Murderock (1984)

Murderock (AKA Murder-Rock: Dancing Death) is a 1984 Lucio Fulci giallo.

The setting is a dance school in New York. This was 1984 so it has a bit of a Flashdance vibe. There’s fierce competition. Out of more than a dozen young dancers only three will be chosen for bigger things.

Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos) runs the class. She was once on the brink of a glittering career, until she was knocked over by a motorcyclist. She recovered, but not fully. Not fully enough to have a career as a dancer. Now she teaches.

One of the girls in her class is murdered, in a rather odd way - a hatpin through the heart.

Lieutenant Borges (Cosimo Cinieri) has insufficient evidence to make any moves. It appears likely that someone in the dance school was the killer. Likely, but not certain.

There’s a second murder. Another girl pupil. The same murder method.

There’s no certainty as to whether the killer is male or female. The victims are knocked out by chloroform first.

Candice is worried. Her boss Dick Gibson (Claudio Cassinelli) is worried. He knew some of the girl pupils. He knew them intimately. That makes him a suspect but there’s so much jealousy and backbiting within the school that everybody is a suspect.

Candice has strange dreams. There’s a man in the dreams trying to kill her. She knows the man from somewhere but she can’t remember having actually met him.

There are romantic entanglements between the various students as well as entanglements the students and the staff. There has been a relationship between Dick Gibson and Candice. Candice also has a hot new boyfriend, male model and unsuccessful actor George Webb (Ray Lovelock).

There’s another murder. This time the killer was photographed but frustratingly the photo shows nothing useful. The paranoia builds. Everyone is jumpy. And nobody believes that the killings have stopped.

There are a lot of interesting aspects about the way Fulci made this movie. It’s a giallo with almost no gore at all. I don’t mind that. There are other things that matter more in a giallo. Style is more important, and this movie has style. An atmosphere of indefinable menace matter, and this film has that. Hints of sexual motivations are essential in a giallo and they’re found here as well. And while there’s no gore there’s a hint of kinkiness in the murder method.

Many giallo fans consider plot coherence to be of minor importance but in this case the plot does all come together even if there are some offbeat outrageous elements. Offbeat and outrageous elements are always welcome in a giallo.

And there are plenty of clues. Lieutenant Borges does not rely on inspiration. He has spotted those clues and he has noted their significance. He’s a good cop. He notices clues and he thinks about them, about what they really mean.

When the solution is revealed it makes perfect sense. The motivations make sense.

I love the automated message that warns the students to vacate the premises within fifteen minutes every night before the whole school is locked down tight by electronic means. It adds to the suspicion that the murder was an inside job and it also adds a touch of paranoia. The school itself is a character in the story.

There are cameras everywhere in the school. Everybody is being watched by somebody - and not just by those authorised to be watching. There’s visual surveillance and auditory surveillance. This is a movie with a definite interest in voyeurism of various kinds.

I love the way Fulci shoots so many scenes in a fragmented way. The frame is fragmented. Some parts of a shot will be lit while other parts are unlit. Lights keep flashing on and and off. Music recordings switch on and off. It’s as if reality is being splintered. It’s very unsettling, and deliberately so.

I’m increasingly fond of 80s Fulci. This was a fascinating extremely varied phase of his career, and Murderock is Fulci in top form. Highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray looks great.

Other 80s Fulci films that I recommend - The Black Cat (1981), The Devil’s Honey (1986), Aenigma (1987).

Autopsy (1975)

Autopsy (Macchie solari) is an odd little 1975 giallo directed by Armando Crispino who also co-wrote the screenplay. It could be argued that it lacks several essential ingredients of the giallo genre. It doesn’t really slot neatly into any particular genre.

There has been a rash of rather gruesome suicides in Rome. This is of professional interest to young American pathologist Simona Sanna (Mimsy Farmer) whose particular field of study is suicide. Or more specifically, the ways to distinguish real suicides from fake suicides.

She has a slight personal interest in the subject when a young woman with whom she had a very brief acquaintance becomes the latest suicide victim.

The woman’s brother, a priest, thinks she was murdered but he has zero evidence.

It’s important to note that until very late in the film the viewer has also seen no evidence to suggest that any of the suicides are anything other than straightforward suicides.

Simona’s father keeps an apartment upstairs from Simona. She believes he uses it to entertain his young lady friends. He has a lot of young lady friends.

There are more suicides. Maybe it really is sun spots. Yes, that’s a theory that Simona has.

The priest, Father Paul Lenox, is hoping that Simona will help him to find evidence about his sister’s death.

There are half a dozen main characters all of whom are damaged or troubled or odd or unstable in some way. Any one of whom could be a potential murder suspect. If in fact there have been any murders. But in all cases their behaviour could have innocent explanations.

Simona’s father is hiding something but it might just be his womanising.

His creepy caretaker might just be a bit creepy.

Her father’s mistress Danielle (Angela Goodwin) might just be a scheming bitch.

Paul Lenox had been a racing car driver until an accident in which his car left the track and killed a dozen spectators. Paul spent some time in a mental hospital and then became a priest. He is still troubled by guilt, but that’s understandable, and now he also fees guilty that he was unable to save his sister.

Simona’s boyfriend Riccardo (Ray Lovelock) is a successful photographer and does not appear to be crazy at all. He’s simply anxious to get Simona into bed.

Simona has been having disturbing hallucinations in which corpses in the morgue come to life. It could be stress, or she could be crazy.

And of course it could be those sun spots!

The plot is convoluted but that’s one of the joys of Italian genre cinema. The important thing is that there are revelations about all the major characters and they’re psychologically plausible.

I like Mimsy Farmer. She had a touch of oddness that works for her here. She makes us uneasy and that’s a good thing.

One of the extras is an interview with the son of director Armando Crispino. His quotes from notes made by his father at the time make it clear that he was trying to avoid making a conventional giallo. It’s also clear that he was interested in the idea of sudden inexplicable epidemics of suicide and other extreme violent behaviours and was hoping to explore that that theme in the movies. And yes, there was a theory floating around at the time that sun spots might influence human behaviour. So those sun spots are not entirely an oddball gimmick thrown in to add a touch of spookiness.

Autopsy is a fascinating offbeat giallo-esque film. Highly recommended.

This movie is included in Vinegar Syndrome’s Forgotten Gialli Volume Three Blu-Ray boxed set. It gets a very satisfactory transfer.

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (1974)

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is a 1974 Spanish giallo starring Paul Naschy. 

Early on there is perhaps some doubt about its genre categorisation but it does get more and more giallo-esque as it goes.

Naschy is Gilles, a drifter looking for a job. The suggestion is made that the three sisters who live in a big house on the outskirts of the village might employ him, although the way the suggestion is put could lead one to suspect that working for the sisters might not be the best of ideas. 

He gets the job anyway and it’s a live-in job.

The eldest sister Claude (Diana Lorys) has a badly disfigured arm as the result of an accident. She is convinced that men now find her repulsive. Her sister Ivette (Maria Perschy) is wheelchair-bound, presumably as the result of the same accident. And then there’s the man-hungry Nicole (Eva León).

The sisters all take note of Gilles’ manly physique when they see stripped to the waist chopping firewood. They like what they see. So now we have Gilles living in a house with three women. They all seek potentially dangerous. All three seem crazy. And, for very different reasons, Claude and Nicole are so sexually frustrated that they’re climbing the walls.

Gilles is by no means immune to their feminine charms.

Then the nurse arrives and there’s something about her that makes us wonder if she’s everything that she seems to be.

A guy suddenly turns up and tries to kill Gilles.

Three cute teenage backpackers arrive in the village. They’re looking for fun. These girls spell fun M-E-N.

Gilles has disturbing dreams, or perhaps they’re flashbacks.

There’s plenty of potential now for mayhem, and there’s a brutal murder. It won’t be the last murder.

There are at least half a dozen very plausible suspects. All of these people are either twisted in some way, or we suspect that they may be twisted in some way. Their motives might be rational or totally irrational.

As usual with his movies Paul Naschy wrote the screenplay and for the most part he plays fair with us. The resolution gets a bit wild and outrageous but it works. For me a successful mystery story is one in which I find the ending believable because the clues pointing in the right direction were there and it feels psychological plausible. That’s the case here. There’s a respect for the conventions of the mystery genre, and that’s not always the case with a giallo.

There is some gore and there are some disturbing moments.

There’s not much in the way of nudity and sex but there is an all-pervasive atmosphere of unhealthy eroticism, and that applies to both the male and the female characters.

Naschy’s performance is very good. He is able to convince us that GiIles is a decent good-natured guy and he’s also able to convince us that there’s at least the possibility of some inner darkness. All of the performances are solid with Diana Lorys and Maria Perschy being particularly good. And Eva León as Nicole oozes sex is a delightfully over-the-top way.

Carlos Aured was the director and co-writer and he worked with Naschy several times. He does a fine stylish imaginative job here. The house in which the three sisters live is a perfect setting for a giallo and Aured takes every advantage of it.

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is a top-tier giallo. Highly recommended.

The transfer (in Shout! Factory’s Paul Naschy Collection Blu-Ray set) is in the 1.37 aspect ratio which is possibly incorrect but it looks OK.

I’ve reviewed Naschy’s other foray into the giallo genre, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (1975), and it’s very much worth seeing.

Knife of Ice (1972)

Knife of Ice (Il coltello di ghiaccio), released in 1972, was the fourth movie Umberto Lenzi made with star Carroll Baker and it’s a bit of a change of pace.

The first three movies are what I describe as proto-gialli - they have some of the style and feel of the later gialli but there are major differences. They’re stylish erotic thrillers that lack the blood and gore of the full-blown giallo. Knife of Ice is an interesting hybrid. Structurally it’s a giallo but in style and tone it’s a proto-giallo. And it has hints of the supernatural.

This was a Spanish-Italian co-production set in Spain. The bullfight credits sequence seems to have no connection to the rest of the movie but in fact it includes a clue.

Umberto Lenzi co-wrote the screenplay with Antonio Troiso. The original inspiration for this movie was Robert Siodmak’s 1946 classic The Spiral Staircase, a movie for which Lenzi had enormous admiration. Lenzi and Troiso made major changes to the plot so if you know how The Spiral Staircase ends that won’t help you in guessing the ending of Knife of Ice. Lenzi did not want to do a remake but rather a totally different movie taking the 1946 movie as a jumping-off point.

Martha Caldwell (Carroll Baker) arrives at her uncle’s home in Spain with her cousin and best friend Jenny Ascot (Ida Galli). Her uncle suffers from a severe heart complaint. He’s being treated by Dr Laurent (Alan Scott). It’s not quite clear if Dr Laurent is Martha’s boyfriend but they’re obviously close.

Then two murders take place. It seems there is a serial killer on the loose. The police find occult symbols and evidence of a Black Mass having taken place. There are signs that a satanic cult might be active. Two of the central characters have a great interest in the occult. There’s a crazy guy hanging around and he seems to be on the scene when a murder takes place. Inspector Duran (Franco Fantasia) certainly thinks he could be dealing with satanic cult murders.

Then the plot twists start to kick in. Regardless of the identity of the murderer or the motive there’s no doubt that Martha has been marked down for murder.

There’s no shortage of sinister suspects. There’s Martha’s occult-obsessed uncle, there’s the slightly creepy housekeeper, there’s the weird satanist guy, there’s the doctor, there’s the black-clad chauffeur.

Like a full-blown giallo this movie has multiple murders but there are no spectacular murder visual set-pieces. Lenzi is more interested in the atmosphere and in building a sense of dread. We feel that Martha is in great danger but we don’t know why and that adds to the dread.

This movie not only lacks gore, it also has no nudity or sex. That probably hurt it at the box office. Lenzi’s three previous movies with Carrol Baker were sexy thrillers and they were huge hits. Knife of Ice enjoyed much more modest commercial success.

Those earlier Lenzi-Baker movies were very stylish films with an atmosphere of glamour and decadence. In this film Lenzi is aiming for a very different feel. He throws in quite a few gothic horror tropes and the overwhelming tone of the movie is gothic. He keeps us in doubt as to whether it might turn out to be gothic horror or merely gothic melodrama but the gothic vibe is strong. There are plenty of moody creepy fog-bound scenes. It’s obvious that Lenzi was determined not to get stuck in a rut. A couple of years later he would turn the giallo genre upside-down and inside-out with his brilliant Spasmo.

Martha is mute. She isn’t deaf. She experienced an appalling shock as a child (seeing her parents killed in a train accident) and she hasn’t been able to speak since. It’s a challenging role for an actress but Carroll Baker does an excellent job.

Alan Scott is very dull as the doctor but the supporting players are very good.

Knife of Ice is low-key but enthralling and I enjoyed it immensely. Highly recommended.

Severin’s Blu-Ray includes something increasingly rare these days - genuinely worthwhile extras. There’s a longish and very informative interview with Lenzi and a very perceptive video essay by Stephen Thrower.

I’ve also reviewed the first three Lenzi-Baker collaborations, Orgasmo (AKA Paranoia, 1969), So Sweet...So Perverse (1969) and A Quiet Place To Kill (1970).

In the Eye of the Hurricane (1971)

In the Eye of the Hurricane is a 1971 giallo but it isn’t. It’s a proto-giallo which was a totally different genre. I’ll have more to say about that later.

This was a Spanish-Italian co-production with a Spanish director, José María Forqué. It was also released with the title The Fox with a Velvet Tail.

Ruth (Analía Gadé) has been cheating on her husband Michel (Tony Kendall). Now she wants to divorce him and shack up with her new lover, Paul (Jean Sorel). Michel is devastated. Paul is annoyed that Michel is taking it so badly - all he’s done is to steal another man’s wife. A gentleman would not make such a fuss over such a trivial matter.

Ruth and Paul set up house in Ruth’s villa. Paul’s slightly shady slightly mysterious friend Roland (Maurizio Bonuglia) keeps hanging around.

Ruth and Paul are very happy, apart from those silly accidents. But they were just accidents. It would be absurd to think that they attempts at murder. Ruth is however rather shaken up.

Then the major plot twists start to kick in. And there are some lovely plot twists in this movie.

An essential ingredient of a proto-giallo is an atmosphere of decadence and that’s present here. No-one is innocent in this movie. Ruth, the ostensible heroine, is after all cheating on her husband. This is a world of casual affairs and emotional betrayals. The pursuit of pleasure is everything. This is also a world of wealth and luxury.

I always like Jean Sorel in movies such as this. He had a low-key charm and a high likeability factor but he was always able to suggest that there just might be something beneath the surface of the characters he played. There’s a certain ambiguity. The charm might turn out to be all on the surface. His performance here is typical. Paul might turn out to be the villain, or the hero or the victim. All those possibilities seem quite plausible.

You absolutely have to watch the Italian-language version with English subtitles. The actress dubbing Analía Gadé on the English version has an atrocious shrieking voice which is entirely wrong for the character and which damages the movie severely. When you watch the Italian-language version you realise that Analía Gadé’s performance is actually rather good.

There’s plenty of sexual tension and also some potential romantic mysteries. Such as Danielle (Rosanna Yanni). Whose girlfriend is she? There’s some nudity and sex but it’s fairly mild.

I liked the swan. I’m not sure what his significance was but he adds a nice touch of visual oddness. I should also add that the swan survives the movie unscathed.

Now we get to the important matter. The Italian proto-giallos (or proto-gialli if you prefer) really did form a genre of their own, with very little in common with the full-blown giallo as it emerged in the 70s. Both genres owed quite a bit to Hitchcock but while the full-blown giallo owed a debt to the Hitchcock of Psycho the proto-giallo owed a lot more to the Hitchcock of Dial M for Murder. The proto-giallos were erotic suspense thrillers with none of the blood and gore we usually associate with the giallo, and none of the extravagant brutal murder scenes. They often include just a single murder. It’s the suspense, the erotic unease and the decadence that matter, not the violence. I personally much prefer the proto-giallo genre.

This is a gorgeous-looking film. It’s clear that a lot of thought and effort was put into the visuals. The acting performances by the four main characters are all excellent.

If you go into this movie expecting a giallo you’ll be disappointed, but if you have an appreciation for the particular charms of the proto-giallo genre you’ll find a great deal to enjoy in this movie. I enjoyed it immensely. Highly recommended.

I saw this movie on DVD (in which form it looks fine) but it’s now on Blu-Ray, as The Fox with a Velvet Tail, from Mondo Macabro. 88 Films have released in on Blu-Ray as well.

I’ve reviewed lots of these proto-giallos - Lucio Fulci’s One on Top of the Other (1969) and A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), Romolo Guerrieri’s The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968), Umberto Lenzi’s So Sweet, So Perverse (1969), Orgasmo (1969) and A Quiet Place To Kill (1970) and Tinto Brass’s Deadly Sweet (1967).

Hitch-Hike (1977)

Hitch-Hike is an odd movie in the filmography of Pasquale Festa Campanile, an Italian director who deserves to be a whole lot better known.

Although set in America this is an Italian movie, shot in Italy. You could describe it as an erotic thriller with perhaps a dash of neo-noir. Perhaps quite a bit of neo-noir. Since it’s Italian the temptation would be to describe it as a giallo but it isn’t. There is however plenty of psycho-sexual weirdness.

The basic setup has been used in various other movies but here it’s given some very disturbing and original twists. The standard version of this setup is that a normal married couple pick up a hitch-hiker who turns out to be a psycho killer bank robber on the run and the cross-country drive becomes a nightmare of terror.

The first twist here is that Italian reporter Walter Mancini (Franco Nero) and his wife Eve (Corinne Cléry) are not a normal married couple. They have a relationship based entirely on sex and it’s not healthy wholesome sex. They don’t make love. They engage in wild, dirty, sleazy, crazed animal couplings. Their ideas on pre-sex love talk are a bit unusual. She calls him a disgusting bastard. He calls her a bitch and a cheap whore. That gets them both excited and they have great sex. There are hints of sadomasochism to their relationship but to see it that way would be an over-simplification. Their marriage is perverse in lots of ways. It’s a successful marriage. They understand each other. They both get what they want from the relationship.

The hitch-hiker they pick up is Adam Konitz (David Hess). He’s a psychopath. He’s killed on many occasions. He will kill again. He’s used to the idea that he can get what he wants through violence and terror. But he hasn’t met people like Walter and Eve Mancini before. He’s crazy, but so are they. He’s dangerous, but so is Walter. And Eve is unpredictable.

There’s also something about the Mancinis’ marriage that Adam doesn’t know.

At first the movie follows the accepted pattern. Adam taunts Walter. He fondles Eve’s breasts. He feels her up. He promises that later he’ll give her the best lay she’s ever had. Eve is terrified. Walter is not terrified. He’s not a fool. Adam has a gun. Walter isn’t going to take crazy risks. And, as I said earlier, Eve is unpredictable. She’s not your regular dutiful suburban wife.

After a few killings along the way Adam decides he’s going to hire Walter. He wants Walter to write a book about him. Adam is very crazy.

Then the first wild plot twist kicks in. It’s followed quickly by another equally unexpected. And a third.

Of course sooner or later we know that Adam is going to want to have his way with Eve, especially after she taunts him by suggesting that maybe for him killing is a compensation for sexual inadequacy.

David Hess as Adam is your standard out-of-control psycho.

Franco Nero as Walter is suppressed rage mixed with contempt for Adam. It’s a crazy very edgy performance and it works.

Corinne Cléry as Eve is excellent - she makes sure that we can never be certain what Eve might do next. She captures her terror very well, and early on she really captures Eve’s wild sexual perversity.

There’s plenty of frontal nudity. Corinne Cléry never seemed to have too many inhibitions about taking her clothes off for a movie. And she looks gorgeous clothed or unclothed.

The shock effect of the violence stems mostly from its sudden eruptions, and the ruthlessness and insanity driving it.

Hitch-Hike takes a familiar setup but makes it really nasty and twisted and surprising and gives it a hard noir edge and a very satisfying multiple-shock ending. Highly recommended.

The old Blue Underground DVD (which is the edition I own) looks fine. More recently there have been several Blu-Ray releases.

While this movie is superficially very different from Pasquale Festa Campanile’s charming feelgood sophisticated sex comedy The Libertine (1968) and his brilliant surreal sadomasochistic melodrama The Slave (AKA Check to the Queen, 1969) there are some similarities - all three films deal with sexual perversity and all three are original and inventive.

The Pyjama Girl Case (1977)

The Pyjama Girl Case (La ragazza dal pigiama giallo) is an intriguing 1977 Italian crime thriller that one could be tempted to label as a giallo. I don’t think it is a giallo. I don’t think it can even be regarded as an unconventional giallo. It’s a murder mystery combined with a police procedural. There's not enough action to qualify it as poliziottesco. I think you could make a perfectly plausible case for regarding this movie as a neo-noir. It combines murder and sex, but in a way that strikes me as much more typical of the neo-noir than the giallo.

The movie is based on possibly the most famous murder case in Australian history. In 1934 a young woman’s body was found, clad in yellow pyjamas. At first the victim could not be identified. It took ten years to identify the woman and solve the case, although some doubts still remain. It was a media sensation at the time and in 1977 when this movie was made there were still plenty of people in Australia who remembered the pyjama girl case.

The movie changes some crucial details but the core of the story - the difficulty of identification and the fact that the girl’s body was put on public display in the hope that someone would identify it is based on historical fact.

This is an Italian movie but a lot of location shooting was done in Australia.

The movie begins with the discovery of a young woman’s body on a Sydney beach. The body had been doused in gasoline and set alight and the face is unidentifiable.

Homicide cop Inspector Timpson (Ray Milland) is retired but manages to get permission to assist in the investigation, much to the disgust of the officer officially in charge of the case.

The police have few clues. There are a couple of pieces of suggestive evidence but they are open to misinterpretation by the police, and by the viewer. There’s another clue so trivial that no-one but Inspector Timpson is even interested in it, but it’s the key to the mystery.

Ray Milland looks old but he’s supposed to be a crusty irascible old guy and he’s still Ray Milland and he’s as watchable as ever. He really is excellent.

Dalila Di Lazzaro makes an effective female lead. Mel Ferrer is excellent as an eminent but lecherous doctor.

Director-writer Flavio Mogherini didn’t have a huge career as a director and didn’t seem to do much else in the crime genre. This is not just an interesting movie but an interestingly constructed movie so it is perhaps a pity he didn’t do more films of this type. The structure is not just daring - it’s superbly executed.

The location shooting goes a bit overboard on Sydney tourist landmarks but on the whole it uses Sydney very effectively as a setting. It’s a beautifully shot movie.

Moving the time period from the 1930s to the 1970s works just fine. In 1977 the difficulty of identification and the lack of certain types of forensic evidence that would today be taken for granted would still have seemed plausible. I love the fact that the decision was made to retain Australia as the setting. The story would have worked in a different setting but the Australian setting gives it a distinctive feel.

The movie takes an extremely interesting and daring narrative approach. The nature of the narrative makes it incredibly difficult to talk about without risking spoilers. This movie really is better appreciated if you go into it knowing as little as possible about the plot so I’m going to dispense entirely with any discussion of the plot.

To be honest I’m not sure that any other narrative approach would have worked.

The pyjama girl’s story involves a lot of the elements that I would see as typically neo-noir - sexual betrayal, jealousy, suspicion. This movie does not feel at all like a giallo but it does feel somewhat like a precursor to later movies like Body Heat and Basic Instinct, and possibly even the 1981 The Postman Always Rings Twice. The Pyjama Girl Case has that same kind of tragic doom feel, with sex being the instrument of doom.

I’m not suggesting that Mogherini was consciously making a neo-noir but I suspect he was doing what a number of Hollywood directors were doing in the 70s, 80s and 90s (starting with Chinatown in 1974) - taking classic film noir as a starting point and taking advantage of the fact that they could now deal much more openly with the dark side of sexual desire. To me the two central characters are very much noir protagonists - they’re a mixture of good and bad and they’re spiralling down into the noir nightmare world and they can’t stop themselves. I also think that in Sydney in 1977 has much more of a neo-noir vibe than a giallo vibe.

The Pyjama Girl Case has its own flavour and it works extremely well. Very highly recommended.

The Pyjama Girl Case is included in Arrow’s Giallo Essentials Red Blu-Ray boxed set. The transfer is excellent and there are quite a few extras.

The Police are Blundering in the Dark (1974)

The Police are Blundering in the Dark is a 1974 Italian feature written and directed by Helia Colombo and it appears to be his only film credit. It’s easy to see why. This movie could have been called The Director is Blundering in the Dark. Despite its flaws it is morbidly fascinating and it has some definite oddball features that make it worth a look.

Incidentally the IMDb claims that Helia Colombo was a woman which is totally incorrect. Almost everything in this movie’s IMDb listing appears to be wrong.

We start with a woman getting a flat tyre on a lonely country road. She then gets butchered by an unknown assailant.

There’s a young couple, Lucia and Alberto, who have just been engaged as servants at a villa owned by a wealthy artist named Parrisi. Lucia and Alberto have an uneasy relationship. And the atmosphere at the villa is unsettling. Parrisi is confined to a wheelchair. His wife Eleonora (Halina Zalewska) is obviously sexually frustrated. Fortunately she is able to satisfy her sexual urges with their niece Sara. There’s also Dr Dalla, who spends a great deal of time at the villa when he’s not tending his gardens.

Another young woman, Enrichetta Blonde (a fine name for a character in a giallo), also has car trouble. She finds a roadside inn and rings her sleazy journalist boyfriend Giorgio (Joseph Arkim). He can’t come to pick her up because he’s busy in bed with another woman. By the time he arrives next morning it’s too late for poor Enrichetta Blonde.

At this stage Enrichetta’s body has not been found so Giorgio thinks she’s just gone missing. An entry in her diary leads him to Parrisi’s villa where he becomes a house guest. And finds himself in the middle of all kinds of weird psycho-sexual dramas. Giorgio is not a man to let opportunities slip by so he figures he might as well seduce both the housemaid and the niece.

As the movie progresses it becomes more incoherent but also much weirder. There is even a possible science fiction element.

Obviously there’s a psycho killer loose but there’s no point in suspecting characters who seem possibly crazy or sexually twisted because every character in this movie seems to be at least somewhat crazy and sexually twisted.

There’s the halfwit son of the old couple who run the inn. There’s Parrisi, whose artistic interests focus on the female nude. He’s eccentric and probably sexually dysfunctional. There’s his wife who is bedding his niece. Eleonora is also a diagnosed erotomaniac. The two servants, Lucia and Alberto, are shifty and seem at least slightly depraved. Lucia is a nymphomaniac so no man is safe with her around. The doctor is obsessed with flowers and is a bit of a worry. And Giorgio himself is an inveterate and amoral womaniser.

And did I mention the guy who has found a way to photograph people’s thoughts?

Colombo attempts a couple of spectacular murder set-pieces, with mixed success. Overall the violence level is fairly moderate. There is no shortage of bare breasts.

The movie has a very low-budget and slightly amateurish feel. Colombo’s inexperience as writer and director is painfully evident. At times this is an asset - he makes odd unexpected choices. Sometimes the choices are misguided but sometimes they’re weirdly interesting. The script is very slapdash. It has some very good ideas but their potential is not fully exploited. Most of the cast and crew, with a few exceptions, were also very inexperienced.

One thing this film has in its favour is a claustrophobic hothouse atmosphere of sleaze, kinkiness and sexual dysfunction.

The science fiction element (the thought photography machine) isn’t just thrown in to add a bit more strangeness. It plays a pivotal part in the plot.

Parrisi, the wildly eccentric artist, is the one character who really makes an impression.

This movie was shot in 1972 but not released until 1975. It made little impression at the box office.

The Police are Blundering in the Dark has to be considered a failure but at least it fails in interesting ways. Despite its flaws I found myself enjoying it. Tentatively recommended.

It’s included in Vinegar Syndrome’s Forgotten Gialli volume1 Blu-Ray boxed set, along with Trauma and Javier Aguirre’s disappointing The Killer Is One of Thirteen. The Police are Blundering in the Dark gets a reasonably decent transfer (to be fair it’s a movie that probably never looked all that great). The only extra is a short but informative audio essay by Rachel Nisbet.

The Possessed (1965)

The Possessed (La donna del lago) is included in Arrow’s Giallo Essentials Red Blu-Ray boxed set. It’s supposed to be a proto-giallo and I generally enjoy proto-giallos (or proto-gialli) even more than fullblown giallos. Whether this movie really qualifies for such a label remains to be seen.

A writer named Bernard (Peter Baldwin) has just broken up with his girlfriend. He arrives at the lakeside hotel owned by Mr Enrico. Bernard spent a lot of time there as a boy and he was there a year ago as well. He tells himself he just wants to relax and get some work done on his new novel. He isn’t even fooling himself. He has come to see Tilde.

Tilde is a maid at the hotel. We assume that she and Bernard had a love affair the previous year and that Bernard wants to rekindle the romance.

Those hopes are soon dashed. Tilde is dead. She committed suicide.

Bernard’s photographer pal Francesco suggests to Bernard that perhaps there was more to Tilde’s death.

At this point you expect Bernard to stay playing amateur detective but he does so in a very halfhearted manner. In fact he does everything in a very halfhearted manner. He does pick up a few possible clues. It does seem possible that Tilde was murdered.

We get a few flashbacks but it’s not always clear if certain scenes really happened or are really happening or are happening purely in Bernard’s mind.

The atmosphere at the hotel is uneasy. The marriage of Mr Enrico’s son Mario (Philippe Leroy) to Adriana (Pia Lindström) seems unhappy. Mr Enrico’s daughter Irma (Valentina Cortese) seems tense. Mr Enrico seems troubled.

There are people who seem to be trying to lead Bernard to the truth and others determined to do the exact opposite.

Interestingly we never find out exactly what went on between Bernard and Tilde. At first we assume they were lovers but later we come to doubt that. Perhaps it was just an obsession on Bernard’s part. We have to consider the possibility that they never actually met, although it appears that he had been spying on her. Everything he thinks he knows about her may be misinterpretations on his part. He’s a writer. He lives in a world of imagination. Of course there’s also the possibility they really were lovers.

The extraordinary ambiguity of his obsession with Tilde is by far the best thing about this movie.

This movie is not a giallo. It’s not a proto-giallo. It has no connection whatsoever with the giallo genre. The visual style is the polar opposite of giallo visual style. It’s in black-and-white and I personally do not believe a black-and-white movie can be a giallo. The visuals are moody, sombre, low-key. There’s none of the characteristic giallo flamboyance. It’s not even film noir. The Possessed has more of the feel of a Bergman movie.

There’s no glamour. No sexiness. No hints of decadence. There are none of the identifying features of the proto-giallo.

This is an art film. As a thriller it doesn’t really work. It lacks actual thrills. It lacks action, it lacks suspense and the murder mystery elements are predictable.

That’s not to say that it’s a bad movie. It’s not without interest as a psychological study, as a meditation on memory (and the unreliability of memory) and the blurring of the line between imagination and reality. It just isn’t even remotely a giallo and it isn’t the slightest bit giallo-esque. Not only is it not a giallo. It’s almost an anti-giallo - the absolute antithesis of everything that defines the giallo. Of course co-directors Luigi Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini were not trying to make a giallo since the giallo did not exist as a distinct entity in 1965. They were presumably trying to make an art movie.

Labelling it as a giallo was probably the only way to make a Blu-Ray release commercially viable. The Blu-Ray transfer looks pretty decent. There are some extras as well.

The Possessed is a moderately interesting art/crime film. Worth a look if you’re going to buy the boxed set anyway.

Luigi Bazzoni would later make an actual giallo, the extremely good The Fifth Cord (1971). Which just happens to also be included in the same Arrow Blu-Ray boxed set.

The Third Eye (1966)

Mino Guerrini’s The Third Eye (Il terzo occhio) is included in Arrow’s Gothic Fantastico Blu-Ray boxed set so you’re going to be expecting a gothic horror movie. That’s not what you’re going to get. There are some gothic touches but it’s a movie that defies easy categorisation. It’s not a giallo or an erotic thriller. It’s not a murder mystery. It’s perhaps best described as a Hitchcockian thriller in the mould of Psycho.

The young Count Mino Alberti (Franco Nero) is engaged to marry Laura (Erika Blanc). Things are very tense between them, which is our first indication that there’s a disturbing atmosphere at the Alberti ancestral villa. Mino’s mother, the Countess, hates Laura. She is a possessive mother and her relationship with her son is both strained and unhealthily intense. Another source of attention is the family’s one and only servant, Marta (Gioia Pascal). Marta may be in love with Mino, she may be ambitious and she is certainly resentful of the Countess.

So we have four people who are a bit strange, a bit too tightly wrapped and all involved in an emotional web of desires and resentments.

We’re not entirely surprised when a murder results but we are a little surprised about the consequences and each of the subsequent murders is slightly puzzling. The motivations are sometimes obvious, sometimes not so obvious, but it’s the reactions of the various characters to the murders that is really unsettling.

We’re dealing with multiple characters who are dangerously unstable, verging on unhinged. We’re dealing with complex motivations. There are jealousies. There are power struggles within this household. The members of the household who have power are determined to retain the whip hand, those without power want to assert their claims to power.

We’re dealing with a number of characters whose grip on reality may be tenuous. They might be deluded, or their understanding of the power balance may be faulty. It’s not easy to predict what they’ll do next. They don’t know themselves. And they can’t predict what other members of this human menagerie might do next.

There are obvious echoes of Psycho. Lots of echoes of Psycho.

There’s very little blood and no gore but there’s a lot of creepiness. Taxidermy certainly qualifies as creepy in my book, and in this movie it’s very creepy.

Things get weirder when Daniella turns up. I won’t spoil the movie by saying any more abut her.

Franco Nero’s performance is very odd but it gradually won me over. He is after all playing a young man who is prone to disassociation. His performance slowly becomes more disturbing.

The other players are very good. Erika Blanc is always a welcome sight in a movie like this.

It’s a very tame movie. Censorship in Italy was still very strict in 1966 and even the moments of partial nudity attracted the ire of those moral busybodies. They were also upset by the movie’s perversity and it is definitely a very perverse movie.

Mino Guerrini directed and co-wrote the script. He’s not a big name in Italian genre cinema but he does a fine job here. The black-and-white cinematography is effective.

The Villa Alberti would have made a fine setting for a gothic horror movie. This movie does not belong to that genre but, like Hitchcock’s Psycho, it has some of the feel of gothic horror.

I’m told that Joe D’Amato’s Beyond the Darkness (which I haven’t seen) is a remake, of sorts, of The Third Eye.

The Third Eye is a bit of an oddity but it’s an intriguing oddity and it is one of the more interesting Psycho rip-offs. It’s creepy and it has some effective scares and suspense. Recommended.

Arrow’s Blu-Ray release looks very nice and there are lots of extras. The Gothic Fantastico boxed set is very much worth buying.