Killer Contro Killer / Death Commando

Four professional criminals are hired by an unidentified employer to infiltrate a chemical plant, steal a briefcase from the safe, and then blow the place up.

Ferrari (Albert Janni) is the vehicle specialist, an ace driver who can hotwire anything.

Jaffe (Fernando Cerulli) is the safecracker, with a penchant for paying women to do bump and grind shows for him.

Cherry (Dalila Di Lazarro) is a conwoman, expert at finding a way into any location and characterised by both a ruthless streak and her commitment to her boyfriend, Sean.




Cherry justifies her actions

Sterling (Henry Silva) is the hitman, an impassive professional whose emotionless mask conceals a fondness for animals, the proceeds from past jobs clearly having gone towards the creation of what amounts to a zoo in the grounds of his mansion.








Classic exploitation of exploitation; note the absence of the J&B bottle that would have been compulsory ten years earlier.

The job goes according to plan and without a hitch – almost too easily, in fact.


Giallo-esque man-nequin and 80s big hair

At this point the man bankrolling the job, identified only as His Excellency (Edmund Purdom) decides that the four and their contact Hagen (Franco Diogene) are too much of a risk to his plans to be allowed to live and accordingly sends his minions to kill them.

Two of the four survive – the credit to Di Lazarro for her “extraordinary participation” gives a clue that Cherry won't be one of them – and go in search of revenge...

Though formulaic and lacking most of the sense of aspiration that characterised the Milieu Trilogy of the early 1970s, allusions to The Asphalt Jungle in the characters' names and traits taking the place of more profound political and social commentary, Fernando Di Leo's Killer Contro Killers is nonetheless competently put together and always entertaining – even if the caper comedy presentation of the build up to and execution of the job (including a nude trampolining Di Lazzaro who distracts the guards so Silva can shoot them with a tranquilizer gun) and a musical interlude which seeing Di Lazzaro deliver a number may seem ill-placed against the no-nonsense hard hitting action foregrounded elsewhere for some.

Certainly it hardly deserved the release it didn't get in Italy itself, a failure that sadly signalled the end of Di Leo's career.

This inglorious fate also shows how far the pendulum had swung against the Italian B movie by 1985 compared to its heydey. With Silva's presence explicable through his fondness for working with Di Leo, few of his countrymen now saw the point in going to Italy if there was work to be found at home on some direct-to-video product. And without a moderately recognisable and bankable star name, it was more difficult to sell the films internationally, resulting in ever lower budgets and a general vicious cycle from which the Italian industry has never really recovered.










The many / few faces of Henry Silva

Those new to Di Leo would be advised to seek out the Milieu Trilogy first – that the film is double billed with the Silva starring The Boss on Nocturno's DVD, with the company having also brought out Milan Calibre 9 and Manhunt, makes this a whole lot easier – insofar as certain moments, such as the introduction of Sterling wielding a bazooka, refer to his earlier work.

In this regard one also notes how Cherry demonstrates her ruthlessness by cutting off a bodyguard's hand to take the briefcase chained to it as a possible allusion to Yojimbo, Di Leo having worked uncredited on the screenplay for Leone's Fistful of Dollars early in his career, the connection enhanced by the way the piano and percussion driven musical cue at this point and others sounding very like Morricone's work there.

Unfortunately much of the rest of the music has that horrible 80s blandness and artificiality to it, with this criticism extending into the styles and designs and technologies on display, too close for comfort and not far enough in the past to be retro. Their time, like Di Leo's, will surely come, however...

Giallo fans will note that Jaffe is shot in the eye through the peephole of his door, an ironic fate for a peeping tom which also mirrors that of Daria Nicolodi's character in Opera – albeit decidedly less spectacularly – while The New York Ripper's Staten Island ferry victim Cinzia de Ponti turns up alive and well as Purdom's secretary.






The peeping tom is perfunctorily punished

Indeed, looking at this eye trauma scene in the context of Di Leo's career as a whole and in comparison with Argento and Fulci, one wonders if Di Leo's failure thus far to gain the recognition afforded them might not have been down to a certain lack of vision.

He could be relied upon to deliver the goods – there are plenty of shoot outs, chases and things exploding here – but rarely transcended the limitations of formulas to imagine those iconic did-I-just-see-that moments that make you sit up and take notice.

The question then becomes whether he considered himself first and foremost a professional – a theme which runs through this film and his oeuvre as a whole – or an artist.

Definitely a candidate for future research...

La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo / The Pyjama Girl Case

The body of a young woman is found on the beach, her face burned beyond recognition. The post-mortem reveals that she had been shot and bludgeoned. In addition to the official investigation, retired old-timer Inspector Timpson (Ray Milland) takes an interest in the case, which soon becomes an obsession.


The true face of horror

Deciding that before they can find the killer they must first identify the victim, the police have the body embalmed and put on public display. This seems to give them the break they need, leading to the arrest of a low-life by the name of Quint.

Timpson, however, is not convinced and goes to a rendezvous with the man he believes to be the real killer. The correctness of his deduction is confirmed by his own murder, compelling his ex-colleagues to re-open the case...






The macabre, Damien Hirst-like exhibition of the pyjama girl to the Sydney public


Luis Barboo in a cameo appearance as one of the audience; note the yellow of the perspex of the girls's glass cage

Though La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo / The Pyjama Girl Case / The Girl in the Yellow Pyjamas is the film certainly belongs within the form, as signalled by its self-referential title, hardly your typical giallo.

Drawing its inspiration from a notorious real-life murder case that shocked 1930s Australia (and which is examined in detail on the featurette on Blue Underground's excellent DVD) the film avoids the conventional trappings of black gloved killers, subjective stalk and slash camera and so on, favouring a low-key approach that's almost documentary like at times, most notably in its warts-and-all exploration of the demi-monde of Sydney's immigrant communities. (“Don't tell me you're jealous – Oh yes, you're Italian...”)


Michele Placido plays to the Italian stereotype


Stylised, but not too stylised?

It also throws the viewer expecting a conventional giallo for a loop through the device – only understood retrospectively – of introducing the pyjama girl to us in a parallel narrative, without revealing that it takes place in the past.

Indeed, thanks to the inclusion of a conventionally connoted vaseline-on-the-lens type dreamy “I remember” flashback in which she and her friend go to bed together, we could easily think that the latter is the victim and that what's about to develop is your standard psychosexual killer seeking to punish deviant women type affair.

What emerges is far more disturbing precisely on account of its banality, as we see how the “pyjama girl” (Dalila Di Lazarro) is deserted by her lover (Mel Ferrer), marries another (Michele Placido) on the rebound, embarks on an affair with a third (Howard Ross / Renato Rossini) and falls pregnant, en route to a denouement that's less premeditated murder than the inevitable accidental outcome of circumstances.

It's the kind of everyday tragedy that we find in neo-realism – the peasant girl mistaken for the GI's killer in Paisa and then shot as a Nazi collaborator, say – or in Pabst's Pandora's Box – the pyjama girl as a 1970s Lulu – of all-too-human characters rather than would-be supermen.

Equally, however, these two unlikely seeming reference points also point to one of the film's few weaknesses, perhaps stemming from director and co-writer Flavio Mogherini's background as a production designer.

It's that tension between simply showing the world out there and making more obvious interventions, of whether its enough in itself to show a factory floor to make a socio-political point or make it a more overtly expressionistic / symbolic unnatural landscape, or what the use of slow-motion and yellow lighting say as the pyjama girl ascends the stairs with the men to whom she has agreed to prostitute herself.








The giallo as exploitation and commentary on exploitation

Sometimes, as in both these instances, the ostensible gulf between objective and subjective is intersubjectively resolved in that poetic manner Mikel Koven distinguishes, although I would contend that there is also a greater degree of conscious artistry here than his thesis would seem to admit of. Elsewhere, however, as with the red and green lights that Mogherini likes to have play across the pyjama girl's face, it feels too self-conscious and contrived.




A case of Bava or Argento-itis

In a similar vein, if it seems impossible for directors to film in Sydney without including a scene or two in front of the opera house there are again potential subtexts: what does it represent, but a vision of the Australian dream; a dream only available to the disadvantaged and disenfranchised as an exterior to be taken in but not actually entered into.

As Troy Howarth pointed out, there are certain parallels between the film and Dario Argento's Sleepless, where Ulysses Moretti is also a retired ex-detective whose unofficial investigation is regarded with suspicion and / or derision by his younger counterparts, but ultimately leads to the solving of the case – albeit at the cost of his life as he gets too close to the truth. (“Times have changed. The modern delinquent's a different breed... don't take this to heart but age isn't on your side and God knows what you might run into in a case of this kind.”)

Yet beyond this Sleepless is the more traditional and conventional giallo through its cunning psychopath playing games with the police and extensive use of the subjective camera killers' eye-view set pieces, precisely because it represented an attempt by its director to “get back to basics” and give his core audience what they wanted / expected after the debacle of Phantom of the Opera.

Where Argento does seem to succeed, however, is in painting a more convincing picture of modern versus traditional police methods, insofar as here modern methods come down to old-fashioned brutality as a confession is forcibly extracted from Quint. Unless, of course, that's the point the film-makers were making here, of a sense of frustration creeping in as new technological and criminological approaches fail to deliver what they promise:

“I've got a theory. In my opinion the girl was raped before she was killed, obviously by some psychopath. Probably a man with a castration complex.”

Again, one comes down to that interpretive richness that makes the film so fascinating to review...






The alien geography of Sydney

Minor criticisms notwithstanding, The Pyjama Girl Case emerges as an impeccably mounted example of the filone as non-filone, the kind of giallo where the writing, direction, performances – Di Lazarro and Michele Placido are particularly outstanding as the ill-fated couple – and overall seriousness of tone, where the sleazy and salacious details always have that double edge to them, perhaps most eloquently expressed in the gallery sequence where the girl's body is exhibited like some perverse artwork before crowds of ambiguously motivated public spirited and / or ghoulish types, could appeal to wider audiences for whom the term “European cult cinema” is otherwise anathema.


A Bava-esque pieta?