiously in the English dub. Anderson genders the mannequin as a "him" even though the dummy has long blonde hair. It would make more sense if Anderson had considered this mock-horror to be a representative of the perils of female sexuality and so would also be roughly congruent with the way the original medieval Executioner dies, by Iron Maiden. 

And why does Anderson want so badly to torture others? Well, the easy answer is that of compensation: he tortures others because he feels tortured. But assuming that the English dub represents the original Italian reasonably well, then the writers were also apparently having fun with the idea of a big strong muscleman who utters lines like "a woman's love would have destroyed me."

Sketchy though both Anderson and Edith are, their one long conversation suggests that Anderson, in pursuing a career as a "muscle man in costume films" formed the idea that he had made himself into "a perfect body." Since physical culture requires denial, Anderson eventually denied himself anything that detracted from his goal of bodily perfection. It's funny when Edith reacts to Anderson's declarations by calling Anderson an "egotist." Yet it's nonetheless true that the villain has validated his ego by worshipping not only his own body's physical power, but also the power that was once wielded by a long-dead master of torture-devices. Italian audiences would have also recognized that when Edith speaks of "costume pictures," she means a specific breed of historical flicks in which a male hero showed off a boulder-shouldered physique, the better to portray legendary heroes like Hercules, Samson and Maciste. The English dialogue does not allude to the fact that by 1965, hardly anyone was making "Hercules films" anymore, so all of Anderson's efforts to sculpt his body for the purposes of cinematic employment would have come to nothing. (And of course the writers would also have known that Mickey Hargitay played Hercules in one Italian-made spectacle from 1960.) However, the existing soundtrack emphasizes only Anderson's fear that somehow the love of a woman will compromise his male integrity. 

I've seen one or two arguments that PIT represents Anderson's rejection of his former fiancee as homoerotic in nature, and for a time I considered this possibility, given that Anderson's only two servants are musclemen like he is. However, the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed. If Anderson's concern is for keeping the integrity of his "perfect body," then a homosexual encounter would be MORE invasive, not less. It's more likely Anderson keeps around two hulking guards because they present no attractions for him, and also because they're the most effective guardians of his privacy. But when Parks' band brings sexy women into Anderson's domain-- one of whom is the woman he had at least dallied with-- then that occurrence reactivates his antipathy toward sex. As long as there were no women around, Anderson could lose himself in narcissistic dreams of his perfection and of the power once wielded by his idol, the Crimson Executioner. But once the female sex is on his radar, then he becomes obsessed with being a torture-master. 

              

And for my last point, I wondered in my other essay how the writers even came up with the idea of a big muscleman dispensing tortures. And one possibility is that if one or more writers were familiar with the major tropes of the musclemen films, they would have known that a great many of those movies place the bulked-up hero in some situation where he must conquer some infernal device (like a spiked wall) or some huge animal, etc. These tortures are visited upon the hero by men and women who cannot possibly fight the hero on his own terms, and in the case of the women, usually evil queens, there can be an element of sadism, the desire to conquer the noble crusader. I hypothesize that the writers of PIT, if only for the sake of variety, wanted to reverse that trope, so that the hulking protagonist would reveal his own impotence in torturing those weaker than himself.  

A WHISPER KILLS (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

If I ever again get the impulse, "Oh, X Celebrity just died; I'll watch this obscure thing in which he/she appeared," I need to kick myself. In this case I gave this worthless piece of TV fodder a chance because of the passing of June Lockhart. I would have done better to have watched the lousiest episode of her stint on PETTICOAT JUNCTION. The director here is long-time journeyman Christian Nyby II, but I blame the badness of eleven-time screenwriter John Bensick for not putting together even a basically serviceable script.

In some small town, Liz (Loni Anderson) runs a local newspaper in partnership with a guy she once slept with. She wants to keep things all business, he doesn't. Then the viewer (but no one else) sees the partner stabbed to death by what is pretty evidently (as shown in the advertising) a lean woman in a mask. A day or so later, a reporter named Dan (Joe Penny), friend of the deceased, comes to town, wanting to find the killer. Liz and Dan butt heads as a foretaste of their inevitable hookup, but she hires this apparent "bad boy" anyway. The killer announces her intent to kill again by phoning the sheriff and saying so in a forbidding whisper.

For the next half hour, Liz and Dan spin their wheels, wasting time and building no suspense whatever. Finally the script gets around to having Dan interview Liz's mother Mrs. Rogers (Lockhart), who reveals that Liz underwent psychiatric care after her father either was killed by an intruder or killed himself-- the script is vague about which is the case. After this big revelation, Dan suddenly starts seeing Liz in a different light, as a possible psycho-- though at no point does Loni Anderson play her character as anything but a square citizen. There's a suggestion that Liz might have been molested by her dad, and also that she had an affair with her psychiatrist, but it's just more time-killing crap.

I can't do better in pointing out, as did another reviewer, the absurdity of creating a mystery about a female killer in a script that only boasts two prominent female characters (though, curiously enough, former serial queen Phyllis Coates has a small role in the telefilm). So of course it's really Mrs. Rogers, but the lazy writer can't even be bothered to sketch out her motivations. Did she execute her two or three victims because she thought they threatened her daughter? Or (slightly more likely) did she resent her daughter because her husband has sex with Young Liz, and so decided to go after Liz's exes?         

Even in the domain of TV movies, this is one of the laziest scripts I've ever encountered.  

SWEET, SWEET RACHEL (1971)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

I'm not sure what's so "sweet" about Rachel Stanton (Stefanie Powers). She's certainly as victimized as any of the most persecuted heroines of Gothic tales, and in almost every scene her torment is torqued up to Warp Eleven. But there's nothing especially "sweet" about her. 

Rachel's torments start out with a bravura opening that's better than the rest of the movie. On the second floor of a manor house, a man, Paul Stanton, sits playing some sort of game with a deck of non-standard Tarot cards. He seems to see and hear his wife Rachel coming toward him, calling his name. He rushes to her, no longer seeing his real surroundings, and crashes through a window, falling to his death. The real Rachel arrives in the room moments afterward, aghast at Paul's catastrophe. The phone on Paul's desk rings, Rachel answers it, and a voice recites the images on the five Tarot cards Paul had just dealt himself.

Viewers never learn just what sort of occult beliefs the late Paul Stanton nurtured, but Rachel did not share them. However, the outre circumstances of Paul's death make her desire to know if she just concocted her impressions out of a psychotic episode, or if there's really supernatural hanky-panky going on. Fortunately, Rachel happens to live in or near a city with a functioning psychic research facility. From this source come the story's heroes: former surgeon Dr Darrow (Alex Drier) and his aide Johnson (Chris Robinson), a blind man who has developed psychic senses in compensation for his affliction. 

The pool of suspects is not a deep one, for RACHEL only has three other significant characters: Rachel's aunt Lillian Piper (Louise Latham), her husband Arthur (Pat Hingle), and their daughter Nora (Brenda Scott). Early in the film Lillian claims that she was indeed engaged in some sort of occult game with Paul, and that she was the voice on the other end of the line, though this confession removes none of Rachel's feelings of guilt. The husband Arthur is perhaps a little too invisible in early scenes, while Nora loudly reviles Rachel, claiming that she Nora was Paul's true love. This is fairly weak story-scaffolding, as the script never expounds on how the two cousins interacted before Paul married Rachel.

Further, the psychic assassin is still in play, taking exception to Darrow and Johnson trying to solve the mystery. In two separate scenes, Darrow is made to hallucinate in ways that might have caused the deaths of both investigators. Then about halfway through the flick, Aunt Lillian gets killed. Did Rachel go berserk and take her aunt's life?

I'll say one thing for screenwriter Anthony Lawrence-- who also co-wrote the underrated pilot for the PHOENIX TV show-- he doesn't dole out a lot of clues, but he does play fair by spotlighting a suspicious encounter between Arthur and his daughter Nora, one that carries a sexual vibe. (To be sure, one IMDB asserts that RACHEL was based on a book, though the IMDB page for the telefilm does not mention this.) Anyway, Darrow devises a way to trap the psychic schemers-- one that gives Johnson his first real role in the story-- and the duo soon learn that Nora, not the late Lillian, is the one with real mental talents. The motive, supplied by Nasty Arthur, has something to do with the uncle inheriting Rachel's fortune if she gets put away, though technically no one in the movie raises the possibility of committing the heiress. There's a struggle between Nora and the father who cajoled her into killing Nora's true love, and Nora "accidentally" kills her oppressor. Rachel's ghosts, so to speak, are laid to rest, while Darrow and Johnson stand ready to bust more ghosts in the TV show that followed this unofficial pilot--

--Except that when that show debuted under the new title THE SIXTH SENSE, Dreier and Robinson were out and the more telegenic Gary Collins became the sole investigator for SENSE's two seasons, on whose episodes Lawrence enjoyed a "created by" credit. I have not watched any full SENSE episodes since the show's initial run, and re-screening might uncover some gems. However, my dominant memory was that the episodes were dull and lacked any of the visual verve that director Sutton Roley brought to RACHEL. Roley and Lawrence were both essentially journeymen talents in the world of episodic TV, and I didn't see too much of distinction in either man's repertoire, except for the previously mentioned PHOENIX credit for Lawrence.  RACHEL by itself is a cut or two above the average Gothic-thriller telefilm from this period, but nothing more.           

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE III (1990)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

And as the sun sinks slowly in the distance, we bid farewell to the SLUMBER PARTY franchise, a farewell made easier by the underwhelming nature of the final entry.

It's probably just as well the director and writer-- both women, though I discerned no feminist content whatever this time-- decided to start over with all new characters. I suspect that most of the later "slumber party" films building on the basic concept probably follow the example of PARTY #3, for it's just the predictable story of a psycho-killer preying on a half dozen girls in a slumber party.

The most I can say for this one is that in comparison to many of the sludgy slashers from the 80s and 90s, this one at least has decent production values. While these California girls are planning their party, a killer knocks off one of their buddies with a rotary drill. The script tosses out two separate red herrings in the form of creepy-looking bozos, and maybe a third when one of the girls (Maria Ford) says she's dating a fifty-year-old suitor. But all of these details are dodges to fool the viewer when the killer proves to be Ken (Brittain Frye), a young clean-cut fellow. He's one of a group of young guys who intrude on the girls' party, but Ken's not interested in harmless sexual teasing. The guy's got some never-completely-explained psychosis due to having been molested by his uncle. Why does this make him decide to kill copious young girls with a power drill? Who knows?

Once Ken kills off the guys, the rest of the film is just running battles in the house as Ken kills some girl, another girl whacks him with some object, he recovers and keeps on drillin'. Eventually he does get taken out by Main Girl Jackie (Keely Christian), though she's not the last girl to survive as in many other slashers. I'd give what few acting points are possible to Frye, who at least puts a lot of energy into his routine psycho. The aforementioned Maria Ford later went to star in a few "lady butt-kicker" films, while another actress, Hope Marie Carlton, had previously initiated the "Hard Ticket to Hawaii" series in 1987.                

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II (1987)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

While PARTY #2 isn't a huge improvement over the first film, I have to give it points for being a little less predictable. 

Writer-director Deborah Block doesn't have a much more stellar resume on IMDB than does previous writer-director Amy Jones. However, Block's PARTY has much more of the look and feel of a slasher-movie. True, she does so by having her viewpoint character besieged by nightmare visions long before encounters the required massacre-maker who may have been partly patterned on Freddy Kruger. (PARTY #1 made substantial coin in 1982, so it's not evident why the producers took five years to whip out a sequel.)

A year or two has passed since the first film. Courtney Bates, the junior high girl who was already very curious about sex, wasn't deeply involved in the original rampage of maniacal Russ Thorn, but we don't know what happened to Trish while Courtney's sister Valerie has been confined to an asylum. Courtney (now played by Crystal Bernard, the only PARTY #2 performer who went on to any acting fame) is first seen slowly awakening from sleep in her bed at home, swaddled in pink sheets. Given that PARTY #2 is mostly about Courtney's desire to overcome past demons and to live a normal (and therefore sexually fulfilling) life, I suspect that the pink sheets were a conscious choice on Block's part.

Courtney hasn't dated yet, but she's in an all-female rock band with three other girls. None of the other characters are important to the story except as background, with the minor exception of Matt, a classmate Courtney likes. Courtney's birthday is impending, and on the same weekend she's been invited by one of her band-buddies to a weekend, just for the girls at a beach condo. The young woman's mother tries to talk Courtney into going to visit her institutionalized sister instead. Courtney, her mind filled with thoughts of sex (since a few boys, including Matt, have been invited), avoids associating with her sister's trauma and gets permission to make the trip (which I don't recall being called a slumber party).

Once she's on her way to the condo, though, our heroine begins having all sorts of minatory nightmares, while at the condo she begins to conflate her potential boyfriend with a weird specter that looks like a demonic Elvis. Most of Courtney's "waking dreams" are fairly standard grossout illusions, but the pomaded predator in the black leather, billed as The Driller Killer, is a fairly original creation. Once Block has burned up a certain amount of time with the bad dreams, she gets down to business with a high-octane chase scene. The Driller, who wields a guitar with a rotary drill mounted on its neck, comes to life and begins slaughtering teens right and left, with copious Freddy-like lines about sexual stimulation (quoting the Stones "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," for example). All of Courtney's friends die, but once her back is against the wall, she summons her inner Final Girl and destroys the killer with a Molotov cocktail. (I assume he doesn't sing "Hunka Burning Love" as he dies was because the rights cost too much.)  Or is the Driller Killer dead? The movie ends with the teen bedded down in an asylum like her sister, just as that fearsome penile drill starts burrowing in from beneath.

Nothing in the finished script indicates a connection between the Driller Killer and deceased maniac Russ Thorn, but some online sites claim that the specter is "The Reincarnated Russ Thorn." I didn't credit this theory at first. However, I was initially perplexed as to why Courtney, a teen who would have been born in the early seventies, would have imagined some greasy-haired rockabilly type as the incarnation of destructive sexuality. HOWEVER-- earlier I pointed out that the performer playing Russ Thorn in PARTY #1 was in his forties when that film was made. So if Thorn came back as a super-powered ghost a la Freddy-- then in life he would have been a teen in the 1950s, and HE would have regarded a greasy rocker as the epitome of dangerous male sexuality. Courtney could not have known that, but if she'd failed to exorcise her psychological trauma, maybe she opened a gateway for Thorn's return. But if so, Psycho Elvis got no third act, for PARTY #3 dropped any connections to the other two films. 

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

In addition to the three entries in this psycho-killer series, the basic idea seems to have been copied not only in the eighties but also into the streaming era. The script for PARTY #1 was written as a parody of slashers by feminist author Rita Mae Brown, but the production company and director Amy Jones reworked the story into a straightforward horror movie with only a few over-the-top elements.

The most obvious such element is the one that got up-front promotion in the above lobby card: that of a bunch of screaming 20-something girls being menaced by a maniac with a power drill poised unsubtly between his legs. But though serial killer Ross Thorn (Michael Villella, then about forty years old) is technically the star of the show, the finished script says nothing about what to led him to start his spree killings, and only toward the very end is it loosely suggested that he views his drill as a penis-substitute. 

It's the girls who get all the screentime (scream-time?) However, they're not any better characterized than the killer or the majority of teen victims in psycho-killer films before or after this one. Two of them rank as the movie's "final girls:" Trish (Michele Michaels), who invites other high school girls to her house for a slumber party because her parents are away, and her neighbor-classmate Valerie (Robin Stille), who gets invited but chooses for Reasons to stay home and babysit her younger sister Courtney. No boys are supposed to attend, though the "slutty girl" invites her boyfriend, and two dateless losers peep on the party as well. Thorn, who's already killed off two young lovelies with his drill, finds out about the soiree and invites himself. 

The dialogue is adequate but dull, and Jones' direction has a no-frills sort of TV-show feel. Not much beyond jump-scares happens until the final half hour, when the girls are trapped in the house with the killer and, amid much carnage, the two Final Girls must step up to end his reign of terror. The scene in which Valerie wields a machete to slice off the end of Thorn's drill is the highlight, but no one's psychology goes beyond the basics. and the male/female social matrix doesn't amount to much either. It may be significant that the only "normal" males who get much screentime are the two peepers-- both of whom get killed-- mention that they've peeped on the girls before and got beat up for it. Maybe it's just as well the world wasn't exposed to Brown's original satirical wit.        

SWEET SIXTEEN (1983)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

"What terrors are unleashed when a girl turns-- sweet sixteen?" Well, in execution, not too many, especially for a slasher film that came out in the heyday of that phase of the psycho-killer subgenre. But it's a nice tagline, and the poster is clever, showing a nude young girl up to her waist in a lake, while beneath the water's surface is a knife ready for hackups. I'm tempted to invoke the hoary "vagina dentata" trope, but I don't really think director Jim Sotos and "only one movie" writer Erwin Goldman were thinking along such lines.

For my own sense of fairness, I have to disclose that I accidentally read the solution to the mystery in some review, long before I got around watching the film for the first time today. I like to think that I would have guessed that the dangerous dame spotlighted, Melissa Morgan (Aleisa Shirley), was not going to be the killer simply because the viewer doesn't see Melissa perpetrating the knife-killings onscreen, which automatically seems like a setup for "the least likely suspect."

So here's the basics: the setting is a small Texas town where nothing ever happens, except when the local racist whites get liquored up and start trouble with the local Indians (though we never see more than two).  Sheriff Burke (Bo Hopkins) seems to have things pretty easy, though his teenaged kids Hank and Marci bug him a little about getting married to his "comfort girlfriend." Marci is an amateur sleuth, but has nothing to practice her skills on, until a new family moves to town. The Morgans consist of Father John (Patrick MacNee), Mother Joanne (Susan Strasberg), and the aforementioned Melissa. John Morgan is an archaeologist who's come to look for Indian artifacts, and he's brought Joanne, who used to be a resident of the small town long ago, but has presumably been absent at least for the length of Melissa's young life. As for Melissa, she's fifteen going on sixteen, and in a big hurry to graduate-- even though of course in a lot of states she still would not be "legal" until 18. 

Melissa is set up to be trouble with a capital T as she starts trying to hang out with young guys in her age-range. However, the script doesn't place a lot of emphasis on Melissa's character. Indeed, it pays more attention to Joanne's previous history with the townsfolk, particularly a local politician who seems to have been intimate with her. She's only come back because of her husband's work-- but why should the audience care, if she's not Significant in Some Way?

Two of the boys Melissa hung out with are brutally knifed to death, and some antique Indian knives go missing from the archaeological dig. Is there any real chance that one of the two Indians in town has gone berserk? Not much, since Melissa says that she saw one of them near the body of the second victim, and local racists lynch the accused man. But is there any chance that the other Little Indian is going to be the culprit? Nope, because he's not even close to being the least likely suspect. Nor is John, nor are the two local racists.

It's at the lakeside scene toward the climax-- wherein Melissa goes skinny-dipping to impress Hank Burke-- that the mystery unravels. The two racist guys attack her and Hank, but they're both slain (in almost the only bloody scenes). The culprit is Joanne, who, in a hurry-up-and-finish revelation, has nurtured for years a double personality, in which she committed the murders. It all has something to do with some molestation of Joanne and her long-dead twin sister, whom Joanne has identified with. But why, in looking for substitutes for the father who traumatized her, does she go after the young guys chasing after her daughter? Even for movie psychology, the solution doesn't hang together.

SIXTEEN is a pretty slow affair, and it wastes time with Marci befriending Melissa-- which doesn't matter because her character remains flat. The actors merely put in their time, for there's not that much with which they could have engaged. So it's Joanne's traumatized sexuality that's the root of the fatalities, and thus the whole "sweet sixteen" thing is a dodge-- though I'll admit that it is like a lot of other slasher-holidays, centered around either holidays or other occasions of liminal importance. Could have been better, could have been worse.                

THE RED QUEEN KILLS SEVEN TIMES (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Given that great title, and QUEEN's ability to spotlight the charms (albeit never naked ones) of Barbara Bouchet, I wanted this film to reach the heights of the classic giallos. But the second and last giallo-movie of director Emilio Miraglia doesn't have anything underlying all the pretty pictures-- and to understand why, I have to do my usual thing of talking about the ending. 

Part of QUEEN's problem lies in the "family curse" with which the story begins, in that said curse never seems like anything but a laundry list of plot-points. We see Bouchet's character Kitty as a child, quarreling with her similarly aged sister Evelyn. They take their quarrel to their rich grandfather, who just happens to have a grotesque painting on the wall of his study. This painting depicts two sisters from some medieval portion of the family tree, with one, the Black Queen, stabbing her nasty sister The Red Queen to death. Grandpa not only keeps this testament to sibling hatred out in the open, he tells the two girls an involved story about how the Red Queen came back to life, killed six innocents, and then murdered her sister as well. Also, the Red Queen supposedly repeats this curse in subsequent generations. Wow, it's a medieval legend that sounds just like the plot of a giallo!

Fast forward to the siblings' teen years: they quarrel again, fight by the side of a river, and when Kitty knocks Evelyn into the water, she's swept away and never seen again. To spare Kitty, her cousin Franziska (Marina Malfatti) and her husband concoct a story for the public: that Evelyn simply emigrated to the US. Kitty feels very guilty but gets on with her life, working for a fashion house that allows the writers to bring in many more hot women, not least Sybil Danning (who does have a really cool nude scene). Then Kitty's grandpa dies, and the question of inheritance comes up. And it's only then that a red-cloaked female killer starts randomly attacking the friends of Kitty and of her boyfriend Martin.

Once the motive of inheritance comes up, though, no one's going to believe that Evelyn is back, fulfilling the Red Queen curse by knocking off random innocents while building up to the main target. Of course's it's a hoax designed to put the whole inheritance in the hands of Franziska and her husband. The hoariness of the plot would be excusable if the characters had been interesting within the bounds of a hyperbolic murder mystery. But despite all the potential psychological conflicts that can arise from sibling rivalry, QUEEN comes off as just a bunch of random characters going through the motions. And though the violence quotient is high, the menace of The Red Queen doesn't come close to the visual impact of the most memoranle giallo grotesques.   

     

ARABELLA BLACK ANGEL (1989)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I don't know if at the time ARABELLA was made, giallos were enjoying a comeback, but since the movie was recently released on a DVD volume called "Forgotten Giallos," I'm guessing the movie wasn't overly successful. I've seen no other directorial efforts by Stelvio Massi, though he was a cinematographer on a number of better-known Italian films, including Giuliano Carnimeo's only giallo, THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS. The writer has no other credits on IMDB, which might explain why the script for ARABELLA tends to wander about at times.

As others have observed, ARABELLA amps up the near-hardcore sex right away. Some reviews call Deborah (Tini Cansino, niece of Rita Hayworth) a nymphomaniac, though all one knows from the first few sequences is that she's not getting any at home. (I think the name Arabella is used for a fictionalized version of Deborah.) We only know of one transgression, when the upper-class Deborah goes to a warehouse sex party, looking for love-- though not, as she specifies in the warehouse scene, for pain. Unfortunately for the young woman, Italian cops raid the party. One cop, DeRosa, seizes Deborah, believing her a hooker, and sodomizes her to exchange her freedom. Deborah goes home, and the next day we see her life with husband Frank and live-in mother-in-law Martha (Ida Galli, the only name I recognized from other films, such as THE CASE OF THE SCORPION'S TAIL). Frank, as a result of an accident shortly after his wedding to Deborah, became both wheelchair-bound and impotent. The result is that he's a petty tyrant.to the women, even though he's apparently able to give them a ritzy upper-class existence just by writing popular crime novels.

 The next day, DeRosa finds out Deborah's upper-class background, and he heedlessly beards her in her own lair, hungry for more easy pickings. The cop corners his prey and talks her into having sex on the property. Deborah goes along with the extortion but Frank in his wheelchair spots the assignation. Deborah sees Frank watching, picks up a handy hammer and apparently kills the cop. (I say apparently because a careless end-scene suggests he might have survived, but this incident was probably nothing but a toss-off notion.) 

The killing of the cop has zero consequences; Deborah and Frank simply bury him on the grounds, and he's barely mentioned afterward. What does affect the plot is Frank having seen Deborah interact with another man. Not only does it stimulate Frank on some level, he decides he wants his wife to go around getting into more sexual encounters, so that the author can incorporate them into his book. (If it wasn't a sex thriller before, I guess it becomes one by fiat.) Deborah is either a nympho or an unusually obedient wife, for she goes along with Frank's scheme. However, her sexual peregrinations also supply the movie with the giallo-trope of escalating murders. Some mysterious person begins killing off people in Deborah's orbit-- including a potential blackmailer she didn't have sex with-- and this is what brings in the cops. The film then shifts its focus to an inspector named Gina.         

 

I don't know if the filmmakers thought audiences might add Gina to the movie's very small pool of suspects for the crimes, but the inspector never seems a potential murderer despite being (a) lesbian and (2) psychologically messed-up because her mother killed her father long ago. I doubt anyone was convinced, though, because the script tosses out such details so carelessly that they don't seem to have any importance. Even Gina's quarrel with her lover, female reporter Agnese, just seems contrived to occupy time, up to the point Agnese is one of the killer's victims.

 After a handful of desultory murders, the script jams together three big reveals at the end. One is that Frank, though probably still impotent, isn't actually wheelchair-bound. (It's not explained very well but I think the idea was that he spontaneously healed yet kept his recovery secret from Deborah in order to keep a mental hold over his wife.) The second reveal is that Gina is actually Frank's half-sister, for Frank was her mother's child by a different husband. The third is no surprise at all, because the mother of Frank and Gina is Martha. who's the only possibility left given that both Deborah and Frank would be too obvious. 

Martha's motive is a favorite among makers of sex-thriller films: she's a prude who hates sex. period, with the slight implication that she resents her daughter-in-law getting so much action. To be sure, though, Deborah isn't a good advertisement for concupiscence. Though she's not a developed character and Cansino isn't much of an actress, there are a few scenes that put across how badly women can be used by men, whether they're husbands or casual extortionists. Those scenes are the only reason I grade ARABELLA's mythicity as fair. But if one has any hopes of ARABELLA being a stylish giallo, those hopes are doomed to perish quickly.          
    

    

OLIVIA (1981)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* 

After the success of 1980's THE BOOGIE MAN, writer-director Ulli Lommel and his wife/muse Suzanna Love began investing considerable energies into producing commercial horror/sf movies. While scouting locations for a potential BOOGIE MAN sequel, Lommel became fascinated with the former London Bridge, which in 1971 had been disassembled and rebuilt across the Colorado River in Arizona, so he and John T. March collaborated on the script for OLIVIA, with Love in the titular role. According to a recent packager, Vinegar Syndrome, OLIVIA did receive some limited screenings as early as 1981 though most references claim it was delayed until 1983. 

Whereas Lommel's script for BOOGIE MAN was relatively layered, OLIVIA's scenario wanders about too much to have much impact. The movie's been called a low-rent VERTIGO, but it has more in common with 1971's HANDS OF THE RIPPER. I don't suggest that Lommel copied that film; only that he pursued a similar strategy in using a "repetition-compulsion" scenario to motivate a female psycho-killer. In both RIPPER and OLIVIA, a female child sees her mother murdered by a killer, and as an adult she becomes a psycho-killer, implicitly identifying with the murderer's power to take life, rather than the victim who suffers and dies.

Olivia (Love) vacillates a bit more than the character in RIPPER, possibly because before dying, Olivia's mother gives her ambivalent advice in the form of the "Rapunzel" fairy tale, claiming that the tale's moral is that princesses will always be rescued by noble princes. Unfortunately, Olivia's mother is a prostitute, and one of her johns asks her to handcuff him for sadomasochistic play. The mother makes the mistake of releasing the john too soon, and he kills her, afterward concealing the crime by tossing the mother's body off London Bridge into the Thames River. Olivia witnesses all of these things but it's not clear if the killer is ever apprehended. Fifteen years later, Olivia has married a conservative man, Richard, who refuses to let her work outside the house (thus keeping her in a "prison tower" a la Rapunzel). Olivia hears her mother's voice and ends up dressing like a prostitute. She entices a customer to take her to his home and replays the sadomasochistic scenario, but with the more desirable ending where she kills the john.

But victims of repetition-compulsion can never find complete satisfaction. Olivia goes out again, and this time she makes a more romantic connection with architect Michael (Robert Walker Jr). He is in London because he's to be involved in the project to disassemble London Bridge and reconstruct it in Arizona. As Olivia continues to see Michael, Richard finds out and confronts the two of them on the aforesaid bridge. The two men scuffle. Richard falls into the Thames, apparently dying in the waters, though no body is found.

Somehow Michael loses track of Olivia, but after he relocates to Arizona after finishing the reconstruction of the bridge there, Olivia turns up there as well. This is where the VERTIGO reference applies: Michael meets Olivia, but she pretends to be an American tour-guide named Jenny. The two strike up a romance once more, but soon it's time for another "return of the repressed," as Bad Richard, who's been off the grid biding his time, makes his way to Olivia's home in Arizona. He kills Michael, disposing of his body off London Bridge as the john did Olivia's mother. He bullies Olivia into compliance, but she waits until he lowers his guard, at which point she murders him with a butcher-knife in the movie's best scene. After a long sequence in which Olivia puts Richard's corpse in a trunk and dumps it in the same river, the film simply ends.

OLIVIA is not as well-constructed a Freudian paradigm compared to HANDS OF THE RIPPER. We know nothing about Olivia's father, so we don't know if Child-Olivia sees the murder of her mother as a fatal version of the "primal scene." The fact that she marries an authoritarian man, though, suggests some complicity in the idea that women should be deferential to men, lest they pay the price for independence by being slain out of hand. The script is a little too lackadaisical to bring forth this sort of symbolism, but arguably similar material appeared a little later when Lommel and his wife collaborated on the script for 1983's DEVONSVILLE TERROR.         

THE NIGHT STALKER (1986)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*                                                                                                                              Had the makers of this routine sleaze-flick wanted to choose a title that didn't bite the style of the NIGHT STALKER TV-franchise, they might have called their movie "Maverick Cop vs. Maniac Cop." But although MANIAC COP's Robert Z'dar plays the evil "stalker" of the title, that series didn't start until 1988, and indeed STALKER's main distinction is that it led to the hulking performer being cast as the undead lawman.                                                                                   

    The star of the show, in any case, is Charles Napier in a rare turn as the hero of the story, J.J. Stryker, in almost every way a maverick cop in the "Dirty Harry" tradition: arrogant, anti-social (he's on the outs with the department for drunken binges), and dedicated to bringing back perps dead on arrival. Stryker departs from some maverick cops in that he does have a steady girlfriend, ex-hooker Rene (Michelle Reese), but they quarrel a lot because he's insecure about her past profession. Yet the script isn't interested in their dramatic potential, only in using Rene to give Stryker a personal motive to go after the villain, a serial killer who targets prostitutes. Because Rene keeps in contact with her pro friends, she becomes another target-- though the story is so episodic that Stryker doesn't cross the killer's trail for half the film. That first half is filled with various episodes in Stryker's crimefighting exploits, which serve to kill time but aren't very memorable. Stryker and his partner Charlie butt heads once with Julius, a pimp who brutally forces his whores to endanger themselves to make more money for him.                                     

The titular stalker (Z'dar) is one of the few unusual elements here. Chuck Sommers seems at first a garden-variety psycho, killing hookers so that he can paint their faces for ritualistic purposes. But Sommers' rituals have genuine magical effects. Viewers don't know if the murders really give Sommers immortality, but at the very least he becomes immune to gunfire. Pimp Julius finds this out the hard way as he and his henchmen try to take down the Stalker and he slaughters them all, ignoring their bullets (another presentiment of the MANIAC COP series). Sommers also kills Charlie and abducts Rene, so Stryker ignores departmental procedure to take down the fiend. The climax, which isn't as violent as I remembered, has Stryker and other cops bombard Sommers with small-arms gunfire, which he laughs off. Then for no clear reason the killer is apparently defeated when Stryker launches an explosive flare (?) and causes Sommers to fall into a smelting-vat. Before the credits roll, there's a quick suggestion that the Stalker may have survived, but patently there were no further adventures of the monstrous killer or his opponent. Apart from STALKER's role in giving Robert Z'dar his most celebrated role, the flick is mainly notable for the curiosity values of a maverick cop combatting a supernatural being and of seeing Charles Napier in a lead role. The director and the two credited writers mostly produced amiable junk with not much historical value, except that co-writer Don Edmonds gained some fame by directing the first two Nazi-sploitation "Ilsa the She Wolf" movies. 

DEEP RED (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*                                                                                                                       The above lobby card for Dario Argento's fourth giallo, directly following FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, is most appropriate to to describe the director/co-writer's approach to the mystery genre. As I've noted in other reviews of Argento-films, the rational type of detective pulls together a variety of disparate phenomena that lead to a rational understanding of a mystery. The irrational type, however, may solve a particular mystery, but often he does so just by bringing various phenomena into juxtaposition, but not creating a rational worldview at all. In the lobby cardm the glass-shards-- rent asunder when the first murder-victim collides with a window-- were part of a distinct whole. But now the broken pieces reflect murders-to-come, all elements of a greater enigma that resists rational explication.                                                                                 

  Technically the murder-victim mentioned above is only the first the audience sees slain in the film's 1970s era. A brief prelude depicts a knife-slaying, one adult slaying another adult, both seen only as shadows on a wall. Someone drops a bloodied knife on the floor and a small boy picks it up, while nearby a Christmas tree testifies to the festive time of year. Then the film shuttles to the current era, in modern Rome. In a lecture-hall two scholars introduce a famous psyshic, Helga Ulmann (Macha Meril). Helga gives the audience a small taste of her ability to read minds, which she says can even extend to impressions of things done years ago. She then announces that someone in the audience is harboring murderous thoughts, as well as thinking about an old house and a children's song. That night, when Helga returns to her apartment, she's murdered with a hatchet (hence the film's subtitle "The Hatchet Murders," which isn't accurate since the psycho does use other methods). Helga, BTW, is the only consistently "marvelous" phenomenon in the story, everything else being confined to the uncanny phenomenality. Helga functions only to uncover a guilty secret, not unlike the quasi-scientific device in FOUR FLIES, able to read images from the corneas of dead people.                                                                                                      

By chance professional pianist Marcus (David Hemmings) lives in the same building as Helga, and he's possibly on his way home when he comes across a colleague, Carlo, who's in the middle of a drunken binge. They're at least friendly enough that Marcus doesn't take offense when the sardonic Carlo accuses Marcus of being "bourgeoise" while Carlo is "proletariat." They both hear a scream, and Marcus looks up to see Helga being slain in her apartment window. He rushes up too late to apprehend the killer, so he dutifully calls the cops.                                                                                                           

Most solid citizens would leave things at that, but Marcus catches the detective bug. His main motivation is that the murder challenges his own confidence in his perceptions, because when Marcus first entered Helga's apartment seeking to render help, he glimpsed a painting in her apartment-- and yet, that painting seems to have gone missing by the time the cops arrive. A lady reporter named Gianna (Daria Nicolodi) gloms on to Marcus's private investigation in the hope of landing a big scoop. The two have a fractious relationship-- when Marcus gives the girl reporter static about feminism, she challenges him to an arm-wrestling match-- so they only work together on-and-off. Marcus interviews the two psychic scholars, and they just happen to guide the amateur sleuth toward the mysterious house of Helga's vision-- which most audience-members will assume has something to do with the murder committed in the prelude.                                                                                                     

Meanwhile, the mystery killer does what most mystery-killers do in these situations: after making few if any attempts on the sleuth's life, they content themselves with cutting off loose ends in the form of potential witnesses to the crimes. The killer's methods are fairly basic, though I'll give points for the use of a mechanized doll to distract a victim and set up the target for elimination. In his quest for clarity, Marcus keeps turning up more and more evidence of the world's enigmatic nature-- a little girl whom her father accuses of being a witch, Carlo's eccentric mother, who keeps calling Marcus an "engineer," and Carlo himself, who has a secret relationship with an epicene young fellow wearing (possibly) rouge. (To Argento's credit, the gay relationship is treated with some sensitivity, in marked contrast to many giallos of the period.) Further links in the chain of clues seem to lead Marcus and Gianna to Marcus's friend Carlo as the killer-- but all is not as it seems. The true killer is identified and slain in the act of trying to finish off Marcus, and the pianist even gets an answer to the question of the missing "painting." Still, the world has been rendered as more irrational than it was before Helga had the vision that cost her life, and the lives of many others.          

THE CASE OFTHE BLOODY IRIS (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              *SPOILERS*                                                                                                                                                                                                      In one respect, I'm not really surprised IRIS isn't one of the great giallos. Director Giuliano Carnimeo uses most of the familiar visual tropes of the genre-- beautiful women getting killed, sometimes with copious nudity, a mysterious killer unseen by the audience, and a host of oddball suspects. But IRIS was Carnimeo's only such thriller, and he's better known for his westerns, like the above-average HIS NAME WAS HOLY GHOST. In another respect, I am surprised that IRIS wasn't better, because the sole credited writer on IMDB was Ernesto Gastaldi. HOWEVER (once again), IRIS is a bit of a transition for Gastaldi. Before IRIS (also going by IMDB), I found all of the author's giallos just okay: STRANGE CASE OF MRS. WARDH (which many fans like better than I do), CASE OF THE SCORPION'S TAIL, and DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS. Yet after IRIS, IMDB lists three of the most myth-intensive giallos of Gastaldi or anyone: YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM, DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT, and TORSO. IRIS isn't a good as the latter three, but it sports some innovative sequences, suggesting that Gastaldi was warming to his work.                                                       

 The story follows the travails of two models, Jennifer (Edwige Fenech) and Marilyn (Paola Quattrini), as they talk on new lodgings at a ritzy high-rise constructed by rising young architect Andrea (George Hilton). They're not aware when they move in that two beautiful female residents have been murdered there. After they've moved in, Andea starts cozying up to Jennifer, and in a short time she reciprocates. But Andrea has an odd, intense inversion to blood, which references the Italian title of the movie, WHAT ARE THESE STRANGE DROPS OF BLOOD ON THE BODY OF JENNIFER? So could he be the mystery maniac, or is it one of several eccentric residents of the high-rise? Of course, it could be the most high-profile suspect (yeah. right): Jennifer's ex-husband Adam, who despite having been divorced from the gorgeous model, still follows her around trying to force her to his will. Adam is the source of the American title, for he ran a small-time sex-cult and wanted Jennifer to participate in the orgies. Adam symbolized the unity of the cult with an iris, asserting that the joined petals of the flower represent the unity of the membership-- though the audience never sees any members in "movie time," suggesting that the organization may be falling apart. Adam hassles Jennifer on the street, trying to browbeat her into coming back to him, because he "owns her." Since this is a spoiler-review, I have no hesitation in stating that neither Andrea nor Adam is anything but a red herring. Perhaps that makes IRIS the first giallo with two titles, each of which references a blind alley.     

 IRIS's main problem is far too many suspects, all of whom have rather arbitrary eccentricities: a lesbian who hits on Jennifer, her violin-playing father, an old woman who reads horror novels and hides an even bigger secret. Because the police suspect that one of the tenants is the killer, the cops ask Jennifer and Marilyn to continue residing at the complex. Neither model has any reason to do so, but they agree, so that the script will work out. Marilyn dies to show the audience that, yes, it is one of the tenants. The cops are also boring eccentrics in their own way, and the killer's murder-methods are violent but not uncanny. He is crazy, though, and the revelation of his ID justifies my category of "clansgression" here, though for all the buildup we've been given, almost anyone could have been revealed as the serial psycho. IRIS is distinguished by one great scene in this so-so movie. One of the early victims is a beautiful Black woman named Mizar, and she performs for an Italian casino a unique act: challenging individual men in the audience to a wrestling-match. If Mizar can't counter a challenger's attacks with her judo, she promises to become the victor's "slave"-- by which I presume she means "sex slave." This is a fine juxtaposition of a female performer using her sexuality to entice challengers, only to embarrass them with her superior skills. Once or twice, there are remarks that highlight other examples of male chauvinism, but Gastaldi didn't organize these tropes into anything coherent, and all that results is a competent giallo with one kickass scene.