Bizarre Gialli – a few out-of-the-box Italian giallo films worth a look

Initially, I was arguing with myself whether to even write this retrospective of a handful of lesser-known gialli or not – but after taking Arrow's (fairly) recent release of Sergio Martino's The Suspicious Death of a Minor for a spin, I thought ultimately it might actually be worthwhile to say at least a few words about the under-the-radar works present in this lush cinematic genre...

When the thought had first hit me to write something about the (slightly?) more obscure films from the giallo canon, it was months before I'd even heard of Arrow's release. Years ago, Severin Films had put out a couple of sleazy, experimental, and somewhat hallucinogenic giallo films on DVD, In the Folds of the Flesh and The Sister of Ursula. The latter one Severin had boasted as a sleazy exploitation giallo, but actually, it's a very entertaining chamber-style giallo. A “chamber” giallo would be an Itlaian thriller that takes place mostly in an apartment where the paranoia within the film's limited amount of characters builds through a series of sexual encounters, misunderstandings, and double-crosses, until everything climaxes in bloody murder and abject fear. The Sister of Ursula dances us through these giallo numbers with the rough edges of a slightly more low-budget production, which it tries to cover up with more sex and nudity than your more familiar giallo stylings. It's actually quite entertaining and the photography through the abandoned hotel/resort that serves as the backdrop for this giallo is visually engaging, as is the entire cast as they work their way through this bodycount/mystery. The Sister of Ursula also stars Barbara Magnolfi, recognizable from Dario Argento's Suspiria.

Barbara Magnofi also appears in Sergio Martino's The Suspicious Death of a Minor, as one of the titular dead minor's prostitute acquaintances, and someone who is also wrapped up in the drug and political conspiracy that pushes lead investigator Claudio Cassinelli into solving the titular crime. Interestingly, this film looked to me like a very early one of Sergio Martino's films, mixing all the expected elements of the giallo genre with the Italian poliziotteschi genre that became popularized following Don Siegel's Dirty Harry – to the point where the music score actually varies and sways from the traditional-sounding giallo soundtrack to the poliziotteschi one. I discovered, after watching this film, that this was actually the last of Sergio Martino's six filmed gialli, and while his previous films The Strange Vice of Mrs. Whard, All the Colors of the Dark, Your Vice is a Locked Room and only I have the Key, and Torso might be the crowning achievements of Martino's career, there is a good spot for his genre and cinematographic mash-up of Italian sub-genres that is The Suspicious Death of a Minor.

Following The Sister of Ursula, I had watched, as a personal double-feature, the Severin Films release of In the Folds of the Flesh, which took me a lengthy amount of time to finally purchase due to the lukewarm reviews the DVD had received online upon its initial release. But shame on me for waiting so long, In the Folds of the Flesh is actually a humourous, sarcastic, sexy, not-quite-mainstream giallo that stat off with wild, unnecessary, hallucinogenic hooks that looks like director Sergio Bergonzelli is trying to give us the Jean-Luc Goddard of giallo cinema – before it segues into a (also chamber-like scenario) take on Roman Polanski's Cul-de-Sac, simply elevating this psychosexual romp in paranoia and conspiracy.

Once experiencing these two Severin Films DVDs – The Sister of Ursula and In the Folds of the Flesh, I found myself energized and ready for one more off-the-beaten-path giallo. I turned to Ruggero Deodato, director of Cannibal Holocaust and Cut and Run, who had made the tip-top of Italian jungle gut-muncher horror films, yet had not been at all prolific in the giallo genre. Again hearkening back to Roman Polanski for inspiration, Deodato's Waves of Lust, put out by Raro Video on DVD, concerns a pair of lovers who set out to destroy an upper-class couple whom they not only view as manipulative and opportunistic, but also believe have something to do with their friend's death and that the world would be better without, and so a very simple, yet very engaging, revenge scenario ensues, turning what is billed as an erotic romp-style drama into total giallo territory, with wonderful success. Waves of Lust is certainly more exploitive than it is mysterious, but this detracts from Deodato's film not in the least. The paranoiac drama between the two couples provides the needed thrust for the oncoming sexual and violent shenanigans in the film, which turns out a wonderfully satisfying ending. While this might be the most obscure of the four films retrospectively viewed here, it's probably the most solid and memorable of them all. Just like Sergio Martino, director Ruggero Deodato made films for commercial genre cinema in Italy in the 19070sand 1980s, and these films are massively appealing. 

Their Later Films Vol. 4 – Dario Argento.

 Argento's colorful career in horror/thriller cinema began with the violent murder mystery The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which ignited a wild fever for post-sixties (post-Bava) giallo films in Italy and made Dario Argento an international filmmaking star. Riding a hugely impressive creative high beginning with Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) and Suspiria (1975 & 1977) and continuing through Inferno, Tenebrae, Phenomena (Creepers), his work in the flashy and exciting giallo genre arguably peaked in 1987 with Opera (Terror at the Opera). Well, whether one believes Opera to have been Argento's creative peak or not, there is no denying that his lush style and over-the-top camera trickery was toned down in his subsequent films, Trauma and The Stendhal Syndrome. For me personally, I believe Argento's creative genius continued up until The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), it was this film that marked the last in Argento's reliable cinematic era, and following this, his films became more and more subdued and/or erratic, in the context of his overall giallo catalogue. Of course many fans maintain the point where his creative train was diverted to a diffident set of tracks was his work post-Opera, and fair enough, stylistically Opera is a force to be reckoned with.

Post-Stendhal Syndrome, though, we have a myriad of weird misfires and comebacks from the man once dubbed the “Italian Hitchcock”. Sleepless was primed to mark a creative comeback for Argento in the new millennium, Sleepless celebrated the style, the sexuality, and the bloodletting of Argento's best gialli from his glory years, and fans would hope for this success to continue, creatively speaking, as the prolific filmmaker continued to get his genre films produced in Italy. On fortunately, this was not to be the case, and to follow Argento's next series of gialli would be like riding a dizzying rollercoaster. From the appallingly pedestrian The Card Player to the successful Do You Like Hitchcock?, which was made for Italian television, it was getting harder and harder to get a grasp on the filmmaker's later body of work. While all three are no doubt giallo films, Sleepless, The Card Player, and Do You Like Hitchcock? couldn't be more stylistically apart from each other. And at this point in the director's career, Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005) would mark the end of the second chapter, artistically speaking, before he moved onto more television projects with Mick Garris' “Masters of Horror” series, where Argento would direct two stunning one-hour films, Jenifer and the gory Pelts, seemingly back to his old creative self once again. In fact, while returning filmmakers John Landis and John Carpenter were toning down their second entries in the “Masters of Horror” series, Argento was ramping his blood and thunder up. Argento's “Masters of Horror” episodes were segues into his third, and most dividing chapter in his cinematic works.

Dario Argento's latest films, Giallo, The Mother of Tears (The Third Mother), and Dracula 3D, have had most fans feeling luke-warm – far from his best works, his last three films aren't exactly terrible, but when compared to his films from the seventies and eighties, we start to wonder how much of his stylistic decline is the fault of the creator, and how much lies with the changing, and likely frustrating demands of Italian and international film and television expectations. Indeed Argento himself has spoken about the diminishing lack of style in his own films in relation to the anti-cinematic requests of the studios producing his films in the later years, beginning with The Card Player. One key thing about the latest of these films, Dracula 3D, is that it reunited the actress-daughter with the director-father, on the tip of Asia Argento's retirement from acting altogether. Prior to this, The Mother of Tears (which also starred Asia Argento) was actually a fast-paced, gory, and exciting apocalyptic supernatural horror tale, mixing the best of Argento's Inferno, Demons and The Church – until it wrapped up an a mind-boggling ridiculous turn... and the purposely-designed giallo vehicle titled, well, Giallo, was nowhere near as bad as the majority of fans and critics had made it out to be. As said, not his best work, but there are still many merits to Agento's final giallo film, including some fantastic art and production design and attractive performances by international actors Adrien Brody, Emmanuelle Seigner, and the lovely Elsa Pataky. If anything lets this films down it's Argento's cinematic portrayal of the antagonist – the killer seems like he'd be more at home in a William Lustig movie. Not exactly a coordinated opera of photographic style and blood & gore like the films from Argento's early-to-mid career, I would still highly recommend Do You Like Hitchcock?; meanwhile Giallo and Mother of Tears might not be as bad as some fickle audience members might have us believe – after all, weren't we far more forgiving as an audience, and as fans, to Argento's cinematic quirks and stylish blunders in the 70s and 80s? 

--V.

(Sleepless)

 (Do You Like Hitchcock?)

(Jenifer)

(The Mother of Tears)

(Giallo)

 

Death Laid an Egg

I had no idea what the title “Death Laid an Egg” could have possibly meant until the watching the first scene, for the first time. Chickens. The movie is all about Chickens.

I'd heard about this title back when I was trying to consume as much giallo cinema as humanly possible, but it never seemed to be available or accessible on any home video format – or if it was, it was never readily available when I was keeping an eye out for it. And then late in 2017 Cult Epics released this late-sixties gem onto Blu-ray, where I was finally able to see it, and I was not disappointed. This sexy sixties giallo stars Eva Aulin, whose claim to fame was playing “Candy” in the British cult film of the same name – Aulin is incredibly alluring in both films, in “Death Laid an Egg” she plays a young co-owner of a chicken farm who, along with Gina Lollobrigida (the striking sophisticated beauty and subtle femme fatale of the film) and Gina's character's husband played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, have just laid off all of the hired farm workers while executing a plan to replace them with new machinery and experimental technology. Right off the bat, it appears someone is trying to put at least one of the owners in harm's way, and the workers make and easy and immediate red herring. But soon, other suspects pop up as we're introduced to a sort of mercenary biologist and an untrustworthy, and highly suspicious, marketing designer who appears to have a relationship with Aulin's character. Amid all of this, the owners of the farm are dead-set on hosting a lavish party at their home, leading up to the point in the film where our giallo killer appears to finally make his (or her) first move – but wait... Strangely, though, at this key point in the film, co-writer/director Giulio Questi (who also directed “Arcana” and “Django, Kill...”) decides to take the narrative in an experimental turn, and it starts to look like we may have a giallo with no giallo killer, and with a death told via a very cleverly-edited and extremely stylish flashback that was not really a very giallo murder at all, but is rather a past event that is not even directly related to anything happening in the present at all, save for our lead characters' state(s) of mind. Even the socio-political aspect of the farm workers' plight has been long dropped from the plot, and at this point I started to wonder if Questi was just fucking with us.

Well, mind-fuckery or not, it was impossible for me to stop watching at this point, because the film is almost hypnotically engaging, it's astoundingly and imaginatively well-edited and it's got style and sixties fashion to burn; and Questi's film oozes eroticism with deceptive ease without actually being exploitive whatsoever. But when his plot suddenly switched gears halfway through from a chicken-industry conspiracy to a noir-style adultery/revenge scenario, I suddenly knew damned well he was fucking with us. It's at this point in the film where Gina Lollobrigida brilliantly takes the lead away from Jean-Louis Trintignant, with Ewa Aulin and her suspicious-marketing-guy boyfriend being the string holding everything in a line. 

There is some slightly lurid sexual exposition in this second half of Questi's arthouse giallo that eventually does lead to a murder, as well as the much-anticipated giallo twist-ending, meanwhile Lollobrigida doesn't so much steal the show, as much as she quietly, and most welcomingly, overtakes it with her dangerous beauty and magnetic screen presence. 

--V. 

The Non-Christmas Christmas Epics of Cinema Past...

Christmas cinema is a tradition in our household, each year's repetitive cinematic celebration consisting of the usual genre classics (and you probably know exactly which films these are). Once every few years, however, I become compelled to delve into the decidedly non-classic Christmas cinema (who decided this I can't rightly recall, but nevertheless I feel safe in saying the film I'm about to talk about rarely make people's traditional must-watch list), some are set specifically over Christmas while some of these films merely allude to the fact that they take place around the yuletide time of year. One of my absolute favourite of the former camp is one of the top masters of cinema's last film, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Clearly set in the days right before Christmas, the movie opens up with married couple (Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, who were married in real life during the filming of this movie) getting ready to go to a lavish Christmas party. As insecurities insidiously winds their way through the couple's sexual consciousness, Tom Cruise seemingly falls into a gritty, and at times very intense, sexual odyssey, without every actually engaging in any sexual acts for the entire film – after initially sleeping with his own wife (Kidman) after the first scene of the movie; the night of the Christmas party. As Cruise's odyssey ramps up in intensity, things go from intriguing to anxious to vaguely violent and very possibly dangerous, as a secret sex society that cruise accidentally stumbled upon appears that they may do anything to keep their raging orgies firmly in the realm of the clandestine. Kubrick's catalyst for making this film, conceived with a friend years before it was actually made, was to create a “mainstream porno”, as he stated in his own words at one point, decades ago. In doing this, however, Kubrick intentionally utilized the cinematic construct of a classic thriller – with all the requisite scene of a noir-style thriller falling in exactly all of the right places, which gives Eyes Wide Shut that edge of imminent danger, when really nothing of the sort is actually happening on-screen during Cruise's odyssey. So it then comes back around that the anxiety of the entire film must hearken back to the sexual anxiety of our leading couple, and their marriage.

What's really interesting is that Eyes Wide Shut plays out like an entirely different genre film than the genre it's supposed to be representing – in other words, it's an erotic movie (or a “mainstream porno”), and an epic one at that, masquerading as a thriller. (Incidentally, film critic Roger Ebert wrote an amazing piece on this in 1999 when the film was first released). The next two non-Christmas Christmas films have exactly this stylish masquerade in place, covering their own inherent genres under the guise of other genres. Following Eyes Wide Shut is another genre epic, Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. This film alludes to Christmas only when one of the characters, one of the eight trapped in an out-of-the-way haberdashery, quietly plays an out-of-tune Silent Night on the haberdashery's long-forgotten piano. Tarantino's movie, which is really just a blown-up version of the film that put him on the map 25 years ago (Reservoir Dogs), is turned into a romp disguised as John Carpenter's The Thing complete with the same star of that film – Kurt Russell – and music from the great Ennio Morricone; and it even features a few blatant touches of the Italian giallo genre (which Morricone was extremely active in for decades). The Hateful Eight successfully utilizes Tarantino's obsessions with Italian genre films (giallo, spaghetti western), to muddy the fact that his epic is ultimately a remake of one of his own films, and through this patchwork of genre celebration he manages to create a very engaging and impressive film in and of itself, if you can make it through the three-hour running time. As Eyes Wide Shut is also nearly three hours long, I wouldn't recommend programming these films back-to-back for your crazy Christmas double-feature, unless you feel like sitting yourself in for a long winter's night.

And if you find yourself up for more following these epics, then there's one more in store. Jess Franco's Eugenie De Sade. Firstly, this is an important film in the Jess Franco cannon, as it stars his once-muse, Soledad Miranda, along with other beauties from his early-seventies repertoire. Taking place in Berlin in the middle of winter, Eugenie De Sade at no time states that it takes place during the Christmas season, but the lush photography creates a dreamy and alluring winter wonderland for the story to take place in. And much like Stanley Kubrick's mainstream-porno-opus (yes, I'm just about to make this comparison between filmmakers), Jess Franco hides his softcore and alluring thriller behind the masque of the more perverse Marquis De Sade, lending the Marquis' name to his offering. And while this might be one of his less-famous films, there should be no contention that Eugenie De Sade is not as interesting, or as amazing, as Jess Franco's more famous offerings – quite the contrary, in fact. Soledad Miranda provides her uncanny beauty in her dependent (and defiant) stoic-muse persona to the best affect in this films, the absolute best out of her six with Franco (in my opinion, despite the beauty of Vampiros Lesbos and She Killed in Ecstasy)... This in itself could be considered a fantastical Christmas gift to Soledad Miranda fans. Eugenie De Sade is in actuality more of an Italian-style surrealist-thriller, and with everything Franco thrown into the sink here, including go-go-dancers, fashion photography, jazz, stand-up comedians, and of course all sorts of sex, one would be fair in dubbing this Jess Franco's masterpiece. Franco's sex & death in Berlin quite possibly could have been more the film Stanley Kubrick had in mind for Eyes Wide Shut. Nevertheless, both films end up presenting themselves to cinematic audiences – along with The Hateful Eight, as well – as films other than they actually are. Mind-blowingly, this all works to the advantage of all three of these utterly fascinating snowbound and Christmas-set films. So following this, all I can say is go down the Christmas rabbit hole and discover (or re-discover) these films and engage yourself in a very merry, off-kilter, bizarre, cinematic Christmas!!

-V.