5 Donne per l'assassino / Five Women for the Killer

As Giorgio Pisani’s (Francis Matthews’) flight arrives – i.e. a classic giallo opening – he is called to the phone – i.e. a key giallo technology – over the intercom. It is his wife, and she is about to give birth.

Pisani contacts family friend Dr Lydia Frantzi (Pascale Rivault) and hurries to his home, finding his newborn son – and his wife dead; Lydia could not save her.

Later, at the hospital, Pisani finds his medical record left on a desk, as if for him to read. Doing so, he learns that he is infertile (apparently a hereditary condition, whose logic thereby makes one wonder.)

Over the next few days two women, whose only points in common are that they are both pregnant and have encountered Pisani, one fleetingly and the other on multiple occasions, are murdered. The method (graphically shown) is the same in both instances: A blade from the pubic region, upwards.

Pisani is brought in for questioning by a police inspector (Howard Ross/Renato Rossini), but released since there is nothing concrete against him.

It’s about this point that Stelvio Massi’s 1974 giallo begins to lose its way. The basic problem is that up until this point we’ve been following Pisani. Now, however, he becomes a suspect while the focus of the narrative shifts to other characters and the police investigation. (That some of the murders show the killer wearing the same distinctive driving gloves as Pisani helps reinforce the suspicion.)

We’re thus given no clear point of identification, in the manner that a Hitchcockian double-pursuit narrative, with Pisani seeking to identify the killer in order to demonstrate his own innocence to the authorities, would have provided.

This tends also to bring out the weaknesses in Massi’s direction. It is not that it lacks style, with there being plenty of hand-held camera work, shock zooms, rack focus, and compositions foregrounding objects before the characters or mirrors. Likewise, in contrast with Mikel Koven’s prosaic narrative/poetic set piece division of scenes, there are potentially poetic touches in even the more routine scenes – the kind of thing that arguably elevates Argento’s work above the generic norm.

This, however, is where the problem arises. For, unlike Argento, there is little sense that Massi’s stylistic devices are employed with any consistent or coherent logic, such that form informs content. The zooms, for instance, sometimes work to heighten dramatic impact, but sometimes just appear to have been used for economy/convenience. As such, they also lack the self-consciously excessive quality that their counterparts in, say, the opening moments of Bava’s Five Dolls for an August Moon have.

This also applies to Giorgio Gaslini’s jazzy score. It’s certainly good and would warrant an extended version CD re-release (it was available via a 1996 Japanese disc, running barely 30 minutes). Unfortunately sometimes it isn’t clear how it fits into the film and its images.

There are, however, some moments when all comes together. One example is the funeral of Giorgio’s wife, where Massi nicely introduces several of the suspects and red herrings. Another is the scene in which one of the titular five women senses she is being stalked and nervously goes to her door and looks through its fish-eye lens, only to find her eccentric but entirely harmless neighbour there. Suspense is thereby built up and deflated, only for shock to then be privileged as, after said neighbour has left, she is suddenly attacked by the killer.

Another point of interest for giallo fans is seeing Ross cast against type as the detective/investigator rather than a perpetrator or suspect, as with the aforementioned Bava film and Fulci’s The New York Ripper.

Hammer enthusiasts, meanwhile, may find it intriguing to see Francis Matthews of Dracula Prince of Darkness and Rasputin the Mad Monk in a contemporary setting.

Future porn queen/MP Ilona Staller has a brief role as a sexually liberated foreigner whose pregnancy precipitates her demise.

Not bad, just not as good as it could have been with a bit more care and attention.

Again thanks must go out to the community for bringing us this composite Italian/German sourced version, in widescreen and with English fansubs. It certainly beats the panned and scanned, Italian-language, VHS-sourced version of the film I viewed a few years back.

A.A.A. Massaggiatrice bella presenza offresi... / A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services

Given the popularity of the giallo in the early 1970s it is no surprise that Demofilo Fidani, "the Ed Wood of the spaghetti western" should have contributed to the filone through, albeit under his own name rather than his preferred SW pseudonyms of Dick Spitfire and Miles Deem.

What is more surprising is that A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services is not completely and utterly hopeless.

This is not to say, however, that it's by any means a good film. Rather, it is one of those lower echelon gialli in which the poetic/prosaic set-piece/narrative distinction discussed by Mikel Koven is in evidence.

The story, which sees the clients of the titular masseuse, played by a young Paola Senatore, falling prey to a killer, does not seem to be up to much.


The marigold killer?

Often as not, it functions as a justification to have Senatore's character, Cristina, parading around in various states of undress, although fans of her later work should note that there's no full-frontal nudity nor anything beyond softcore simulation. Critics of giallo exploitation may also care to note that the role of the voyeur/spectator is also implicated here prior to his punishment in our stead.




You are the voyeur

At other times AAA.... is talky, focusing upon Cristina's relationships with her sleazy boyfriend - seeing as he's played by Howard Ross, sleaze tends to come with the territory - her flatmate, confusingly named Paola (and played by Fidani's daughter), Paola's boyfriend and Christina's respectability-obsessed and estranged father.


Dig that fur coat / white roll neck ensemble Ross is wearing

The investigation of the clients' murders is left mostly to the police which, coupled with the fact that Cristina herself does not appear to be in too much danger in the Edwige Fenech manner nor is especially proactive in the Susan Scott manner, results in a pretty slow moving and unengaging movie at times.


Mack Sigis Porter rocks!

On the plus side AAA... has plenty of tasteful 70s costumes and sets (both credited to Fidani's wife, Mila Vitelli Valenza, who also had a hand in the writing in that keep it in the family / economical way) along with a good sleaze/suspense score from Lallo Gori, topped off with a closing track by the immediately recognisable Mack Sigis Porter ensemble.




Unusual blocking

You can also see that Fidani was at least trying not only in the set pieces, most notably the unmasking of the killer, but also in some of his compositions and use of yellow objects. This said, the decision to outfit the otherwise classically black clad, straight-razor wielding killer with yellow gloves comes across as a step too far, unless the intention was to connote a kitchen-sink domesticity to them...

Dalle Ardenne all'inferno / The Dirty Heroes

Wow, what a mess!

An intermittently entertaining one, to be sure, but a mess nonetheless.

For this post- Dirty Dozen WWII action / caper crossover can't seem to decide what it wants to be, the tone it wants to take, and generally outlives its welcome somewhat thanks to a resulting lack of focus and a near two-hour running time.

We begin with the escape of two Chicago gangsters, Joe Mortimer (Frederick Stafford) and Randall (Howard Ross) from a Nazi POW camp, aided by one of the guards, Sergeant Rudolph Petrowsky; Petrowsky just happens to also be from the Windy City, having had to leave the US in a hurry and take advantage of his dual nationality sometime before the war.

The three men are intent on steal some diamonds and plans for the V1 and V2 rockets from the Nazis. To accompany these goals they need the assistance of three people.

The first person is local resistance leader, Luc Rollman (Adolfo Celi). He unfortunately expects that the diamonds should be returned to the Dutch people from whom the Nazi's appropriated them...

Students of geography and military history will at this point note that the Ardennes, as referred to the in film's Italian title, is in Belgium rather than Holland; suffice to say that this proves an early indicator of the film's somewhat slapdash approach to such matters.

The second person is Kristina von Keist (Daniela Bianchi). She's the wife of the local Wermacht commander, General von Keist (Curd Jurgens). She's also Jewish, her real name being Hannah Goldschmitt.

Needless to say it would be very bad for her and her husband if recently arrived SS commander General Hassler (Helmuth Schneider) were to find out.

Being intent on pursuing what his army counterpart Keist feels to be a lost cause, Hassler's has brought about an end to the uneasy truce that had existed between Rollman's partisans and Keist's men by a series of punitive SS actions.

The third person - finally we get there - is another of the men's old Chicago crime colleagues, O'Connor (John Ireland) who's now a Colonel in the advancing US army. They need him to create a diversion by launching an attack on the German positions at the right time. The complication here is that O'Connor doesn't really have the authority to make such an attack...

In sum, what we have is an convoluted and co-incidence based story that alternates awkwardly between war as hell and war as caper approaches, with few clichés left unexplored - the good German and the bad Nazi, the Jewish woman passing as 'Aryan' - and some dubious treatments of the partisan struggle and the Holocaust where attempts at pathos tend instead to come off as bathos.

Alberto De Martino's direction is a mixed bag, some effective compositions and set pieces - most notably the underwater sequence in which our (anti-)heroes enter the Nazi compound through the canal system - being offset by a lack of imagination in the battle scenes, some poorly integrated stock footage and, most laughably, a moment when a reconnaissance plane commandeered by O'Connor transforms into a bomber, delivers its payload, and metamorphoses back again.

Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone contribute some suitably stirring martial music.

The leading men acquit themselves well enough in the derring-do stakes - Howard Ross looking as though he'd been working out particularly hard - whilst Bianchi makes for a suitably attractive love interest and sympathy figure.

The cast are nicely rounded out by some of those always welcome Eurocult faces, including, in two rather unimaginative pieces of casting John Bartha as an SS officer and Tom Felleghy as one of his allied counterparts.

Genova a mano armata / Merciless Man

If it would be difficult to think of a more generic title for a poliziotto than Genova a mano armata, writer-director Mario Lanfranchi's 1976 film nevertheless manages to produce the occasional surprise amongst the de rigeur shoot outs, brawls, chases, crosses and double-crosses.

Specifically, rather than being a dedicated crime fighter or a gangster, our protagonist (Tony Lo Bianco) is an ex-cop kicked off the force for inappropriate conduct.

Taking advantage of his father's Italian origins he's relocated to Genoa and set himself up as a private investigator – a post assumed against the wishes of local cop Gallo (Adolfo Celi) who is convinced 'The American' is up to something but cannot put his finger on anything specific.

Not that it can be said that the American has exactly shone in his new occupation, with his most recent case going spectacularly wrong on all counts as he failed to save a kidnapped businessman from being killed, the ransom from going missing and the kidnappers from escaping.

Nonetheless given that a group of gangsters seem intent on following the American's every move and also warn him against further involvement in the case he does at least have some leads to go on when the victim's daughter, Dr Marta Mayer (Maud Adams), hires him to track down her father's killers and bring them to justice one way or another...

Whether on account of the cross-over between the hunters and hunted or the apparent omission of 15 or 20 minutes of material in the version I watched, Genova a mano armata had a somewhat choppy narrative, being prone to jump from one plot point or incident to another without bothering too much about the finer details of the whys and wherefores

Though the eventual resolution goes some way to explaining how this should be so, it's also one of those cases of too little too late.

Other incidents along the way such as the American's shooting up heroin in order to infiltrate a private clinic he believes is involved in the increasingly confusing affair – presumably an idea borrowed from the French Connection 2, just as a later bus hijacking recalls Dirty Harry – strain credulity, without being well enough put together to get by on character, performance or direction alone, especially when we're not really given much reason to care about Lo Bianco's character to begin with.

Bond fans may care to note that the film may well be unique in starring not one but two of that franchise's major villains in the form of Thunderball's Celi and Octopussy's Adams, while the presence of Howard Ross / Renato Rossini as the leader of the gangsters should be a plus as far as Italian trash fans are concerned as will Franco Micalizzi's characteristically energetic score.