Delitto Carnale / Killing of the Flesh

After the death of their wealthy patriarch, the assorted members of a family assemble at an isolated hotel to wait for the funeral, the reading of the will, and the division of the estate.

With nothing to do but wait, those assembled seek to distract themselves as they know how: Having sex, arguing, fighting, playing practical jokes, or just drinking (J&B, naturally).


An emblematic image: tired, weary, bored

There is also the first indication that this is indeed a giallo, when one of the few servants in the hotel is seen on the phone, announcing that she knows the patriarch did not die in a road accident but was murdered, and that she also knows the identity of the killer.

What we don’t get, however, is a murder scene – or at least not for a while. Instead we get lesbians in the bath and heterosexual no-becomes-yes rape-becomes-consensual sex scenes.

Finally, after one particularly heavy night of debauchery – we are now more than half way through the 80-odd minutes running time – one of the family is found dead, clearly murdered.

The police are called. While they take the dead woman’s body away they do not begin an investigation, instead leaving those present to sort things out for themselves. A couple more murders result and the guilty party is outed. The end.

Delitto Carnale / Killing of the Flesh marks the end in more ways than one, being the last film from writer-director Cesare Canevari and the last film to star Marc Porel, who died the same year as it was released, 1983.

Canevari has an interesting filmography which includes the spaghetti western on acid Matalo!, the first Italian Emmanuelle film, Io Emmanuelle, and the self-explanatory Last Orgy of the Third Reich.

In fact, however, that should be seemingly self-explanatory. Last Orgy of the Third Reich has certain serious and artistic pretensions in the Night Porter, Salon Kitty or Salo mould. There’s the hint its not just being unpleasant for the sake of it, in that ‘how much of this can you take?’ way, but also asking about why you are ‘taking this’ in the first place.

In its own way Delitto Carnale is similar: How much ennui and boredom can you put up with and why? Do these composition and camera movements – and there are some pleasing and effective ones, including the discovery of the body and sequences in cobweb-filled storerooms and the patriarch’s modernist apartment – constitute sufficient reason for watching? Is it ‘for real’ or a parody in which everything is ironicised, distanced, estranged, ‘in quotes’? Just how critical is its vision of sex and dying in high society?

There’s no definitive answer, of course. And, as always, this is its source of strength, weakness, frustration and interest as a piece of Euro-trash. In this regard, it’s perhaps telling that the film was released in various different cuts, some inserting hardcore material for the raincoater crowd: If all else fails, you can always try to sneak something subversive in via the lowest-common-denominator sex film.

Recommended to those who have seen and can appreciate (read: see something in) the likes of Play Motel, The Curse of Ursula (for a Porel / Magniolfi giallo trash double bill) and Giallo a Venezia; it’s also recommended that you take a shower afterwards...

Thanks to the good people at Cinemageddon for making the film available and fan-subbing it.

La Sorella di Ursula / The Curse of Ursula

This 1978 entry from Enzo Milioni occupies a position at the trash end of giallo spectrum with the likes of contemporaries such as Play Motel and Giallo a Venezia, with the same pervasive sense of being the work of no-talent filmmakers aiming squarely at the lowest common denominators of sex and violence.


Duck, you sucker!

It's odd, then, that in a rare lapse of tastelessness the filmmakers chose not to exploit their otherwise traditionally depicted killer's weapon of choice, a dildo, for shock value or as reductio ad absurdium of psychoanalytic style phallus-as-weapon logic, preferring instead to keep it in suggestive silhouette and focus on the victims' reactions and the bloody aftermath.

Tellingly – some shots prominently displaying the dildo serve to narrow down the list of suspects and shortcircuit the murder-mystery angle somewhat, even as the inclusion of a some more traditional black-gloved hand clutching a knife retrospectively shows at least an inkling of how to work with a Delirium-style multiple maniac dynamic – the first murder neatly coincides with the arrival of sisters Ursula and Dagmar Beyne on the scene, an out of season Mediterranean coastal resort, the former looking for fun and the latter seemingly determined to do her neurotic best to disapprove of and complain about everyone and everything...








More classic giallo imagery

We soon learn that the hotel and the accompanying nightclub, with star attraction Stella Shining – cue atrocious music and worse lip-synching and performance – are doing less than stellar business, a fact that makes it hard to explain why manager Roberto should seem so keen to turn away potential guests.

Maybe it's that his soon-to-be-ex wife, Vanessa, who arrives at the place with new female lover in tow, is unwilling to let him have the place as part of their divorce settlement.

Maybe it's also something to do with the drugs trafficking operation that forms a subplot, in turn explaining why some may not want the police looking too closely even if on initial inspection it cannot account for the paucity of official investigations as the body count rises...




Franco-esque artistry

As a number of commentators have remarked, La Sorella di Ursula / The Curse of Ursula has an aesthetic frequently reminiscent of a Jess Franco film, whether it be the general languidness of the mise en scène; random shots of the sea and other non-signifying details; overuse of an ill-matched selection of sleazy listening cues; obligatory nightclub routine, or simply the endless succession of singularly unerotic sex scenes that could probably be recut to be harder or softer as individual markets demanded.






Got wood?!

Unlike a Franco or Polselli film, however, there is little sense of a more consciously experimental or subversive aesthetic at work, of a knowing camp / kitsch / trash sensibility in which, for instance, Star's act would be made as deliberately outre as possible and the audience would be let in on the joke. As it is, however, Curse of Ursula takes itself too seriously and as a result isn't nearly as fun as its the dildo killer summation might make it sound.


In an ironic piece of life imitating art / art imitating life casting the tragic Marc Porel plays a junkie

Some comments on the film at IMDB: http://imdb.com/title/tt0078300/usercomments