Bugie Rosse is a giallo which, in terms of writing, performances and direction, is probably superior to the majority of 1970s product, albeit with the rider that the last aspect depends in large part upon whether you like your gialli subtle instead of showy-for-showy-sake.
It has, of course, the misfortune to miss the filone boat by about 20 years, coming at a time when even the established masters of Italian genre cinema (e.g. Martino) were finding it harder and harder to get their films made and out there to any prospective cinema audience.
In this regard it also shows that Italian filmmakers of the 1990s could have adapted just as well as their 1960s and 1970s predecessors to the new order, insofar as it is an erotic thriller as much as a giallo – even if here we must also note the probable influence of such late 60s gialli as Double Face, Perversion Story and Umberto Lenzi and Carroll Baker’s collaborations, as sexed-up noir / Hitchcock hybrids, upon Basic Instinct, Body of Evidence and their lesser known straight-to-video counterparts.
While featuring many of the old tropes of the classic giallo, with plenty of black gloved subjective camera murder set pieces, voyeuristic scenarios, and suspects / red herrings to keep the amateur detective both within the diegesis and the audience involved, the main difference between the film and its 1970s counterparts, Argento somewhat excepted, is with regard to sexual ‘perversion’, in the form of (male) homosexuality. (As the title of Rosa von Praunheim’s 1971 film suggests “It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives.”)
Specifically, the main narrative focuses on a television journalist, Marco, who decides to go undercover in search of a scoop in the case of five gay men who have been murdered in as many months, posing as one “indiscipinato 90” on the hook-up boards. (As an early quasi-email system this is itself of interest in relation to the way in which the giallo has often foregrounded the role of modern technology, with the reel-to-reel tape elsewhere being replaced by its cassette counterpart, as part of a Hi-Fi system with a CD rather than a record player.)
Visiting the city’s main cottaging area– a small patch of land presented so often in the course of the narrative that you half wonder how the police haven’t been able to catch the killer themselves, unless pointing at official indifference is a narrative subtext, which it may well be – he soon finds himself thrown into the thick of things. His second pickup of the evening robs and knocks him unconscious, just as a mysterious assassin kills his first.
While Marco thus has an iron-clad alibi, and is ably protected by his best friend Roberto, a high-flying lawyer, he declines to identify his assailant from a series of mug shots and decides to continue his investigations.
His next visit to the city’s gay demi-monde almost brings about his demise as he agrees to go with a Polish immigrant who claims to know the identity of the killer but then turns out to be a gay basher. Left to burn to death – somewhat awkwardly Marco himself is not soaked in petrol and set ablaze, only the ground around him – a mysterious, unseen interloper pulls him to safety...
Despite Roberto’s counsel, Marco remains determined to solve the case and enters deeper and deeper into the city’s gay scene, putting increasing strains on his marriage as he becomes increasingly unsure of his own sexual identity, a la Cruising...
The first key difference between Bugie rosse and the typical classic giallo is that male homosexuality is not presented as being equivalent to paedophilia, as discussed by Koven, but is instead treated here as just another sexuality, albeit one whose practitioners – an awkward word, I admit, insofar as it implies choice, as in of a career, somewhat – are still subject to prejudice and discrimination.
Indeed, as with Argento’s more progressive early films, especially Deep Red, the gay characters are presented here as more sinned against than sinning, unable to be open about their orientation precisely because of the negative implications it still has societally. (The narrative, as it turns out, revolves around blackmail, thus implicating one of the other great giallo themes, that of the rational rather than irrational motive for murder.)
The first difference, compared to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Four Flies on Grey Velvet, is that homosexuality it is not treated as a subject for comic relief.
This is an element that is markedly absent with the exception of an elderly swinger couple who sit to both sides of Marco in a porn theatre, clearly intent on a threesome. Yet even here there’s perhaps something of a shift from the 1970s, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’s antique shop encounter aside, insofar as Marco responds by declining their invitation and moving away, rather than through a (stereotypically) aggressive male heterosexual defensiveness. (Marco, passive / non aggresive, is gay / receptive / open?)
The second, more at the level of the general writing, direction and acting, is that a sense of being thought through pervades the whole film, giving it that re-watchable aspect insofar as once you know who the killer is you can still watch it again to see the subtle cues and miscues along the way, in the same manner as with Deep Red or Tenebre.
In other words, it’s not a choice of the prosaic or the poetic, or of form or content, but rather a film where form is content, and vice versa in a commutative or syllogistic way.
To mention three things worth considering in this regard:
First we have Marco’s alter ego, “the undisciplined one” (directorial freedom, masochism) implicitly in search of the other, of discipline (directorial control, sadism).
Second, that the modus operandi of the murders preceding the narrative, and thus absent / not depicted, and within it, and thus present / depicted, are different.
Third, that both the heterosexual and gay encounters are scored with the same kind of arousing / engaging music and shot with the same approach to mise-en-scene as an expression of Marco’s growing confusion. Admittedly showing more in the former case, but how many US erotic thrillers of the time were as willing to show (pseudo) gay as (pseudo) lesbian activity?
Well worth the giallo enthusiast’s attention, even if the Berlusconi bankrolling perhaps implies an awkward subtext to the Bugie Rosse - i.e Red Lies - title...
Writer-director Pierfrancesco Campanella's later Bad Inclination is also highly recommended...
Showing posts with label erotic thriller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label erotic thriller. Show all posts
Monday, 6 April 2009
Sunday, 8 February 2009
Spiando Marina / The Smile of the Fox / Foxy Lady
Foxy Lady has three things going for it. The first two are the most obvious: Deborah Caprioglio's 'charms,' prominently displayed throughout in all their glory. The third, the direction by George Raminto, takes a little, but not much more discernment, as he places the camera in somewhat unexpected places and moves it in somewhat unexpected ways, as with an early shot that begins as an establishing shot before tracking back as the characters advance.
Who is this guy and why have I never heard of him before, I wondered. Maybe he's not a top-flight filmmaker but definitely someone with the air of a solid B-man whose whose work would be worth exploring further.
I did a spot of investigation and it became much clearer: behind the George Raminto pseudonym lies none other than Sergio Martino, one of the undisputed masters of the giallo form.
Or maybe not, as a second mystery then arises: Martino, while sometimes using a pseudonym, is not the sort of guy who you'd think would want or need one here.
True, Foxy Lady is the kind of film that might be labeled a giallo for convenience sake, being a hitman revenge drama cum erotic thriller more than your traditional murder mystery, but some more traditional elements - voyeurism and sexual perversion, a protagonist troubled by traumatic flashbacks to a life-defining incident in the past, rendered in slow-motion for added impact - are there as well.
The biggest problem the film has is its script, courtesy of Martino and Piero Regnoli. Going for surprise over suspense, the narrative both strains credulity whilst you are watching and raises a number of Hitchcockian "icebox" moments afterwards.
There is the odd self-referential touch, with Caprioglio's character remarking at one point that hers is "Such a stupid story [which] sounds like a trashy soap opera," but these aren't enough.
The first issue here, excusable in terms of market realities trumping others, is the basic set up: Steve Bond is a corrupt ex-cop, who was caught working for a drug smuggling cartels and then turned on them to save himself, with the consequence that they killed his wife and son.
The second, slighly less excusable but still probably explicable in terms of co-production opportunities, is the setting, Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the supposed home of the cartel: how many Argentinean drug cartels have you heard of?
The third is the thing which brings Bond and Caprioglo's characters, Mark and Marina, together, that they are neighbours in the same apartment block.
In itself this wouldn't be a problem, other than the possible implausibility of Mark being assigned to do the hit and then having to wait weeks for his target to be announced to him.
Well, that and the eventual identification of said target as Marina's effective owner, who conveniently beats and brutalises her for added emotional impact, along with remarks made by Mark's contact which imply that they and she are all part of the same conspiracy.
Or, it's Martino as director versus Martino as screenwriter, with the former not quite able to overcome the inadequacies of the latter. But if Foxy Lady is thus a failure as a film, it is also a revealing one, by virtue of identifying how much Martino needed a screenwriter such as Ernesto Gastaldi to make it all work and the distinction between his gialli and those of an Argento, where style and substance were inseparable.
Who is this guy and why have I never heard of him before, I wondered. Maybe he's not a top-flight filmmaker but definitely someone with the air of a solid B-man whose whose work would be worth exploring further.
I did a spot of investigation and it became much clearer: behind the George Raminto pseudonym lies none other than Sergio Martino, one of the undisputed masters of the giallo form.
Or maybe not, as a second mystery then arises: Martino, while sometimes using a pseudonym, is not the sort of guy who you'd think would want or need one here.
True, Foxy Lady is the kind of film that might be labeled a giallo for convenience sake, being a hitman revenge drama cum erotic thriller more than your traditional murder mystery, but some more traditional elements - voyeurism and sexual perversion, a protagonist troubled by traumatic flashbacks to a life-defining incident in the past, rendered in slow-motion for added impact - are there as well.
The biggest problem the film has is its script, courtesy of Martino and Piero Regnoli. Going for surprise over suspense, the narrative both strains credulity whilst you are watching and raises a number of Hitchcockian "icebox" moments afterwards.
There is the odd self-referential touch, with Caprioglio's character remarking at one point that hers is "Such a stupid story [which] sounds like a trashy soap opera," but these aren't enough.
The first issue here, excusable in terms of market realities trumping others, is the basic set up: Steve Bond is a corrupt ex-cop, who was caught working for a drug smuggling cartels and then turned on them to save himself, with the consequence that they killed his wife and son.
The second, slighly less excusable but still probably explicable in terms of co-production opportunities, is the setting, Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the supposed home of the cartel: how many Argentinean drug cartels have you heard of?
The third is the thing which brings Bond and Caprioglo's characters, Mark and Marina, together, that they are neighbours in the same apartment block.
In itself this wouldn't be a problem, other than the possible implausibility of Mark being assigned to do the hit and then having to wait weeks for his target to be announced to him.
Well, that and the eventual identification of said target as Marina's effective owner, who conveniently beats and brutalises her for added emotional impact, along with remarks made by Mark's contact which imply that they and she are all part of the same conspiracy.
Or, it's Martino as director versus Martino as screenwriter, with the former not quite able to overcome the inadequacies of the latter. But if Foxy Lady is thus a failure as a film, it is also a revealing one, by virtue of identifying how much Martino needed a screenwriter such as Ernesto Gastaldi to make it all work and the distinction between his gialli and those of an Argento, where style and substance were inseparable.
Sunday, 10 August 2008
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]
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]
Saturday, 26 July 2008
Le Tue mani sul mio corpo
A bourgeois family gathers at their home by the sea for the holidays. There is Andrea (Lino Capolicchio), the neurotic student haunted by memories of his dead mother; his father, a publisher (Jose Quaglio); his new trophy and / or gold-digging wife, Mirelle (Erna Schurer), who is far closer to Andrea's age than her husband's; Mirelle's mother and, before long, her friend, Carole (Colette Descombes) and her partner Jean.
Andrea on his motorcycle, fantasising about taking a death trip
Male and female voyeurs
It soon emerges that Andrea is obsessed with and secretly spies upon Carole, whilst Mirelle – who knows of Andrea's obsession – alternatively flirts with and mocks the already confused young man.
Some of the images produced by Andrea
Later, following a party, Andrea introduces a black woman, Nivel, indicating that she is his fiancee in a bid to shock his father and stepmother: “Nivel will be a splendid wife. I want many, many children. Lots of little cannibals that eat you all up”; subsequently Nivel performs an interpretive dance in which she dresses as both a KKK man and his victim.
Playing with identity
The intrigues and games continue, gradually becoming more serious until, eventually – literally the last scene of the film – there is a murder.
Technically accomplished and well constructed, Le Tue mani sul mio corpo – i.e. your hands on my body, although with the 'you' and 'me' references remaining free floating and shifting – is a challenging film that demands more of the viewer's active involvement than is often the case, with director and co-writer Brunello Rondi preferring to make his points elliptically rather than obviously.
At the start there's a considerable degree of uncertainty over the characters' relationships to one another belied by the neat who's who summary above such that, for example, when we first see Mirelle, we're possibly inclined to think that the man she's with is her boyfriend and / or that she's Andrea's sister.
It's a strategy that works well to foreground Andrea's sexual and other confusions and makes his state more intersubjectively shared by the audience, whilst also providing a more perverse cast to the family as a whole.
The fragmentation of space and identity
Much the same can be said of the general lack of attention to time, place and state within the film, cumulatively giving a somewhat dreamlike quality to the proceedings – what is objectively real and what is in Andrea's mind's eye – and again conveying his lack of purpose and direction.
Individual scenes displaying a carefully thought and worked through mise en scène in which the placement of the characters within the frame – alas often compromised by the pan and scan presentation on the copy I watched – and the decoupage tell us as much about what is going on as the well-crafted dialogue and situations.
Pieces of the puzzle – woman as enigma and piece of meat
Thus, for example, Andrea tries to show his sophistication to the slightly older Carole by making her a cocktail, but then finds he cannot remember the recipe and, pouring her a whisky instead, fills her glass more as if it were wine, with extreme close-ups of Carole apparently returning his gaze suggesting a connection, whether real or imagined, between them.
If there's thus a definite method to the film, the question the giallo enthusiast may find himself asking is whether it is really for him, emerging as it does more as a bourgeois melodrama / psychodrama than as a thriller in the conventional sense. While it's certainly true that the likes of Lenzi's psico sexy films of the period – Colette Descombes having actually appeared in Orgasmo the previous year – also have considerable dramatic elements and a similar tendency to focus on outwardly respectable bourgeois types, they counterbalance this with conventional conspiracies motivated by passion or financial gain and a willingness to present obvious set pieces alongside the more mundane narrative. (In this regard Le Tue mani sul mio corpo is perhaps more reminiscent of Death Laid an Egg for the way in which it too fuses narrative and set-piece, albeit in a more restrained, 'tasteful' and bourgeois way than Questi and Arcalli's masterpiece of Marxist satire.)
This said, the persistent emphasis on traditional giallo scenarios of past trauma erupting into the present, of the pleasures and dangers inherent in voyeurism voyeurism, and the persistent foregrounding of blocks of yellow within the mise en scène – if there's a curtain, a towel, a telephone or piece of swimwear it is almost guaranteed to be yellow – clearly indicate that the film is sullo stesso filone, albeit in its own north by northwest manner.
Capolicchio makes us empathise and sympathise with his character even as we necessarily retain a greater degree of distance from him than we would another more typical protagonist, while Jose Quaglio – also excellent as the blind fascist ideologue in The Conformist – plays the bourgeois patriarch as if to the manner born. Erna Schurer turns in one of her better performances as Mirelle, the character demonstrating a self-awareness about what she really represents to her husband and step-son, and the actress that she possessed brains as well as beauty thereby.
Giorgio Gaslini provided the score, an effective mixture of lyrical and jazzy cues, while the cinematography by Alessandro D'Eva, art direction by Oscar Capponi and the editing by future director Michele Massimo Tarantini are uniformly accomplished, never detracting from Rondi's vision.
[Thanks again to the good folks at Cinemageddon for making the film available and doing the English subtitles.]
Andrea on his motorcycle, fantasising about taking a death trip
Male and female voyeurs
It soon emerges that Andrea is obsessed with and secretly spies upon Carole, whilst Mirelle – who knows of Andrea's obsession – alternatively flirts with and mocks the already confused young man.
Some of the images produced by Andrea
Later, following a party, Andrea introduces a black woman, Nivel, indicating that she is his fiancee in a bid to shock his father and stepmother: “Nivel will be a splendid wife. I want many, many children. Lots of little cannibals that eat you all up”; subsequently Nivel performs an interpretive dance in which she dresses as both a KKK man and his victim.
Playing with identity
The intrigues and games continue, gradually becoming more serious until, eventually – literally the last scene of the film – there is a murder.
Technically accomplished and well constructed, Le Tue mani sul mio corpo – i.e. your hands on my body, although with the 'you' and 'me' references remaining free floating and shifting – is a challenging film that demands more of the viewer's active involvement than is often the case, with director and co-writer Brunello Rondi preferring to make his points elliptically rather than obviously.
At the start there's a considerable degree of uncertainty over the characters' relationships to one another belied by the neat who's who summary above such that, for example, when we first see Mirelle, we're possibly inclined to think that the man she's with is her boyfriend and / or that she's Andrea's sister.
It's a strategy that works well to foreground Andrea's sexual and other confusions and makes his state more intersubjectively shared by the audience, whilst also providing a more perverse cast to the family as a whole.
The fragmentation of space and identity
Much the same can be said of the general lack of attention to time, place and state within the film, cumulatively giving a somewhat dreamlike quality to the proceedings – what is objectively real and what is in Andrea's mind's eye – and again conveying his lack of purpose and direction.
Individual scenes displaying a carefully thought and worked through mise en scène in which the placement of the characters within the frame – alas often compromised by the pan and scan presentation on the copy I watched – and the decoupage tell us as much about what is going on as the well-crafted dialogue and situations.
Pieces of the puzzle – woman as enigma and piece of meat
Thus, for example, Andrea tries to show his sophistication to the slightly older Carole by making her a cocktail, but then finds he cannot remember the recipe and, pouring her a whisky instead, fills her glass more as if it were wine, with extreme close-ups of Carole apparently returning his gaze suggesting a connection, whether real or imagined, between them.
If there's thus a definite method to the film, the question the giallo enthusiast may find himself asking is whether it is really for him, emerging as it does more as a bourgeois melodrama / psychodrama than as a thriller in the conventional sense. While it's certainly true that the likes of Lenzi's psico sexy films of the period – Colette Descombes having actually appeared in Orgasmo the previous year – also have considerable dramatic elements and a similar tendency to focus on outwardly respectable bourgeois types, they counterbalance this with conventional conspiracies motivated by passion or financial gain and a willingness to present obvious set pieces alongside the more mundane narrative. (In this regard Le Tue mani sul mio corpo is perhaps more reminiscent of Death Laid an Egg for the way in which it too fuses narrative and set-piece, albeit in a more restrained, 'tasteful' and bourgeois way than Questi and Arcalli's masterpiece of Marxist satire.)
This said, the persistent emphasis on traditional giallo scenarios of past trauma erupting into the present, of the pleasures and dangers inherent in voyeurism voyeurism, and the persistent foregrounding of blocks of yellow within the mise en scène – if there's a curtain, a towel, a telephone or piece of swimwear it is almost guaranteed to be yellow – clearly indicate that the film is sullo stesso filone, albeit in its own north by northwest manner.
Capolicchio makes us empathise and sympathise with his character even as we necessarily retain a greater degree of distance from him than we would another more typical protagonist, while Jose Quaglio – also excellent as the blind fascist ideologue in The Conformist – plays the bourgeois patriarch as if to the manner born. Erna Schurer turns in one of her better performances as Mirelle, the character demonstrating a self-awareness about what she really represents to her husband and step-son, and the actress that she possessed brains as well as beauty thereby.
Giorgio Gaslini provided the score, an effective mixture of lyrical and jazzy cues, while the cinematography by Alessandro D'Eva, art direction by Oscar Capponi and the editing by future director Michele Massimo Tarantini are uniformly accomplished, never detracting from Rondi's vision.
[Thanks again to the good folks at Cinemageddon for making the film available and doing the English subtitles.]
Monday, 26 May 2008
La Ragazza del vagone letto / Terror Express!
All aboard the overnight sleaze express...
Where do all the other passengers go once the action gets underway?
Our passenger list includes:
A man and his wife, who is seriously, even terminally, ill.
An outwardly respectable father and husband who has incestuous desires towards his 16-year-old daughter; you may recognise the actor playing the father, Roberto Caporali, from Zombie: Nights of Terror.
A cigar-chomping businessman and his put upon minion, whose first task is buying “all the porno magazines you have” for his boss from the station kiosk.
A bickering couple, Anna and Mike, played by the suitably mismatched pairing of Zora Kerowa and Venantino Venantini.
A by-the-book policeman escorting a prisoner across the border from Italy into Germany; said prisoner is played by another Gabriele Crisanti alumnus, Gianluigi Chirizzi.
A prostitute, played by top-billed Silvia Dioniso, who works the train in exchange for paying the guard for his services as procurer.
And, last but by no means least as catalysts for this Twentieth Century meets Late Night Trains meets Assault on Precinct 13, three young thugs looking for kicks, two of them played by Werner Pochath and Carlo De Mejo.
The guard and the gang
The attraction between Kerova and De Mejo's characters is immediately apparent.
Let's sit back and enjoy the ride...
Objectively, Terror Express! / La Ragazza del vagone letto (i.e. The Girl in the Sleeping Car; a reference to Dioniso's character) is not a very good film.
As is Dioniso's effect on the other passengers
The contrast between the exterior images of the train which repeatedly punctuate the action, and the studio interior recreation of a small subsection of it is somewhat jarring: how come no-one from any of the other carriages ever steps in or wonders where the guard has got to over the course of the entire night?
Late Night Trains worked a lot better in this regard because the second train, the one on which the rape and murder occur, was established as empty save for the smaller central group of five characters who board it, whilst also generally making a more convincing use of the possibilities of the train space.
The obligatory softcore sex and nude scenes are also awkward. Not so much in the sense that they make for uncomfortable viewing – porno rape and a father's incestuous desires towards his adolescent daughter should certainly be awkward viewing – but more because this awkwardness comes through director Ferdinando Baldi's unfortunate tendency to present everything throughout in what he appears to intend as the same an arousing way, complete with dramatic angles and inappropriate music.
The issue is most apparent in the scene where Anna goes off with one of the thugs, Ernie. She's clearly attracted to what he represents in contrast with her older, clearly conservative minded or even reactionary husband. As such, it's appropriate to have that sense of illicit thrill in the mise en scène, as something which is between the two characters: as they fuck, they are also fucking with the system, the man, as represented by the likes of Anna's older husband. But when another thug, Phil, sneaks in to the compartment and joins in, the power dynamics of the encounter change: Anna did not consent to this. Unfortunately Baldi's direction doesn't successfully convey this.
Still on the consensual side of things...
Nor do the violent action scenes quite convince, although the problem here is perhaps as much to with the difficulty of believing in De Mejo and Pochath as anything more than obnoxious bullies. They don't give off the same psychopathic aura as David Hess in Hitch-Hike or House on the Edge of the Park, where you genuinely believe he can back up his threats as and when the need arises.
But, then again, perhaps this actually works in terms of Terror Express!'s own dynamics. Specifically, it might be argued that what we have are three bad boys – emphasis on the boy – out to see how far they can push things, who then don't get pushed back until it is too late and things have gone far further than they had anticipated.
Beyond this, the characterisation is often unsatisfactory and the attempts at social commentary, courtesy of writer George Eastman/Luigi Montifiore, somewhat ham-fisted.
Yet, what saves the film and makes it so interesting and worth watching despite its flaws is the inclusion of this selfsame material, disregarding the way it slows down and complicates the narrative as you try to keep track of everyone, their relationships with one another and, most intriguing of all, to try to figure out where the filmmakers want to you stand regarding them all.
Rather than just class, it's also about gender, generation, political leaning and appearances against reality.
Thus, for example, when first confronted with the gang, the father asks his daughter if her current boyfriend is like that, a “social degenerate” before playing the “I only want what's best for you” card in his defence; a decidedly creepy remark in the light of later revelations.
Likewise, Anna, who had earlier welcomed the gang playing their radio loudly, responds to the quiet arrival of the prisoner and his guard in the dining wagon with the remark that their presence “shows a complete lack of consideration.”
Her husband's equally telling riposte: “Look who's talking, when you condone the outrageous actions of those three punks back there! God, it pisses me off!”
Father: “It's really hot in here”
Daughter: “I wish I could turn off the heating”
Father: “Why don't you take off your nightgown?”
Where do all the other passengers go once the action gets underway?
Our passenger list includes:
A man and his wife, who is seriously, even terminally, ill.
An outwardly respectable father and husband who has incestuous desires towards his 16-year-old daughter; you may recognise the actor playing the father, Roberto Caporali, from Zombie: Nights of Terror.
A cigar-chomping businessman and his put upon minion, whose first task is buying “all the porno magazines you have” for his boss from the station kiosk.
A bickering couple, Anna and Mike, played by the suitably mismatched pairing of Zora Kerowa and Venantino Venantini.
A by-the-book policeman escorting a prisoner across the border from Italy into Germany; said prisoner is played by another Gabriele Crisanti alumnus, Gianluigi Chirizzi.
A prostitute, played by top-billed Silvia Dioniso, who works the train in exchange for paying the guard for his services as procurer.
And, last but by no means least as catalysts for this Twentieth Century meets Late Night Trains meets Assault on Precinct 13, three young thugs looking for kicks, two of them played by Werner Pochath and Carlo De Mejo.
The guard and the gang
The attraction between Kerova and De Mejo's characters is immediately apparent.
Let's sit back and enjoy the ride...
Objectively, Terror Express! / La Ragazza del vagone letto (i.e. The Girl in the Sleeping Car; a reference to Dioniso's character) is not a very good film.
As is Dioniso's effect on the other passengers
The contrast between the exterior images of the train which repeatedly punctuate the action, and the studio interior recreation of a small subsection of it is somewhat jarring: how come no-one from any of the other carriages ever steps in or wonders where the guard has got to over the course of the entire night?
Late Night Trains worked a lot better in this regard because the second train, the one on which the rape and murder occur, was established as empty save for the smaller central group of five characters who board it, whilst also generally making a more convincing use of the possibilities of the train space.
The obligatory softcore sex and nude scenes are also awkward. Not so much in the sense that they make for uncomfortable viewing – porno rape and a father's incestuous desires towards his adolescent daughter should certainly be awkward viewing – but more because this awkwardness comes through director Ferdinando Baldi's unfortunate tendency to present everything throughout in what he appears to intend as the same an arousing way, complete with dramatic angles and inappropriate music.
The issue is most apparent in the scene where Anna goes off with one of the thugs, Ernie. She's clearly attracted to what he represents in contrast with her older, clearly conservative minded or even reactionary husband. As such, it's appropriate to have that sense of illicit thrill in the mise en scène, as something which is between the two characters: as they fuck, they are also fucking with the system, the man, as represented by the likes of Anna's older husband. But when another thug, Phil, sneaks in to the compartment and joins in, the power dynamics of the encounter change: Anna did not consent to this. Unfortunately Baldi's direction doesn't successfully convey this.
Still on the consensual side of things...
Nor do the violent action scenes quite convince, although the problem here is perhaps as much to with the difficulty of believing in De Mejo and Pochath as anything more than obnoxious bullies. They don't give off the same psychopathic aura as David Hess in Hitch-Hike or House on the Edge of the Park, where you genuinely believe he can back up his threats as and when the need arises.
But, then again, perhaps this actually works in terms of Terror Express!'s own dynamics. Specifically, it might be argued that what we have are three bad boys – emphasis on the boy – out to see how far they can push things, who then don't get pushed back until it is too late and things have gone far further than they had anticipated.
Beyond this, the characterisation is often unsatisfactory and the attempts at social commentary, courtesy of writer George Eastman/Luigi Montifiore, somewhat ham-fisted.
Yet, what saves the film and makes it so interesting and worth watching despite its flaws is the inclusion of this selfsame material, disregarding the way it slows down and complicates the narrative as you try to keep track of everyone, their relationships with one another and, most intriguing of all, to try to figure out where the filmmakers want to you stand regarding them all.
Rather than just class, it's also about gender, generation, political leaning and appearances against reality.
Thus, for example, when first confronted with the gang, the father asks his daughter if her current boyfriend is like that, a “social degenerate” before playing the “I only want what's best for you” card in his defence; a decidedly creepy remark in the light of later revelations.
Likewise, Anna, who had earlier welcomed the gang playing their radio loudly, responds to the quiet arrival of the prisoner and his guard in the dining wagon with the remark that their presence “shows a complete lack of consideration.”
Her husband's equally telling riposte: “Look who's talking, when you condone the outrageous actions of those three punks back there! God, it pisses me off!”
Father: “It's really hot in here”
Daughter: “I wish I could turn off the heating”
Father: “Why don't you take off your nightgown?”
Saturday, 2 February 2008
Las Trompetas del apocalipsis / I Caldi amori di una minorenne / Perversion Story
There's a cartoon by the American artist Raymond Pettitbon which shows a naked, Manson-esque tripping hippie leaping off a building, a thought bubble indicating that the drum solo he's hearing is so good he wants to take it with him.
It's an image which came to mind when watching this 1969 giallo that opens with not one but two such leaps, those of music professor John Stone and student Catherine Milford.
News of Professor Stone's death significantly prompts a desperate attempt to save Catherine from her fate
The police unimaginatively conclude that they are dealing with two separate suicides. Stone had a history of mental illness, whilst Catherine was distraught at the break-up of her relationship with her erstwhile boyfriend, Boris the Romanian. Though a throughly unpleasant and unsympathetic character – traits that seem linked to his foreign status, which everyone incessantly remarks upon – he had a solid alibi.
Moreover, Catherine's room was locked from the inside, making it been impossible for anyone else to have thrown her out the window – unless, of course, you've read any S S Van Dine or seen, say, The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh. Yet why then did she leap out a closed window, rather than an open one like Stone?
It's questions like this which impel Catherine's flatmate Helen and brother Richard, recently returned from overseas to an unfamiliar London and news he did not anticipate, to conduct their own investigation. Their quest for the truth takes them into the city's hippie underworld, centring on the trendy nightclub the Mouse Hole and its denizens, further murders and / or suicides and ultimately the kind of shock ending which stretches credulity, even by the standards of the form.
Moody lighting
The film is also one of three, all released in the same year, to have somewhat confusingly borne the Perversion Story AKA in English release, along with Lucio Fulci's giallo Una sull altra and historical drama Beatrice Cenci.
The Fulci connection can be taken further, insofar as Spanish writer-director Julio Buchs' take on Swinging London is rather similar to the one Fulci scripted for Riccardo Freda's giallo A Doppia Faccia and later presented in his own Lizard in a Woman's Skin. It's that same mixture of fascination, distaste and non-comprehension, half South Park's Mr Mackie's “drugs are bad” and half Eric Cartman's nightmares of “filthy hippies,” and one which was no doubt useful in both selling the film to young Spanish audiences and justifying it to the Francoist old guard in the censors office.
Drugs are bad, mkay?
The film also exhibits that amusingly skewed outsider's view of its location also seen in so many krimis and a number of gialli, with the dubbing voices talent a mixture of mockney accents and the urban geography creative to say the least, where the taxi taking Richard to Catherine's goes from the Houses of Parliament to Piccadilly Circus to A N Other street and the chimes of Big Ben can apparently be heard anywhere within the city.
Gianni Ferrio's soundtrack is also all over the place, mixing experimental horror movie music, jerk beat, wild jazz, easy listening, syrupy strings and psychedelic cues. At least this is clearly the intention, however, as a means of further foregrounding the clash between conservative / conservatory and contemporary cultures and idioms:
Richard: “We know each other, don't we – you work at the Mouse Hole?”
Harry: “Yes, I work as a disc jockey at that horrible place. Surprised to see a low-brow job like that given to Stone's star pupil? He hated the music played there as much as I do. But it's a way of earning my living [...] I'm like everyone else – I must eat after all. So at night I put beatnik clothes on, put a beatnik wig on with all the trimmings. And for hours I play that sickening so-called music at the Mouse Hole.”)
Is that a thinner Harry Knowles on the right?
Hippies!!!
Brett Halsey makes for a uncomplicated, no-nonsense lead, quick to resort to his fists or revolver, while Marilu' Tolo is adequate as Helen but lacks the spark which an Edwige Fenech or Barbara Bouchet would have brought to the role.
And the hurdy gurdy man
Tellingly in the light of the film's conservatism, a romance develops between the two but doesn't go particularly far beyond this, with there likewise remaining a clear division between the suspects in the crime and the non-suspects. This is emphatically not the kind of film where we are going to learn that Helen was in fact Catherine's lover and killer, motivated by Catherine's leaving her for another woman and that she subsequently moved to seduce Richard to throw him off the scent.
Buchs' contribution is bland and predictable, the kind of direction where you can predict when there will be a shock zoom, when handheld camera is going to be used or when there will be some expressionistic distortions to convey a drug state or suchlike. The cinematography does look good, however, with effectively moody lighting and/or vibrant colours.
Ultimately your response to the film is likely to come down to its McGuffin. Personally I can't decide if it's smart, dumb or something of both. I can't help thinking, however, that a more imaginative director could have made something special out of the film and its McGuffin, the titular Trumpets of the Apocalypse, while avoiding its too easy demonisation of the hippie.
The film was issued on video by Retel in the UK, with a AVI file of it being available from Cinemageddon; Ferrio's soundtrack can be found here.
It's an image which came to mind when watching this 1969 giallo that opens with not one but two such leaps, those of music professor John Stone and student Catherine Milford.
News of Professor Stone's death significantly prompts a desperate attempt to save Catherine from her fate
The police unimaginatively conclude that they are dealing with two separate suicides. Stone had a history of mental illness, whilst Catherine was distraught at the break-up of her relationship with her erstwhile boyfriend, Boris the Romanian. Though a throughly unpleasant and unsympathetic character – traits that seem linked to his foreign status, which everyone incessantly remarks upon – he had a solid alibi.
Moreover, Catherine's room was locked from the inside, making it been impossible for anyone else to have thrown her out the window – unless, of course, you've read any S S Van Dine or seen, say, The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh. Yet why then did she leap out a closed window, rather than an open one like Stone?
It's questions like this which impel Catherine's flatmate Helen and brother Richard, recently returned from overseas to an unfamiliar London and news he did not anticipate, to conduct their own investigation. Their quest for the truth takes them into the city's hippie underworld, centring on the trendy nightclub the Mouse Hole and its denizens, further murders and / or suicides and ultimately the kind of shock ending which stretches credulity, even by the standards of the form.
Moody lighting
The film is also one of three, all released in the same year, to have somewhat confusingly borne the Perversion Story AKA in English release, along with Lucio Fulci's giallo Una sull altra and historical drama Beatrice Cenci.
The Fulci connection can be taken further, insofar as Spanish writer-director Julio Buchs' take on Swinging London is rather similar to the one Fulci scripted for Riccardo Freda's giallo A Doppia Faccia and later presented in his own Lizard in a Woman's Skin. It's that same mixture of fascination, distaste and non-comprehension, half South Park's Mr Mackie's “drugs are bad” and half Eric Cartman's nightmares of “filthy hippies,” and one which was no doubt useful in both selling the film to young Spanish audiences and justifying it to the Francoist old guard in the censors office.
Drugs are bad, mkay?
The film also exhibits that amusingly skewed outsider's view of its location also seen in so many krimis and a number of gialli, with the dubbing voices talent a mixture of mockney accents and the urban geography creative to say the least, where the taxi taking Richard to Catherine's goes from the Houses of Parliament to Piccadilly Circus to A N Other street and the chimes of Big Ben can apparently be heard anywhere within the city.
Gianni Ferrio's soundtrack is also all over the place, mixing experimental horror movie music, jerk beat, wild jazz, easy listening, syrupy strings and psychedelic cues. At least this is clearly the intention, however, as a means of further foregrounding the clash between conservative / conservatory and contemporary cultures and idioms:
Richard: “We know each other, don't we – you work at the Mouse Hole?”
Harry: “Yes, I work as a disc jockey at that horrible place. Surprised to see a low-brow job like that given to Stone's star pupil? He hated the music played there as much as I do. But it's a way of earning my living [...] I'm like everyone else – I must eat after all. So at night I put beatnik clothes on, put a beatnik wig on with all the trimmings. And for hours I play that sickening so-called music at the Mouse Hole.”)
Is that a thinner Harry Knowles on the right?
Hippies!!!
Brett Halsey makes for a uncomplicated, no-nonsense lead, quick to resort to his fists or revolver, while Marilu' Tolo is adequate as Helen but lacks the spark which an Edwige Fenech or Barbara Bouchet would have brought to the role.
And the hurdy gurdy man
Tellingly in the light of the film's conservatism, a romance develops between the two but doesn't go particularly far beyond this, with there likewise remaining a clear division between the suspects in the crime and the non-suspects. This is emphatically not the kind of film where we are going to learn that Helen was in fact Catherine's lover and killer, motivated by Catherine's leaving her for another woman and that she subsequently moved to seduce Richard to throw him off the scent.
Buchs' contribution is bland and predictable, the kind of direction where you can predict when there will be a shock zoom, when handheld camera is going to be used or when there will be some expressionistic distortions to convey a drug state or suchlike. The cinematography does look good, however, with effectively moody lighting and/or vibrant colours.
Ultimately your response to the film is likely to come down to its McGuffin. Personally I can't decide if it's smart, dumb or something of both. I can't help thinking, however, that a more imaginative director could have made something special out of the film and its McGuffin, the titular Trumpets of the Apocalypse, while avoiding its too easy demonisation of the hippie.
The film was issued on video by Retel in the UK, with a AVI file of it being available from Cinemageddon; Ferrio's soundtrack can be found here.
Tuesday, 24 April 2007
Il Miele del diavolo / The Devil's Honey
Watching this 1986 Lucio Fulci film through a beat up English dub, pan and scan VHS sourced print with burnt-in Norwegian subtitles is obviously hardly the best way to experience it, particularly the contribution made by Allejandro Ulloa's cinematography. Nevertheless, The Devil's Honey still has something about it even in this format, as a kind of “perversion story” for the '80s.
While more an erotic thriller than purist's giallo in terms of its dynamics, it makes for an interesting companion piece to Argento's Opera, released the following year, thanks to the sadomasochistic thematics and relationships running through both films and the casting of sisters Blanca and Cristina Marsillach in the key female roles.
With Cristina Marsillach proving one of the most difficult actors Argento ever worked with, it seems that Fulci got the better part of the deal here, Blanca happily submitting to every indignity The Devil's Honey's various writers could dream up.
She plays Jessica, a young woman very much in love with Johnny, a young musician - saxophonist, naturally - who treats her like dirt. When she falls pregnant, he forces her to have an abortion, telling her that the last thing their relationship – and his career – needs right now is a mewling infant. Then Johnny has an accident and needs an urgent operation.
The only man who can perform it is Dr Simpson, nicely essayed by Eurotrash stalwart Brett Halsey. He's got problems of his own, finding it easier to relate to prostitutes than his wife Carol, played by the top-billed but underused Corinne Clery, herself no stranger to this kind of material as her roles in the likes of Story of O and Hitch-Hike testify. With his wife's words ringing in his ears - basically it's me or your job - Dr Simpson fails to save Johnny's life.
Obsessed with her deceased love and the man she holds to be responsible for his death, Jessica then abducts him and takes him to an isolated beach-front house to extract her revenge...
While more an erotic thriller than purist's giallo in terms of its dynamics, it makes for an interesting companion piece to Argento's Opera, released the following year, thanks to the sadomasochistic thematics and relationships running through both films and the casting of sisters Blanca and Cristina Marsillach in the key female roles.
With Cristina Marsillach proving one of the most difficult actors Argento ever worked with, it seems that Fulci got the better part of the deal here, Blanca happily submitting to every indignity The Devil's Honey's various writers could dream up.
She plays Jessica, a young woman very much in love with Johnny, a young musician - saxophonist, naturally - who treats her like dirt. When she falls pregnant, he forces her to have an abortion, telling her that the last thing their relationship – and his career – needs right now is a mewling infant. Then Johnny has an accident and needs an urgent operation.
The only man who can perform it is Dr Simpson, nicely essayed by Eurotrash stalwart Brett Halsey. He's got problems of his own, finding it easier to relate to prostitutes than his wife Carol, played by the top-billed but underused Corinne Clery, herself no stranger to this kind of material as her roles in the likes of Story of O and Hitch-Hike testify. With his wife's words ringing in his ears - basically it's me or your job - Dr Simpson fails to save Johnny's life.
Obsessed with her deceased love and the man she holds to be responsible for his death, Jessica then abducts him and takes him to an isolated beach-front house to extract her revenge...
Monday, 25 December 2006
Naked Girl Killed in Park / Ragazza tutta nuda assassinata nel parco
It is a great exploitation title. The problem, as any fan knows, is that it is usually a lot more difficult to make a film that lives up to it. And, alas, Naked Girl Killed in Park / Ragazza tutta nuda assassinata nel parco seems to be one of those cases in point.
While director Al Brescia does deliver what the title promises – though not, it should be emphasised, the actual crime – along with memorable opening and closing sequences set against the backdrop of an amusement park, the majority of what happens in between is of the “old when old was young” varietal. Thus we have a mute muscular handyman upon whom suspicion inevitably falls (cf. Amuck!) and a beautiful but neurotic young woman with a heart condition (cf. Les Diaboliques).
The Italian-Spanish co-production opens with wealthy businessman Johan Wallenberger emerging dead from a ghost train. Two questions soon emerge: what was he doing there and was his death mere hours after taking out a one-million dollar insurance policy something more than coincidence.
Hoping that the latter question will answer the former by way of proving foul play, the insurance company calls in cocky young investigator Chris Buyer, essayed by genre regular Robert Hoffmann. Introduced to one of Wallenberger's daughters at a party – she has just, not coincidentally, been the recipient of a threatening telephone call and is then terrorised in her house – the investigation soon leads the pair to the family home, complete with another, equally beautiful and suspect sister and the not unattractive, recently widowed mother.
The case gets increasingly complicated from here on in, with blackmail, intrigues and double-crosses leading to a few instances of killing as the ultimate simplification of life…
Some subjective camera stalking and a few moments of gratuitous nudity and violence are present, but come across as more a concession to 1970s tastes in what is otherwise an old-fashioned thriller. It is these same touches, however, that are also of interest for the way they again suggest the missing-link qualities of the giallo not just in relation to the American slasher film but also to the later development of the erotic thriller.
While director Al Brescia does deliver what the title promises – though not, it should be emphasised, the actual crime – along with memorable opening and closing sequences set against the backdrop of an amusement park, the majority of what happens in between is of the “old when old was young” varietal. Thus we have a mute muscular handyman upon whom suspicion inevitably falls (cf. Amuck!) and a beautiful but neurotic young woman with a heart condition (cf. Les Diaboliques).
The Italian-Spanish co-production opens with wealthy businessman Johan Wallenberger emerging dead from a ghost train. Two questions soon emerge: what was he doing there and was his death mere hours after taking out a one-million dollar insurance policy something more than coincidence.
Hoping that the latter question will answer the former by way of proving foul play, the insurance company calls in cocky young investigator Chris Buyer, essayed by genre regular Robert Hoffmann. Introduced to one of Wallenberger's daughters at a party – she has just, not coincidentally, been the recipient of a threatening telephone call and is then terrorised in her house – the investigation soon leads the pair to the family home, complete with another, equally beautiful and suspect sister and the not unattractive, recently widowed mother.
The case gets increasingly complicated from here on in, with blackmail, intrigues and double-crosses leading to a few instances of killing as the ultimate simplification of life…
Some subjective camera stalking and a few moments of gratuitous nudity and violence are present, but come across as more a concession to 1970s tastes in what is otherwise an old-fashioned thriller. It is these same touches, however, that are also of interest for the way they again suggest the missing-link qualities of the giallo not just in relation to the American slasher film but also to the later development of the erotic thriller.
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