Una lucertola con la pelle di donna

Lucio Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is a very solid giallo but not the best from him. Working with a decent script and some solid actors, Fulci creates a truly bizarre mood with some nifty visuals and makes for quite a unique viewing experience. The hallucinations/dream sequences are well done, creepy and suspenseful and set the tone for an original mystery that unfolds mostly well and peppered with some solid set pieces along the way, two of which involve mutilated dogs and an array of nasty bats.

Fulci is a talented giallo filmmaker, his films Seven Notes in Black (aka The Psychic) and particularly Don't Torture a Duckling show he can effortlessly handle murder mysteries with relatively straight forward narratives and create much suspense without his trademark gore set pieces that characterized his later nonsensical Gothic horror films. In most respects; Lizard is a simple murder mystery laced with dreamlike visuals and is made out to be more complicated than it actually turns out to be. It's well written and constantly keeps the viewer guessing up until the very end. The conclusion not only makes sense but is wholly satisfying and makes the viewer want to return to the film in the near future. Also, it's quite sexy, with regular giallo femme Anita Strindberg showing off her goods.

At only 90 plus minutes the film somehow seems a bit overlong. Some scenes feel rather long winded and overly stretched. Supporting actors are rather lame and the English dub is not very good.

Overall Lizard is an interesting movie which just shows even further that Fulci should have stayed mostly within the thriller genre. Argento he's not but a very good giallo filmmaker nonetheless.