Cover Girl Killer

This 1959 British thriller is the kind of film which had it been made fifteen years later in Italy would probably have been a fine trash / sleaze giallo with a black gloved killer and plentiful J&B, pulchritude and stalker-cam. Think Strip Nude for Your Killer without the stripping...


The obvious suspect / red herring

Running just under an hour, the film sees a moralistic serial killer murdering his way through the cover girls of Wow! magazine, luring them with promises of work and leaving them posed in macabre tableaux morte based on the photoshoots.

The police and Wow!'s new proprietor, an archeologist incongruously left the maagzine and the Kasbah nightclub by his uncle, find their investigations hampered by the fact that the killer wears a disguise, his ill-fitting wig and coke-bottle glasses ensuring that everyone who sees him remembers but also has no idea of who he really is.


“She's the showgirl with the most on show,” which by the standards of Britain, 1959 wasn't very much...

The sole exception – and the thing which distinguishes the film from the giallo while helping generate suspense even as it removes the red herring element – is that the viewer knows the killer's identity from the outset. He's played by Harry H. Corbett, best known to the British audience from the long-running TV series Steptoe and Son.


A vital piece of photographic evidence

Unfortunately Corbett is about the only thing the film has going for it, with flat direction, generally poor performances and – as might be expected – little real sleaze content except that inherently attaching to its grimy, low-rent milieux. (“I've got a divorce coming up. If she's dead I've saved myself a lot of money,” remarks one husband whose star-struck wife walked out on him.)


The next victim, again declining to strip nude for her killer...

An amusing self-reflexive element sees the killer pose as a film producer seeking to make a cheap cash-in production based on the selfsame killings, just the sort of thing you can imagine the producers Butchers themselves doing.

Writer-director Terry Bishop (a hypenate combination surely more about economy than auteur aspirations) also made the similar-sounding Model for Murder the same year.

Red Blood Yellow Gold / Professionals for a Massacre

Having just been caught by Captain Richardson (Milo Quesada) and his men selling Confederate arms to the Union, three outlaws, Frank the Preacher (George Hilton), Ramirez the Mexican (George Martin) and Chatanooga Jim (Edd Byrnes) are court martialled and sentenced to death.


One and two halves of the three


Two and a half of the three...


Finally all three in the one shot, apparently about to be shot


Things get more complicated when you add a fourth...

After Frank asks the Lord for a small sign of grace that will stay their execution, the trio receive it from an unexpected source in the form of Sibley's hitherto trustworthy right-hand man Major Lloyd (Gerard Herter) who makes off with a gatling gun and a consignment of Union gold earmarked for buying much needed munitions for the Confederacy.

Reasoning that it takes a thief to catch a thief, General Sibley offers Frank, Ramirez and Jim a full pardon if they can recover the gold and bring in Lloyd, dead or alive. Reasoning that they can't be trusted, Sibley also sends Richardson along with them. He also has his own motive in that Lloyd had accused him of being a union spy.

The four men soon pick up the trail of Lloyd and his men by dint of a characteristic piece of spaghetti western logic. Finding tracks going off in four directions, they split up and take one route each. Three provide evidence of their quarry's passage – bullets, a stirrup and a saddle. The fourth produces no such traces and, as such, is clearly the way to go.

Things become a bit more complicated when, after various incidents, a Mexican bandit clan headed by a wizened old matriarch whose sons all seem to be called after their birth order take the gold off Lloyd and his men...

Red Blood Yellow Gold / Professionals for a Massacre is one of those films which illustrates the distinction between those that work for the critic and those that work for their intended audiences.

Viewed from the mainstream critic's perspective Red Blood, Yellow Gold must seem fairly derivative stuff, with a confusing narrative; stereotypical characters like the sadistic, grotesque Mexican and the honourable “Old South” Confederate, and generally lacklustre direction that springs to life only during the action scenes, the old standbies of brawls, chases and shoot themselves being in lieu of anything more demanding of filmmaker or spectator alike.

Yet, viewed from the perspective of the film's likely audience – so far as I can presume to assume it, of course, given cultural and temporal distance – it is precisely these same features that make the film work.

The confusing narrative and stereotypical characters come to emerge as a comment on the notions of campanellisimo and amoral familism referred to by Christopher Frayling, that one's only loyalties are to family, friends and so on rather than to any wider notions such as nation and class, and that anyone who believes or acts otherwise is a gullible fool whose lack of guile is to be exploited. In these terms, alliances are temporary and strategic and no-one outside the group can be trusted except for to betray or change allegiances when it suits their purposes, it's not something personal, just following of the codes of professional, business and social life.

The action sequences emerge as variant of the “electrocardiogram” model of the audience discussed by Christopher Wagstaff, of giving the terza visione spectator some thrills or other pay off every few minutes to attract his attention away from the social space of the theatre and back to the screen. In such terms it could also be argued that the confused narrative doesn't really matter insofar as this audience weren't necessarily following it and, to the extent that they were, probably had a better intuitive understanding of what was going to happen next and why than the outsider.

The distinction between the good and bad guys can also be drawn in these terms. If the good guys aren't really good by the standards of the American western, they are loyal to one another, have an infectious sense of fun, and don't indulge in quite the same kind of indiscriminate lethal violence as their enemies, who massacre a family of civilians merely to take their clothes. (A further irony sees the sole survivor of the massacre, who was absent at the time, believe that our heroes were responsible for it, leading her to alert the real perpetrators to an ambush.)

The film is on DVD from Wild East; I suspect that it looks a lot better than the old video sourced copy I viewed here, which was panned and scanned and suffers, as the screenshots indicate, from a tendency not to be able to fit everyone in on screen.

The missing link?

Is Ubaldo Terzano the missing link between many great gialli - Blood and Black Lace, Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Deep Red all have him as camera operator.

Carroll Baker

Just noticed from the IMDB link that today is the 77th birthday of one of my favourite giallo divas, Carroll Baker. Hope she has a good one :-)

Ator l'invincibile / Ator the Fighting Eagle

In addition to producing Ator, The Fighting Eagle for his Filmirage company, Joe D'Amato wrote, directed and photographed it, though he conceals these involvements behind his David Hills and Frederick Slonisko pseudonyms.

His contribution as cinematographer is infinitely superior to his direction and writing, with some genuinely impressive lighting effects and compositions, such as the Dutch Master style lighting in the Birth of Ator scene and the sunlight shining through the clouds in the Forest of the Dead.




The Birth of Ator


The Spider King's Temple






In the Forest of the Dead; the play of light here is beautiful

Alas, as these capital plot points and locations indicate, everything else is pretty much by the numbers stuff.

An introductory voice-over sets the scene to stock footage of mountain tops: The Spider King has oppressed the land for a millennia of darkness. There was a hero, Torin, but he failed to defeat the Spider King. This is where Torin's son, Ator, will succeed...

Ator's birth is preceded by various portents, leading the Spider King's high priest, Dakkar (who is conveniently played by Dakkar) to send his Black Knights out to kill any newborn bearing Torin's mark.

Fortunately for the helpless child the mysterious Griba (an unrecognisable Edmund Purdom, wearing a Warrior of Genghis Khan outfit) is on hand to magically conceal the mark and deliver the child to safety in the form of family of farmers who agree to raise him as if he were their own son.

The years pass and Ator (Miles O'Keeffe) has grown up. He's also developed a romantic interest in his adoptive sister, Sunya (Ritza Brown), which she reciprocates. Happily, because they aren't really brother and sister it doesn't get classified as incest, and so their parents happily consent to their marriage. (Thinking back to Anthropology 101, I suppose there's no reason why this couldn't happen in certain cultures; if incest taboos are universal the specifics of who you can and can't marry also vary.)


Sunya and Ator




Ator wielding his sword and staff

Unfortunately Griba has been spotted hanging around the village by one of Dakkar's men, who reports the news to the high priest. He and his men go on a search and destroy mission, interrupting Ator and Sunya's wedding celebrations (including an interpretive dance routine that would be more at home in something sullo stesso filone Flashdance or Fame than Conan the Barbarian), killing their parents and most of the other villagers, and taking Sunya away with them to the temple. They fail, however, to find Griba or realise to who Ator is, leaving him for dead with the others...

Awakening, is understandably annoyed and swears revenge. At this point Griba conveniently shows up once more and begins to reveal Ator's true destiny to him...

Cue encounters with the amazon/valkyrie thief, Roon (Sabrina Siani); a sorceress (Laura Gemser) and the blind warriors of the caves who guard the Shield of Mordor (sic) that Ator needs if he is to fulfill his mission...


Roon


The Sorceress

Other 'highlights' include Ator's annoying bear cub, Keog, which has the habit of appearing and disappearing whenever convenient to the plot; Dakkar's assembling his dozen or so Black Knights on the dozen or so steps of the Spider King's temple like some kind of a cut-price Thulsa Doom; Sayna's entrapment in a spider web that looks like a reject from Bloody Pit of Horror; some stock footage of volcanic eruptions; loads of dry ice being all too obvious blown in front of the camera, and a truly awful closing theme.

Carlo Maria Cordio's own music is surprisingly good, getting the Basil Polodouris vibe just right and, as we've already said, whenever you're feeling prone to give up completely D'Amato pulls one of those stunning images out of his bag of tricks. Wonder why the cinematography wasn't credited to Aristide Masaccessi?

All told, good, cheesy fun if taken in the right spirit (or with a large glass of spirits, J&B being the obvious choice, even if the setting precluded the usual product placement).

Ammazzali tutti e torna solo / Go Kill Everybody and Come Back Alone

We open with a long essentially dialogue free pre-credits sequence in which six “bandits, killers and thieves” infiltrate a Confederate stronghold using a combination of stealth, strength, skill, acrobatics and technological gimmicks, most notably a kind of dynamite firing gun.

It perhaps plays a bit more like a Gianfranco Parolini / Frank Kramer sequence than an Enzo Castellari one, but otherwise very much sets the scene for what is to follow: lots of action and comparatively little talk; adept utilisation of the widescreen Techniscope frame, with some beautiful foreground / background compositions and uses of the arid Spanish landscapes; a rousing Francesco De Masi score and, above all, a strongly masculine world.

Indeed, throughout the film's 90 odd minute running time we see absolutely no female faces whatsoever, never mind any stock types let alone rounded characters.

Rather, as the closing theme states, the thing that “all men desire” is GOLD

The six:


Clyde MacKay, the group's spokesman, de facto leader and brains.


Deker, “the smart one,” “who can do anything with dynamite – anything unpleasant, that is”


Bogard, “strong enough to break a man in two with his bare hands” and “the kind that doesn't need much of a reason” to do so.


Blade, a half-indian, half-Mexican knife specialist who “likes to cut – people mainly”.


Hoagy, “a strange boy – light fingered, especially with a gun. He'll kill if he has to but then he's sorry afterwards”


Kid, who “moves like a monkey” and has “one virtue – he's a pure killer”

Their mission, accepted by Clyde: to penetrate a Union stronghold and steal one million dollars in gold which is intended for use in purchasing armaments. The treasure is located in a munitions store, intermixed with explosives – one spark or stray bullet and the whole lot will be blown sky-high.

It maybe doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it too much, especially when a first complicating factor, from which the film takes its title, is revealed to Clyde alone: to dispose of any survivors amongst his team, should there be any, and make sure he's the only one who returns.

Why exactly? Why don't the confederates wan't the gold for themselves?

It also gets still more improbable when the team is unexpectedly joined by a would-be seventh member in the form of Lynch, the apparently loyal Confederate counter-espionage agent who first discovered the Union's scene and the location of the gold.




Lynch; note that he is the only one of the three characters to be framed in the mirror

Still, how many other spaghetti westerns featured similarly unstable identities and shifting allegiances and required similar leaps of faith to accept their (il)logics at times?

For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for two, the latter connection further cemented by the importance of a prisoner-of-war camp to the latter part of the proceedings, not to mention Castellari and writer Tito Carpi's other, obvious Leone tribute, Vado... l'ammazzo e torno – i.e. Go Kill and Come Back – with its Stranger, Mexican bandito and three-way corrida finale.

The most obvious difference between the two treasure hunts lies in their cast. Whereas Go Kill and Come Back features three actors and as such relegates its stuntmen to lesser roles, the balance here shifts somewhat towards the latter group, with Ken Wood / Gianfrano Cianfriglia (the subject of a lengthy and informative interview on the Wild East DVD) and Ottaviano Dell'Acqua playing Blade and the Kid respectively. The acting contingent is headed by the perpetually grinning Chuck Connors, the always impressive Frank Wolff and Franco Citti, whose kill and pray role might be an in-jokish reference to frequent collaborator Pier Paolo Pasolini's casting as a radical priest in Requiescant.






Some examples of Castellari's striking compositions, lensed by the reliable Alejando Ulloa

Though Castellari hadn't at this stage in his career quite developed the full expressive vocabulary he would later employ to such great effect on the likes of Keoma, with more zoom and less slow-motion, his grasp of cinema is nevertheless remarkably assured for someone who was barely 30 at the time.

Well worth a look.

Die Todesgöttin des Liebescamps / Love Camp

Okay, I know: this isn’t an Italian film. Rather it’s a West German/Greece co-production. But I felt it was worth writing about anyway for two reasons.

First, it could be construed as a borderline Black Emanuelle entry on account of having Laura Gemser and Gabriele Tinti up to their usual tricks.

Second, it’s just so amazingly bad that it’s worth an hour and a half of any Euro trash or cult fan’s time. We’re talking – in line with the film’s milieu and themes – transcendentally awful.

Gemser plays the leader of a vaguely Jim Jones /Children of God styled love cult (and as such the film might form a nice companion piece with Lenzi’s Eaten Alive, if the Italian trash fan needs any other reason for watching it) who takes full material advantage of her gullible young hippie followers.

The rules of the cult are simple: no exclusive relationships; everyone can have sex with everyone else; is expected to hook and recruit for the cult, and is apparently free to leave of their own free will whenever they like.

In fact, however, we soon learn that Gemser will brook no refusals and has her muscle-bound bodyguard and henchman Tanga covertly dispose of any apostates by throwing them down a crevasse.

A visiting US senator’s daughter comes to the attention of Gemser through her chief recruiter, Dorian, played by the film’s writer, director and composer Christian Anders.

Will true love win out, or will a tragedy ensue?

Really, who cares.

It’s all an excuse to showcase lots of nudity; some softcore heterosexual and lesbian fumblings; the odd bit of violence and sadism; some truly atrocious disco tunes and Hair-style production numbers; some free your booty and your mind will follow cod philosophising; a bit of ludicrous kung fu (courtesy of Anders, who also made similarly (non-)sterling contributions to the even more ludicrous sounding Kung Fu Emanuelle) and – most amusing of all – Tanga, permanently oiled and tensed up and looking as if he’s wandered off the set of a peplum.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, so in lieu of any more commentary here’s a few:


Christian Anders, whose fault it all is...


One of the camp followers, playing air guitar; his buddy looks like Tony Levin from King Crimson but unfortunately doesn't play air stick...


Tanga


And more Tanga...


Gemser thankfully spends more time out of costumes than in them...