Plot of Fear (1976)

Original title: E tanta paura

Various, mostly rich and influential, people are killed in gruesome ways. The killer always leaves a page of German old-timey sledgehammer education picture book “Struwwelpeter” at the scene of the crime.

When he isn’t sleeping with his model girlfriend, Inspector Lomenzo (Michele Placido) does some actual, proper, investigative work – and acquires a new model girlfriend in form of Jeanne (Corinne Cléry) during it. From Jeanne, Lomenzo learns that all the victims were involved in the sex and violence parties hunter and dealer in wild animals Hoffmann (John Steiner) held at his estate when he was still alive, and all of them were there the day a prostitute died under highly dubious circumstances.

It’s nearly as if someone were trying to punish the people involved through brutal violence as also happens to be the tradition of old-timey German picture books for kids.

Paolo Cavara’s Plot of Fear is definitely one of the better attempts at mixing elements of the giallo with those of the Italian cop movie, and making pretty successful attempts at subverting both of them while also delivering the genre thrills an audience would expect.

On the giallo side, while this is certainly a stylish and well-shot film, Cavara shows little interest into stylizing the violence as someone like Argento or Martino would (though he does clearly have some heterosexual guy kind of fun with the nudity). Where the often sexually non-binary identities of the killers in your typical giallo can suggest a rather conservative world view (if these aspects are meant that way is a very different question), the killer here comes out of a thematic concern about vigilantism, the misuse of surveillance and the misuse of power that reads very directly left-wing to me.

Police film-wise, Lomenzo is a very different proposition to the two-fisted – depending on your view point fascistically coded (though I would often not read them this way) – action copper as exemplified in someone like the great Maurizio Merli. While he does get into a couple of scraps (the genre demands, and Cavara is clever enough to accede), Lomenzo approaches the case with his head instead of his fists, though he is no Sherlock Holmes, either. He’s a softer, more thoughtful proposition, easily flustered but just as determined and uncorrupted as his more brutal antipodes – he just clearly does believe in due process and proper procedure as the basis of actual justice.

All of which is nice and interesting on paper, but wouldn’t be worth much if Plot of Fear weren’t an engaging genre mix. Fortunately it is, providing the expected genre beats with verve and enough style to keep my sleazier nature happy while pushing two genres into directions they not often go. Hell, Cavara even manages to add humorous interludes that are actually drily funny, which is not a sentence you’ll find me writing about many giallos.

Death Carries A Cane (1973)

Amateur photographer Kitty (Susan Scott) witnesses the brutal murder of a naked woman by a someone dressed all in black – of course wearing the mandated black leather gloves - through a telescope. This isn’t going to be the last murder committed by this particular killer, who takes care of witnesses as much as of his core victims.

Curiously, the murders seem somehow connected to Kitty’s social circle, and soon, the investigating Comissario (Jorge Martín) seems so interested in Kitty’s boyfriend, the not the least bit suspicious and shifty Alberto (Robert Hoffmann), Alberto feels motivated to do some amateur sleuthing to save his own skin.

If ever you wanted to see a “typical”, made completely out of tropes, middle of the road, giallo, Maurizio Pradeaux’s Death Carries A Cane has your back. It is fair to say the film has no ideas of its own, but it has studied its giallo contemporaries and forebears well enough, it is able to apply the ideas it has borrowed from them consistently and coherently (as far as any giallo ever aspires to coherence). Thus this base-line giallo is also a very satisfying watch that gets what the genre is all about and what an audience likes about it.

The film’s only nearly original element is that it can’t quite decide who its central amateur detective is going to be – first it’s Kitty, then Alberto, then it’s back to Kitty again – which does hamper its narrative focus from time to time yet also keeps the audience on their toes.

On the level of style, this isn’t up to par with Argento, Bava or Martino, but Pradeaux does make great use of the contrast between run-down looking exteriors and the fully fashioned up interiors all giallo characters are bound by law to inhabit. The killings are also rather well done, often very effectively using dark blues and deep shadows before we get to the artificial red of cut throats. The climactic stalking – with a Kitty who has by now descended into hysteria – is particularly fine and again makes great use of locations and all the colours of the dark.

There’s little of substance here, of course, but some October nights, you just want to see a tale of pretty people of dubious moral fibre, a killer with a great fashion sense, and brutal murders. Well, make that most nights.

Lost Soul (1977)

aka The Forbidden Room

Original title: Anima persa

Tino (Danilo Mattei), a provincial late teen without much of a clue what to do with his life, comes to Venice to try his hand at studying art. He’s taken in by his uncle, the engineer Fabio (Vittorio Gassman) and aunt Sofia (Catherine Deneuve) to live with them in their decaying palazzo. Half of the place isn’t in a fit state to dwell in anymore, and Sofia and Fabio are very adamant about Tino not going into the attic. That’s pretty much the only thing husband and wife are agreeing on, though: Fabio is a dominating, verbally abusive hypocrite who very casually belittles Sofia, and she is fearful and neurotic about things Tino can grasp even less than the audience does.

Tino quickly – so quickly I’d hardly call it a spoiler – finds out there’s somebody else living in the house. His uncle’s brother is locked up in the attic room, incurably mad, raving, with Fabio his only human contact. Well, and the prostitute that visits once a month, apparently doing her thing with the madman while Fabio watches.

Given how quickly we learn about the man in the attic, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise there are more secrets in the palazzo, some concerning the dead daughter of the couple and the effect her death had on the marriage. Eventually, Tino will find out about all of them.

Dino Risi’s Lost Soul is not your typical Italian Gothic horror, but rather a somewhat arthouse-minded classy drama that thoughtfully takes influences of European Romanticism and Gothic horror to explore ideas of bourgeois hypocrisy and the loss of innocence through a revelation of family sins. Until its final revelations suggest that coming at things from this sideways direction of Gothic horror will still very much leave you making a horror movie. In fact one whose final revelations suggest a depth of perversity and sad corruption, Risi made the right choice not including Christopher Lee and his whip collection.

It helps Risi’s case for the sideways Gothic that Venice – particularly shot as clearly and moodily as DP Tonino Delli Colli does here – seems the perfect place to tell a tale of modern, sadly Gothic decay. It is, after all, a city grand but clearly on its slow way towards nowhere, full of stories terrible and wonderful (there’s an indelible, short sequence where Fabio explains some of the stories surrounding some palazzos they pass on their way to Tino’s school), enticing, but probably smelling of death below its perfume.

As a narrative, there’s very little actually happening here on the surface, but what’s lacking in action is made up by thoughtful and complex dialogue sequences full of allusions, suggestions, and the sharp needles of truth, filtered through fantastic performances by Deneuve (who is so good, you nearly buy her utterly counterfactual bits about the horrors of her aging which in reality are not at all visible on her face) and Gassman. There are layers of meaning – personal, philosophical, political – in the dialogue, but it feels not at all as if it were straining to carry them all. Risi’s touch appears so light, it can only result from a great feat of control.

Obviously, this is not a traditional Italian Gothic, but a film that uses choice elements of the form so well, it still is one of the hidden gems of the genre.

Three Films Make A Post: Their thoughts can kill!

Scanners (1981): This is sometimes treated as one of the lesser movies in David Cronenberg’s incredible run as a director from 1977 to 1996, but there’s so much to love in this version of the 70s conspiracy thriller as seen through the eyes of Philip K. Dick. Performances that are spot on or so weird they actually are spot on exactly because of their weirdness (Stephen Lack), a plot that starts in the realm of semi-plausible spy-fi but drifts further and further into the realm of the outright surreal, and a direction whose by now proverbial cool eye is all that stands between the material and utter, screaming lunacy. Plus, exploding heads are inherently cool (unless it’s your own head exploding).

Closed Circuit aka Circuito chiuso (1978): This Italian TV movie by Giuliano Montaldo does overstay its welcome a little, so that its turn from the locked room murder mystery to the outright fantastical doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could in a more concentrated form, but there’s much to recommend it: a clear love for the cinema experience of the time grounded in an ability to actually show the way cinemas at this time and place worked procedurally, a cast that has fun with the range of characters (all with secrets that have nothing to do with the case, of course) on offer, and the joy of seeing that most mock-rational of genres (as much as I have grown to enjoy golden age style murder mysteries, their ideas about logic and reason are utter nonsense) break down into the realm of the kind of fantasy that admits it is one.

The Kingdom of Jirocho aka Jirocho sangokushi (1963): This is the first film in the second cycle of films Masahiro Makino made about yakuza boss Shimizu Jirocho (Koji Tsuruta) – a real historical figure that had turned into something of a folk hero, and the embodiment of that most ridiculous of ideas, the good yakuza, honourably helping solve problems wherever he goes. This is really all set-up, showing the first meetings between Jirocho and the core members of his clan, but it does its business in such a light-handed and fun way, I hardly missed the presence of an actual plot.

Makino, apparently well-known for being a quick worker, clearly isn’t a sloppy one. Rather, there’s a lot of camera and character movement here, so much so, you’re never surprised when the protagonists break into song, as they regularly (though not quite regularly enough to call this a musical) do. There’s a joyous quality to the whole thing, unexpected from a film that finds a director repeating a greatest hit.

For fans of 60s/70s Toei ninkyo eiga – as I certainly am – there’s the additional joy of encountering a lot of the usual character and side actors, as well as a very very young Junk Fuji as a flirtatious bar maid (and alas not the female lead).

Red Desert (1964)

Original title: Il deserto rosso

Having spent some time in an psychiatric clinic, Giuliana (Monica Vitti), the wife of a higher-up at a local plant, now walks through life and the industrial wastelands of rural Italy between fugues and moments of intense activity, confused, alienated and sad. She drifts into something of an affair with businessman Corrado (the most clean-cut I’ve ever seen Richard Harris), who isn’t quite as fine with the world as it is as everyone else around them, and feels drawn as much to Giuliana’s pain and alienation as he is to her body – or he might just be very good at pretending thus.

This might sound as if Michelangelo Antonioni’s arthouse classic Red Desert has something like a traditionally dramatic plot, but there’s very little interest in that sort of thing on display here – as in most of Antonioni’s films I’ve seen. The bits and pieces of plot are really only there to have things for Vitti to react – or not react depending on her mood – to or pull away from in anguish. Vitti performs the kind of inner turmoil that can’t really be expressed in its inescapable, near-spiritual totality, a suffering for and against the world in ways I found touching and sometimes deeply disturbing – this feels much more like real “mental illness” than most movie versions of it do.

Aesthetically, Vitti’s work is couched in the most striking visual depictions of an industrial waste you’ll ever get to see, pictured in ways that always emphasise Giuliana’s alienation, but also never shy away from the beauty and fascination of our destruction of the natural world, while the soundtrack prefers abstract drones to a traditional score. There’s an ambiguity to how the film views Giuliana, and it is never quite clear how much it shares her alienation and anguish at the modern world; most probably because living in a man-made world instead of forever standing outside of it, in pain, also suggests certain beauties to the filmmaker and the audience Giuliana can’t grasp, as much as the rest of the world cannot, will-not come to share her perspective fully.

Dagger Eyes (1983)

Original title: Mystère

High class call girl Mystère (Carole Bouquet) keeps up the style and posture of a high fashion model at all times, projecting an aura of impossibly perfect beauty presented with total emotional detachment. Her mantra appears to be that nothing ever surprises her. Indeed, Mystère’s perfect surface hardly shows the tiniest cracks even when a mysterious figure starts stalking her with ambitions on murder.

The killer is not a random maniac, as you’d expect, however. Rather, a long-fingered colleague has more or less accidentally hidden a lighter in Mystère’s stylish handbag she has stolen from a client. In the lighter is a microfilm, and on that microfilm are photos that show the assassin (John Steiner) who shot a politician during a motorcade. The brutally disposed people behind the assassination are in the espionage business, and certainly not to be trifled with.

However, neither is in Mystère, even less so once she teams up with the deeply misogynistic, very subtly named, Inspector Colt (Phil Coccioletti).

The giallo genre hit a rather big snag during the 80s. In part, this was only natural in the somewhat fad and fashion based world of Italian genre movies where yesterday’s hit genre is today’s box-office death knell. Italian filmmaking as a whole started suffering from fewer opportunities and ever lower budgets, with rather a lot of talent making their way to the aesthetically less pleasing but more secure feeding troughs of TV production.

However, I believe the giallo had another problem in trying to update its style to that of the new decade. Visually, the genre had always been deeply informed by pop culture and fashion, but there aren’t that many directors involved in the genre who appeared interested in updating this element of their films as much as it was needed to keep giallos contemporary.

Carlo Vanzina, mostly specialized in directing comedies, demonstrates no problems in that regard here (nor in his later giallo Nothing Underneath) – if there is any film that breathes the idea of the giallo as a version of the thriller and horror genres informed by violence and sex but also by fashion, it is Mystère. Its titular heroine – really embodied by Bouquet more than strictly acted – is presented as the impossible ideal of its time: an always perfectly made-up, cool kind of femininity. Bouquet always looks as if she’s just stepped out of a magazine cover, even when surrounded by people who look perfectly normal, always in control, Hitchock’s everyman protagonist inverted into something new and deeply contemporary - as it will turn out morally as well as stylishly, as befits the decade.

She strides through a plot that enlivens giallo standards by combining them with the conspiracy thriller – also reimagined into something more fashionable and more amoral – through often rather wonderful suspense sequences, shots of great, artificial beauty, and those sudden outbreaks of illogic and goofiness which were always part of this arm of the genre. Indeed, if you ask me, its the inherent strangeness and the disinterest in presenting the world of the film as working like the real world does that always bring the giallo into the folds of horror, or at the very least the cinema of the fantastic, as a sibling of the film noir that’s even more stylized and even less interested in real-world logic.

From this perspective, even the pretty damn silly epilogue of Mystère makes sense as part of the aesthetic package of the film; that it also doesn’t even seem to understand, and certainly not share, the moral outrage of the conspiracy thrillers it also borrows from makes sense: this is a complete product of the 80s.

Three Films Make A Post: No man left behind.

Life After Fighting (2024): Lead actor/martial artist/director/producer Bren Foster’s directorial debut climaxes in forty minutes or so of incredibly impressive martial arts madness of the naturalistic, bone-crunching style, presented in a direct and visceral way. To get there, you have to work your way through eighty minutes or so of much too slow build-up, pointless side-plots, and scenes that – in classic indie tradition - never seem to want to end when they really should have ended minutes ago.

I do appreciate Foster’s willingness to go slow and actually ground his character emotionally – this certainly beats the “egomaniac martial arts asshole” you always fear in this kind of project – but there’s providing the ground for things, and then there’s scenes crawling by at a snail’s pace for no good reason.

The Heroin Busters aka La via della droga (1977): This Enzo G. Castellari joint with Fabio Testi (playing a character named Fabio in case he forgets) and David Hemmings as cops (well, Hemmings is playing an Interpol agent) on a rampage starts out pretty slow as well, but it doesn’t take more than half of its running time to gather its speed. Once it dies get going, there’s no holding its series of probably highly dangerous to stunt people action sequences back for even a second. There’s a manic, dangerous energy to Castellari’s action at its best, and here, he holds that level for the whole last act of the film, while doing much less feet-dragging than Foster’s movie before.

Land of Bad (2024): Despite the military-based version of the action film being my least favourite type – I dislike some of the sub-genre’s inherent assumptions even less so than those of vigilante films – it is difficult to find fault with the way William Eubank and a game bunch of actors (several Hemsworths, Ricky Whittle and Milo Ventimiglia in an actually good performance, as well Russell Crowe chewing scenery delightfully as the Man in the Chair) present a series of theoretically tired old clichés. In a style I find by now typical of Eubank, he leaves no cent of the budget not visible on screen, so there’s an always entertaining series of gunplay, explosions, unarmed combat and more explosions shown off in the most effective manner possible.

The character bits are clichéd but also just work, so there’s enough emotional backing to the violence. If you squint and look at the film in the right light, you might also see it as a mild critique of the detached ways of modern technological warfare in some scenes, of course in between the film milking modern technological warfare for the funnest possible action.

The Sect (1991)

Original title: La setta

After a prologue taking place a couple of decades earlier in the USA introduces us to a rather nasty cult leader (Tomas Arana) with the habit of cutting off faces in a rather occult-scientific way and threatens a decades-long plan, we fast forward into the future of the early 1990s, to a small town near Frankfurt.

After orphan turned teacher Miriam Kreisl (Kelly Curtis) invites a rather smelly looking old gentleman – who will turn out to have the delightful name of Moebius Kelly (Herbert Lom) - into her house because she nearly ran him over with her car, her life turns into a living nightmare, of course involving that face-cutting cult and the endgame of their plan.

In between an actual labyrinth hidden in her house’s cellar that contains a well connected to hell or a comparably unpleasant place, a nasty bug that may or may not lay an egg in her brain, a really creepy weirdo as her love interest, and the eventual realization that her whole life is a lie, the face cutting bit might actually appear rather harmless to our protagonist.

Before Michele Soavi became a work for hire director for Italian TV, and after working as an assistant director for Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento, he directed a quartet of incredible horror movies, so wonderfully Italian in all the best ways, it is hard to believe they were made at the tail end of successful genre filmmaking in the country when most of his peers couldn’t get a good movie financed to save their lives.

The Sect is usually the least appreciated of these films. I’m not terribly surprised about that fact, for where the nightmarish mood of the other three films – Stage Fright, The Church and even that of Dellamorte dellamore - is rooted in as much proper narrative as you get with this arm of Italian horror (which isn’t much by the boring standards of the here and now), the film at hand goes as far in the direction of free-floating, macabre strangeness as possible while still being recognizable as a genre narrative. In this sense, as in its extreme – if different – stylishness this reminds me most of my favourite Argento movie Inferno. There as here, narrative concerns and real world logic matter little when compared to creating moods, feelings and impressions through a distinctive visual style.

Which rather seems to be the point of the whole project of the cinema of the fantastic as a whole when seen through the lens of these films, and most certainly the point of The Sect. The irrational and the supernatural by their very nature are meant to defy logic and explanation, and from this perspective, their only proper treatment would be through a film becoming illogical and outright weird.

In Miriam’s specific case, all of her ideas about her identity and the reasons underlying the way she leads her life are completely undermined (rather as if she had a labyrinth where most people have a cellar), and she finds herself the pawn of a ritual the cultists being involved in don’t actually appear to be able to grasp beyond a belief they are involved in a variation of Rosemary’s Baby.

Clearly, unlike the cultists, Soavi (who co-wrote with Argento and Gianni Romoli) was not terribly impressed with the ending of that film, so he writes a better one for Miriam than Rosemary got, an ending that mixes about five surprisingly feminist minutes with a further dollop of utter irrational weirdness only proper in this particular movie.

Needless to say, this is even less a film for everyone than most other movies are; though if it sings to you, as it does to me, it’s going to truly sing.

Three Films Make A Post: Sometimes, No Tagline’s Forthcoming

Death Occurred Last Night aka La morte risale a ieri sera (1970): The mentally disabled daughter of a single parent father (Raf Vallone), disappears without much of a trace. An increasingly invested cop (Frank Wolff) takes on the case to find some rather nasty business concerning a prostitution racket and personal betrayal.

Even though it is often strikingly shot and edited with as mix of inventiveness and intelligence, and features fine performances by the always great Vallone and Wolff, I never quite managed to connect with this police procedural (whoever pretends this to be a giallo as the genre is typically understood is simply lying). Perhaps the reason is Duccio Tessari’s unwillingness to ever show as much of the sordidness this tale is built upon as would be actually necessary? The overwhelming sense of watching a film that really wants to make it clear that it is socially conscious and rather important?

Never Give Up aka Yasei no shomei (1978): Junya Sato’s often somewhat too slow and vague narrative style – the film is nearly two and a half hours long! – never quite manages to disguise quite how strange of a genre mixture this Ken Takakura vehicle is: it’s a melodrama about a man of violence trying to do penance for past sins, a 70s conspiracy thriller about a female journalist stumbling upon a small town conspiracy that is at the same time apparently nation-wide, a movie about a psychic kid, an action movie that prefigures some beats of the final act of First Blood. There’s just a lot going on here, and for at least the film’s first third, it is not exactly easy to parse how all these disparate elements connect.

However, once they do – or if you enjoy figuring out vague narratives – Never Give Up becomes more than just a little compelling. Needless to say, the acting is pretty wonderful, and there’s a very 70s fearlessness on display when it comes to the death of central characters and downer endings.

Mars Express (2023): I don’t understand the high praise this French piece of science fiction animation is getting all around the net. To these eyes, Jérémie Périn’s film is about as generic as science fiction action gets, and neither its animation nor its design is much to write home about – unless you’re deeply into things looking as if they were done with strict professional competence. The narrative is as been there, done that as it gets, and the worldbuilding nothing that hasn’t been done in science fiction again and again to better effect.

It doesn’t improve my appreciation that the film shunts its only compelling ideas into its final fifteen minutes.

The First Omen (2024)

Warning: there will be (some) spoilers for this as well as for Immaculate!

1971. Young Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), raised as an orphan by the Catholic church, is sent to Rome to take her vows as a nun in a convent-orphanage. After early moments of genuine female companionship with the other nuns and an invitation to the pre-vow wild life by the place’s other novitiate, the not terribly nun-like Luz (Maria Cabellero), Margaret’s time at the nunnery turns increasingly nightmarish.

There appears to be something very wrong with one of the orphans, Carlita (Nicole Sorace), and the older nuns’ treatment of the child seems rather extraordinarily strange and cruel, particularly when you compare it to their usual behaviour towards the children in their care. Margaret herself is increasingly plagued by visions connected to creepy demon fingers touching her, bad sexual experiences and pregnancy; nightmare and reality become increasingly difficult to keep apart.

When the rogue priest Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), contacts Margaret with a highly unlikely tale about what’s really going on at the orphanage, our protagonist isn’t quite ready to believe him yet, but she’s certainly beginning to look at the things that might be hidden in plain sight all around her.

Apart from movies about spiders, this is apparently a year for movies about young women having to fight the not so tender attentions of Catholic Church breeding programs (one would be tempted to defend the Church against horror scriptwriters, but given its history, it has to fend for itself there). Though only one of the latter movies has a scene where a woman smashes the little baby Jesus, second edition, with a rock. The movie at hand is not that movie.

But seriously, even though The First Omen does share quite a bit with its out of wedlock sister film Immaculate – namely the feminism, the Church breeding program and the palpable love for the weirder corners of 70s horror – it does have a feel of its own.

Mostly, that’s because director Arkasha Stevenson’s visual imagination quickly transcends the quotes from the original Omen, numerous stylish Italian horror films, and 70s horror in general, and instead starts using the visual elements taken from there to create a language of horror that feels personal to her as a filmmaker.

Stevenson has an indelible eye for the freaky shot, for short, metaphorically loaded tableaux, a command of mood that drags her protagonist – as well as at least this viewer - ever further in the direction of dread and the weird. The big horror sequences don’t just work as set pieces, but are always also metaphorically loaded for bear, creating the kind of film that does little of its metaphorical work through plot or character work and instead puts all emphasis on mood and style as carriers. Again, very much in the spirit of the era of horror filmmaking it builds much of its aesthetic grounding on.

I wouldn’t say the film’s subtextual interests are terribly original: a young woman trapped in a system that only sees her as a breeder for the men that are going to be really important; a sense of paranoia where nearly every paranoid thought our protagonist has is based on truth, and where even her own identity doesn’t truly belong to her; childbirth as a form of body horror. However, the way it puts these interests into movement, colour, and sound makes them feel like things you’ve never seen or heard about before quit this way. Which is quite the trick in a prequel to a franchise that on paper really didn’t need one.

The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971)

Original title: La coda dello scorpione

Warning: I’m going to spoil an early twist!

The plane the businessman husband of Lisa Baumer (Evelyn Stewart) is on is destroyed by a bomb while the good lady is having a bit of fun with her lover. Hubby had insured his life for a nice million dollars, and the insurance company seems perfectly willing to pay out at once, without any investigation into the matter. Lisa only has to come to Greece to get the money, for reasons. In truth, the company isn’t really as happy to oblige Lisa as it pretends to be, and has put sexy investigator Peter Lynch (George Hilton) on her trail.

He doesn’t seem to be the only one interested in Lisa, though, for a shadowy figure in classical giallo killer get-up is following her around. For some reason, Lisa wants to take the money due her in cash; and once she has it in her hands, the killer loses little time in dispatching her and absconding with the money.

After Lisa’s death, the female protagonist role shifts to journalist Cléo Dupont (Anita Strindberg), who is rather too nosy for staying healthy in a giallo environment. Of course, there are further murders and curious plot twists coming.

I am quite the admirer of the giallos of director Sergio Martino, and The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail is no exception here. This is certainly one of the more conventional of Martino’s giallos, seeing as it follows a properly constructed, if overconstructed (it is a giallo after all), thriller plot that even borrows its early protagonist death from Psycho as if this were a Jimmy Sangster script for one of Hammer’s thrillers of the 60s. This is not a complaint, mind you, for Martino, as was his wont at this stage of his career, puts out all the visual stops: hand camera, POV shots, dramatic close-ups, wonderfully artificial light, unconventional camera angles are all part of his toolkit, as are picture postcard beautiful shots of Greece, and a good bit of bloody business.

Because Martino at this point was one of the masters of this sort of thing, this intense stylishness isn’t just a way to distract the director and his audience from implausible plotting, and the tedium of straightforwardly shot dialogue, or to make his beautiful cast look even more glamorous, but also creates the flow and energy of the film, the tension and release quality so important for thrillers and horror films. As is often the case in the giallo, the director’s style takes on the function of the choreography in a martial arts film or a musical, turning what could be a dry presentation of twists into a sort of dance. Style becomes substance.

Immaculate (2024)

Warning: I will spoil some elements of the film’s ridiculousness, including its ending, because I’m not going to hide its main selling points.

American novitiate nun Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) is transferred to a pretty swanky looking convent for her final vows. The place is actually a hospice for elderly, dying nuns, many of whom suffer from the mental vagaries of old age as well, but clearly, the Church has decided to see them off in style. However, some of the nuns – elderly and not – act rather weirdly, treating Cecilia either as if she were about to be sainted, or like their mortal enemy. Things become curiouser still when Cecilia becomes pregnant – without ever having had sex in her life.

Her superiors decide rather quickly – and certainly without consulting the Vatican – this to be a case of immaculate conception, and thus, Cecilia is the new Mother of God. But there’s something nasty hiding behind dressing our heroine up like Maria and singing her praises.

I have repeatedly gone on record with my general lack of interest in religious horror, but I do tend to make an exception for its absurd and trashy arm, even more so when the absurdity and trashiness is combined either with the values of classic Italian exploitation or an comparatively high budget to pump into its idiocy. Michael Mohan’s Immaculate manages to have a foot in both camps, thus making me very happy indeed.

Having said that, I also have to warn anyone looking for a serious piece of (religious) horror: this is as absurd and trashy as it can get away with, throwing away concepts like believability and logic with great enthusiasm. Andrew Lobel’s script suggests it knows Catholic doctrine only from the pages of 18th Century anti-Catholic literature (as if the actual church didn’t have flaws enough), and has never met a human being or an actual religious believer – fanatic or not. It’s pretty impressive, in its own way, mostly because it enables the film to come up with its central conceit: a Church conspiracy to mad science up an embryo clone of Jesus Christ (gene material apparently donated by a nail from the True Cross) and implant it in a particularly “fertile” young nun, obviously – this is the Church, after all – without consent. Or, if needed, a series of nuns.

As it happens, this conspiracy also is into torture and murder, and has nuns who hide their faces behind stocking masks directly out of giallo central. In practice, this is exactly as awesome (and tasteless) as it sounds. The film’s plot, such as it is, contains little actual drama, but does provide a series of set pieces for Sweeney to enthusiastically overemote in, mechanical jump scares in exhausting number, surprising amounts of squishy gore in the Italian tradition and a general sense of unhinged enthusiasm for material that’s crude and more than just a bit dumb. Of course, its’s exactly that crudity and stupidity that makes the whole affair as enjoyable as it is, even more so since the film mostly plays things straight, as if this were high religious (anti-religious?) drama.

To make things even better, Mohan packages the glorious nonsense in often strikingly composed shots – with more than a nod to Italian exploitation cinema of old –, and stylish, moody camera work while strolling through some wonderfully designed sets.

It’s a truly wonderful piece of exploitation cinema that had me riveted to the screen throughout. I suspect not exactly in the way the film was meant to be taken, but it’s not as if I were doing something as disrespectful as enjoying myself ironically.

Apart from the obvious candidates from the 70s and 80s, this would make fantastic double feature with the likeminded yet also antithetical The Pope’s Exorcist – one can only dream of a team-up between said exorcist and Sister Cecilia, killer of the Sweet Baby Jesus, in a future Pope’s Exorcistiverse movie.

The Valachi Papers (1972)

This Dino de Laurentiis production directed by Terence Young just about managed to beat The Godfather to the cinemas, but didn’t make much of a splash there; nor is it as well-remembered as even the least of Coppola’s gangster movie trilogy would eventually become.

Which certainly has a lot to do with how little this rates in any aspect compared to the Coppola film. Instead of turning the true crime plot about real life Mafia goon turned federal witness Joe Valachi (Charles Bronson) into an exploration of a man’s relationship to the criminal world he betrays, or even just an actual exploration of anything but the surface of that world, this just races through plot points probably taken from the book this is based on, hitting on anthropological bits of Mafia rituals, murders and Valachi’s love life (Jill Ireland inevitably makes her appearance there) in turn, but never stopping to connect any of this to become something you might want to call an actual narrative.

Watching this, it’s not difficult to imagine Martin Scorsese suffering through it as well, only to think he can certainly do this better by using actual themes and characters and even – gosh! – connecting those, while keeping to the life-long scope of the film, coming up with Goodfellas in the process, a film that’s directly comparable in its scope and basic set-up, but does everything right The Valachi Papers can’t even seem to imagine doing.

Despite the gritty visual quality native to movies made at this point in time, there’s a blandness to the film that’s more than just a little infuriating, a feeling as if nobody involved could actually be bothered to add any personality or depth to the proceedings. The sloppiness of the period parts – where no attempt seems to have been made to hide out of period background details to a degree even I noticed it – adds further to this air of a film that’s just not bothering. Which, as always, leaves the question why a viewer should.

Three Films Make A Post: A new depth of fear

Gods of the Deep (2023): British low budget one man movie making army Charlie Steeds returns to the Lovecraftian well, including a pretty fantastic God of the Deep/homemade Cthulhu effect.

Otherwise, this is at first dominated by the joys of cheap underwater sci fi sets that sometimes reminded me pleasantly of Juan Piquer Simón’s own cardboard underwater horror/sf affair The Rift, to then turn into a mix of cheap weird psychedelia with terrible action movie dialogue and some dollops from Aliens.

It’s all very 80s Italian in its approach to, ahem, creative borrowing, which, depending on one’s taste, is either a damning indictment of the film, or, if you’re me, a gateway to the kind of fun they don’t usually make this way anymore.

London Overground (2016): John Rogers’s documentary finds that most London of writers, Iain Sinclair, retracing the steps he took for his book of the same title, with the involvement of some of the usual suspects. Like a lot of later Sinclair, this is a mix of insightful observations on London and the changes in her, an old man ranting at clouds while walking, and a portrait of a man finding poetry in the sort of thing most people would just walk on by and ignore.

Thus are some of the typical problems of Sinclair’s work on display. Predominantly, the inability to separate the critique of the capitalist horrors inflicted on a place from one’s own nostalgia for the ideal version of the place that only ever existed in one’s mind – or in this case the books one wrote, which can lead to the impression that Sinclair is against any change whatsoever (which I don’t believe he actually is).

However, there’s much to think about and look at here that would be lost without Sinclair or this film.

Top Line (1988): A writer (Franco Nero) procrastinating and sleeping around in Colombia is put on the trail of a great conspiracy that hides the trail of alien influences on earth. Various forces – like a sadistic Nazi played by George Kennedy of all people – try to hinder or murder him. Among those forces is a wonderfully blatant – and pretty good looking, effects wise – Terminator rip-off, for we are back in the arms of the actual Italian rip-off machine in all its confused oddness. Here, James Cameron meets the UFO conspiracy and traces of the 80s jungle adventure movie, Nero goes shirtless a lot, and little happens that makes much sense.

On the plus side, little happens that makes much sense that isn’t also pretty awesome or entertaining. From time to time, director Nello Rossati even manages an actually suspenseful scene – the preposterous but great sequence of Kennedy hunting Nero through a cactus field comes to mind. If not that, he at least comes up with something memorably goofy. Why wasn’t the Arnie Terminator smashed by an angry bull?

A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Belgian master detective Hercule Poirot has retired from the detection biz to become a sad, rich guy with ridiculous facial hair and very specific culinary obsessions in Venice. He’s more than a little depressed, yet also very unwilling to step back into his old life. However when Poirot’s old friend, the writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) who based her serial detective on him, drags him out of his new private life to partake in a Halloween séance in the supposedly haunted palazzo of opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), he can’t quite resist.

Poirot very quickly reveals that the medium Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) and her two assistants are frauds, as he expected, but he’s rather more troubled by the murders that, also as expected, happen afterwards. During the course of the night, locked in with a good handful of horrible rich people and the hired help with reasons to hate them, Poirot will have experiences that not only put his own abilities in doubt, but also the rational world view he prides himself on.

Though it certainly is not a spoiler to say that Kenneth Branagh’s third Hercule Poirot film will explain the supernatural away in the end, and will reinstate Poirot’s belief in himself on the way as well. Like Death on the Nile, this film is interested in asking questions about the role of the Great Detective, not so much doubts about his abilities or the use and abuse of a very classically humanist idea of rationality but rather the practical use such abilities and principles should be put to. In Branagh’s view, Poirot’s weakness appears to be the detective’s tendency to drift into that realm of pure rationality where the knowledge gained isn’t tempered by compassion, and where Poirot’s attainment of this knowledge doesn’t actually help anyone. So all three of Branagh’s Poirot films see the man confronted with murders not committed out of reasons of pure evil or greed but as result of human tragedies. The cases thus become not only about the Great Detective’s use of his powers of ratiocination, but about how he learns to use them in the cause of justice more than that of the law.

It’s not a very Agatha Christie approach to the formula, if you ask me. As most writers of traditional crime in the “Golden Age” (ha!) style, she showed little emotional investment in the compassionate approach to human tragedy leading to crime (especially when committed by the lower classes), or really, little interest in the murder mystery as more than a neat puzzle.

Clearly, this is not an approach Branagh is interested in, so Poirot ends this third movie as a man with a degree of moral authority, and a degree of humility that’s based on compassion more than anything else. Like any good superhero, he’s getting back to the business of making the life of others perhaps just a little bit better. To me, that’s a rather more interesting approach than mere puzzle solving, but I’ve been known not to be the greatest fan of Christie and her stylistic sisters and brothers, so others might very well be annoyed by this instead of enthused.

Of course, this also affords Branagh with his acting hat on to actually do something with Poirot beyond the always fun preening. In his context Poirot is allowed to doubt and stumble and actually be involved with the people he has come to judge, an opportunity he certainly doesn’t let pass by. In general, A Haunting in Venice feels very much like a film built to give its whole cast something interesting or fun in their characters to work with, and as is usually the case with films that do, everybody puts effort into mildly theatrical and pretty wonderful performances that bring all these flawed rich arseholes with dark secrets to life.

And because this is a Halloween movie, Branagh the director spends much of the film using every traditional – say from the expressionist era to late 40s Universal with perhaps a little visit to Robert Wise’s The Haunting – visual trick of the spooky trade. The shadows are dark and deep, the light of dubious use for visibility but of the greatest for atmosphere, and there’s hardly a minute going by without a perfectly applied Dutch angle. I’d love to see Branagh try his hand at an actual ghost story in this manner, but I’m perfectly happy with the half of one we get here.

So call me an Branagh Poirot apologist, but I do love this third of the man’s Poirot movies just as much as I did the first two.

In short: Macabre (1980)

Original title: Macabro

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Bad luck apparently comes in twos to Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers). After her lover is decapitated in a car accident and her little son is drowned by his sister Lucy (Veronica Zinny) in the bathtub – though everyone believes that to be an accident as well – Jane spends some time in a mental institution.

When she is released, she moves into a room in the mansion of blind Robert Duval (Stanko Molnar). Robert is attracted to his new tenant, though, surprisingly enough, only in a mildly creepy way. Jane seems to come on to him regularly as well, but generally in ways that suggest she doesn’t understand the concept of “blindness”. However, whenever intimacy seems to threaten, Lucy is visited by a mysterious man who invokes the loudest sex noises imaginable from her. Of course, we the audience have also witnessed her masturbating with the same wattage, so we will not be quite as surprised as Robert when we eventually learn the mysterious lover is actually the head of her dead lover she keeps in her icebox.

Things come to a head (tee-hee) because Lucy can’t stop torturing her mother.

Lamberto Bava’s first effort as a feature director after years of experience as an assistant director for his father, the great Mario Bava, and the great Dario Argento, is a bit of a mixed bag. It is certainly an at times stylish giallo, but not stylish enough to cover up how little is actually happening in much of its first acts. Everything and everyone seems to at least be established twice, so that things move at the slowest possible pace at any given moment.

The final act is a different thing: here, Bava junior very suddenly loses all inhibition. Not only is the narrative suddenly moving like a freight train crashing down a cliff, the film now leaves sense and good taste so far behind, they are somewhere in another dimension. It’s impressive, so much so I can’t even fault the first two acts too much anymore. Their slowness still isn’t necessary, mind you, but the contrast between them and the final act feels like one of those Insidious ghosts suddenly jumping out and screaming in your face turned into a movie.

To skew my critical faculties even more in Macabre’s favour, it ends on a final shot so ludicrous and awesome its existence could be justified by it alone.

The Ghost (1963)

Original title: Lo spettro

Somewhere in the Scottish countryside in 1910. Dr John Hichcock (Elio Jotta) suffers from a nearly complete paralysis of a kind respectable medicine has no way of curing. Hichcock himself has come up with experimental treatments using curare and other poisonous substances. Given his state, he can’t really experiment on himself, though. It has taken the good doctor quite some to time to find another physician willing to commit to these experiments, but when the film starts, Dr Charles Livingstone (Peter Baldwin) has been living in the mansion, testing Hichcock’s treatments for some time now. Until now without any success, unfortunately.

What Hichcock doesn’t know is that his wife Margaret (Barbara Steele) and Livingstone have started an affair. Margaret is working on convincing Livingstone to murder her husband. The younger doctor is after all excellently positioned to make it look like a death from natural causes, and Margaret would very much like to get rid of her old, mean-spirited husband but keep his money. Livingstone eventually agrees – the Power of Barbara Steele compels thee – but murdering a man and ending up happily ever after are different things.

For one, Hichcock hasn’t actually left all of his money to Margaret, and the couple need to do rather a lot of grubbing, perhaps adding a bit of grave robbery to their list of crimes, to get around that little problem by stealing the loot before anyone knows how much of it is there. Then there’s a less easily soluble bit of trouble – the couple appear to be haunted by Hichcock’s ghost, who shows himself in increasingly intense ways that put rather a lot of strain on the murderers’ relationship.

To my eyes, The Ghost is among director Riccardo Freda’s best films. For much of its running time, its combination of Gothic and thriller tropes produces more than just a pleasant frisson, though it certainly does that as well. The film clearly takes place in the same imagination space like Poe’s “The Black Cat” or “The Cask of Amontillado”, but Freda never quotes directly from this particularly Gothic forbear. Instead he is aiming for a shared mood of psychological derangement as expressed through the art of deep shadows and tellingly symbolic colour contrasts. Even in the mediocre print I’ve seen shots like that of Steele in full Victorian widow garb, clutching a bunch of red flowers to her chest while kneeling in front of Hichcock’s tomb are pretty spectacular to look at, suggesting all those darkly romantic ideas about beauty, death and guilt that are part and parcel of the poe-etic.

Steele is as wonderful as ever. Her inherent mix of attraction, weirdness and intensity always made her a spectacular presence in Gothic horror surroundings, so much so that looking at her actual characters as written tends to be beside the point.

The only element of The Ghost I’m not terribly happy with is its unsurprising revelation of the haunting being no such thing. Though, to be fair, the supposedly mundane explanation includes astral projection. This isn’t a deal-breaker, especially since it also sets up a very macabre ending for everyone involved, but a natural explanation feels like a bit of a cop out after a film has gone so out of its way to create an atmosphere of the gothic macabre.

Crypt of the Vampire (1964)

Original title: La cripta e l’incubo

As tradition holds it, centuries ago, the witch Scirra (Ursula Davis) cursed the noble family of the Karnsteins. Today, as of 18xx, Laura (Adriana Ambesi), daughter of the contemporary Count Karnstein (Christopher Lee), suffers under terrible nightmares during which various family members are killed, perhaps by herself. Unable to watch his daughter suffer, and fearing the old curse might be real, Karnstein sends for the scholar Friedrich Klauss (José Campo) hoping Klauss might find the truth about the life and death of Scilla, thereby either debunking the whole curse business or discovering a way to lift it.

Klauss isn’t the kind of scholar who spends a lot of time in the stacks, though, and seems to spend most of his days trying to flirt with Laura and his nights having mildly spooky encounters.

Things turn rather more dramatic once Laura and Klauss encounter a mother and daughter who were involved in a coach accident. The mother (Carla Calo) needs to get wherever she’s going badly, but her daughter Ljuba (Ursula Davis, hmm) is clearly in no state to travel with her now. Laura does of course offer for Ljuba to stay in their creepy old castle with the Karnsteins until her mother comes back, and so they have a new houseguest.

Laura falls for Ljuba in the least sub subtextual bit of lesbian attraction imaginable, and soon the two young women have hardly an eye for anyone but each other, throwing the heaviest of heavy looks, and spend much time in each other’s bedrooms at night. Klauss certainly has lost all attraction for Laura. At the same time, the young woman’s nightmares turn ever stranger. Eventually, members of the Karnstein family do indeed start dying like they do in her dreams.

Her father and Klauss soon begin to suspect Laura of being the killer, though they dare not quite express it; they are not terribly bright.

Camillo Mastrocinque’s Crypt of the Vampire is one of the more curious adaptation of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”. It puts the core of the tale into a very different Gothic horror tale about the kind of witchy revenge the makers of Italian Gothics were more than a little obsessed with. The filmmakers do realize that the lesbian angle is somewhat important to the tale, but I’m not too sure they understand how and why, so Le Fanu’s thematically much richer lesbian vampire tale becomes rather diluted between this and the witch angle. However, the film’s portrayal of the intense, clearly sexual infatuation between Laura and Ljuba is highly effective, carrying erotic tension as well as an undercurrent of danger.

As a narrative, Crypt leaves rather a lot to be desired – the pacing is often curious and somewhat plodding, things never quite seem to come together logically, and characters never seem to have much character. However, as a bit of Italian Gothic horror, little things like a logical narrative and thematic depth really aren’t what the film is aiming for – this really is best seen as a pure evocation of mood through the play of light and shadow, the vigorous use of tropes and clichés as anchors to cling to in a narrative that doesn’t provide for the more typical expectations of logical narrative development. Like most good pieces of Gothic horror – and this is certainly good, perhaps even great – the film’s great strength is is ability to create a mood of the eerie and the macabre, its ability to feel like a very peculiar dream, where you won’t remember silly things like a plot the day after having watched it, but will find some scenes – Laura’s final dream, the moment when Laura draws Ljuba into her darkened chamber and both women disappear into darkness, Christopher Lee’s face during the climactic staking, the curious doppelganger/mirror business with Klauss – returning to your mind’s eye from time to time for years to come.

In short: The Skin Under the Claws (1975)

Original title: La pelle sotto gli artigli

A murderer not just wearing black gloves but also a black stocking over his head stalks the streets of an Italian city. He seems predominantly interested in murdering prostitutes, but there’s something really strange going on with the killings. The state of the corpses, and the time of death never seem quite to match, and the forensics experts “help” Comissario Rinaldi (Ettore Ribotta), the man tasked with getting to the bottom of the case, with results like “the victim must have hugged a corpse shortly before her death”. Which is only of little help to an ongoing investigation, one has to admit.

Does this have anything to do with the nice discussions between physicians Professor Helmut (Gordon Mitchell), Dr Gianni Dani (Tino Boriani) and Dr Silvia Pieri (Geneviève Audry) about all kinds of mad science philosophy we pop into from time to time? Is it a good idea for Pieri to fall for Dani? And can you hypnotize a corpse?

Nobody will ever confuse Alessandro Santini’s The Skin Under the Claws with one of the great giallos. Santini’s direction is just too bland and the script too unfocussed even for a genre not known for its focus or internal logic. The film meanders between scenes for often only the vaguest of reasons, and even once you’ve learned what’s going on (which makes little sense, obviously, but no matter), it is often unclear why Santini decided to show us certain scenes at all. Usually in a giallo, scenes of dubious narrative worth are in because they look cool, or moody, to the director’s eye, or because they are an excuse to get some more nudity into the movie. Here, there’s really not enough style on screen to make this proposition believable, apart from the nudity bit.

Having said this, I also have to admit that I had a perfectly good time with the film. While there’s really very little of actual quality in it, it does try its damndest to deliver all the giallo and all the mad science tropes it can squeeze into its allotted ninety minutes. For the longstanding fan of the genre like me, this sort of thing has a certain draw. So much so, I’d call the somewhat bonkers last twenty minutes or so actually worth watching despite their complete lack of artistic merit, simply for their perfectly misguided attempts at bringing the traditional mad scientist into the giallo.

Three Films Make A Post: Evil has a new vessel…

Haunting of the Queen Mary (2023): From time to time, Gary Shore’s and Rebecca Harris’s tourist attraction based horror film gets up to a scene or two of effective, surrealist horror. More often then not, alas, this is one of those movies that confuses “surrealist” with “random”, so there are interminable scenes of the filmmakers just throwing random stuff at characters and audience.

Little of that stuff sticks or lands anywhere interesting, while the film drags through an interminable two hours of non-plot. Good actors like Alice Eve and Joel Fry stand around, do things with little relevance or connection, some dude who doesn’t look like him and isn’t too great of a dancer plays Fred Astaire (did I mention this thing is random?), and little of any actual consequence, impact or meaning happens.

The Red Monks aka I frati rossi (1988): Not really less confused but decidedly more concise is this Italian TV movie (“Presented by Lucio Fulci”) directed by Gianni Martucci. Its tale of sordidness and a bit of murder plays out before an early 40s background it can’t afford to actually portray (again comparable to Queen Mary) but really doesn’t seem to care about anyway. What the film does care about is to put a kind of cheapskate greatest hits of Italian Gothic horror and giallo tropes on screen, mix them up with the help of a surprisingly clever protagonist shift in the final act, and let its audience wallow nostalgically in the TV sleaze.

This will only work for viewers who are really into the beautiful ages of Italian genre cinema and its byways, but for those like us, it is a surprisingly fun little movie.

The Spiral Staircase (1975): This version of the Ethel Lina White thriller drags the somewhat venerable book into the age of the 70s British potboiler thriller. It isn’t exactly art, but Peter Collinson was pretty great at this sort of thing, rushing its protagonist (Jacqueline Bisset) through her private gauntlet of betrayal and mad men with verve and the joyful nastiness of the British thriller of that era.

From time to time, the film teeters on the brink of actual feminism, but whenever it does, Collinson appears to get distracted by needing to do something cheap and schlocky instead. I’m neither damning nor complaining here, for as much as I would have liked the whole affair to just be a little bit more clever than it ends up being, I never could – and certainly still won’t – resist a bit of good schlock. Plus, say what you will about the director, Collinson was pretty great at improbably, schlocky suspense sequences.