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]