Giornata nera per l'ariete / The Fifth Cord

While wandering home in a drunken state from a New Year's party alcoholic journalist Andrea Bild (Franco Nero) is one of the witnesses to the assault and robbery – possibly attempted murder – of a fellow guest, Joe Lubbock, an Australian teacher of English at a language institute.


An example of J&B that proves they were not paying for product placement, as Bild indulges in some drinking and driving in a way you cannot image a film getting away with now

Assigned to the story by his editor, Troversi, for reasons that become clearer as the sordid tale unfolds, Andrea's unofficial investigations continue as killer strikes again, murdering wealthy invalid Sofia Bini (Rossella Falk) – who just happens to be the wife of doctor Richard Bini (Raf Vallone / Renato Romano) who had earlier treated Lubbock.

The maniac also leaves a calling card in the form of a guanti neri with one finger cut off. Since a glove was also left with Lubbock, Bild and the police conjecture, not unreasonably, that the killer is not finished and that the next victim will be found with a missing two fingers...






The hand of doom and its handiwork

Discretely following Bini, Andrea witnesses him talking to another, younger man (Luciano Bartoli), who then gets into a car with his on-off girlfriend Lu (Pamela Tiffin). Back home, they have an uncomfortable exchange:

Andrea: Where have you been all this while?


Lu: Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies. I was at home studying. I have this, eh, history exam on Thursday. Didn't I tell you? What's wrong?


I telephoned your house and your mother said she hasn't seen you for over a month. You're a lyiing little whore! What kind of home did you come from!? Your mother didn't take care of you, your father's gathering mould in a state home for the aged and you play tramp in one sports car after another!

Was it a red sports car?

That's right

Well that car happens to belong to my brother Walter, you idiot!. You know, ever since you've been playing detective you just can't get anything right!

Next Andrea goes to see Lubbock, who clams up as another teacher and party guest, Vermont, enters. Outside, however, he confesses that he has since received threatening telephone calls, following which Bild receives one of his own...


A classic piece of giallo jet set imagery as Bild's estranged wife, complete with fur coat, leaves the city

Bild then finds that his investigations have also attracted the attention of someone wealthy and powerful – also the killer? – who tries uses his or her influence to have Troversi tell him to drop the story. This only encourages the headstrong reporter to continue following up leads, as does the subsequent murder of Troversi himself – his body also being found with the requisite glove, this time missing two fingers – and the way it seems to implicate him as far as the Inspector (Wolfgang Preiss) is concerned:

“We have an attempted murder and two murders. In all three instances you are one of the few people who knew all three victims. Funny coincidence, isn't it? Especially seeing as you have no alibi in any of these three cases. Still, we haven't decided to formulate charges against you – for the moment.”

Watching this post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage giallo from Luigi Bazzoni makes for a fascinating insight into the evolution of the form, using as it does Argento's cinematographer and composer Vittorio Storaro and Ennio Morricone there – two names that virtually guaranteed the visual and aural qualities of a film at this time regardless of the merits or otherwise of the work – and bringing in more familiar themes and visual motifs – voyeurism; the amateur detective; the sexual revolution (“if you want to get laid go ahead; you know it doesn't bother me,” Lu remarks in a note at one point); the black gloved killer; subjective killer's eye view; the park as beautiful place to die; an exciting mano a mano showdown in an abandoned factory at the finale; the omnipresent J&B bottle etc. – absent from the director's previous, more sui generis entry made prior to the generic codification of what giallo-as-film meant, circa 1971. (It would be interesting to read David McDonald Devine's 1967 source novel and see what the film-makers had added or subtracted from it.)

Bazzoni's third filone excursion, Le Orme, released at the tail end of the giallo boom in 1974, meanwhile represents something of fusion of its predecessors, insofar as it again features a key contributions from Storaro (Nicola Piovani handles the musical duties) but is more akin to La Donna del lago in terms of its tone, borderline arthouse sensibilities, and plot as a woman discovers she cannot account for a period of a few days and receives a ticket to a mysterious island that may holds the clue to the mystery.










More or less random examples of The Fifth's Cord's stunning visuals - surfaces and depth, refraction and reflection

What all three films have in common is their sheer quality. Film for film, I would say Bazzoni is perhaps the finest director to specialise in the form, with the possible exceptions of Argento and Bava. While his genre filmography may be considerably more limited than theirs, he does not have any films – Five Dolls for an August Moon, Cat o' Nine Tails – that require a special case be made.

Structurally The Fifth Cord is less complex than its predecessor, simply because the mystery begins with the attack on Lubbock and then proceeds from there rather than entailing the investigation of an event discretely in the past (i.e. its is more hard-boiled thriller than classical detective, at least in this regard). Nonetheless the opening sequences, with an unidentified fish-eye lens, irised POV camera – Bild? the killer? a general subjective (altered) state along the lines of a Pasolinian “Cinema of Poetry”? – and unsituated voice-over slightly reminiscent of that which opens Tenebrae and unidentified woman's scream establish a number of enigmas and bear close scrutiny in relation to that which follows.

“I am going to commit murder. I am going to kill another human being. How easy it is to say. Already I feel like a criminal. I've been thinking it over for weeks. But now that I have given voice to my evil intention I feel comfortably relaxed. Perhaps the deed itself will be an anticlimax. But I think not. Already I can imagine the excitement and the thrill, the pleasure I will experience as I stalk my victim. How much effort is required to strangle? Perhaps a knife would be better. No – I want to feel the trembling flesh in my hands as I squeeze the life out of the body. What if there's a struggle and the victim escapes? I must think of a way to avoid that. There must be no mistakes.”

Visually it is equally complex, blending the notion of restricted vision – note how many compositions place us on the outside of a situation, seeing the characters through glass on which fall shadows and reflections, or an almost Von Sternberg-style use of screens and overlaid textures – with Storaro's “painting in light” techniques and a use of modernist architecture and designs strongly reminiscent of Antonioni (also a key influence on Argento, making the lines of descent and influence harder to chart).






The modernist cityscape...


... and the Marienbad Gardens?

What we also get, by way of some insertion of more generic element, such as momentary flashback inserts and zooms in on significant details, is an enigma that is not only soluble but which presents a clear path. Coupled with a greater emphasis on suspense and violence – still relatively restrained, with as much emphasis on the aftermath as the crime – it perhaps lessens the case for The Fifth Cord as art, but does give it an immediacy and accessibility its predecessor somewhat lacked.

Aurally The Fifth Cord marks an improvement on La Donna del lago, whose somewhat conventional romantic themes and Blood and Black Lace crime jazz stylings were perhaps its weakest point, with Morricone contributing his usual combination of gentle easy listening and suspense themes – albeit with the former frequently marked by undercurrents of the latter.


White telephone and giallo light

Franco Nero makes for one of the genre's most ambiguous protagonists, his consistent gulping down of J&B and violent outbursts subverting the more usual connotations attached to the brand within the filone cinema of the period, even as their deeper rooted cause – a dislike for a father we never see – is very post-1968/9 Italian cinema.

The supporting players are uniformly well cast, bringing the right degrees of glamour, sophistication and / or suspicion to their characters.

Note that the Italian title – literally Black Days for the Arian, as in the sign of the zodiac – has resonances that are lacking in its English counterpart but, as with most cryptic titles of the time, is essentially something of a red herring itself whose meaning only emerges at the end.

Lo Squartatore di New York / The New York Ripper

A man out walking his dog finds a severed, rotting hand. It proves to belong to a model-actress-whatever who went missing a few weeks before, but with no real leads to go on the case is quickly all but forgotten by Lieutenant Williams - after all, "eleven people a day are murdered here in fun city, and over half of them are women."

A few weeks later another young woman is butchered on the Staten Island Ferry, her screams drowned out by its horn. The killer's modus operandi suggests it to be the work of the same maniac, "a lefty with a yen for slashing up young ladies."

With pressure from the higher-ups mounting, Williams enlists the help of psychology professor Paul Davis to profile his quarry - not necessarily a wise decision since the self-satisfied genius is himself set up as a suspect through his penchant for game-playing and dismissal of the predictable patterns by which Williams and policemen like him think...


Words guaranteed to put moral watchdogs on edge and delight the moral entrepreneurs among them #1


Words guaranteed to put moral watchdogs on edge and delight the moral entrepreneurs among them #2

Following yet another murder, that of a sex show performer at a 42nd street club - following which the duck-voiced killer taunts Williams, imparting an uncomfortably personal dimension to the case - there is an apparent break in the case as a known sexual sadist by the name of Mickey Scellenda, earlier seen attending the sex show and easily recognisable through a disfigured hand pursues student and prospective Olympian Fay Majors off the subway and into a deserted movie theatre.

Somehow, despite going into a fugue state - in which she images her attacker to be her boyfriend, Peter, a physicist - she manages to fend him off.

Unfortunately by the time the all-points-bulletin goes out on Scellenda he is already with another likely victim, Jane, the thrill-seeking wife of a crippled bourgeois whom he had earlier encountered at the sex show...


The Blade of the Ripper...


... and its handiwork #1


... and #2...

There are two problems any commentator faces with approaching this 1982 giallo from Lucio Fulci.

The first is the external baggage that accompanies it, especially in the UK context. Emerging at the height of the "video nasties" affair, the print of The New York Ripper was famously escorted out of the country by the authorities who flat out denied it the possibility of being released. While now available on DVD, that a scene of one of the ripper's victims being mutilated with a razor blade remains cut on account of running contrary to policy on images of sexualised violence and, possibly, the obscene publications act, seems telling - even if these cuts are minor compared to, say, those inflicted upon Deodato's rape-revenge entry House on the Edge of the Park.

In truth I don't think there's much that really needs to be said here. The film, like many others, had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I doubt has the film-makers had any misogynistic or puritanical agenda in mind as has been claimed. Rather, their goal was more likely to simply provide their target audience with new thrills; a task necessitating greater extremity than ever before in the wake of such mainstream slasher releases as Cruising and Dressed to Kill - which one suspects were more influential than contemporaneous Italian product - and in which, for better or worse, it has to be said that they succeeded admirably.










How to tell a story visually - Scellenda and Jane at the sex show, eyeing one another up and then both suspiciously vacating before the female performer is murdered backstage

The second is the gimmick of having the killer speak like a duck, which many commentators see as ruining the mood and inducing laughter. This is a more serious criticism to address, but again I think does not really detract from the film as much as some have claimed.

The specific logic behind the killer's speaking like a duck does make a kind of perverse sense in terms of their motives, whilst further connecting back into Fulci's giallo filmography in the form of Non si sevizia un paperino / Don't Torture a Duckling.

In terms of scoring, writing, performances and so forth the general impression one gets is, to paraphrase the police coroner, of "good efficient butchery," necessarily limited by constraints of time and money but horribly accomplished within these terms.

Likewise, while there's a sense of deja-vu to Fulci's techniques and tropes - rack focus, shock zooms, extreme close-ups of eyes are all present and correct, along with his that all but patented approach to graphic violence - these at least mark the film out as his.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is that the element of going through the motions that results from this is also in ironic accord with the pervasive worldview of The New York Ripper specifically and Fulci's oeuvre during this period generally, as one of disconnection, despair and all pervading hopelessness.












It could almost be from Suspiria until we get the broken bottle to crotch incident; one suspects that to render this sequence in a more naturalistic idiom would have been too much, even for most Fulci fans

"You're either the best or you're nothing" remarks one character; perhaps Fulci's problem was that he was the best at nothing - i.e. evoking absolute nihilism; perhaps part of the reaction to The New York Ripper stems from its uncomfortable realism.

At least when Liza and John faced the sea of darkness at the end of The Beyond they do so together, unlike those left alone as the credits roll here...

La Donna del lago / The Lady in the Lake

Following a terse telephone call to his girlfriend in which he tells her they can no longer be together, writer Bernard retreats to an isolated, perpetually gray and windswept town dominated by the lake at its centre – hardly the kind of place to go get away from it all.

Requesting the same room as last year from the hotel manager, it soon becomes apparent that Bernard has unfinished business in the place in the form of hotel chambermaid Tilde. The sight of her coat triggers pleasant memories – think Proustian madeleine – but she herself proves to be curiously, conspicuously absent in the flesh.

Bernard's inquiries as to her whereabouts produce non-committal answers from the hotel manager that sustain his dreams, until the town chemist, a hunchback, reveals the truth – Tilde is dead, an apparent suicide drowned in the lake.

Haunted by this revelation of loss, Bernard has the sense that something about it does not ring true. The Tilde he remembers was vivacious, hardly inclined to suicide. Digging deeper against the marked hostility of most of the townsfolk, but aided by the hunchback – who may of course have an agenda all of his own – Bernard gradually unearths the truth about his lost love and what befell her...






The graveyard in the woods

During the interregnum between Bava's Blood and Black Lace and Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage a number of directors tried their hands at the giallo. Most approached it squarely as a popular genre, seeking to put a new yellow gloss on old noir and Hitchcock models. A few however veered into more modernist and arthouse territory, most notably Luigi Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini here and Giulio Questi – who actually also has a co-writing credit – with Death Laid an Egg.


The funeral procession

Unlike Antonioni's more determinedly anti-giallo Blow Up from the same period, 1966-1967, these are, however, films which have never received much attention from the critical establishment, with what recognition there exists coming from some of more adventurous and discerning cult scholars like Craig Ledbetter and Adrian Luther-Smith and his Italian collaborators.










Examples of the Bazzoni and Rossellini's absolute control over their medium - everything is in here, with a purpose

If then, to paraphrase Ledbetter, Death Laid an Egg is Godard had directed a giallo while on acid, La Donna del lago / Lady in the Lake might be similarly glossed as the filone's riposte to Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad with a soupçon of Dreyer's Vampyr thrown in. In other words, it's a challenge to the unprepared viewer in its refusal to provide any easy ontology of images / clues with past, present, real and imaginary states co-existing on the same plane and intermingling seamlessly.


A black glove moment in a non-black glove example of the form

Although the film-makers use the voice-over extensively in adapting what one assumes must have been a relatively interior source novel by Giovanni Comisso the device never feels heavy-handed. Rather, what Bernard does not say / think proves as important as what he does, with both also contributing to the totality of a mise-en-scene with which what we don't see at all or are given a partial view of are as important / significant as anything else.

Note, for instance, the parallel between the opening shots of Bernard, back to us and mirrored in the glass so as to be almost a ghostly superimposition, and of the figure he sees wearing Tilde's distinctive chequered coat through a shop window.




Through / in a glass, darkly

Or take the way in which the vital reason behind Tilde's disappearance and the silence surrounding it is revealed not by one of the photographs Bernard scrutinises endlessly but by the hunchback's suggestively negative image of her, against which the two men are then themselves almost silhouetted.






The rhetoric of the image

Or the distaste that Bernard develops for the fish he is served – fish from the lake that trigger too many uncomfortable thoughts, poisoned as they are by Tilde's death.

An astonishingly beautiful and rich film that rewards every viewing with new subtleties and nuances, La Donna del lago lives up to its billing in Luther-Smith's Blood and Black Lace book as “a masterpiece” and demonstrates once more just what could be done with the form if more serious critics and popular audiences were willing to truly attempt to engage without prejudice.

Thanks to Paul for enabling me to see this rare classic, and for doing such a good job on the subtitles as well.

Some cult soundtracks

Here - http://my.opera.com/indrid%20cold/blog/

Another Italian horror blog

A warm welcome to http://bloodyitaliana.blogspot.com/

Name to the face

Who is this actor? I think I've seen him in Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade, where he plays a mechanic who gives his female clients a full service ("no one works the way he does"); Zombie, where he's the assistant at the morgue with the less than sharp scalpel, and City of the Living Dead, where he is one of the participants in the seance.

Slash Hits Volume 2

This second volume in Midnight Media's ongoing Slash Hits series, subtitled Teens in Trouble, covers the peak years of the slasher film, 1980 to 1982, and is of interest to fans of Italian genre cinema fans for an all-encompassing approach that sees the likes of Joe D'Amato's Absurd, Romano Scavolini's Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Ovidio G Assonitis's Madhouse, Fulci's The New York Ripper and Argento's Tenebrae being included alongside the more mainstream North American fare.

Taking a viewer's guide approach that recognises the main reasons many will have besides curiosity, nostalgia or completism for sitting through many of the examples contained within, each film is given ratings for boobs and blood.

These prove criteria by which Euro product often scores highly, The New York Ripper getting a maximum five on both scales and Tenebrae a four and a five - Friday the 13th gets only two and four by way of comparison.

Za-la-mort

One interesting fragment in Mary Wood's discussion of Italian noir is her mention of the character Za-la-Mort, featured with his female partner in crime Za-la-Vie in a silent-era Italian take off of Feuillade serials like Fantomas by Emilio Ghione, which she intriguingly mentions as forerunner to the likes of Diabolik.

Has anyone seen any of the Za-la-Mort films? Are they even available? They sound like a fascinating piece of film history that should be...


A nice reproduction of a German Za-la-Mort poster

European Film Noir

This book examines the history of film noir in five European national cinemas, those of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy. Each country and tradition gets two chapters, the first in each case covering classical noir and the second contemporary neo-noir, with the exception of Italy, given only one chapter for reasons that say a lot about the limited success of the volume as a whole as far as I was concerned.

While there is a lot of interesting detail in the individual chapters with discussion of little-known films and movements that are to be welcomed, a recurring sense I had throughout was that of authors trying to force recalcitrant national cinema texts into Hollywood specific noir frameworks or else producing loose, all encompassing and thus somewhat meaningless redefinitions of noir to suit.

Consider, for example, the opening remarks of Robert Murphy chapter on British noir:

“As film noir is a critical category constructed to deal with a specific group of Hollywood films, it would be surprising to find its characteristic traits fully mirrored in British films. But if one defines noir in terms of films that reveal the underbelly of society, expose baser emotions, concentrate on melodramatic events and represent the world as turbulent and often unjust, than [sic] a substantial proportion of British cinema falls within its scope.” (p. 84)

Thus, by bringing in a combination of violent popular entertainments, Victorian stage melodrama, German Expressionism, French Poetic Realism and American detective fiction he is able to present the Tod Slaughter and Edgar Wallace films of the 1930s in proto noir terms. I don't know about you, but I can't see Slaughter taking much inspiration from Marcel Carné, period.

Likewise Robert Stone on Spanish noir:

“There is no such thing as Spanish film noir. At least there is none to speak of until after the death of General Franco in 1975. During the forty years of the fascist dictatorship film noir was a bête noire, unable to show its face for fear of reprisals on its perpetrators [...] Except, as this chapter will argue, film noir in the Spain of the dictatorship was never more insidious and, even by its absence, was never more relevant.” (p. 185)

What we thus really seem to have are a variety of alternate crime cinema traditions – the Spanish policíacas, the French polar, the Italian giallo etc. that while engaging with noir and more particularly neo-noir at certain points, also exhibit as much if not more difference, but which sadly lack the name recognition value and cultural prestige to be considered worthy of serious consideration in their own terms. (Call it the magic of the marketplace.)

This is a picture that that also applies,unfortunately, in the case of Mary Wood's chapter on Italian film noir – tellingly introduced as “noir or giallo?” – as our own special area of interest.

There she first comments on the regrettable marginalisation of popular filone in discussions of the nation's cinema, noting for instance the way in which Fabio Giovannini's literary-based definition of noir and giallo fail to work in the case of Dario Argento, only to then emphasise the most important cinematic giallo tradition to be the giallo politico of leftist auteurs like Francesco Rosi.

Again, it is not that one has anything Wood's argument per se, more that it seems to offer a counter-hegemonic view of Italian cinema to only then snatch it away back from us once more. Yet, crucially, it is not about replacing discussion of Rosi with discussion of Argento. That does not got far enough, since it still sets auteur over filone and risks reifying the form. Rather, we need a more extensive, exhaustive investigation that ideally explores all the different currents of giallo cinema, including what almost was and might have been.

One interesting point that Wood makes in this regard – and one which is borne out by some of my own screenshots here and titles like La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo and La Casa del tappeto giallo – is the symbolic significance of the colour yellow, “the use of saturated yellow tones on film to connote hidden realities and to introduce the intertextual frame of generic conventions into the text.” (236).

If we're looking for a reason why the giallo film took a good 20 years after its noir counterpart to really emerge and why its greatest period of success came after colour had replaced black and white it's a tantalising starting point.

Likewise, might it offer a reason why this particular type of crime cinema should have peaked its Italy just as neo-noir was emerging elsewhere – a reason that, in turn, throw some light on why commentators who note the significance of a Klute fail to see its indebtedness to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage...

La Sorella di Ursula / The Curse of Ursula

This 1978 entry from Enzo Milioni occupies a position at the trash end of giallo spectrum with the likes of contemporaries such as Play Motel and Giallo a Venezia, with the same pervasive sense of being the work of no-talent filmmakers aiming squarely at the lowest common denominators of sex and violence.


Duck, you sucker!

It's odd, then, that in a rare lapse of tastelessness the filmmakers chose not to exploit their otherwise traditionally depicted killer's weapon of choice, a dildo, for shock value or as reductio ad absurdium of psychoanalytic style phallus-as-weapon logic, preferring instead to keep it in suggestive silhouette and focus on the victims' reactions and the bloody aftermath.

Tellingly – some shots prominently displaying the dildo serve to narrow down the list of suspects and shortcircuit the murder-mystery angle somewhat, even as the inclusion of a some more traditional black-gloved hand clutching a knife retrospectively shows at least an inkling of how to work with a Delirium-style multiple maniac dynamic – the first murder neatly coincides with the arrival of sisters Ursula and Dagmar Beyne on the scene, an out of season Mediterranean coastal resort, the former looking for fun and the latter seemingly determined to do her neurotic best to disapprove of and complain about everyone and everything...








More classic giallo imagery

We soon learn that the hotel and the accompanying nightclub, with star attraction Stella Shining – cue atrocious music and worse lip-synching and performance – are doing less than stellar business, a fact that makes it hard to explain why manager Roberto should seem so keen to turn away potential guests.

Maybe it's that his soon-to-be-ex wife, Vanessa, who arrives at the place with new female lover in tow, is unwilling to let him have the place as part of their divorce settlement.

Maybe it's also something to do with the drugs trafficking operation that forms a subplot, in turn explaining why some may not want the police looking too closely even if on initial inspection it cannot account for the paucity of official investigations as the body count rises...




Franco-esque artistry

As a number of commentators have remarked, La Sorella di Ursula / The Curse of Ursula has an aesthetic frequently reminiscent of a Jess Franco film, whether it be the general languidness of the mise en scène; random shots of the sea and other non-signifying details; overuse of an ill-matched selection of sleazy listening cues; obligatory nightclub routine, or simply the endless succession of singularly unerotic sex scenes that could probably be recut to be harder or softer as individual markets demanded.






Got wood?!

Unlike a Franco or Polselli film, however, there is little sense of a more consciously experimental or subversive aesthetic at work, of a knowing camp / kitsch / trash sensibility in which, for instance, Star's act would be made as deliberately outre as possible and the audience would be let in on the joke. As it is, however, Curse of Ursula takes itself too seriously and as a result isn't nearly as fun as its the dildo killer summation might make it sound.


In an ironic piece of life imitating art / art imitating life casting the tragic Marc Porel plays a junkie

Some comments on the film at IMDB: http://imdb.com/title/tt0078300/usercomments

Sound Dimensions

I've been listening to a bit to Sound Dimensions - Music for Images and Imagination, a six-CD reissue set of library music Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai recorded in the early 1970s recently. It's pretty experimental stuff that would be perfectly at home over a suspense scene in a post-The Bird with the Crystal Plumage giallo, more uneasy listening than anything else.

Bruno Mattei

Seems that Bruno Mattei has died. Coincidentally I've watched three of his films recently - SS Girls and Women's Camp 119 for the first time, and Hell of the Living Dead for the umpteenth. I think there was also a recent view on which he worked as editor.

It seems, as with the deaths of Fulci and D'Amato, to signal the passing of an era in Italian exploitation - all the more so since he kept active right until the end.

While I would never say Mattei's films were good, they could usually be relied upon to deliver the goods. Indeed, part of the problem I had with Women's Camp 119 vis-a-vis SS Girls was that it seemed to be trying to something more than a straight ahead exploitationer. With SS Girls you could enjoy its camp excesses and the sheer ridiculousness of the sub-Salon Kitty shenanigans, whereas with Women's Camp 119 those same aspects undercut any sense of seriousness.

A Violent Professional

Just ordered this new book about everyone's favourite maniac, Luciano Rossi, from reliable genre publishers FAB Press. It's by Kier-La Janisse, whom I remember introducing a double bill of Blood and Black Lace and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage at Dead by Dawn a number of years back - a cinema experience I will never forget.

Colour me excited

"The first and most quoted book on the British horror movie, David Pirie s acclaimed 'A Heritage of Horror' has long been regarded as a trail-blazing classic, having the force of a revelation , according to one recent study of the subject, inspirational in another. It was the first book to detect and analyse the roots of British horror, identifying it as the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own and was consequnetly heralded by film-makers like Michael Powell and Martin Scorsese. But though it inspired a revaluation of the form, 'Heritage' has been unavailable for so long that copies have changed hands at very high prices. Now at last, David Pirie updates and revises his original work in 'A New Heritage of Horror', bringing the story right into the new century, examining all that has happened since (including the latest horror boom inaugurated by films like 'The Others') and uncovering fresh documentation from the original files to add more revelations about the history of UK horror and Hammer Films, not least the largely untold story of their desperate battles against censorship. 'A New Heritage of Horror' promises to be one of the key film books of 2007"

Schreie in der Nacht

This sounds like a very interesting film from a giallo/krimi crossover perspective: written, directed and produced by Antonio Margheriti, an Italian-West German co-production starring Joachim Fuchsberger, Marianne Koch, Claudio Camaso, Dominique Boschero and Luciano Pigozzi.

Mi Caro Assassino / My Dear Killer

"What happened is unpleasantly obvious, but how and why it happened is something else"

What was ex-insurance investigator Paradisi doing hiring an excavator to nose around in a recently flooded quarry?

Why did his investigations compel someone to have him murdered – decapitation by digger jaw, no less – and then murder the digger operator, Mancini, making it look like he had committed suicide as a traumatised response to the incident?

What relation do the murders bear to an unsolved kidnapping / murder case from last year involving a wealthy industrialist and his young daughter?

These are the questions which the dogged Inspector Peretti (George Hilton) seeks to answer in this 1971 giallo from Tonino Valerii, a director better known for spaghetti westerns like Day of Anger and My Name is Nobody but who, like many talented craftsman, proved his versatility and adaptability within a range of genres.






The titles make you wonder if this is a spaghetti western or a giallo?


But it's a giallo - in which Django can be seen playing on the TV

The key to his success and the key to understanding his work - at least from what I have seen of it - is, I think, a pervasive grown-up sensibility that endeavours to go beyond the lowest common denominator.

Thus, while there are obvious concessions to genre expectations here - quirky and sleazy supporting characters; subjective killers-eye handheld camera and brutal murders by a black-gloved assasin etc. - there is just something different about the way Valerii uses them that raises his work out of the conventional.


Giallo...


... giallo and black gloves...


... and Donald Duck (well, Scrooge McDuck); the child's schoolbook drawing contains a vital clue a la Deep Red

In terms of quirky it's that the elderly couple who cohabit in a shack by the quarry also serve to provide further commentary on the changing gender politics of the time, in that the relationship between Peretti and his own partner Anna is strained not only by his dedication to his work - the cliche of the cop married to the job - but also because she has a career of her own and is unwilling to meekly accede to a traditional anatomy-as-destiny role:

"I suppose I'm being silly, but it's the first time in more than a month you and I have had an evening like this. Like Wanda, the girl who used to come to my place to clean. She worked all day long. Her husband worked all night long. That means for them to have a baby, Luca, things had to give one way or another! We've got to spend more time together, before our relationship is beyond repair."

"You know, you've screwed up our last three evenings together like this. What about when I call?! 'This is an automatic recording: I'm out of the house right now'"

In terms of sleazy it's that we have situations and characters that are too unpleasant and disturbing than to be read as sources of humour, with one supporting character / suspect clearly a paedophile and another the victim of blackmail on account of being caught in flagrante with a 12 year old in a brothel.

In terms of the violence it's not just that it is hard-hitting - the murder of a schoolteacher with a circular saw is particularly wince-inducing - but also that it is shown to have consequences. Oddly, we don't see the murder of the digger operator, only Peretti's reconstruction of what must have happened, while the murder of her husband and daughter has reduced the industrialist's widow, unable to accept the (abject) reality of what has happened to an amnesiac, blank state.






"When they found them they were already in an advanced state of decomposition. The postmortem showed that Allessando Morosi had a fractured skull and had died violently. The girl had died of starvation. Her hands and feet had been tied with wire. It was obvious that she had suffered terribly."

As a murder-mystery the film is perhaps less satisfactory. While there's a nice interplay / dialogue / dialectic between the different detective modes discussed by Todorov, with Peretti's investigations proceeding by an almost literal process of elimination through the killer's remaining one step ahead of him until the Agatha Christie-style denouement in which the inspector assembles all the suspects in a room and forces the guilty individual to reveal their hand, some viewers may find that the detective's moments of insight, as signalled by a sudden insert or zoom, are somewhat heavy-handed and may short circuit our own involvement.




Leaps of induction and deduction abound - from the torn corner of a clue fragment to its source in one shot

Against this, however, we must also note some nice visual touches: the way in which Valerii racks focus through the hood ornament of the killer's car, the BMW logo serving like a kind of gunsight; or the deft way in which one of the numerous flashbacks is introduced the camera panning through the same space to a different time. Those pursuing a psychoanalytic approach to the filone will no doubt find the importance accorded a (circular) mirror within the proceedings to be ripe for interpretation. ("You should take a look at yourself in the mirror," says Anna to Luca; at issue is what this self really is...)

George Hilton proves himself a solid dramatic lead once more, with interest afforded through the way in which he is here playing the hero rather the ambiguous types he so frequently essayed for Sergio Martino and others, although William Berger fans should note that, while second billed, his role is really little more than a cameo. The rest of the cast - Marilu Tolo, Helga Line, Patty Shepard etc. - are typically reliable, whilst the IMDB had Lara Wendel down as playing the kidnapped girl under another name; can anyone confirm?

Ennio Morricone's subdued score, firmly in experimental soundscape mode, is another asset. As is often the case with his work within the filone, it is not necessarily the sort of thing to be listened to in isolation (in both senses of that term) but contributes immensely to the mood of the whole. (As a little gedanken experiment, try imagining the same titles, whose font seems very spaghetti western, with a Morricone score for that genre.)

All told, not quite a masterpiece of the form, but certainly the kind of film that could be used to make the case against its detractors.

Il Profumo della signora in giallo?

Just something I happened upon on Ebay

Schoolgirl Killer poster

Found this somewhere on the net - maybe Ebay? Classic exploitation - sell the sizzle, not the steak, as David Friedman puts it

Nude... si muore / School Girl Killer

A black gloved killer strangles an unidentified woman in the bath, stuffs her naked body into a trunk and puts it on the train for the south of France. The next thing we see is the trunk atop the minibus from St Hilda's School for Girls - what is it with St Hilda; didn't the college in What Have You Done to Solange have the same patron saint? - whilst inside some of the exclusive boarding school's staff are introduced to us: Sr Brazi, the new gym teacher; Richard Barrett, the riding teacher, "very popular with the girls"; Misses Martin and Clay and handyman La Foret.


Insert finishing school joke here; I find it interesting that the 's is perhaps missing from St Hilda's - possible coincidental parallels with the fashion house sign in Blood and Black Lace?

As it turns out there about as many of them as pupils, although this staff:student ratio is one that also proves to be in something of a state of flux when it emerges that the still unidentified killer has in fact accompanied his or her luggage.

The first victim is Betty-Ann, who strays where she shouldn't into the storeroom containing the trunk, but is assumed by the headmistress to have run away. Rather than calling in the authorities, she has the staff conduct a search of the grounds, while the students are ordered to stay in their rooms but proceed, inevitably, to sneak out for secret rendezvous and the like.




Compare this to the shower murder in Crimes of the Black Cat - what a difference a few years makes; or Psycho as thriller model and Psycho as slasher model

Betty-Ann is then followed by Cynthia in what could be a case of mistaken identity, insofar as Lucille had entered the showers a few moments before. Faced with a body, the headmistress has no option but to call in the police, while the Nancy Drew style Jill decides to conduct her own investigation. This is a wise move seeing as the chief investigating officer, as played by Michael Rennie in what-am-I-doing-here mode, needs all the help he can get. Suspicion at first falls upon the La Foret, incarnated by the ever-shifty Alan Collins / Luciano Pigozzi in sweaty peeping tom mode, but then he too gets offed...

Margheriti's direction is comparatively restrained, his mise-en-scene more classical than flashy pop modernist. There's a calculated elegance to his compositions and camera movements that evinces a professional very much in control of his medium at work.

A similar of restraint carries through into the depictions of sex and violence, with as much suggested as shown and a sense of decorum prevailing as far as shower scenes and burgeoning schoolgirl sexuality are concerned. (Silvia Dioniso plays one of the schoolgirls, but not such that you'd see her as a forerunner of Waves of Lust as the like.)




The male voyeur becomes the subject of the female gaze; note that Jill is not punished for this usurpation of a purportedly masculine prerogative

Genre scholars will no doubt want to compare and contrast with Solange, released a mere four years later, in this regard - especially since our Schoolgirl Killer, whose identity is probably the film's biggest surprise, proves to have a financial rather than psychosexual or revenge motivation, although disappointingly we don't really have the opportunity to solve the case for ourselves.




More post-Blood and Black Lace, pre-Bird with the Crystal Plumage black glove as metonymic killer stand (hand?) in

Likewise, the involvement of Mario Bava in writing the story cannot but lead to imagining what might have been in terms of a school set version of Blood and Black Lace, perhaps as riposte to the Kriminal installment Omicidio al riformatorio that had in turn riffed on his film within the context of a reform school (cf. http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/fumetti.html)


Guess what's used to kill Pigozzi...


Lucille tries to persuade another student to double for her, as Margheriti's composition futher makes the point

At any rate, Carlo Savina's bright and breezy score further conveys the sense that nothing here is really to taken that seriously - another highlight in this regard is a figure in a wetsuit trying to drown one of the girls in the school's outdoor swimming pool, the kind of bizarre idea that only makes sense in a context where Brazi is a scuba expert and agues for lessons in it as a vital part of the girls' education - while the theme music, Nightmare, is more likely to raise a smile than induce fear.

Not, then, the kind of giallo to read too much into, but certainly a fun way to spend an hour and a half.

Hmmm

Anyone know anything about this and what they classify as a European Horror Film in the first place? Expressionist classics? Hammer? Krimis? Seytan, the Turkish Exorcist?

Attori a mano armata

This Mediane / Amarkord book and CD combo - the disc is housed in the inside back cover - presents an ideal introduction to the men, music and ephemera of the 1970s Italian cop film.

But, speaking as someone with a passing familiarity with the genre - i.e. I've got some of the previous compilations and seen most of what's available on DVD with English sub or dub, but not gone to the lengths of tracking down old videos or LPs - it's less satisfactory.

If you're like me you'll know who a Ray Lovelock or Maurizio Merli is and want more on the bit and supporting players, those distinctive types whose omnipresence is as much a part of the whole world of these films as, say, a Michael Ripper is to Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in Hammer horror.

Much the same goes for the music. While it's good to have a proper version of Guido and Maurizio De Angelis's title theme for Castellari's The Big Racket to go alongside that MP3 ripped direct from the film, there are elsewhere too many of the same over-familiar selections - Micalizzi's Folk and Violence, Bacalov's Summertime Killer, Osanna's Preludio etc.

Perhaps the problem is that when the compilation strays from these familiar waters - that melange of wacka-wacka and chicken scratch guitar, funky polyrhythms, fat analog mono synths, jazz flute, bad ass brass, quaintly inflected English etc. - the selections are generally less inspiring.

Cipriani's Papaya from La polizia chiede aiuto is certainly a nice piece of easy listening to be sure, but it just feels too party scene for me.

Likewise, Franco Campanino's The Climber, from the film of the same name, seeks to channel the spirit of Barry White or Isaac Hayes through Jessy's vocals, while Alessandro Alessandroni's Sangue di sbirro is pretty much an instrumental Shaft knock-off - neither is bad, just not as evocative of that specific time, place and mood as they could have been.

What remains to justify the purchase are the poster, album and other artwork in the booklet and the other less familiar pieces - including, oddly enough, the one new track, Mecco Guidi's "Giulia 1600," a successful channeling of the spirit and sound of the era.

Don't get me wrong - I'm glad I got Attori a mano armata, that it's out there and I hope it's successful enough for more volumes like it to come out; it's just I'm not entirely sure how many casual fans there are and whether there's enough in it for those who are more hardcore.

The Third Part of the Night

A distinct lack of updates of late, as I have been very busy. Time to rectify that somewhat...

Last night I went to see the film The Third Part of the Night, the first film by Andrej Zulawski. It's just been released on DVD in the UK, and Zulawski was doing a little promotional tour for it, introducing the screening and doing a Q&A afterwards.

It's only the third Zulawski film I've seen after La Fidelite and Possession - which Argento has praised, although in the interview in Eyeball Zulawski was pretty dismissive of The Stendhal Syndrome; he's the kind of guy who's not afraid to ruffle some feathers - and probably now my favourite.

Set against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation of Poland, it has a fragmented narrative in which reality and dream intertwine, with symbolist and surrealist elements, sometimes perhaps a touch overdone (one doorframe has a illuminati triangle above it; I thought it enough that it was there for us to notice, but that it didn't need to be emphasised; likewise the recurring crucifixes and rocking horses).

I'd reductively describe it as The Pianist crossed with Mirror or Point Blank with borrowings from Vampyr and (maybe) Jean Painleve, although as these scrabblings for reference points suggest Zulawski's really one of those sui generis filmmakers who creates his own universe of meanings.

Likewise, there are are probably sources closer to home there, with that usual difficulty of watching a film from another culture through a limited set of reference points, as when in the Q&A he referred to some Polish surrealists ouwith the familiar western / southern European pantheon.

At any rate, it made me want to watch Possession again and gets the thumbs up.

Nude... si muore

Dark Sky films, who have released some interesting horror stuff in recent months - I can recommend their Slaughter of the Vampires, Count Dracula and Berman / Baker double bill of Blood of the Vampire and The Hellfire Club - have also put out the Bava scripted, Margheriti directed Nude... si muore:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063370/

Not either man's finest hour and a half by any means as I remember it - I really should do a proper review some day - but is an enjoyable enough post-Bava, pre-Argento mid-late 1960s giallo as I remember it, with the ever-reliable Alan Collins / Luciano Pigozzi as a perving handyman and a sleuthing schoolgirl detective whose father is... well, watch it and find out.

Given that the packaging has the banner "The Antonio Margheriti Collection" I wonder what else may be forthcoming should it prove successful.

This guy is a friend of ours...

A new euro cult cinema blog:

http://thecelluloidcesspool.blogspot.com/

We're not worthy

Found via Latarnia / Euro Film Score society - a seriously amazing collection of gialli material:

http://www.das-kompendium.com/bbs/index.php/topic,3093.0.html

Capsule reviews

Via a DVD trade - hi Eugene! - I recently got another batch of obscure gialli. They're the kind of things I don't necessarily feel warrant full reviews, but are worth giving a few summary notes on:

...a tutte le auto della polizia / The Maniac Responsible

A schoolgirl from a good family goes missing and then turns up dead, a bullet in her head. The police investigation soon uncovers a web of intrigue involving men in high places, while the killer ruthlessly moves to cover his tracks.

Another giallo-poliziotto schoolgirls-in-peril entry along the lines of Dallamano's trilogy, with that same combination of political critique and awkward / hypocritical approach to its subject matter, condemning sexual exploitation whilst parading young women in various states of undress before us with that familiar attraction / repulsion dynamic resulting.

The cast isn't as good as What Have You Done to Your Daughters, however, with Antonio Sabato - an actor who I must confess to not particularly liking, however - no match for Mario Adorf and Luciana Paluzzi pretty dropping out of the action halfway through, her eye-candy function evidently fulfilled.

Enrico Mario Salerno is good as always, while Mario Caiano's direction is typically effective.

Coriolano Gori's soundtrack relies overmuch on one theme. This wouldn't be so bad if it was good, but while the bass and percussion certainly provide it with a Cipriani-style propulsion, the synthesiser noodling atop this foundation is uninspired and just sounds cheap, like the worst of Marcello Giombini.

La Lunga spiaggia fredda / Lonely Violent Beach

Vacationing at an isolated beach house, Jane and Harry are terrorised by a gang of four drifters, led by the troubled Freddie. Freddie rapes Jane - sound like an X-certificate version of Rainbow! - with predictably dubious consequences as she then falls for him, impelling Harry to prove that he is a man...

Written and directed by Ernesto Gastaldi, presumably as a vehicle for his wife Maya Maryl to showcase her dramatic skills, this is an interesting if not entirely successful combination of social comment on the failure of the 1960s and revenge / territorialist dynamics to emerge as something reminiscent of another Italian take on Last House on the Left with elements of Straw Dogs and The Wild One - what is Robert Hoffmann's Freddie, evidently from a good family, rebelling against but everything and nothing? - thrown into the mix.

The visual style of the film is more Leone than Peckinpah, however, with the initial showdown between Harry and the gang is presented as a parody of a corrida, all rhythmic cross-cutting, close-ups and rising testosterone levels.

Performances, direction and technical aspects are fine, while the score - Stelvio Cipriani with Nora Orlandi vocalism, no less - further helps elevate the piece above its obviously low budget.

And some more public domain films

Hercules Against the Moon Men:
http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/nshowmovie.html?movieid=207

Goliath and the Dragon:
http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/nshowmovie.html?movieid=935

Hercules Unchained:
http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/nshowmovie.html?movieid=201

Hercules and the Captive Women:
http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/nshowmovie.html?movieid=208

Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon:
http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/nshowmovie.html?movieid=200

Horrors of Spider Island:
http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/nshowmovie.html?movieid=40

Sure there must be some pepla or Barbara Valentin fans out there...

Some public domain films

Apparently all are public domain legal bittorrent downloads.

Metamorphosis:
http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/nshowmovie.html?movieid=750

Boot Hill:
http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/nshowmovie.html?movieid=707

Gunfight at Red Sands:
http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/nshowmovie.html?movieid=302

Crypt of the Living Dead:
http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/nshowmovie.html?movieid=837

Morricone link

http://www.chimai.com/ - lots of information on the man and his music

Il Controfigura / Il Diavolo nel cervello

These are two rather different gialli, operating more at the psychological thriller level and emphasising character and narrative over most of the the more usual filone ingredients as they existed in the early 1970s. This also, unfortunately, has the consequence of making them more difficult to discuss without introducing spoilers to this review. What we can say, however, is that in both cases the final revelation comes as a genuine surprise yet, crucially, also makes sense within the context of the whole to give new retrospective meanings to previous actions and imparting deeper, more tragic resonances rarely seen in more run of the mill genre entries.

Both films have relatively complex narrative structures, La Controfigura / The Double beginning at the end with the death of its protagonist to proceed via flashback in classic Sunset Boulevard or Double Indemnity manner to provide the why to accompany the who that we already know; Il Diavolo nel cervello / The Devil in the Brain providing an unusually low key take on the classic primal scene type scenario - a mother walks in to find her son standing over the body of his father, smoking gun in hand - with multiple re/deconstructions of what actually happened, a la Rashomon. (Again these are not idle references, more suggesting something of the domain within which the films are operating; note also the gun rather than the blade in a black gloved hand and that no less than Suso Cecchi d'Amico collaborated with Sergio Sollima on Il Diavolo Nel Cervello's script)

As The Double unfolds we are introduced to an unusually small set of characters, most importantly the quartet of Frank - our man at the moment of dying, whose visions these are - Lucia, Nora and Eddie.

The former couple, recently married and ten years apart in age - he is 30, she barely out of her teens - are holidaying in Morocco where they meet Eddie, an English hippie, and are visited by Lucia's mother, Nora. Frank takes an immediate dislike to Eddie, whom he sees as a rival not just for Lucia's affections but also those of her mother, to whom he finds himself intensely attracted as a more sophisticated version of her daughter. (The double of the title thus has an ambiguous double / multiple meaning - Frank and Eddie, Lucia and Nora, or the various combinations thereof?)

What emerges is a tale of obsession, misunderstanding, murder and vendetta, perhaps not too dissimilar from a jet-set giallo version of Billy Budd - if you can imagine such a thing - in which the relationship of the assassin to his victim remains a mystery until the end.

The Devil in the Brain begins with Oscar returning from abroad and visiting Sandra, upon whom he is fixated. He is shocked to discover that she has no memory of him nor of her husband and son, Ricky. Investigating with the help of a psychiatrist friend, Oscar discovers that Sandra's state is the result of what she saw that fateful day. Crucially, however, the association between Ricky, the gun and his father's corpse is not quite as straightforward as it initially seemed. But if Ricky did not kill his father, then who did? And why?

Impressively put together, The Double and Devil in the Brain are the kind of gialli that could appeal to a wider audience were they to get a proper release and be marketed appropriately by some enterprising DVD company. If I had to choose one, it would be Devil in the Brain. Featuring one of Morricone's most beautiful scores it has a more transcendent resonance than somewhat time-capsule The Double. (Interestingly this is a trait that is common to the other Sollima and Guerreri films I've seen, with The Sweet Body of Deborah also being very much the product of its times whereas Sollima seems to have a facility for transferring his political concerns, as evinced by the reworking of the western The Big Gundown in contemporary guise as Revolver.)

Even in a decidedly fuzzy pan and scan transfer sourced from RAI TV, it again confirms Sollima as one of the most under-rated Italian directors. Perhaps the problem was that his films seemed too generic for the elite tastemakers of the time in that "only a western" or "only a giallo" manner. Then again, I suppose the more politically minded critics also treated the likes of Claude Chabrol - to whose Helene cycle films Devil in the Brain might also bear comparison - with similar disdain, so if nothing else we could say Sollima was in good company...

Interesting conversation

Talking to my sister, who knows nothing of Dario Argento or horror cinema, and the topic of conversation comes on to Turin. What does she say - the weird / supernatural aspect of the place , or the one that Argento taps into with his films using it.

A Spaghetti Western Top Ten

A top ten, deliberately limiting myself to one film per director to avoid the dominance of Leone and Corbucci and omitting Once Upon a Time in the West as being more a classic western than an Italian western, as signalled by Leone's desire to say farewell to the Dollars films by having the three gunmen who meet Harmonica essayed by Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach.

1. The Good the Bad and the Ugly – a great film, period.

2. The Big Gundown – Morricone, Sollima, Van Cleef and Milian all at the top of their game, plus some of the most impassioned singing I've heard courtesy of Christy.

3. The Great Silence – the logical extension of the laconic Man of no Name, the baddest of the bad and the bleakest of the bleak - landscapes and endings - make for an unbeatable package.

4. Death Rides a Horse – another dark, complex and satisfying revenge tale; another great Morricone score.

5. Companeros – the best of the political spaghettis, successfully combining its message with solid entertainment, the latter half of the equation being the one that all too many “committed” filmmakers forgot about.

6. The Return of Ringo – the Odyssey as spaghetti western #1 and a beautiful reinterpretation of the classic American western style and mythology.

7. Cemetery without Crosses – what could easily have been nothing more than formulaic Leone pastiche becomes a genuine tribute from filmmakers who really understood what he was doing.

8. Keoma – yes, even with the singing, no worse than Leonard Cohen in McCabe and Mrs Miller; Castellari's post-Leone, post-Peckinpah action sequences bring it all back home once more.

9. Django the Bastard - the supernatural western, with Anthony Steffen's impassive acting style being to the benefit of the whole and another of Luciano Rossi's delightful wackos.

10. My Name is Nobody – the Odyssey as spaghetti western #2 and a fitting farewell to and summation of the spaghetti form.

Let's hear yours...

L' Ultimo uomo della terra / The Last Man on Earth

Dr Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) is the titular Last Man on Earth. A plague has swept the world, killing much of the population and transforming the remainder into vampires.

Every day he goes through the same routine, carrying out his undending search and destroy mission against then returning to his boarded up, garlic, mirror and crucifix-festooned home before night falls and the undead, including his former colleague and friend Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) gather outside and taunt him to come out...

A faithful adaptation of Richard Matheson's classic 1951 horror novel I Am Legend - the author had a hand in the writing under the pseudonym Logan Swanson - this 1964 Italian-American co-production would seem to have exerted a considerable influence on the imagery of George A. Romero's Dead films and The Crazies, the sequences of gas-mask wearing soldiers pitching bodies into burning pits also being the kind of things that would not look too out of place in a documentary on Nazi atrocities.

Benefitting from a strong performance from a cast-against-type Vincent Price - his sophisticated, suave manner has no place in a world where all that matters is to survive - and good use of the distinctive architecture of the EUR region of Rome, as also seen in Antonioni's L'eclisse and Argento's Tenebrae, The Last Man on Earth is a surprisingly good film that deserves to be better known.




The post-apocalyptic landscape of the EUR

One also wonders if the depopulated world of Tenebrae, as another science-fiction film set a few years into its future - now our past, of course - might not have been affected by a plague like the one depicted here, leading to the emergence of a new, post-human order. (After all, weren't Demons and Phenomena in part Argento's musings on a world where fascism had triumphed and Opera a meditation on the impossibility of love in the era of AIDS respectively?)