Qualcosa striscia nel buio / Something is Creeping in the Dark / Something is Crawling in the Dark

We open on a dark, stormy night on an isolated road that is seeing an unusually high amount of traffic.

Feuding couple Sylvia and Donald Forrest (Lucia Bose and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) are en route to a party at her friend Helen's, prompting Donald to naturally assume that the two cars which race past them must be other guests.


Director Colucci constantly reverses the angles here, framing Sylvia and Donald in the eerie blue light that dominates much of the film

In fact they are occupied by Inspector Wright (Dino Fazio) and Detective Sam and their quarry, the psychopathic Spike (Farley Granger).


Farley Granger as a rather old juvenile delinquent

Spike reaches the bridge and discovers it has been washed away in the storm and is thus apprehended by Wright. He then starts to turn back towards town with his quarry, advising Sylvia and Donald to do likewise.

They encountering another car heading in the opposite direction, occupied by Dr Williams and his assistant Susan who, despite being on the way to perform a vital operation, nevertheless had time to stop and pick up Professor Lawrence after his car broke down.

With the road back flooded and the water level rising all around, attention turns to a mansion house on the hill nearby.


The old dark house, plus ca change

Once inside, Wright and Williams go to make their urgent telephone calls, only to discover that lines are also down.

Sylvia and Donald continue to argue, with Sylvia also proposing that the group all make the most of the night via an anonymous orgy.

Spike then proves himself to be more than your average psychopapthic killer by improvising an etude on the piano. This has a powerful effect on Sylvia as we segue into a slow-motion fantasy sequence situated in an as yet unidentified room; later on it will prove to be the guest bedroom Sylvia and Donald are allocated.

In the fantasy Spike strikes Sylvia, who then stabs him repeatedly as he grins, undoubtedly plenty of material for anyone wanting to interpret the characters' repressed desires through the lenses of psychoanalytic and / or feminist theories: is this what men are really like? what women are really like? what men really think about women? what women really think about men? what men think women are like?

Intriguingly, however, the ensuing exchange of dialogue again hints at something beyond all this, insofar as both Spike and Sylvia seem to have somehow shared this fantasy and, through it, something of their respective inner secrets and desires:

Sylvia: “Tell me, how does it feel to kill?”

Spike: “Do you think you could really understand? Tied to a thousand fears, a thousand prejudices, a thousand superstitions? No, you live a life full of vanity and compromise. You could be able to understand what it really means to free yourself from all the hypocrisy and stupidity of this decadent world. You couldn't understand that.”

“And why not?”

“Because you're swimming in it.”

As the night continues the irrational and magical side is further foregrounded as discussion next turns to the house's former owner, whose initially covered portrait dominates the room. Apparently Lady Sheila Marlowe died in mysterious circumstances a year ago, not long after being acquitted for the murder of her husband. The information that she was also an occultist and held regular séances prompts Sylvia to suggest trying to contact Lady Marlowe.






The only true mystery is that our lives are governed by dead people?

Needless to say this soon proves to have been a less than good idea given the circumstances...

This 1971 supernatural horror / thriller was one of only two films directed by Mario Colucci and the only one which he both wrote and directed; his other directorial credit is on the 1968 spaghetti western Vendetta per Vendetta, while his list of writing credits is surprisingly, encompassing a total of seven films in nine years.

With Something is Creeping in the Dark also being Colucci's final film credit, one wonders whether he died shortly afterwards; had invested most of his own money in the film in the hope of launching his career, or simply responded to the indifference that met its release by turning his attentions elsewhere.

Yet while the film may not be particularly outstanding or memorable is it not the exactly the worst example of its kind on any count.

Colucci uses all manner of techniques – including slow motion, freeze-frame, superimpositions, rapid-fire edits and subjective camera alongside the more usual zooms and extreme close-ups – and demonstrates a firm grasp of how to generate atmosphere and effect and of ways in which to tell a story visually.


At one point Colucci even turns the camera upside down

Technically the film is likewise accomplished, with production design and lighting dominated by cool blues and brilliant reds, while the presence of Lucia Bose, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart and Farley Granger in the cast imparts a degree of quality and name recognition there as well.

Angelo Francesco Lavagnino – who also makes his only on-screen appearance in the film, minus the Angelo, as the Professor – contributes a simple but effective series of cues, ranging from the percussive polyrhythmic mix of bongos and hi-hat overlaid by shock stabs that heighten the excitement of the opening car chase; through Spike's suitably lush and swooning piano piece, to the piano chords that accompany the séance and sound like they could well be emanating from the pits of hell itself.

The satisfactoriness of the script is more dependent on how generous one is willing to be. For example, we're told that Professor Lawrence was picked up by Dr Williams after his car broke down. Given that Williams were supposed to be racing to an emergency it seems unlikely that he should have stopped – unless this selfsame contrivance is read as another indicator that no-one present here as quite the control over their actions they think, albeit in terms of the supernatural rather than the unconscious.

What this in turn clues us into is that, to the extent it is an example of the European fantastique, the film should theoretically be working via a cinematic rather than a narrative logic. The question here is whether this is successfully and consistently conveyed. While the aforementioned dream sequence certainly works in fantastique / cinematic terms, the mundane nature of the conflict between the police and Spike doesn't, with the filmmakers also failing to make the most of the rational detective type figures encountering a supernatural mystery angle or the Terror Express / Assault on Precinct 13 one of the two coming together against a mutual foe.

Beyond this, it's perhaps also that, for all the technique, the film also feels curiously old fashioned compared to Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon, as another group of unpleasant characters stranded in an isolated location thriller, and Freda's Tragic Ceremony, as another occult themed horror-thriller. Colucci's direction lacks the sense of irony and self-parody we get in Bava's film, while his set of characters and séance are that bit less hip and happening than their counterparts in Freda's.

The one other area where the film is modern, namely its avoidance of an obvious protagonist with whom we can identify – Sylvia or Donald?, Spike or Inspector Wright? – also hurts it, because we're not given sufficient information to approach them the other way, that they aren't supposed to be rounded flesh and blood characters with whom we might identify as much as the pieces in some cosmic game.

One final point of note is that Something is Creeping in the Dark contains one of the more memorable credits within the Italian horror and thriller cinema, that of Lorenda Nusciak. Appearing as Lady Sheila Marlowe, the actress has a role recalling Gene Tierney's debut in Laura, in that she too only appears on screen in a still photograph. Nice work if you can get it?

Guess the film from the poster

It's one of those Polish posters, so unless you know the language it may be difficult :-)



The clue is that it's a giallo with either an animal and / or a number in its title.

Krimi project?

I'm toying with the idea of putting together a little book / booklet on the krimi films, along the lines of the Midnight Media giallo and slasher series or Tough to Kill: The Italian Action Explosion, as a sort of viewer's guide, nothing too heavy or serious.

This post is just really to gauge interest, to see if there would be any and also so see if you have any ideas for what could be used as ratings icons - e.g. bowler hats, London towers, Kinskis?

Der Gorilla von Soho / The Gorilla of Soho / The Ape Creature / The Gorilla Gang

The bodies of drowned men, all elderly, wealthy foreigners with no relatives in the UK, keep being hauled out of the Thames. While the first seemed like an accident – the victim's wallet still being full – the fourth in as many months offers a challenge to statistical probability and suggests that something more sinister may be afoot.


Here we see the Gorilla of Soho, in its natural habitat...

As it so happens the victim, an Australian millionaire, was found with something else in his possession: a doll with writing on it.

The first problem facing Inspector Perkins (Horst Tappert) and Sergeant Pepper (Uwe Friedrichsen) is that the writing, in addition to being obscured, is in an language they do not know.


Yet another doll

Accordingly Miss Susan McPherson (Uschi Glas) is brought in. An expert on African languages, she soon identifies the words “crime,” “murder” and, most revealing of all, “the monster and the gorilla”


Female narcissism


Female to be looked at ness, as Pepper frames Susan


Not so easy to place

The notorious Gorilla Gang has returned...

The revelation that Ellis had left his wealth to the organisation Love and Peace for People shortly before his untimely demise naturally leads Perkins there. He arrives to find known blackmailer Sugar (Herbert Fux, in his only krimi role) and the organisation's head, Henry Parker, in the middle of a heated exchange; though not party to the exchange that Sugar is being paid off because of something to do with Henry's brother, Donald, the Inspector certainly knows that something is up.

Accordingly his next point of call is a nightclub with scantily clad models who pose on pedestals for the members – who, as it turns out include Sir Arthur – to photograph and sketch them. He is not there for this, however, but rather to speak with club habitue Sugar and to dig around to see what he can find out, thereby learning that one of the girls at the club, Cora, was involved with Donald Parker.


Herbert Fux, lit in the dominant red of the nightclub

Meanwhile Sugar is confronted by a gunman and almost grabbed by a digger – shades of My Dear Killer's opening decapitation murder – but escaped by diving into the river; it's supposed to be the Thames but remains as unconvincing as the rest of the non-stock footage.




Fux and a foreground gunman, in the dominant blue of the nighttime exteriors

This stock footage, meanwhile, is itself somewhat badly used in the obviously back projected driving sequences, with the same iconic red bus appearing behind the drivers no matter where they're supposed to be in London.

Next the investigators visits St Mary's, a convent-run institution for wayward girls where Dorothy Smith, a mute black girl, tries unsuccessfully to communicate something to Perkins on his way to ask the mother superior about Jack Corner, the ex-boss of the Gorilla Gang who had worked at St Mary's following his release from prison three years earlier.

Apparently Corner suffered horrible burns as a result of an accident in the boiler room – a fate with echoes of Sheila Isaac's fate in The Case of the Bloody Iris or the scalding of Amanda Righetti in Deep Red – but disappeared shortly thereafter.

On the way back Susan discovers another doll in her bag with writing on it, again in an African language: “The gorilla sometimes comes at night; the mother superior doesn't know,” revealing that one of the girls knows more that the others. Curiously, however, they don't connect the African language to Dorothy, the only non-white girl there, encouraging Susan to go undercover at the convent as a welfare officer.

Meanwhile the gang, the contours of whose activities are gradually taking shape, are plotting the murder of their next victim, Mr Stuart. At a meeting with Henry Parker and his lawyer, Dr Jekyll [sic], Stuart, another wealthy foreigner of advancing years, surprises the foundation's director with the news that they are not to be the prime beneficiaries of his will. Rather, he has just discovered that he has a daughter, Susan Ward, whom he is intend on tracking down.

That same night Stuart falls victim to the gorilla and is delivered to St Mary's. There the Sister and a reluctant Dorothy dispose of his body as they have clearly done the gang's previous victims. The girl also plants a doll on Stuart, whose body is fished out of the Thames shortly afterwards. Perkins discovers the doll, whilst the post-mortem reveals the curious fact that he been drowned in fresh rather than sea water...

At this point we're only about half-way through; safe to say that everything ultimately ties together and is resolved in a re-assuring manner with everyone getting their just desserts one way or another...

Though certainly entertaining at the camp and trash level, this is one of those awkward post-Blood and Black Lace pre-The Bird with the Crystal Plumage krimis that shows the filmmakers trying to find a more contemporary aesthetic, attitude and approach but largely failing.

Part of the sense of deja vu throughout the proceedings must also, however, be attributed to the highly formulaic nature of the material. Obviously popular genre works, both literary and cinematic, are always formalaic to an extent, but there is nevertheless the distinct impression of the filmmakers adapting a bottom of the pile krimi featuring rather many elements that had appeared earlier in the cycle and which thus now feel distinctly past their best before date.

Thus, for example, the gorilla costume wearing villain instantly recalls the likes of The Monk with the Whip and The Frog with the Mask. This in itself is not a problem but it does leave one wondering why that bit more, insofar as the film's Gorilla Gang – I suspect the novel may be different – seem to have been given their appellation for no particular reason. And, in a film like this that moment of questioning in the viewer is fatal.

It would have been better if the gang had been using a trained gorilla in their crimes. While certainly more difficult to render on screen convincing way – here it's worth remembering that 2001: A space Odyssey was released in the out the same year – this would also have kept one more in that state of wonderment and presented a nice line of descent back to Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue and thus the very origins of the detective genre and sensation literature.

As it is, despite the alternative Ape Creature title, the filmmakers don't even try to cover up that it is a man in a suit, with the on-screen presentation of making it clear from the outset that we are dealing with a man in a gorilla suit.

Again the contrast with the likes of the the monk with his whip or the archer in green is telling, insofar as the films in which they appear present us with an enigma of the sort absent here: are these supernatural figures from the past who have somehow manifested in the present, along the lines of Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles, or merely something more mundane?

Not everything is the filmmakers' fault, however, with the plot being very obviously a retread of The Dead Eyes of London, beginning with the paradigmatic substitution of reform school girls for blind beggars as the subjects for dubiously motivated philanthropy and continuing through the foundling who is unwitting heir to a fortune; the man-beast cat's paw figure; the woman helping the police because of her special linguistic abilities and soon falling into peril thereby, and the pushing of one blackmailer down a lift shaft.

If all this is partially masked by the shift to colour and to another set of stock performers – Horst Tappert assuming the Joachim Fuchsberger role; Uschi Glas the Karin Baal one; Uwe Friedrichsen the Eddi Arent one etc. – the behind-the-scenes team are essentially the same, featuring such ubiquitous krimi film names as director Alfred Vohrer, production manager Horst Wendland, editor Jutta Hering, cinematographer Karl Lob and composer Peter Thomas.

While Thomas and Hering's contributions are solid, with the former exhibiting the ability to adapt to the new musical idioms of the time whilst still producing something distinctively his, Lob fails to push the expressive use of colour far enough in the set-pieces and lights the expository scenes in somewhat flatly. Putting it another way if Lob's work on Dead Eyes of London was almost comparable to that of Bava on Black Sunday – as two films released in the same year and independently of one another showcasing traditional black and white Expressionism circa 1960 – his work his work here falls far short of his Italian counterpart on Blood and Black Lace – as one of the key models for the new colour Expressionism / expressivism.








Another almost there but not quite murder set piece begins

Vohrer's direction is, in itself, nothing to be ashamed of. It's brisk and efficient and contains enough self-conscious stylish moments and images without becoming self-indulgent. But there's also little he hasn't done before. Maybe it's a case of seeking to demonstrate a consistency of authorial voice – the opening credits, after all, proclaim “an Alfred Vohrer film” before anything else – but if so, it's also one without that vital element of development that Peter Wollen identified as the distinction between the John Ford and Howard Hawks.

A key moment here is one of the film's most striking images, in which another character is reflected in the mirror of a Kinski-esque blackmailing ex-con's sunglasses. For, in fact, Vohrer had used the exact same shot with Kinski himself in Dead Eyes, where he had played this selfsame role.


The Kinksi-alike – or in a giallo the Luciano Rossi-alike

Likewise, while the choreographing of one of the murder set pieces to the smooth jazz record playing on the dansette is a nice touch – the victims legs cease kicking just as the music stops – this is offset somewhat by the re-introduction of non-diegetic mood music moments later as their body is discovered. (I'm also fairly certain that another krimi had featured a similar device, in a manner more directly prefiguring Tenebre. Please let me know if you know which film it is. )

This said, the period between Dead Eyes of London and The Gorilla of Soho can hardly be compared to the 40+ years of Ford and Hawks' careers, nor the ever-desperate production context of the German popular cinema in the 60s with the solidity of Studio era Hollywood.

Indeed, another element that emerges from the film is precisely that of the rapidly changing social and moral climate of the 1960s basically outstripping (at times literally) the ability of the filmmakers to adapt their material. Thus, for example, whereas 1964's The Phantom of Soho had featured a brief blink-and-you'll miss it flash of exposed breast from of its nightclub performers, here the nightclub is wall-to-wall breasts and buttocks; bush was still a no-no though the obscuring literal and metaphorical fig leafs here would soon come off for the later giallo-krimi crossovers, the St Pauli thrillers and the Schulmadchen report cycle alike.

If this is again just a syntygmatic shift, other elements attest to more profound changes. While the name of the Peace and Love Foundation clearly resonates with post-Summer of Love idealism, the reference to it as a Salvation Army type organisation and its actual philanthropic work in finding work for ex-convicts along with their distinct recidivist tendencies are grounded in an early 20th century weltangschauung that was becoming increasingly shaky in the Age of Aquarius. (Consider here also the case of Jack Henry Abbott, and the question of how far his inability to cope with his release from prison was the result of inherent psychopathy or long institutionalisation or the relative weight commentators might afford these alternatives depending on their politics.)

Likewise, it's the question of whether the Sergeant Pepper character, with his less dedicated attitude towards his work and chasing after every figure in a skirt, is a Wallace name that has been given a non-Wallace characterisation or is entirely the invention of the filmmakers as a younger, hipper alternative to the hitherto traditional but ostensibly outmoded Eddi Arent upper class twit type.

After all, the “you've never had it so good” ideology of the period was one in which the old politics of social class supposedly no longer mattered, though the cynic in me would suggest that it was more the case that new post-war model of mass production requiring more mass consumption than anything else, with the gap between the haves and have nots certainly returning with a vengeance less than ten years later and the persistence of the lumpenproletariat or underclass – old wine, new labels? – emerging as a challenge to left and right alike.

Elsewhere we get a couple of girls at St Mary's engaging in a catfight, apparently because one made vaguely lesbian advances towards the other; the head of Scotland Yard showing a distinct interest in one of girls at the club, and, at the end, a decidedly phallic “ende” that seems to belong more to the world of Bond and the Beatles than bowler hats. Yes, the times they were a changing...

To sum up, not a good krimi but one which is certainly entertaining and which proves to offer a lot to talk about – I haven't even mentioned the underwater gorilla sequences, which have to be seen to be believed – even if itself it doesn't really have much to say.

Nice piece on the krimi film

Here:

http://www.corabuhlert.com/ewgerman.pdf

La Mansión de la niebla / Quando Marta urlò dalla tomba / Maniac Mansion / Murder Mansion

This is one of those Spanish-Italian co-productions where the preponderance of Spanish names amongst the cast, including actors Andrés Resino, Analía Gadé, Alberto Dalbés and Edouardo Fajardo, and crew, most prominently director Francisco Lara Polop, leave one in little doubt as to who were the dominant partners.

The impression is further enhanced by small details like the pouring of a whisky from a Cutty Sark rather than a J&B bottle, if not the prominence given giallo regular Evelyn Stewart / Ida Galli amongst the performers.









Reading the signs

While somewhat slow to get started, the credits being followed by a five-minute, dialogue-free driving sequence, it's not padding, instead serving to neatly introduce some of the characters and something of their respective personalities, as we witness a macho competition between a young motorcycle riding vaguely counter-culture type, Fred, and his older sports coupe driving counterpart, Mr Porter, soon centring around their rivalry for the attentions of attractive hitch-hiker Laura.

Meanwhile, the middle aged Mr and Mrs Tremont calmly continue on in their VW beetle, declining to get involved.

Following some more introductions and exposition involving the pre-existing relationships between philandering husband, Ernest, and his neurotic, father-fixated wife, Elsa, everyone then finds themselves lost some way from their mutual destination, Milen.

Fortunately a mansion house is nearby. Even more fortuitously the house's owner, Martha, happens to be there. This is an especially lucky coincidence given that she was herself only visiting to do a spot of work on the dilapidated property.

As everyone introduce themselves attention turns to the portrait of Martha's grandmother above the fireplace. The woman, a well-known occultist who looks curiously like her granddaughter, apparently died alongside her chauffer in a car accident some 30 years before, but is rumoured to haunt the area, with the nearest village having been abandoned as a result of a wave of mysterious deaths.

Combined with the Bosch and Eliphas Levi style images all around the mansion, it hardly makes for a terribly reassuring place to spend the night – especially for Elsa, who had a terrifying encounter with the selfsame chauffer in the cemetery just beyond the mansion only a few minutes before.


Elsa encounters the chauffeur and the witch / vampire

Though himself almost run over by the chauffer's phantom car Fred proves more skeptical and, accompanied by Laura, adopts the role of investigator determined to get to the bottom of the mansion's many secrets...

Murder Mansion is one of those old-fashioned horror-thriller crossovers that hedges its bets around supernatural versus naturalistic explanations for most of its running time before ultimately plumping for the latter in the manner of the giallo. The most relevant reference points thus emerge as the likes of Something is Creeping in the Dark, with its similarly ill-matched group of travellers stranded in a remote “old dark house” location, and The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave, with its tomb-using noir-style conspiracy of passion and wealth.


Against giallo convention this black glove is worn by the film's hero, Fred, as part of his motorcycling get up

Given Fred's role and apt name, the film is also clearly one of those “Scooby Doo” gialli identified by Mikel Koven, where the bad guys – don't worry, I won't reveal he, she or they are – would have “gotten away with it” were it not for the “pesky meddling kids”




Grandmother Martha and her reincarnation?

Though certainly featuring traditional horror devices like creepy music and shock zooms, Francisco Lara Polop's direction is also surprisingly subtle at times.

He often blurs the image to transition from one scene to the next rather than making a straight cut – a simple technique but undeniably also effective in imparting a oneiric sense to proceedings, especially when used both for routine changes of scene and as a route into the flashback sequences around Elsa and her father, played by familiar giallo film face Jorge Rigaud, and with whom she seems to have something of a Jocasta complex, if we want to be psychoanalytic about things.

Similarly Polop sometimes opens a scene on a detail rather than with an establishing shot, to momentarily make us that bit more confused as to our location and whose perspectives we are sharing.

The film's colour schemes is also interesting. The mansion interiors are dominated by orange, the exteriors of its surroundings by blue, thus creating a striking visual contrast between the two and a subtle recurring theme of the blurring and / or encroaching on these boundaries – further echoing the fantasy and reality theme – as when, for example, Martha and Elsa, the two most sensitive characters in the piece, don bright blue dresses.










Blurring the boundaries – sexual orientation, living and dead, past and present, reality and nightmare, orange and blue

Another major strength of the film is the sheer tangibility of its fog. Rather than looking all too obviously like the artificial, cliché, product of a smoke machine situated just off camera it has the cloying, obscuring physicality of the real thing, further helping location and studio material blend seamlessly and adding to the believability of the supernatural or otherwise manifestations, such that we don't immediately dismiss them as the obvious products of smoke and mirrors which our onscreen surrogates are curiously unable to see through.

Amongst the performers no one really stands out positively or negatively, the women being glamorous and threatened, the men heroic and shifty, all very much in accordance with types. Curious as it may sound this also contributes to the effectiveness of the film as a whole, precisely because there is thereby a uniformity of style and approach by which no-one stands out, in sharp contrast to some Italian or Spanish productions starring out of place ex-pat Americans. (As with many films of its type the setting is somewhat unclear, the names of the places and people – Soren, Milen, the Clinton family – serving instead to indicate that we're in that mythic Eurotrash land where “any reference to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental”. )

Marcello Giombini's music is characteristically idiosyncratic, blending traditional horror pipe organs and the like with strange noises, laughter and screams, but generally works and further contributes to the atmosphere.

Fright

Or the night before the night he came home...

For what we have here is a film that, released in 1971 and thus a good seven years before John Carpenter's seminal Halloween, plays out a somewhat similar babysitter in peril scenario, albeit in a lower key, almost kitchen-sink manner more in keeping with its British origins.

The babysitter in question is Amanda (Susan George), a childcare student at the local technical college who agrees to babysit for Helen and Jim (Honor Blackman and George Cole), a middle-aged, somewhat shabbily genteel couple who have recently arrived in the village.

Helen proves to be somewhat on-edge, though her concern at this point seems explicable as nothing more than that of a slightly neurotic mother leaving her young child, Tara, in the care of an unfamiliar babysitter in an unfamiliar place:

Amanda: “Is there anything I ought to know, Mrs Lloyd?”
“No!”
“About Tara, I mean.”

It is only later, as the couple drive to what passes for the town's most glamorous night-spot – and, given the drab reality of much of early 1970s Britain quite possibly its only night spot – and meet with their friends that the truth begins to emerge:

Jim: “Do you think she knows?”
Helen: “Why should she?”
“I don't know – something she said about everyone knowing everything.”

That Helen and Jim are not in fact husband and wife and that she is celebrating her divorce hardly seems to warrant this concern, even given the villagers' apparently conservative attitudes...


The maniac's first appearance, reflected in a kettle

Meanwhile Amanda is unnerved by a presence outside, though when her boyfriend Chris (Dennis Waterman) arrives she naturally takes this as one of his horror buff his practical jokes, the practical side of it as far as he is concerned that of getting into her pants in time-honoured slasher film manner.

While the film's discourse around sexual frustration leading inexorably to violence has parallels with Halloween's, we never definitively learn whether Amanda is or isn't a virgin unlike Laurie and her friends in Carpenter's film:


Chris attempts to persuade Amanda to go to bed with him

Chris: “You can't stay a virgin all your life, you know”
Amanda: “How do you know? I might not be one.”
“Ah, well, if you're not this is your big chance.”
“With you?!”

It was not Chris who was lurking outside earlier, however, but rather Helen's estranged husband Brian (Ian Bannen), who has escaped from the asylum where he was being held – yet another echo of Halloween, along with his taking a car to get here and killing the driver in the process, though this is kept off-screen– and is determined to get back his wife and child, whatever it takes...

It is also this aspect that gives Fright more of a slasher than a giallo feel, in that as there's no real mystery or conspiracy angle. We soon realise that Brian is insane, while Jim, Helen and their Doctor friend are only acting in everyone's best interests rather than seeking an inheritance and / or revenge as would typically be the case in a comparable Italian scenario such as The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave.


A nice two plane composition with a fake split screen effect

Whatever the plusses and minuses of this approach, there's little question that the film's makers knew their business and goals.

Director Peter Collinson and co-producer Harry Fine had worked together on the earlier woman-in-peril thriller The Penthouse in 1967, with Collinson again mining similar psycho-on-the-loose territory with Straight on Till Morning in 1972.

This, in turn, was produced in conjunction with Hammer films who had worked with Fine and Michael Styles company Fantale Films on the Karnstein trilogy comprising The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. Each of these was also made from a Tudor Gates script and featured music by Harry Robertson / Robinson. Editor Spencer Reeve also worked on two of the three Karnstein films, along with a further five earlier Hammer productions.


The Plague of the Zombies

All this is telegraphed by the inclusion of clips from The Plague of the Zombies as the film within the film that Amanda, perhaps unwisely given her state, watches on television – a neat little in-joke that also prefigures Carpenter's interpolation of clips from The Thing from Another World into Halloween.

Joining the dots still further around the British-Italian-US horror circle, The Penthouse starred Suzy Kendall prior to her women-in-peril roles for Dario Argento and Sergio Martino, whilst in between Italian excusions such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Torso she also appeared in Sidney Hayers's Assault, a film that with its mystery aspect – who is the rapist and killer haunting the woods near the girls' school? – is as much British giallo as proto-slasher.

George, meanwhile, had earlier appeared in Peter Walker's Die Screaming Marianne, a film also features some giallo-isms of the sort that would become still more pronounced in his later The Flesh and Blood Show – as a British take on The Assassin Reserved Nine Seats or Stagefright locked theatre murder scenario – and Schizo.




Classic 70s rack focus action

And then there's the fact that Cole and Waterman had both recently made appearances for Hammer, the former in The Vampire Lovers and the latter in Scars for Dracula. Indeed, the horror movie episode Chris recounts to frighten Amanda, of a girl being decapitated sounds almost like an out-take from The Vampire Lovers, while Waterman's apparent inability to enter the Lloyd house until invited resonates with Stoker's original formulation of the rules of vampirism and the fate that befell his character's brother in Scars of Dracula.

All this genre pedigree doesn't necessarily mean anything beyond an inherent interest in terms of trivia of course. Fortunately, cast and crew alike deliver on the promise it represents with the result an entertaining and suspenseful thriller that's worth watching in its own right.




Shot and reaction shot, enhanced by sharp editing

Cole and Blackman are the kind of solid professionals that the British theatre and cinema system was so good at producing in its hey-dey, adept at taking any character and presenting them with the same professional finesse.

George, though representative of a more contemporary approach where the female actor's abilities sometimes seemed to count for less than her willingness to strip off, nevertheless likewise acquits herself well.

In this she is also helped by the characterisation provided by Gates, as one that allows for her to express not only one-dimensional scream queen-isms but also an emergent sense of resolve, beginning with the brush-off she gives the too-cocky Chris and continuing, albeit intermittently, to rhw finale with its final girl-style shift from passive to active defence.

The stand-out performance for me, however, was that of Bannen as the madman. By turns terrifying and pathetic, he is always utterly credible, a far remove in this regard at least from the unstoppable, supernatural, archetypal “boogeyman” figure represented by Michael Myers in Halloween.




Bannen at his most threatening; note also the skilful lighting effect

Even more amazing, however, is that it isn't necessarily Bannen's best performance of this type, as anyone who's also seen his turn as the suspected child-molester in Sidney Lumet's The Offence could attest.

Collinson expertly builds the tension up through devices such as the unmotivated cut, camera set-up and movement – why that shot from the top of the stairs, looking down on Amanda at the door? why those hand-held shots in the already cramped space of the kitchen? – and a well developed eye and ear for picking out and exaggerating unnerving details, be it a giallo-style broken doll, a loudly rattling water pipe, or a tapping whose source modulates from a leaky tap to the dark outside and thus prompts Amanda to go investigate.

He also knows when to spring a Lewtonian “bus” rather than a more graphic shock, as in the following scene when a ghost-like sheet suddenly blows across Amanda's face. As an objective image it may not make sense, but as a subjective one it works beautifully to create the desired effect, whilst also hinting at her distracted state and the ease with which someone could have snuck past her whilst her attentions were otherwise occupied.

Not that gorehounds will necessarily be disappointed, with the brutal bludgeoning of Chris following shortly afterwards to demonstrate that Collinson could deliver the goods here as well if he wanted to.

The director also makes interesting use of more obvious subjective camera elsewhere in the film, sometimes presenting things from Brian's point-of-view with Amanda being replaced by his ex-wife, recalling the bizarre masks worn by the killer's victims in Lamberto Bava's Delirium: Photos of Gioia, but considerably more accomplished.

Robinson's music is satisfactory, with no emetic style balladry of the “strange love” sort, though the Ladybird, Ladybird title theme, with its subtle fairytale allusions to the events about to ensue, is sung by one Nanette, perhaps a British equivalent to all those Minas, Olympias and Christys' who so often did the honours in Italian product of the period. There's even a nice bit of Hammond-heavy party music that plays as Jim and Helen get down on the dancefloor, though whether this is Robinson's work or comes off a KPM library sessions album I wouldn't presume to say...

American risciò / American Rickshaw / American Tiger

How many films about a rickshaw driver can you think of?

Well, chances are that unless it's your chosen specialist subject, American Rickshaw will probably increase your total by an either infinite amount, or somewhere in the region of fifty to one hundred percent.

Therein lies the first of many questions about Martin Dolman / Sergio Martino's 1990 film. Why make a film about a rickshaw driver? Was he hoping to start a new franchise along the lines of the American Ninja series by taking advantage of those who would watch anything with the magic word 'American' in its title?

It might make sense, although I can't recall rickshaws exactly being big in the 80s, unlike ninjas. There were no Teenage Mutant Rickshaw Drivers, after all.

Whatever the motivation, there's certainly a strong east-meets-west aspect to the production, not only in the hero's occupation but also the mysterious old Chinese woman who, as we will eventually learn, represents the forces of good in opposition to Donald Pleasance's televangelist, Reverend Mortom

If this combination suggests that Martino and company might have been drawing some inspiration from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, which also starred Pleasance, and Big Trouble in Little China, these also seem somewhat odd choices for models given their relative lack of box office success at the time and somewhat belated cult recognition. (Thinking back to my own teenage years, I can remember catching up with Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York and The Thing, but never thinking about seeing Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness, either in the cinema or on home video; my loss.)

Regardless of its inspirations American Rickshaw emerges as a somewhat confused film, with the list of supporting characters including the televangelists son, who has a penchant for hiding behind one-way mirrors and filming people having sex; the stripper-cum-hooker who ensnares our hero, Scott, for one such film; Reverend Mortem's murderous minion, played by ex-Fists of Steel cyborg Daniel Greene, and Scott's friends and colleagues, including an amusingly / offensively camp gay rickshaw driver.

The plot meanwhile veers uneasily between the mundane and the magical, with Scott having to worry about his college exams one day and the fate of the world the next, with curious coincidences and mystical Mcguffins.

Though it might be argued that this serves to make the protagonist easier for us to engage and also places us in a position somewhat comparable to his – what exactly the hell is going on? – it proves hard to really care when athlete Mitchell Gaylord's suffers from a severe lack of charisma as Scott and Martino's direction is utterly flat and uninspired.

If American Rickshaw has any value it's as a time capsule of late 80s fashions, technologies – check out those mobile phones – and attitudes. Fine if you're a historian or sociologist but not so good if what you want is to be entertained.

Three upcoming releases from Shameless

The Designated Victim, Strip Nude for Your Killer and Oasis of Fear, all arriving on 15 September.







Especially nice to see The Designated Victim and Oasis of Fear, which have previously been hard to find.

Cinque uomini contro tutti / Cobra Mission / Operation Nam

Obviously taking its inspiration from Rambo, this Fabrizio de Angelis / Larry Ludman entry sees a group of Vietman veterans decide to return to the country after hearing reports that some of their comrades are still being held in prisoner-of-war camps by the Viet Cong, fully a decade after the war's official end; that there's a four- rather than a one-man army is probably explicable by the fact that none of the quartet of Christopher Connelly, John Steiner, Oliver Tobias and Manfred Lehmann could exactly be described as possessing the same physique or star recognition as Stallone, though together they certainly present an attractive proposition for the Eurotrash enthusiast.


Gordon Mitchell also appears as one of the men's former commanding officers, and tries to dissuade them from their self-appointed mission.

After incidents involving an cynical conman who takes opportunity of Americans desperate to be reuinted with loved ones and a militantly anti-communist French colonialist priest – incidents which also allow for some welcome cameo appearances from Ennio Girolami, Luciano Pigozzi and Donald Pleasance to further bolster the film's cult appeal – the four men cross the border into Vietnam and proceed to dispose of what seems like half the Vietnamese army without themselves really breaking much of a sweat.






Exploding huts, trucks and choppers

Although the action remains equally gung-ho in the second half as the Cobra Mission team heads for the border with the rescued POW's in tow, the film also develops a more serious side as it emerges that the US authorities have not only repeatedly denied the prisoners' existence but have also been complicit in the Vietnamese keeping them captive.

If the resulting impression is one of an at times awkward mixture of juvenile action and a rather more adult and cynical approach, vaguely reminiscent of the moral universe of the spaghetti western, it also helps to further distinguish the film from its American model and give it a more distinctively Italian cast.

In particular Rambo's famous question “do we get to win this time” cannot necessarily be answered in the affirmative here – assuming, that is, that it's even possible to definitively identify this “we,” with the early US-set scenes also nicely establishing that the four veterans have not exactly been welcomed back into civilian life with heros welcomes.

One wonder what John Wayne would have thought of his son Ethan's role in the film. It's not The Green Berets, that's for sure...

One Suite for the Murderer

A three-band old-style prog rock suite inspired by Deep Red:

Jack el destripador de Londres / Sette cadaveri per Scotland Yard / Seven Murders for Scotland Yard

Present-day London is in the grip of a serial killer whose modus operandi recalls that of Jack the Ripper nearly a century before, suggesting someone with surgical training – or at least the skills of a butcher.




The lost world of British sexploitation advertising

This evidence suggests that the crimes may be the work of Pedro Dorian (Paul Naschy). A Spaniard who attended medical school for a couple of years in his home country, he also happens to have a limp, sustained as the result of a circus accident, and thus fits a young eye-witnesses' description of the man the police are looking for.









Classic giallo imagery

But while academic amateur investigator Windsor Derby Christian (Andrés Resino) is convinced Dorian must be the man responsible for the crimes, his professional counterpart and friend Commissioner Henry Campbell (Renzo Marigano) continues to have his doubts – at least until the bodies and the evidence against Dorian begin to mount, most notably when an anonymous tip off leads to his being found with his date from the previous night, dead, mere days after the murder of his own wife...

This 1971 Paul Naschy vehicle sees the Waldemar Daninsky star trying to board the giallo bandwagon, with mixed results.

For while featuring the obligatory black gloved, knife-wielding killer, his identity concealed by various point-of-view shots, along with a decent body count, the film never really goes all out on the sleaze front, with little nudity to speak of, a tendency for the victims to die somewhat neatly after one or at most two stabs and a preference for telling us rather than showing us the more extreme of the ripper's depradations.

Nor does the whodunnit aspect amount to much. Working on the premise that Naschy cannot be the murderer, both for the extra-diegetic fact that it's not his style to draw his audience in and pull the rug from under us, that the typically tragical nature of his monster figures depends on our knowing their true nature, and the diegetic sense that someone is trying too hard to make him the most – i.e. too – obvious culprit, we're left with only really two other candidates in a population of seven million: Windsor and Henry.

Given that the filmmakers approach to the Scotland Yard authority figures seems rather more krimi than Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion – and here also remembering that the Spanish half of co-production team were still subject to the strictures of Francoist censorship – the genre-literate viewer may soon quickly reduce this short list to one.

If all this starts to read like a spoiler, bear in mind that the typical viewer for the film is likely to have seen a fair number of better gialli and Naschy entries; certainly when I watched the film with a friend who had never seen Seven Murders for Scotland Yard but who possesses this wider awareness he had no difficulty whatsoever in correctly picking out the guilty party almost as soon as he had appeared on screen.

If similar points could be made about many other gialli, they are usually at a bit better at finding a number of other suspects.

One telling point of comparison here, given the nature of their killers and use of locations foreign to the filmmakers is The New York Ripper, with the coincidences further enhanced by the presence of another foreign suspect marked out as different, in the form of Mickey Scellenda with his missing finger, and of an suave and sophisticated, intellectual, chess-playing investigator / suspect, in Dr Davis, within Fulci's film.

What Fulci succeeds in doing, however, is really conveying a sense of New York-ness to his film and, more significantly, making this sense and integral part of the overall sensibility of his film through the way in which his other characters, those with no real counterparts in Seven Murders for Scotland Yard, are made part of the warp and weft of the film.

Though Naschy and company clearly did travel to London to pick up some location shots of his character wandering around Soho these paradoxically lessen the overall effectiveness of the piece precisely because they jar with the other, rather too obviously Mediterranean exteriors found elsewhere in the film. (Much like their more pervasive counterparts in The New York Ripper there's also a nice incidental documentary aspect to these images, showing the difference between the still relatively staid Soho of 1971 with posters for films and shows promising more than they likely ever delivered, and the hell-on-earth of 42nd Street just prior to the AIDS and crack epidemics; in characteristic displays of British reserve many of the bystanders also do their best to move out of the camera's gaze or to cover their faces.)

Seven Murders for Scotland Yard is also rather lacking in pace. In part this is quite literally the case, thanks to the Naschy character's disability and the longer than usual shots of his walking from one scene to another that result. But it's also down to the curious almost real-time pacing of the film, where scenes and shots have a tendency to be held beyond the moment when their dramatic point has been made in a manner that is oddly, if presumably unintentionally, reminiscent of Antonioni.

Consider the opening murder: For two minutes we have shots streets of Soho from the POV of the unidentified killer. He then silently picks up a prostitute. They enter the block where she has her room and ascend the stairs, watched by a girl, Margaret, whose eye-witness testimony will later prove important. Once in the room, the woman then proceeds to slowly strip off, the camera alternating between close-up and longer shots that probably no longer correspond with to the killer's POV insofar as he as busy taking out his knife; we're now at the four and a half minute mark.

The killer then advances on the woman, whose look turns from one of feigned pleasurable expectation to terror, and, after all this build up calmly stabs her twice. A few credits roll over the freeze-framed, red tinted image of the dead woman's body on the bed and the killer slowly makes his exit, taking us to almost the seven minutes in before the second sequence starts.

This sees Naschy's character in a nearby bar, nursing a wound to his hand. After finishing his drink, he gets up and walks home, arriving there about the 8 minutes 30 seconds mark.

As far as the performances go Naschy is, well, Naschy, complete with the regulation bare-chested and mano a mano fight scenes, no fewer than three of them.

Indeed, given that the aforementioned footage of him shuffling around Soho proves remarkably reminiscent of similar scenes in the later Waldemar Daninsky entry Dr Jekyll versus the Werewolf and that a final showdown in the madman's dungeon-cum-laboratory could easily have also come from just about any entry in the same series, you half expect him to transform at just about any moment.




Oops, I've done it again?

Still, whatever Naschy may lack as an actor he compensates for in the sheer commitment he always brings, coupled with a surprising willingness to take on somewhat unsympathetic and unheroic roles. Here Pedro does little more than drowning his sorrows with one whisky after another. If this leads to some obligatory giallo traumatic flashbacks, tinted blue to hint at an ambiguous association with the red tint over the opening murder, that his whisky of choice is Vat 69 rather than J&B again seems to foreground the Spanishness of the production.

The other performers are satisfactory in their one-note roles although the exaggerated dubbing accents used on the English-language version adds further unintentional humour to what is already often some rather doubtful dialogue:

“It's alarming how many crimes of a sexual nature are being committed at the moment.”
“Did you say anything dear?”
“No, nothing – I was merely thinking aloud”

“Jack – Jack the Ripper!”
“Yes, his signature's all over the bodies of those two women.”
“But surely Jack the Ripper's dead, isn't he?”
“Undoubtedly – or extremely old”

Piero Piccioni delivers some engaging jazzy themes which affords him plenty of opportunity to whizz around the keys of his Hammond. Unfortunately these themes never really integrate that well with the film as a whole, giving the impression of being library music or at least pieces originally composed for some other purpose.

Luigi Scattini blog

Here: http://luigiscattini.wordpress.com/

Belve feroci / Wild Beasts

Whether by accident or design there's a certain affinity between Savage Beasts' setup and that of Jorge Grau's excellent Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, the main difference that Franco Prosperi's technology gone awry scenario is that bit more plausibly grounded.

For rather than seeing an experimental pest control machine bring the recently dead back to life, what we have here is the contamination of the water supply of a city with PCP causing the animals that drink it to become aggressive and run amok.




Man and the City

The ensuing gory highlights include a couple being devoured by rats; a blind man being savaged by his seeing eye dog; a cheetah pursuing an open-topped VW beetle and an elephant crushing a man's head underfoot.


Dottoressa de Selle

In the midst of the chaos a team of scientists, led by the always welcome Lorraine De Selle, try to work out what has happened and how to stop the madness before it spreads further...


A film with a message?

If its difficult to take Savage Beasts' quasi-ecological message all that seriously given writer-director Prosperi's background in mondo, this selfsame background also shows through in his willingness to take on a challenging assignment of the “never work with children and animals” type with largely successful results.

The main difficulty many will have with the film is the element of unpleasantness that pervades it, most notably with the burning alive of several dozen rats, some butchery footage and the unleashing of a tiger on some penned-in cattle.


Gore, but perhaps not of the sort the fan wants

Though perhaps inherently distasteful at a visceral level these images also reminded me somewhat of Georges Franju's brilliant documentary about a Paris abattoir, Blood of the Beasts, in that they're showing us things going on all the time but which we generally prefer to bracket out of our existence.

After all, in any sizeable city there will be pest controllers whose job it is to exterminate vermin, and slaughterhouse workers and butchers responsible for turning animals into abstracts, those cattle into beef or those pigs into pork, bacon and so on.

A mondo-style juxtaposition of the butchery footage, by which the tiger is fed in an unnatural manner, and its own bringing down of one of the cows, by which it follows its natural instincts, is also interesting from a philosophical perspective if we think about the German philosopher Heidegger's notions of authentic and inauthentic being. (The film's setting in a northern European city, identifiable as Frankfurt, is a happy coincidence in this regard.)

For, from a Heideggerian perspective a caged tiger in a zoo is not an authentic tiger, being unable to roam around and hunt for food as it would in the wild.


Contrary to appearance, this is not a real tiger

Following from this, as in so many other aspects of life, modern, 'fallen' man has been conditioned to accept an inauthentic ersatz substitute for the real experience, or a pacified un-nature in place of authentic nature, often red in tooth and claw.

If such ideas seem far removed from the Italian exploitation cinema, it can also be argued that they are at the heart of Prosperi's own filmmaking practice, given that the mondo is a form of cinema which trades on notions of documentary realism for much of its effect but which has always attracted criticism for its dubious claims to authenticity in fabricating scenes.

Moreover, if we think about it these scenes are often about the contrasts between modern and primitive and civilised and savage forms of life, with the division frequently also breaking down along lines of the fallen and the authentic.

While Savage Beasts is a fiction film, as foregrounded by the obvious reference point of Suspiria for the seeing eye dog attack, similar questions can still be asked of other aspects of it. Note, for example, the way in which Prosperi establishes the situation with his opening montages of the urban jungle: were those discarded needles that the camera picks out on a U-bahn escalator found or planted? If found, were they a lucky find or near ubiquitous? If near ubiquitous, what does this say about 'our' way of life, when so many need to find escape in drugs...

Giallo Radio

Another new site well worth checking out: http://www.gialloradio.com/

Cyborg, il guerriero d'acciaio / Cy Warrior / Cy Warrior: Special Combat Unit

An accident causes the activation of the top-secret Cyber Warrior or 'Cyw' before his programming has been completed.


Number five is alive – or something

Concerned that the Cyw may fall into the hands of enemies, prove unable to control or simply receive unwanted attention from the public or foreign powers, the military dispatches a crack squad led by Colonel Hammer to bring back the Cyw one way or another: “If any of you see this piece of garbage and it gives you any kind of resistance blow it up as quickly as possible.”

Meanwhile, their target is befriended by young Brandon Scott and his sister Susan (no relation to Nieves Navarro, evidently), who had conveniently been orphaned by the death of their parents in a car crash a few years previously...

If this 1989 entry from make up and effects man Gianetto De Rossi is an obvious Terminator rip-off, down to copycat scenes of the Cyw performing surgical repairs on himself and POV shots in which he assesses the threat posed by possible enemies, it also has certain affinities with the later Universal Soldier which, along with in its high-speed reading Star Trek: The Next Generation's Data, demonstrates that apparent influences could go both directions or merely be coincidental.


“Hey CW1, we're friends. You can trust us. We don't want to do you any harm.”

Otherwise, there's not much to say about the film itself, with action, characterisation, dialogue and narrative alike being decidedly perfunctory. Nor is De Rossi's direction particularly inspired or imaginative, though also characterised by a surprising restraint, with little use of 'dramatic' close-ups, zooms and other techniques that we might traditionally associate with the inexperienced filmmaker striving for effect.


Henry Silva, great fun as always

Henry Silva is good value as the foul-mouthed Hammer, the kind of the boo-hiss villain who thinks nothing of having his men fire into crowds of innocent bystanders at a funfair in an ill-fated attempt to bring in the Cyw in the confidence that his superiors will cover up the incident as a turf war between local gangs, while the woodenness of Frank Zangarino as the Cyw is suitably in-keeping with his robotic nature, every move of his head being accompanied by the whirr of his motors on the soundtrack at a volume that makes you wonder how he didn't also turn the heads of people in the street.

The music by Lanfranco Perini is a plus, with simple yet effective percussive ostenati overlaid with synthesisers in a way that successfully connotes the Cyw's high-tech, robotic nature and, as the story progresses, emergent humanity.






Note how the Cyw's insides extend out further than his outside.

What was most interesting for me is how the film, like a number of filone entries of similar vintage such as Luigi Montifiore's Metamorphosis / DNA formula letale and producer Fabrizio De Angelis's Killer Crocodile – one of De Rossi's other directorial ventures was a sequel, Killer Crocodile II, shot back-to-back with its precedessor – seems to have sank without a trace, as indicated by the murky looking pan and scan Greek subtitled VHS source through which I had the opportunity to watch the film.

Twenty or even ten years earlier Cy Warrior would likely have found enough of an audience and and sufficient box office returns for De Rossi to carve out a longer running directorial career and maybe even have the opportunity to find a filone he was more suited for.

[The AVI is available from Cinemageddon]

Das Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen / The Devil's Daffodil / The Daffodil Killer

With newspaper hoardings announcing a second daffodil murder a young woman goes to make a call to Scotland Yard, but is herself murdered by a black clad masked figure before she can can be put through to them.






The daffodil killer strikes again in a scene full of giallo-style iconography but comparatively lacking in style

After leaving a daffodil on the body the killer then goes after Global Airlines investigator Jack Tarling, played by archetypal krimi detective hero Joachim Fuchsberger, finding him with a cargo of fake daffodils containing heroin intercepted by customs officials as part of a cargo from Hong Kong.

While successful in blowing up the customs officials the daffodil killer fails to kill Tarling, who then meets with his Hong Kong counterpart, Ling Chu, played by the unlikely seeming figure of Christopher Lee, as planned.


Fuchsberger and Lee

After announcing their presence to Scotland Yard the two men then investigate the convoluted mystery, beginning with the daffodils' importer, Lyons, before moving on the Soho nightclub where the first three murder victims all worked, the Cosmos...


Yet more daffodils and a characteristic mirror shot

With the subsequent proceedings continuing very much in the conventional krimi vein – Klaus Kinski is also on hand in characteristically twitchy mood, though Eddi Arent's comic relief is absent – the most interesting aspect of The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodil is arguably its production context, as one of the few collaborations between German and British filmmakers on an Edgar Wallace adaptation.

From the point of view of the krimi productions, the chief benefit of the co-production emerges as its affording more location shooting and less stock footage than usual. Even here, however, while Picadilly Circus is effectively used as the backdrop for one assassination – the victim ironically falling into a flower-seller's basket after being shot – Scotland Yard is still represented by a plaque on some random building elsewhere over which, inevitably, Big Ben chimes.


On location in exotic Soho

Insofar as the German audience would happily accept this attempt at conveying London-ness, what really hurts the film is the blandness of the Shepperton Studio interiors, which generally have a somewhat flatter and anonymous look to their lighting and lack the kind of production details that are so much a part of the charm of their German counterparts.

In fairness Terence Fisher's Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace suffered from a similar aesthetic discomfort when moving geographically in the other direction, suggesting that both British and German filmmakers of this type were perhaps somewhat set in their own comfortable ways of working at home.

Certainly if the later example of Cave of the Vampires is taken into account director Akos Rathony gives the impression of being a competent veteran but one who never found his particular niche, the first signalling his similarity with Fisher and the second his difference.

Ultimately one thus feels that it is the film's very title that indicates what it most lacks: an expressive use of colour.

If it is Blood and Black Lace rather than Hammer that would prove the catalyst here, The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodils' intersection of a drug smuggling plot with a masked killer working his way through a number of glamorous women, all from a particular place, and the prominence given elegant yet sleazy sounding bongo rhythm heavy music combine to suggest that some influences may conceivably have gone in the other direction.

It's as if, having seen what the British could bring to the krimi the Germans then sought to see whether the Italians could do any better, with the colour flooding into the antique shop from the adjacent dance hall and the more surreal look given the masked killer in Bava's film indicating that they most certainly could. (Not that this prevented future German-British krimi collaborations, as Circus of Fear demonstrates, but the results were decidedly uninspired.)

With Fuchsberger's investigator operating in the same respectable, s(t)olid manner as his more usual Scotland Yard men, it is Lee's character who is given responsibility for the more ruthless aspects of the investigation, including a spot of torture where he drowns out the victim's screams by turning up the radio.

Much like the notion of having a white actor playing a non-white this is a piece of stereotyping whose implications – these sadistic Orientals with their history of fiendish tortures as per Fu Manchu etc. – are decidedly awkward today.

This is however partly offset by Lee's always respectful performance, alongside the simple fact that at the time the ability to perform the role would have likely appeared a positive sign of his versatility as an actor rather than as negative display of potential cultural insensitivity; here it must be remembered that Lee also appeared in all manner of European productions with no-one ever really seeming to complain that his portrayal of, say, a WWII veteran German officer in The Virgin of Nuremberg was offensive or taking away work from indigenous actors.

More important than this, however, is that within the context of The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodils itself the filmmakers actually make an oblique comment on the performative rather than essentialised nature of identity by having Ling Chu have a habit for quoting Confucian proverbs and epigrams in a Charlie Chan manner only to eventually reveal that he has been making them up as he went along.

Finally, it should be noted that the film was shot in both German and English language versions, with some differences in the casting of the smaller roles. That the German version is the only one available, complete with a commentary track but no English subtitle option, presents a clear indication of the differing popularity of Wallace in the two territories today.

Another review of the film: http://dantenet.com/er/ERchives/reviews/d_reviews/daffodil.html

Biancaneve e i sette nani / Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Such an innocent title for what is, in fact, a hardcore porn film from Joe D'Amato associate Luca Damiano / Franco Lo Cascio.

The opening sequence intercuts serving girl Snow White's comparatively exploration of her own body with the wicked queen having one of her regular sessions with her servants.

These sexual numbers, the first with two women and the second with four men, take us to the 15 minute mark.


Snow White's sexual awakening

At this point then wicked queen discovers from the magic mirror that she is no longer the most beautiful in the land and thus sends her assassin to kill Snow White.


The wicked queen

Smitten by her beauty and casually exposed pudenda, he finds himself unable to complete the task and thus lets her flee into the woods, where she finds the seven dwarves' cottage.

Some hours pass and eventually Snow White goes to bed, whereupon she masturbates and falls asleep.

Next we're introduced to the Prince, who is under pressure from his father to take a wife and produce a heir for the throne. While he and his cousin happily have sex, she's relucant to have a child, leaving the Price to search elsewhere...

Next the seven dwarves make their appearance and, after a brief discussion, decide to let Snow White stay.

“I don't know if I'll be able to repay you for your kindness,” she says.

“Yes, yes,” they reply, with their lascivious grins spelling out what's coming soon...

For a porn film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs features surprisingly decent direction, performances and production values, with the bright colours and Disney-style costume worn by Snow White giving the whole film something of a playful, live-action cartoon feel, and the odd unexpected touch like some Evil Dead style camera work when Snow White is lost in the woods alongside all the more routine moan, groan and grind action.

But perhaps this shouldn't really be such a surprise. After all, Damiano started his career as a regular filmmaker, including a long period as assistant to no less than Fernando Di Leo, and seems, much like the better-known D'Amato to have made the shift into porn production very much as a business decision whilst retaining a commitment to producing as high quality a product as he could. (While he and Damiano often co-directed, D'Amato shot second unit on the film.)

A glance at his filmography also reveals that Damiano was something of a specialist in producing porn versions of well-known characters and (hi)stories, with his other 1995 entries including Hamlet X, The Erotic Adventures of Marco Polo and Decameron Tales I and II.

The last two titles are particularly significant insofar as they indicate a longer and more continuous history that goes back to the 1970s decamerotics – including D'Amato's Canterbury No. 2 - nuove storie d'amore del '300 – and saw the fragmentation of the market into soft- and hardcore forms, the increasing dominance of the latter and the corresponding emergence of more specialised filmmakers, performers and audiences.

It's the last factor, that the film would have been watched by its target audience in the home rather than the movie theatre, that perhaps also accounts for another of its differences from earlier filone forms.

While spaghetti westerns, gialli and so on also combined narrative with spectacle, with the shootout or stalk and slash scene performing a function analogous to the sexual number, these set pieces were usually shorter in duration, with the films themselves running a tighter, more commercial 80 to 95 minutes. Here by contrast there's the understanding that no one is really interested in anything except the sex scenes – no-one except the odd weirdo like yours truly, that is – with the result that more such material is inherently better. (D'Amato: “Unfortunately hardcore doesn't have room for a plot, they're just a series of fuckings.”)






Three faces of Snow White, with my deliberately avoiding shots of further down her body that would otherwise provide more context.

The emergence of the porn ghetto also seems to have unfortunately led Ludmilla Antonova, who plays Snow White with a winning combination of fresh-faced innocence and enthusiastic sexiness, absolutely nowhere except a few appearances in the likes of World Sex Tour 4: Budapest.

Two decades earlier its easy to imagine that simply by undressing she could have been an Edwige Fenech level star or even a decade earlier at least have had a mainstream career in the manner of Michela Miti in the earlier, fumetti-inspired sex comedy all'italiana version of the story, Biancaneve.

Another film that comes to mind here is the porn / musical version of Alice in Wonderland from 1976. Made at a post-porno chic point where the division between the porn and mainstream film industries was not completely entrenched, its female lead, Kristine DeBell, found her mainstream career suffering as a consequence of her X-rated debut.

One area where Snow White suffers by comparison with Alice and Biancaneve its relative lack of subtext. Simply put, the suck and fuck action leaves little room for much else and, indeed, arguably renders any notion of the what the original story is 'really' about in psychosexual terms pretty much redundant, inasmuch as Snow White's sexual initiation is explicit rather than implicit.

While Alice in Wonderland is somewhat similar – a hardcore film without sex scenes is something of an oxymoron, after all, unless we split hairs and define it as mediumcore – the progression in Alice's character is clearer along with their mythological and psychoanalytic functions.

Two areas where Snow White's limited budget are apparent are the special effects, which are none too special, and its soundtrack, which consists of a number of repetetive synthesised themes in which the limitations of the instrument and / or its performers in sounding like actual strings, brass and so forth are particularly evident. (D'Amato fans may also think of the surreal looped dialogue snippet in Caligula II that plays over the orgy scene, again and again.)

Finally it should be noted that, somewhat contrary to my deliberate obfuscation and evasion above, there is not the expected dwarf orgy, with only one of the sex scenes featuring a single dwarf performer. If this provides a further indication that the film was aiming at a mainstream audience rather than a specialist fetish one, it also indicates something of the filmmakers' hard-headed business sense if we consider that 15 years earlier D'Amato was experimenting with trangressive sex and horror combinations. The potential was undoubtedly there, all the more so since some of the seven dwarves were actually played by women but, for better or worse depending on your own position on such exploitative / subversive possibilities, it was not used to the fullest.

To sum up, not a film I could ever see myself watching particularly often nor recommend except for curiosity value, but nevertheless interesting and thought-provoking enough, almost in spite of itself.

[This was another Cinemageddon acquisition; there's another review of the film at http://www.bloodandsleaze.com/snowwhite.html]

Il Conto è chiuso / The Last Round

A mysterious stranger enters a town controlled by two criminal factions. After proving his abilities and learning who's who in the process, he plays them off against each other, before cleaning up those who are still left...


The drifter on the road

If The Last Round's scenario sounds familiar, it should. For the film is a contemporary update of A Fistful of Dollars set in a northern Italian town, with a revenge subplot involving a music box clearly derived of For a Few Dollars More – even as the protagonist's skill with a knife, which he prefers over the gun if he is forced to use something other than his fists for reasons of range, is more reminiscent of Yojimbo.


The music box and photographic memory

The stranger, Marco Russo, is played by Argentinean middleweight boxing champion Carlos Monzon, who understandably makes up for in physical presence what he may have lacked in acting ability.

The leader of one faction, Rico Manzetti, is played by poliziotti regular Luc Merenda, with his brothers and gang including such familiar filone faces as Gianni Dei and Gianfranco Cianfriglia.




Merenda shows his prowess with a gun, aiming not for the heart but a range of targets, including the left and right eyes.

The leader of the other faction, Belmondo (sic), is played by Leone regular Mario Brega. His faction is not as like the Baxters as Merenda's are the Rojos, in that he's neither the law in the town nor dominated by his wife – indeed, we never actually see his family.


Monzon demonstrates his skills

In the middle of all this are a blind girl and her adoptive father who live in a shack near a run down factory and provide Russo with information and assistance, and a second girl and her mother who kept prisoner by Rico Manzetti. They are played by Giampiero Albertini, Eleonora Fani, Annaluisa Pesce and Mariangela Giordano, the last of whose presence serves to also highlights the involvement of Gabriele Crisanti as executive producer and of his frequent screenwriting collaborator, the prolific Piero Regnoli.


I know the face, but not the name

While Luis Enrique Bacalov's imaginative and varied score also highlights the spaghetti western connection, the actual representation of the town and its two gangs has more in common with the poliziotto and Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest, itself a largely unacknowledged reference point for Kurosawa and Leone's film alike.

Although we are told that the police have been bought off they never appear as an obstacle to Marco, a plot point which would perhaps have better emphasised the gangsters' power, although against this a magistrate who does make a public stand against them is almost immediately gunned down.

More generally the references to the running down of the city's industry, labour unrest and its heavily polluted atmosphere suggest a wider context not too far removed from that of Hammett's Poisonville.

Though certainly entertaining – the main issue, it must always be remembered – and stimulating – the secondary issue – I was not convinced that The Last Round's relocation of the Leone spaghetti to 1970s Italy really worked.


A nice re-imagining of the Leone corrida in a present-day setting – the two gangs in a sports arena, with Russo watching from above in the middle

The issue isn't so much with corrupt town, which one can easily believe in as an exaggerated version of an actual city in northern Italy at the time – though the selection of this is somewhat unexpected, given that the specific cultural framework of the spaghetti has been convincingly argued to be a southern Italian one by critics like Christopher Frayling – as the juxtaposition of two fundamentally different approaches to place, time and action or, to use Bakhtin's notion, chronotopes.

Marco belongs to the 'mythic' realm, where the single heroic individual can triumph through strength (the peplum film) and / or skill and guile (the spaghetti western) over seemingly impossible odds. These same impossible odds, as they are presented in the poliziotto context of The Last Round, however belong far more to the 'real' world (more so than the superspy films of the previous decade, as a form that cross-fertilised with the spaghetti western in certain ways), where they either cannot be surmounted or the hero's triumph is necessarily 'imaginary'.

This division is apparent in some other poliziotteschi, being highlighted by the traditional maverick cop on a one-man crusade as incarnated by Maurizio Merli, but it is also less pronounced because he is embedded in this same world. To put it crudely, he uses guns versus guns, not a knife or his fists. He can also be defeated, die, or achieve a victory that is partial or pyhrric.

It could also be said, however, that the distinctive combination of character and environment in The Last Round serves to make the imaginary aspect of its solutions to real problems more prominent than in 90 per cent or more of mainstream films, including most other poliziotteschi.


Mario Brega, looking a little like Lucio Fulci here

In real life, that is, the individual is arguably fundamentally powerless, or at least tends to have his or her capabilities overstated by the (non)powers that be for various reasons. (Just try to imagine a politician or party whose message was that they really had little or no control in the grand scheme of things.)

Stelvio Massi's direction is brisk and efficient, presenting a one-two combination of surprisingly elegant camera movements, especially in the studio-bound and interior sequences, and crash zooms. He also throws in some tricksy mirror shots as Russo and Belmondo meet for the first time, an approach which seems less showing off for its own sake as a externalisation of the duplicities inherent in the set up and Russo's character as a trickster hero.

The fight sequences sometimes make use of slow motion to highlight Monzon's pugilistic abilities, although the blows still sound like car doors slamming – realism, that is, is again limited by the higher priority of entertainment...

[The film is on Region 1 DVD from Noshame. The package also includes a CD of contemporary interpretations of 70s poliziotto music and a somewhat surreal extra in the form of a tour of Luc Merenda's antique shop]

The House of Weeping Mirrors

Found on the Morte ha no sesso blog: a rather cool soundtrack for an imaginary giallo. Terska there also did the cover art and is clearly a man of many talents :-)

I Cacciatori del cobra d'oro / Hunters of the Golden Cobra

In his essay on the Italian filone cinema of the late 50s through to the early 1980s in the Monthly Film Bulletin, critic Kim Newman makes the point that if this cinema could be for ripping-off Hollywood, it could also be praised for the energy and audacity of many of these rip-offs.

Hunters of the Golden Cobra is an case in point. Though clearly derivative of Raiders of the Lost Ark and, before it, the adventure serial – in turn a reminder that the only thing that was really new about Spielberg and Lucas's film were the resources and talent behind it – it showcases all that was best about this cinema in making the most of its comparatively limited resources with ingenuity and its sheer coglioni.

The story begins in 1944, as two British and American commandos, Bob Jackson and David Franks, played by the inimitable David Warbeck and John Steiner, launch a daring raid on a Japanese base somewhere in the Philippines; coveniently, these same islands also serve, post Apocalyse Now, as the actual locations for the film.

Their misson is to abduct Japanese officer Yamato, apparently an agent and counter agent.

Yamato has something else on his mind, however: The Golden Cobra. Recalling the likes of the golden snake of the Edgar Wallace novel and krimi film as much as Raider's Lost Ark – and thus as further reminders that in this day and age everything has some antecedent – this McGuffin is valuable in more ways than one, as we shall soon learn.

As Yamato flees the base after calmly gunning down the Japanese soldier who had discovered his treachery, Jackson and Franks embark on a desperate pursuit via jeep and then plane, bombs and buildings exploding all around them. (“You know, I've never driven one of these before” “Now you tell me.” “It's going to be quite an experience, I can assure you.”)

Yamato's plane crash lands on an island, so Jackson parachutes out after him while Franks returns to base with the promise of returning with reinforcements.

Jackson soon catches up with Yamato but both men are then shot with poisoned darts by the natives. Whereas Yamato is slain, Jackson is placed on a makeshift raft and floated downstream, unsure whether he has really seen a white woman at the head of the tribe or just hallucinated her presence...

A year or so passes, during which time the Japanese are defeated. Franks, still an officer in the British army, tracks down Jackson in a seedy bar, hitting the bottle hard and down on his luck to the extent that he's willing to trade his campaign medal for a couple of dollars.

With Jackson responding to Franks' hello with a right hook, a fistfight and then mass brawl breaks out before Franks finally gets the chance to explain himself. He did search for his colleague, but was delayed as his plane had ditched in the ocean some 200 miles from land.

Franks is not here about past history, however. Rather, he has been ordered to offer Jackson $20,000 to go back into the jungle with him and find the golden cobra. For, as Franks' superior in the briefing room explains, “If this priceless object should fall into the wrong hands, all of south east Asia could be destabilised [...] Call it superstition, but millions of people in Asia believe this golden cobra possesses some sort of supernatural power, a destructive force that we can't even imagine.”

Jackson remains cynical and reluctant until the high priestess of the cult appears on the screen wreathed in flames and a native waiter, evidently a member of the cult from his cobra tattoo, attacks him with a machette. He thus accepts the mission – but for $40,000, paid in advance.

By the time the expedition is ready to leave – during which time more cultists come out of the woodwork at every opportunity – it has gained two more people: a wealthy adventurer and archaeologist by the name of Greenwater (Alan Collins) and his niece Julie (Almanta Suska), who looks exactly like the woman from the island.

And so she should, for they are in fact sisters...

“I see no reason why we shouldn't all go” surmises Franks, and thus the adventure really begins...




The hunters and their quarry

Director Antonio Margheriti was quite simply the man for this kind of film, knowing not only how to deliver no-nonsense, testosterone-fuelled action scenes with the best of them but also a whole range of more subtle trick effects, ranging from model work with aeroplanes and lava-filled chasms to convincingly placing two his leading ladies in shot simultaneously

The implicit racism of the material with its backwards cultists and the white goddess figure of Suska is made slightly more palatable by the fact that Franks is just as much of a caricature; the base motives accorded most of the western characters, and, most interestingly, the space given one of the natives who opposes the cobra cultists for their backwardness and dreams of a progressive future for his country as one “with many friends and no masters – and that includes you westerners too.” (On this subject, it's also worth remembering that Jackie Chan's Armour of God isn't exactly politically correct either, with its 'comedy' tribesmen.)





The natives bowing down before the white goddess, as per usual

Warbeck is reliable as ever as the tough, no-nonsense action hero, making one lament that he was never given the opportunity to play James Bond, while Steiner's unflappable British officer with his Terry-Thomas style upper class twit voice is amusing without becoming tiresome.

The talismanic Collins, whom Margheriti would always cast if he got the chance is suitably shifty, his character's name recalling Sidney Greenstreet, his mannerisms that actor's Maltese Falcon co-star, Peter Lorre; on the Bond angle Jackson amusingly calls Greenriver Greenfinger at one point.

If the final couple of minutes, featuring an awful theme song performed by someone with a somewhat flexible sense of pitch, are painful, the preceding 90 odd are compensation enough.

[I watched the film on a English-dubbed, Japanese (?) subtitled AVI, again found via Cinemageddon]

Peter Bark has a posse

Or, if he doesn't then he, as everyone's favourite creepy incestuous dwarf, should damn well have!

What height and weight was he anyway, for the stickers?

Il Corpo / The Body

The presence of Carroll Baker in this 1975 film from Luigi Scattini neatly makes its claims to be a giallo that bit clearer. For, if featuring no black gloved killers nor traumatic incidents in a characters past now erupting into the present, it does include a noir style conspiracy in which the participants are motivated by passion and / or prospective financial advantage.

But unlike the various films she made with Umberto Lenzi a few years earlier, Baker is here cast in a supporting role rather than as a conspirator or victim, with the majority of the drama instead revolving around the triangle of Enrico Maria Salerno, Zeudi Araya and Leonard Mann.

Salerno plays Antoine, a New York cabbie who won the lottery and left the rat race behind to go live in the tropical paradise of Trinidad.

That, at least, was the theory.

The practice has thus far proven somewhat different, entailing little more than a change of scenery, more mosquitoes, and a shift from driving a cab to piloting a boat.

Indeed, given that the story actually starts with two locals attacking Antoine because he apparently owes them money it's possible that his life could even be considered to have gotten worse, were it not for one major compensation.


Antoine and Alan

That is Araya. She plays Princess, a beautiful islander who serves as Antoine's lover and housekeeper.

Mann plays Alan, the drifter who rescues Antoine. With Alan soon proving as handy with boats as with his fists, Antoine offers him work and a place to stay.


Images of the characters behind symbolic bars recur throughout the film to convey their senses of entrapment

Though Princess initially gives Alan a frosty reception, this facade soon melts as they spend some time together away from Antoine's watchful eye.


Princess tries on the yellow rather than black dress as she prepares to make her move

Then, however, Princess turns cold again, although this only proves to be a test of Alan's commitment to their relationship and how far he is willing to go to be with her:



“Alan, do you really love me?”

“You know I love you.”

“Do you really love me very much? Do you love me enough to do anything at all for me?”

“Yes”

“Then, darling, I want you to kill him.”

But, as with Ossessione – a possible model given its own noir origins, comparable triangle of two men and one woman, and oppressive setting that the woman wants to get away from – the question is first whether words are one thing and deeds another and then, once the deed is done, whether the conspirators will get away with it...

Scattini's direction is simple but effective, juxtaposing a direct handheld camera style that gives a raw documentary feel with more carefully composed touristic imagery and some generally judicously used shock zooms.

The performances from Baker, Salerno and Mann are pleasing, benefitting from their willingness to engage with their characters, warts and all.


Unusually Antoine drinks rum rather than J&B whisky

One moment that particularly stands out in this regard is the first encounter between Baker and Salerno, in which we also learn of their past history together:

Madeleine's latest love has left her, as Antoine foretold he would. Having hit the bottle hard she is torn between being her desire not to be seen by her former husband in such a dissolute state and her momentary craving for his attention and affection, as those selfsame things that he is unable and unwilling to give.


The deglamourised Baker

If this scene would pose no threat to Baker in the context of a stage production of some respectable play about a middle-aged, alcoholic racist, commutated to the screen in the form of a popular film it carried more of a risk of typecasting for the 40-something star, as someone only suitable for portraying faded and tarnished glamour. (“You don't want that black bitch. Don't you understand – you don't own her, you're the slave, the slave of a black body!”)

As The Body of the title, Araya's role necessarily provides less to work with. Though perhaps not managing to transcend its limitations, her performance is nevertheless credible and belies her history as a beauty queen and model in a way that makes it clear Scattini was justified in casting her in a number of his films. (It also left me wondering what she might have brought to the Black Emanuelle franchise, in that disregarding Laura Gemser's beauty the Dutch-Indonesian actress does tend towards a certain inexpressiveness that sometimes detracts when her character presents the same blasé indifference to each and every encounter, no matter how outre.)






The body – Araya displaying her charms


Not Tinti and Gemser, but Mann and Araya

Scattini, Massimo Felisatti and Fabio Pittorru's writing is also better than average. Though they throw a number of twists into the tale, some of which are also pleasingly ironic, there is nothing that emerges as contrived either whilst watching the story unfold or reconstructing it retrospectively.

Instead, seemingly incidental aspects come to attain a greater significance. Note, for example, Antoine's drunken remarks to Alan that drifters and thieves are one and the same after they have failed to catch some apparent intruders one night, as an indication of suspicions of his new friend and that he's more on the ball than his habitually dishevelled, drunken state suggests. Or note Princess's request that Antoine get her a pair of shoes when he is in town, having hitherto declined to wear them.

Piero Umiliani contributes a beautifully evocative score that is by turns soothing, melancholy, romantic and impassioned, with Hammond organ grooves, lush vocalism and all the his trademark ingredients present; more generally, looking at the list of Umiliani and Scattini's collaborations, it's clear that they were very much in tune with one another, resulting in a series of scores that work beyond the images they support and which, like the film, can be enthusiastically recommended to those willing to go beyond the more familiar Argento / Martino / Morricone / Nicolai giallo idioms of the time.

[I watched the film through an English dubbed AVI from Cinemageddon]

L' Orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock / The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock / The Terror of Dr Hichcock / The Secret of Dr Hichcock / Raptus

The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock is, of course, that he is a necrophile.

It's a theme which showcases the boldness of Freda and other Italian gothic specialists of this time, if we consider that Hitchcock himself – the difference between the two spellings explicable for legal reasons, that Freda and screenwriter Gastaldi were thus not referring to any actual person, living or dead – had declined to make explicit the horrible secret of Vertigo, that “it's about a man who is in love with a dead woman,” except in interview, and the circumspection with which he approached the motives underlying Norman Bates' taxidermy in Psycho given the character's derivation from Ed Gein.

At the same time, hoever, the film obviously isn't as explicit as the likes of Beyond the Darkness, Nekromantic and Aftermath in terms of its depiction of Hichcock's practices, just as The Whip and the Body was less explicit in its depictions of sado-masochism than a Punishment of Anne or Glissements progressifs du plaisir: there were still strict limits in what could be depicted in the early 1960s within a popular / vernacular / genre context.


Another Hitchockian image, recalling Foreign Correspondent

Nonetheless, there is no question that, like Bava's film, The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock remains one of the Italian, and indeed world, cinema's supreme depictions of amour fou, and an absolute must for anyone interested in the capacity of cinema to present perverse, sublime and subversive images and ideas.

Indeed, given that the two films were often censored on their initial release, it's clear that they were pushing the envelope for their time, daring to go where most other popular filmmakers had feared to tread, not only in shock-value exploitation content but also for their surprisingly adult, romantic and non-judgemental approach to their subject matter.

This is evident in the early scenes between Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) and his first wife, Margaret (Teresa Fitzgerald / Maria Teresa Vianello). Rather than being a victim, Margaret is presented an equal participant in what we might term their sadomasochistic edge play. If the active / passive, sadist / masochist positions assigned Hichcock and Margaret here appear conventional, such that the mainstream feminist critic might accuse Freda and Gastaldi of being male sadists presenting a woman suffering from a kind of “false consciousness” in her masochistic identification, this remains an unsatifactory critique in a number of fairly transparent ways.

Indeed the filmmakers actually bring broadly psychoanalytic discourses like these into the film itself, with one of Hichcock's students, Dr Kurt (Montomery Glenn / Silvano Tranquilli) later indicating his engagement with the ideas of a certain Freud from Vienna, whilst in discussing the film in interviews Freda also often made reference to Kraft Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis and case studies therein.

Likewise, Hitchcock is not so much the conventional mad scientist as a dedicated medical professional whose experiments with anaesthesia have proven of benefit in both his personal and private lives. We do not know which came first, whether he discovered that anaesthetising his patients provoked a sexual response, or whether his sexual adventures with Margaret had unexpected benefit for others in the public rather than the private sphere.

Rather than presenting binary oppositions, the filmmakers thus seem more concerned with challenging them, and with exploring those undecidable areas in between, the slippage between poison and cure in Hichcock's use of anaesthetics perhaps even having something of the quality of the Derridean “pharmakon,” to invoke a theoretical term that comes to mind.


Poison was the cure?

Of course, one could have things another way and suggest that the life-saving operations Hichcock performs on his patients are but sadism by proxy, that a man becomes a surgeon because it gives him a way of legitimately cutting up women. While I have no doubt that there was an element of this to Victorian medicine when unnecessary surgeries such as the removal of the ovaries as a means of controlling 'unruly' or 'hysterical' women are considered, to make such a reading of the film appears an interepretive step too far.

Hitchcock, after all, is genuinely distraught when Margaret dies as a result of an overdose, leaving his home immediately after the funeral and being unable to face returning for twelve years: while he may take pleasure in necrophiliac activities, actually precipitating death through his own actions or inactions is a source of considerable distress.


The housekeeper, Martha, dominated by the image of Margaret; note that on the Italian dub their names, Margaretha and Martha, are even closer than in the English subtitles.

Indeed, we might wonder how much simpler his life would have been were he a stock psychotic killer type whom we, as viewers, could then place at a safe distance, as something and someone apart from ourselves; think here of Flesh for Frankenstein with the connotations of the Warhol and Morrisey names and their camp approach actually lessening the extent to which their film really challenges. Put another way, you – i.e. the implied art cinema elite – watch Warhol to show how superior you are, even if the joke may well be just as much on you.

Yes, I like that film's jokes about “fuck[ing] death in the gall bladder” and on the distinctive nasum of the ideal typical member of the Serbian master race as much as the next person, but also find it hard to get away from the sense that Morrisey didn't really have as much genuine feel for a popular form as, say, Polanksi with Dance of the Vampires.

On Hichcock's return he has a new wife, Cynthia (Barbara Steele) to whom his devoted housekeeper Martha, who had remained in the house during his years of absence, appears to take an immediate dislike, recalling the character of Mrs Danvers in Rebecca; we also soon after learn that Cynthia's marriage was preceded by a breakdown following the death of her father, hinting that Hichcock represents something of a substitute father for her.






The Woman at the Window, seeing the woman in the garden

Before long strange things start to happen in and around the house. Cynthia sees a female figure in a shroud in the garden near Margaret's crypt. A phantom or just an overactive imagination or trick of the light given the ferocious tempest outside? Later that night she hears what footsteps in the passage outside her room and sees the handle turning, though her husband, whose room is adjacent, professes to have heard nothing.








Martha frequently appears as if out of nowhere, like a phantom

Later, exploring the house, Cynthia finds a locked room that Martha seems rather overly protective of and, returning alone after a visit to the opera when her husband is called away to the hospital, hears a figure calling to her from the fog, proclaiming that “death will catch you as you sleep” to foregrounding another of the film's major themes, the slippage between different states of unconscious being in that to die / to sleep / to sleep perchance to dream manner.


Memento mori

Maybe the voice was that Martha's insane sister, mentioned in passing earlier as yet another ingredient in the gothic stew, but the servant claims to have taken her to the asylum earlier in the day.

Something is clearly going on, however, as testified to by Cynthia then discovering a skull in her bed, a shock moment that allows the filmmakers to reference yet another Hitchcock film, Under Capricorn, just as later a glass of milk will allude to Notorious as it becomes the pivotal element in the mise en scène and the unfolding drama.


The glass of milk

Meanwhile, one of Hichcock's patients has just died in surgery, primarily because he declined to use his anaesthetic: “I shall never use that aneasthetic again. It isn't perfected yet. It can be fatal.”

As the woman's body, covered by a sheet, is led away, Hichcock looks ambiguously at it, a cut to him at home where he then attempts to drown his sorrows once more indicates the lasting consequences of Margaret's traumatic death.

Yet, as Robert Flemyng's wonderful facial tics suggest as Hichcock drinks, he is also desperately trying to suppress the thought of the woman's corpse in the morgue, as yet more memories flood back in a near Proustian manner. Or, as his student's mentor Freud argued, the repressed will return one way or another...

Taken in its own terms as a work of delirious romantic excess, where everything is about overwrought emotion and atmospherics, The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock is an unqualified success, even a masterpiece, in which every element contributes to the whole.

Thus, for instance, though we might quibble about the Italianate appearance of Hichcock's house and the near absense of any other real locations apart from the hospital, the former and the mix of location and studio work also serve to give a suitably uncanny cast to the proceedings and the lack of much sense of the wider metropolis to emphasise Hichcock's growing obsession and the concomitant isolation of his new wife.

Indeed, the one exception to this general pattern, which sees the Hichcock's attend a concert and thus meet other members of society and his colleagues, is itself a pivotal moment in the film by confirming the doctor's inability to really rejoin this world, his wife's concomitant isolation cum encagement and generally setting everything else that follows in motion.

Freda's direction is superb, his camera movements and choice of set ups always telling. He uses close-ups and zooms sparingly and thus more effectively than in some of his later works. Besides the customarily excellent use of light and shadow, fog, and flashes of lightning to momentarily (overly) illuminate a scene, he and his collaborators also make excellent use of colour and production design more generally.


An almost irridescent image of a phantom like Steele




More images of Margaret dominating over Hichcock and her replacement, Cynthia

The Hichcock house is dominated by heavy, subdued colours and a number of portraits of Margaret, the hospital by a sterile whiteness, thus allowing the more obviously stylised, expressive and poetic uses of colour at key points to really stand out. Here we might note, for instance, the flashes of red as Hichcock passion builds or the sickly Vertigo-esque green of the secret passages investigated by Cynthia.












The red of Hichcock's rising passion

The performances are also note perfect, a fact that is all the more vital considering that there are only really five characters in total, two major and three minor.






La signora in verde

Though he might have expressed misgivings about the subject matter, British actor Robert Flemyng's portrayal of Hichcock is genuinely powerful, not so much stiff upper lip as quivering and bitten lower one, as he fights, again and again, against the weight of his past and emerging future...

Whilst Steele is here limited to portraying the light / victim side of her persona and perhaps doesn't do anything we hadn't seen before or wouldn't see again in her other Italian gothic roles, that ineffable facilty for these roles that she possessed again, that inimatable something, again comes through even as at times Cynthia's propensity to faint at the merest provocation foregrounds the character's stock origins.

Here, it's also an interesting thought experiment to try to imagine what the film would have been like had Steele played both Margaret and Cynthia: if the Hichcockian transference motif would have been then stronger, this would have been at the expense of subtlety elsewhere, that we would then have known from the outset why Hichcock had remarried after all these years and that he was not over Margaret but had rather at last found her reincarnation and / or someone who could be refashioned in her image a la Vertigo.

Freda and Gastaldi are engaging with the Hitchcockian in their own terms, rather than merely imitating. Or, to note a neat coincidence, given the importance of anesthesia in their film, it's worth mentioning in passing that Hitchcock's first published piece of writing, a short sensation narrative, was itself an account of an anaesthesia inspired nightmare, in the style of Poe. There is really nothing new under the sun – or the moon for that matter...


An image of premature burial, after Poe

Harriet White was making a career out of playing sinister governesses and housekeepers at this time, and as such has the withering glance and the curt delivery down to an art.

Teresa Fitzgerald beautifully conveys the secret life of her Victorian lady through gestures and expressions that are initially enigmatic – what are her smiles anticipating – and then convey a sublime bliss followed by “the tempestuous loveliness of terror” as the games goes wrong.

Montgomery Glenn rounds things off with a fine, if necessarily somewhat bland by comparison performance as the dashing romantic lead, a figure who represents one of the film's few concessions to convention.

Yet, if the eventual resolution is not as perverse as some might wished, there is little question that the film is a triumph, the whole being topped off by Roman Vlad's lush, romantic score with a lyrical passage or sweeping crescendo to complement each and every image, pushing the whole from melodramatic to operatic intensity.

In a word, unmissable.

[Having previously only seen The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock through a washed out print – though I retrospectively realise that part of this washing out was a reflection of the film's distinctive use of colour – and a somewhat fuzzy VHS source, both in English, this AVI in Italian with custom-made English subtitles came as something of a revelation. It is available from Cinemageddon.]

Le Amanti del mostro / The Lover of the Monster

There’s a joke formula which, reduced to its essential components goes as follows:

Question: What do you call a man who has done X – something deviant, often of a sexual nature – and A, B, C, D and E – a list of things that are exemplary in every respect?

Answer: an X

Taken back further, I suppose it’s a variant on that line in Julius Caesar, that “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

At this point you may well be wondering what the hell this has to with The Lover of the Monster. The answer is that its director, Sergio Garrone, increasingly appears to me as a victim of what could be described as the Italian filone cinema variant of this formula, which we might tentatively term “Umberto Lenzi Syndrome”.

This would be that, as a filone director, the filmmaker worked on a load of films in different genres, some good and some not so good, but comes to be recognised, if at all, for one or two of the worst and sometimes least representative ones.

With Lenzi it’s the emphasis on the cannibal films like Cannibal Ferox over his gialli and poliziotteschi. With The Lover of the Monster’s writer-director Sergio Garrone it’s the foregrounding of SS Experiment Camp and SS Camp 5 Woman’s Hell over the likes of Django the Bastard and this film.

As in his earlier supernatural horror tinged western, in which we aren’t sure if Anthony Steffen’s eponymous / nameless avenger is alive or dead, Garrone demonstrates a particular facility for conjuring up gothic atmospheres, albeit within a more traditional context.

We begin with the arrival of Anijeska / Anna Nijinsky (Katia Christine) and her husband Alex (Klaus Kinski) at her family's country house, where they intend to stay and to restore to its former glory.

Before long we learn that their marriage, despite both parties' efforts, is not a particularly happy or successful one, with the troubled Alex apparently having suffered an unspecified nervous illness that caused him to give up his own medical practice.


Alex and Anna arrive in characteristically non-communicative mode

Clearly unable to fulfil the dominant masculine role expected of him, the couple sleeping not just in separate beds but also separate rooms, with Alex being assigned Anna's father's old chamber by his wife in a further indication of his impotence and the power dynamics of their relationship, Alex comes to believe that his wife may even have engineered their move to the country house in order that she might be closer to Dr Walensky.

Certainly the young and handsome doctor is quick to pay the couple – or perhaps more specifically Anna – a courtest call, to return and, indeed, to indicate to Anna that his feelings are of an amorous nature and that he has concerns over her husband's mental and physical condition.

Against all this Alex discovers that the late Professor who stayed at the castle was engaged in some mysterious researches, with his well-equipped laboratory still remaining intact.

Alex decides to pick up where the professor left off, first performing some Frankenstein-like experiments with his wife's dog, dead as the result of a fortuitous accident, then moving into more Jekyll and Hyde / Wolfman territory as he becomes afflicted by the same side effects as his predecessor's notes had cryptically alluded via temporary transformation into a half-man, half-beast creature with the overwhelming impulse to kill whomsoever he may come across in the grounds of the house, the woods around it or the village nearby...

While The Lover of the Monster's not totally coherent amalgam of gothic themes could be taken as evidence of the declining relevance of the form, that this was not confined to the Italian gothic is evinced by much of Hammer's output of the time, such as Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde with its equally cut-and-paste mish-mash of Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper and the bodysnatchers Burke and Hare, and the misjudged The Horror of Frankenstein.

Unlike Brian Clemens and Jimmy Sangster, Garrone however avoids the temptation to camp things up or indulge in self-parody, instead playing things commendably straight in inviting his audience to enagage with his scenario in a more traditional way to recall the more romantic and tragic strand represented by the likes of Fisher's The Curse of the Werewolf and Frankenstein Created Woman and Bava's The Whip and the Body.

The setting of the film remains somewhat vague as the late 19th / early 20th century – the book detailing the professor's experiments that Kinski finds is dated 1875 – apparently somewhere in eastern Europe. This dproves to the film's advantage, making us less concerned with the little details and their accuracy or otherwise beyond whether they feel right – though the production designs and uses of colour certainly help convey a verisimilitudinous impression – and concentrating our attention on the more universal aspects of the tale in that once upon a time / fairy tales for adults manner.

Of the film's themes another notable one is the way in which outsiders are treated by the rest of the community, with one man being lynched and another executed for the crimes of Nijinsky's alter-ego. While the treatment of the first victim highlights the attitude of the peasantry – an attitude which could still be represented in a contemporary setting by the likes of Fulci's southern Italian set Don't Torture a Duckling – that of the second is more of a commentary on the supposedly more enlightened authorities, as represented by a Dr Caligari-esque magistrate who quickly forms his own opinion on the facts of the case and will let nothing sway him thereafter. (When the accused pleads his innocence, the magistrate simply says that this is what 'they' always do, reading it as further evidence of the man's guilt in a damned if you do, damned if you don't way.)

Though two wrong accusations might be criticised as poor or lazy writing, especially given the film's already brief running time, I would argue that the variations between them allow Garrone to suggest that both peasantry and burghers alike are prejudiced and unthinking, their natural assumptions being that neither they nor their social superiors could ever have committed such crimes. (This said, however, the film doesn't quite have the same structural elegance of Frankenstein Created Woman, with its guillotining of father and son 15 or so years apart for crimes that they did not commit.)




(in)justice is done

For the 1970s or contemporary century viewer looking back on such representations with a knowledge of 19th century respectable hypocrisy and 20th century genocide – a theme also foregrounded here by the vague positioning of the outsiders as gypsy types and the naming of one as Polanski in an apparent reference to the Polish-Jewish director – the errors in such assumptions are self-evident. (Garrone's self-consious approach to naming his characters is evident elsewhere in the film, with Christine's character's father being called Ivan Rassimov in what appears an in-jokish reference to the star of another of the director's spaghetti westerns, Se vuoi vivere... spara.)


Wonder what the real Ivan Rassimov thought here

As themes these also suggest a degree of continuity with the Nazisploitation entries of a couple years later. Whether intentional or not, it points once more to the near omnipresence of political subtexts in Italian filone films of the period.

Garrone's direction is energetic, perhaps a touch over the top with canted angles, dramatic zooms and handheld work often being the sort of techniques where a more selective deployment proves more telling, but you can at least see he was making the effort and trying to conjure up the appropriate atmospheres. The laboratory and stalking scenes are particularly well realised, with both also making interesting use of sound, the former featuring insane laughter whose source remains unclear and the latter heavy breathing and heartbeats to provide an aural counterpart to the more familiar subjective camera visuals.




Kinski, haunted by visions as usual

Kinski is a natural for Alex thanks to his distictive physiognomy and performance style. Whether or not he actually thought anything much of the role or regarded it as another easy collect-the-paychceck and run job – the latter possibility perhaps more likely on account of his also working on the film's face-transplant themed companion piece, The Hand that Feeds the Dead – is thus something of an irrelevance. More often than not, he just has to be there and deliver one of those looks or expressions that tell us everything we need to know.

Katia Christine likewise impresses, being convincing in a role in which you suspect some actresses would have considered fulfilled by the presence of their beauty alone. There's always the sense of something more to Anna's interactions with Alex and Dr Walensky, that Christine's performance is telling you as much about what's going on as the lines she's delivering.

The film is scored in the old-fashioned orchestral style of composers like Roman Vlad and Carlo Rustichelli, with sweeping themes that do a good job of conveying the characters' passions and torments even if they were again perhaps a touch passe for 1974 audiences.

[This DVI copy of the film, apparently sourced from a TV broadcast and presented in Italian with hard English subtitles was downloaded from Cinemageddon]

Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea / Tragic Ceremony

Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea is a strange title for a strange film.


A subtitler's nightmare

It translates as Extracted from the Secret Archives of the Police of a European Capital, suggesting a early 70s poliziotti along the lines of the previous year's Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica / Confessions of a Police Captain, whose vagueness in identifying a state compared to this apparent predecessor might be attributed to the combination of Italian and Spanish production money, with many Spanish genre films of the period using foreign settings as a means of getting around the censors by presenting their contents as offering a critique that was not directed at their conservative Francoist regime.

What we actually get, however, is a supernatural / fantastical horror that references in the dialogue to Scotland Yard, Chelsea and “Church Street” indicate to be around London, even as the sun-drenched sea and rural mediterranean locales and distinctly Italian cast to the architecture and fauna indicate very much otherwise.

Simultaneously, however, this also affords a degree of contuinity with director Riccardo Freda's previous British-Isles set, Italian-made gothics The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock and The Ghost and the giallo Double Face, on each of which he also used his Robert Hampton pseudonym, even if the motivation underlying this name and perhaps the choice of settings could be understood as more commercial than artistic:

“I was in Sanremo, and I happened to be in front of the cinema where I Vampiri was on. At that time, I would sometimes go into the hall to study the audience's reactions. I don't know why, but the theatre was almost empty. Anyway, many people were attracted by the posters, which were very beautiful. The people would read I Vampiri, I Vampiri and that seemed to tempt them. Then, at the very last moment, they would notice the name: Freda. The reaction was sort of automatic: Freda? It's Italian, it must be horrible, the Italians can't make this kind of movie.”

Yet Tragic Ceremony – as I will from hereon refer to the film, both for brevity and as better suited to its actual content – also evinces elements of continuity even with I Vampiri, through its present-day setting, mixture of aristocratic and commoner characters and theme of the old and powerful feeding upon the young and powerless.

The film opens on a sailing yacht as we are introduced to our four hippie-ish protagonists. Bill (Tony Isbert) is the son of an industrialist, Jane (Camille Keaton) the girl he covets. Joe and Fred (Maximo Valverde and Giovanni Petrucci) are friends, of less privileged backgrounds and happy to take advantage of Bill's seeming gullibility.

The game the three men play here is interesting in the light of Freda's cynical world view and interests in fine art and games of skill and chance, including horseracing and the wager-based origins of some of his films.




Fortune and misfortune as the dune buggy attack batallion meets the mysterious Lord Alexander

Within the context of the film meanwhile it also serves to introduce a pervasive theme, that of the clash of cultures and values between generations and classes, as Joe remarks: “You might be the son of a great industrialist, but as far as boats go you know nothing. You're only good at spending money. It almost seems like you prefer it that way.”

Given Joe's own modest origins and coming from an interior part of Andalucia if an indicental line of dialogue can be accorded any weight, it is less clear where he picked up his specialised knowledge of nautical terminology.

Later, as the group go ashore and make camp for the night, Joe confesses to Fred that he read up on the subject beforehand because it seemed likely to prove useful, highlighting the idea of the working-class student who consciously studies bourgeois tastes and practices to move outwith the world of his own class.

Bill then follows after Jane to give her a gift of a pearl necklace. (Cue ZZ Top lyrics, although in this case it is jewellery we are talking about.) A match cuts as he places it round her neck sees him placing the item around his mother’s instead, following which he tells her – and thus the audience looking in – its curious history.

The necklace is said to contain an evil spirit, which took over the woman who once owned it. A psychic and medium then performed an exorcism, and was given the necklace in gratitude by its previous owner, but then herself died in doubtful circumstances shortly thereafter.


Good bad taste and bad bad taste, to invoke John Waters's distinction

Bill’s mother hesitated to wear his gift, not out of fear of its provenance – or so she claims at least – but rather because she finds this history to be “in bad taste,” to again highlight the film’s distinctive tendency to intertwine aesthetic and moral judgements. Given the relative prevalence of bello and brutto rather than buono and male in Italian compared to their English language counterparts of beautiful and ugly and good and evil, this might also be a wider aspect of Italian culture – note here also the notion of Fascism as the aestheticisation of politics – that Freda and his collaborators are making particularly obvious here.

Whatever the case, Tragic Ceremony is clearly one of that subset of Eurocult films – Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon would be another obvious example, along with much of Jess Franco's oeuvre – whose own discourses might profitable be analysed using Pierre Bourdieu's ideas around the social judgement of taste, as an ironic point of “distinction” from other examples of the form insofar as they tend to approached and interpreted more externally as cult film objects.

As Jane moves to kiss Bill, a dramatic image from her point of view shows his face all blue, as if he were dead – an image all the more shocking inasmuch as there is no indication that Bill has told her the item’s history and, as such, one which also suggests its curse may not yet have been lifted.

Having rested for a while, the group decides to return home. A few miles along the road their beach buggy runs out of petrol – this despite Bill having checked and being certain the tank should be half-full. Worse, the assistant at the petrol station (Jose Calvo), who seems to appear out of nowhere, is highly distrustful of Bill’s travellers cheques and reluctant gives them a little petrol, albeit for free.

A bit further along, the buggy breaks down again anyway, with the weather also having worsened considerably. Fortuitously there is a large house opposite. Even more fortuitously there are several cars in its driveway, indicating that someone must be at home. Joe rings the doorbell, which is answered by Count Alexander (Luigi Pistilli). He and his wife (Luciana Paluzzi) purport to be firm believers in noble traditions of hospitality and invite the group to stay overnight.


Jane and the Countess

While the three men are assigned the kitchens, the countess takes Jane up to a room of her own, next to the countess, who takes an interest in her the necklace. Elsewhere in the building, preparations are being made for a black magic ceremony – a ceremony in which Jane has been assigned the role of sacrificial victim.

Fortunately Bill, Fred and Joe realise something is up just in time, leading to a shocking orgy of violence and a deliberately confusing extended denouement, the events described thus far barely taking us to the midway point of the film.










The satanic ritual is one of the film's visual highlights, with effective use of black void space and distorting lenses and angles

If Freda's approach to exploitative material in Tragic Ceremony is reminiscent of its immediate predecessor The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire in its general crudity, its distinctive approach towards aesthetics-as-ethics means this also comes across as a more deliberate decision, that Freda was self-consciously indulging in bad taste and deploying techniques like the shock zoom because they were justified by the material.

In other places the film recalls its gothic predecessors more with the emphasis being squarely on atmosphere. The lighting and lightning effects are convincing and many of the individual compositions arresting.

Though the camerawork is mobile, it is not particularly fluid, sometimes having something of a stop-start quality, while the hand-held shots are often a bit on the wobbly side. While we might take these as further expressions of the film's themes, I think this would be going too far and that Freda really needed a better camera operator.




Some of the film's more striking images

Though on paper the film has quite a good cast it should be noted that Pistilli and Paluzzi aren't really in it for very long, with the youthful protagonists on screen for most of the time. Their performances are adequate rather than inspired, although Keaton displays an effective blank / traumatised expression that also served her in good stead as the titular victim in What Have you Done to Solange?

Stelvio Cipriani provides the music, with Freda also contributing lyrics to the opening and closing credit theme. The score is a strange and at times inconsistent seeming mixture of styles, though this could also again be taken as a reflection of the film itself, with the individual cues generally being effective excepting some overly dramatic shock horror pieces.

The Toolbox Murders

Though obviously not a European production, this was one of those films which I had long felt was significant from a historical perspective but had never gotten around to seeing until now.

Released in the UK on a double bill with Zombie Flesh Eaters / Zombie it can in retrospect be seen as part of a key moment in the emergence the 'new' horror and of the so-called “video nasty,” with both films subsequently being banned as a result of the 1984 Video Recordings Act.

More recently the 2005 remake / reinterpretation directed by Tobe Hooper – how the mighty have fallen – was of interest for the strange geometry of its apartment block, as something more akin to the witch houses of Suspiria and Inferno than real world architecture, an element which perhaps helps explain how its screenwriters subsequently worked with Argento on The Third Mother.






Ambiguous images of the traumatic incident in the past that compels murder in the present

Returning to the original film, meanwhile, we also have a number of slasher and / or giallo elements.

These begin with the traumatic flashback, soon revealed as motivating the killer on his murder spree, in which a young woman falls out of a car, sustaining injuries that prove fatal; the presentation here is decidedly odd, as the image of the car driving along unexpectedly freeze-frames as the sound of a crash is heard on the soundtrack, following which we get the images of the accident itself.

Significantly the whole is also accompanied by a fire and brimstone type preacher attacking sinfulness and corruption, as the type of broadcast that it seems unlikely the presumably young and fun-loving inhabitants of the car would have been listening to, but which could well express the maniac's attitudes or even be read as part of his subjective reconstruction of this “primal scene”.

Whatever the case, we then return to the more concrete present as the killer, clad in black and wearing a ski-mask, swiftly murders three women in the apartment block that is to serve, like the aforementioned Argento fantasy horrors and Case of the Bloody Iris alike, as the film's predominant location.

The first victim, Mrs Andrews, a boozy middle-aged divorcee, attempts to defend herself with her bottle, but is run through with a power drill.

The second and third, a younger woman, Debbie, and her (girl)friend, Maria, are bludgeoned to death with a claw hammer and stabbed with a screwdriver respectively, Maria also managing to kick the killer in the groin, stunning him momentarily.






Got my black gloves on, got my ski mask on...

Debbie's actions are somewhat strange, perhaps explicable only via the logic of the exploitation film. Arriving home, she prepares to take a shower. Then, having turned the water on, she notices a shape behind the curtain and pauses. It is only some clothes, hanging up. Nevertheless, still clothed, she then steps into the shower to turn it off, then takes off her now wet and clinging white shirt and changes into a different one, apparently completely abandoning the idea of having the shower to thus curiously give us some of what 'we' want to see (i.e. breasts) but not the rest (i.e. bum and bush).

Following this the crimes are discovered and the police, led by Detective Jamison, arrive to investigate, oddly questioning the other inhabitants of the apartment block at the crime scenes and seemingly quite happy for just about anyone and everyone to wander in.

In the process we're introduced to some suspects and red herrings, though compared to the typical giallo there are fewer of both types, with it likely that most viewers familiar with playing amateur detective will have very little difficulty in identifying the guilty party amongst those present; again recalling Case of the Bloody Iris, we've got someone with an intimate knowledge of the building and its inhabitants who has or claims to have a blood phobia, namely the block manager Mr Kingsley (Cameron Mitchell).

As is so often the case in these films the police prove singularly ineffectual however, with a further murder taking place the very next evening along with an abduction.

The fourth murder set-piece provides the nudity that was lacking earlier, as Dee Ann (Kelly Nichols) is attacked with a nail gun after pleasuring herself in the bath (“Take me to your secret world again,” as the man on the love duet playing on the radio sings here). Dee Ann also makes some efforts at self-defence, and at attempting to reason with the killer (“please, put it down – I'll do anything”) though again these are to no avail. (The killer, that is, is not like Leatherface in Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2, for whom sex supplants the desire to kill at a similar moment.)

The abduction meanwhile leads to something of a shift in the narrative, with the identity of the killer and his motivation – the abducted girl, Laurie (Pamelyn Ferdin), reminds him of virginal dead daughter, while all his victims are understood as whores, representing the types who led her astray and precipitated her death – being revealed by the mid-way point of the film.

This is a device unrepresentative of typically more mystery-oriented giallo and slasher films – Halloween an exception here – and one that which provides for a more detailed and sympathetic exploration of the killer's psychology than is often the case usual, even if this still remains at a relatively superficial level.

Meanwhile, Laurie's brother Joey investigates, accompanied by Kingsley's nephew, Kent...

Another slasherism is of course the gender-neutral name of Laurie, although compared to most of her ilk she is a relatively passive and feminised “final girl” character identified by Carol Clover in her seminal study of the form, Men, Women and Chainsaws. This is also a characterisation which it's perhaps worth considering in relation to the more active than usual defences mounted by the earlier victims, ineffective though they may have been.










Some more blatant symbolism than usual

Or, to suggest some classic US slasher rather than Italian giallo binaries, here it seems very much to be the case that active = sexual = bad girl and passive = non-sexual = good girl. While some gialli, perhaps especially in the post-Halloween era do follow this schema, there are many more examples with sexually active female protagonists when we consider the kind of characters habitually incarnated by Edwige Fenech and Susan Scott in films like The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh and Death Walks at Midnight.

If the filmmakers' identification of evil with active female sexuality – note also here the “that's disgusting” remark when one character passes another the dildo he has found in Dee Ann's apartments – is further suggested by the even more obvious than usual phallic quality of some of the weapons with which they are punished for their transgressions, the paradigmatic selection of nail gun and power drill is also unusual given the argument that the typical slasher film weapon is essentially “pre-technological”.

Likewise, there is little suggestion of any gender confusion to the maniac, motivated as he is more by a puritanical, misogynistic morallty.

Though writing, performances and direction each leave something to be desired at times, the film is better put together than its generally bad reputation would suggest, even if still resolutely on the functional side of things most of the time.

Cameron Mitchell – whose very presence establishes another connection to the giallo through his association with Bava and appearance in Blood and Black Lace – contributes a gleefully over the top performance, while some of some of the flash-frame editing is surprisingly adept.

The music is also better than many slashers of the period. While the main suspense theme, a simple piano led motif, is not up there with Halloween it is also pleasingly light on droning synthesiser noodling. The diegetic cues are also used well and, in their middle of the road blandness, providing a ironic counterpoint to the madness and mayhem as they dispassionately, anempathetically play over in a manner curiously reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs. (Or, more generically, the Italian horror films discussed in Kay Dickinson's Troubling Synthesis essay in Sleaze Artists.)

[I watched the film via the Blue Underground DVD]