"If you see Carlo again you'll be in big trouble!"
"That's none of your business. You think you own me or what? I want to be a fashion model, not a kept woman or a slave"
Major spoilers:
My goodness, this is certainly quite an eye-opening experience! It is absolutely terrible as a murder-mystery film, with not enough attention paid to sketching in a cast of potential suspects and a weak motive for the killer to be doing what they are doing (that are very like the motivations of the killer in the much later Argento film Trauma, though it felt that the motivation was handled better there). We barely even get the chance to focus on the incriminating group picture from the past that the killer is apparently using to systematically kill each person off, and as the audience we are just given that motivation in basic sketched in terms that all of the characters have no inkling as to the significance of until the very end of the film, because enough related people have to have been bumped off for the photograph to mean anything to them! However we as the audience get the, also characteristic of a giallo, explicit and blunt opening historical trauma scene of an abortion gone wrong being covered up to look like a suicide that all of the other characters similarly seemingly have no memories of until the very end of the film.
But I think that these flaws in the murder-mystery aspect of the film are entirely tied in with the themes of giallo. It is just that this is a more 'advanced' giallo film in which the core idea of murder-mystery is almost entirely pushed aside to focus on other characteristics of the genre more nakedly! (The J&B product placement reaches hilarious levels in this film!)
In a way though the characters having no particular clue as to what trauma that they were responsible for causing a killer to be revenging is the ultimate damnation of them that the film has to offer. The reveal of the killer is someone we barely remember amongst the flurry of models in the studio from early on in the film (and this is a film that takes pains to provide us with a mid point recap scene of the latest soon to be victim watching a news report about the five murders so far!) and has an inconsistent, or rather too wide ranging, motive for committing the murders that appears to have dragged a lot of innocents into the situation as well. For example she kills the doctor who performed the abortion on her friend/lover first, which makes a lot of sense, and then during the film murders the (lesbian, seducing all of the models) dominant wife and (cuckolded, impotent except with a plastic doll, which we perhaps significantly only ever see in its withered and deflated state!) portly bad driver of a husband.
But why kill the latest model that Carlo has brought into the modelling studio? I guess that she may have been killed because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time (the lesbian bosses home, post coitus and pushing things by demanding work instead of being just a sex object from her). That might explain why exactly the same sequence occurs in the murder of the portly husband a scene or two later, just with a slight variation in where the killer leaps out from! I really like the idea that the killer is setting up all of these brilliant metaphorical situations by running water from first the kitchen and then the bathroom taps to make the guilty victim remember about the running water in the bathtub that the abortion gone wrong girl was put into to fake her suicide, only to have people not realise the significance behind doing that! And then go to all that effort of stalking and hiding in wait for victims only to murder the wrong person a couple of times over! (And ironically out of the two people who
would understand the significance of running the taps, the first is killed quickly early on with no water motif and the other survives because they were being 'saved for last')
I guess what I'm saying is that the killer would not be that interesting a character even if the film paid them more attention than it barely does! (Also why does the murderer suddenly turn into Jack the Ripper in the last couple of murders and start mutilating the bodies as well? That suggests even more that their motives for what they are doing are insanely inconsistent). Domino often says that murderers and their motivations in a giallo film are arbitrarily chosen, but here that literally feels like the case and that arbitrariness (just another model with a grudge, living in the past rather than the present) feels like it ties into the theme of casual modelling lifestyles with a lot of comings and goings and new blood to shed.
Kudos to the film however for having someone with a woman's build in the biker leathers and helmet actually
be a female character as well! Some later films with the same type of set up (I'm thinking of the killer in Night School) just use a male body double before the female reveal, which rather negates any sense of being able to work out the mystery even more! In some ways this film is a predecessor of the figure in Nail Gun Massacre.
Also why have the killer in biker leathers and helmet only to have them drive everywhere! Could they only afford the biker gear and not the motorcyle itself? Or did they just pick it up as the perfect cool outfit for a killer to wear, as the early flamboyant homosexual victim (and obvious Scorpio Rising fan) notes a little excitedly before the 'biker' has the bad manners to purposefully spill their bottle of J&B everywhere!
___
I do think that whilst the film does not work as a murder-mystery, to the point of undermining the entire core of the subgenre, it is kind of brilliantly subversive as a giallo though. Both the film and characters are far too horny and distracted by sex for their own good, and so much of the scant investigative elements and police interviewing members of the modelling agency (including a very explicit version of one of the inspectors getting sweatily excited by one of the models uncrossing and crossing her legs which precedes Basic Instinct by seventeen years!) just get overwhelmed by people disrobing, whether for business or pleasure! All of the characters seem to be acting as if they are in a sex film, yet so much happens that is disturbing and horrific that
isn't just the murders!
A lot of the action swirls around Carlo, an absolute bastard of a photographer, introduced cruising a local health club and getting excited by a latest lady to walk by in her swimsuit, stalking her down a corridor as she shows no interest whatsoever all the time taking lots of close up photographs of her without asking if he can, and shoving his camera about an inch from her face (and bottom and breasts), all the while exclaiming about how horny she is making him (there are a few straight faced "Mamma mia!"'s uttered here, at least on the Italian soundtrack!). But despite saying he is an irritation at first, and despite no change in his cocky demeanour, she likes it in the end and he convinces her to join him in the sauna and take off her 'restrictive' bikini before getting in for a closer look. I was rather appalled at this scene until the brilliant moment at this stage where Carlo tries to take another picture of her, as she lies splayed out entirely nude for him, only to find that he has used all of his photos up in the stalking sequence just before! Carlo came far too soon, with his camera at least, and has to just set it aside to focus on sex itself instead without the pretext! (Which on reflection ties him together with the portly cuckolded husband trying to brutally force himself on another model, only to find that he is impotent with an actual flesh and blood woman, all whilst she has gone from having to consent to be raped to having to console the potential attacker that 'it happens to all men sometimes', before leaving him with only his flaccid blow up doll and the murderer for company!)
Sex here isn't particularly
fun. Everyone is driven by their urges but its deeply entwined within their business as well. In fact it seems a bit wasteful (and definitely more dangerous!) to be having sex when it is not for work! The other (arguably) main character Magda, played by Edwige Fenech, for example is introduced as a photographer in the modelling agency like Carlo, so about on his same level and briefly suggested to be kind of a professional His Girl Friday-style rival, and seemingly annoyed that he can bring back his latest conquests to the studio on the pretext of employment (but seemingly more for his boss to sample) whilst she cannot. Magda immediately undermines herself however by coming into the dark room and stripping nude and asking him if she could be a model too. Carlo says why bother when she has a career and models only last for a year or two before they are discarded, which is a very good point, but there is a suggestion that the compulsion towards exhibitionism and sex is a stronger pull for Magda than even maintaining a professional status. And by going down on Carlo right there in the darkroom, she has already shifted her status in their relationship to something different.
And whilst everyone is still pretending to be in a sex film even after five or six people have been murdered, perhaps the most disturbing moments are the ones where the sex film turns violent such as when the plumper husband coerces a model back to his home for sex (via the most queasily dangerous car ride ever committed to film! It beats the one in The French Connection!) and then attacks her until she gives in (until, after all that huffing and puffing, he is impotent. Maybe he prematurely climaxed during the dangerous driving scene? Much as Carlo shot his roll of film too quickly before it actually counted). Or when the same model before her own murder sequence turns out to live with an even more abusive boyfriend who slaps her around a bit before
he himself gets murdered too(!). In particular it is there in Carlo, feeling insecure when the girl he brought to modelling agency is killed early on that it might make the police might think he is the killer which leads to him threatening his female boss that he would tell the police about her 'sampling the merchandise' if she told them he brought her; along with the lovemaking scene with Magda in her apartment turning into him strangling her when she casually tries to start doing some giallo-style investigation of the murder!
Carlo is both the main character and the most unsympathetic one possible, which makes the film fantastically disturbing in the way that it affords him a certain status by making him the lead and does not seem to be entirely condemning his actions perhaps because of the milieu in which he operates such wild behaviour is expected (even Magda after almost being strangled to death returns to a calm demeanour and goes back to reading the paper! She does not even put any clothes on or try to get out of bed to move away from him!). But it does make the film seem weirdly moral in its utter amorality, if that makes any sense, as it lets the viewer themselves feel disgust and hatred of the character even without any other character condemning him for his actions!
This all comes to a head in the fantastic (and horrific) resolution:
After the murderer has been uncovered and revealed that they were a lover of another model who died whilst getting an abortion, with it being covered up by both the doctor and Carlo to look like a suicide and that the killer had been 'saving Carlo for last' in her revenge plot (maybe trying to turn him into the pariah by making him look like he was the murderer? Which also suggests the killer's complete wrongheadedness in their actions, as that would only have worked if we were in a 'moral' world where anyone particularly cared about models being killed!), we get to the wrap up scene of Carlo and Magda in bed together for a relaxed coda now that all of the horror is over. But is it? In the absolutely astonishing final moments Magda jokingly says that she'd never find herself in that position of needing an abortion anyway as she is on the pill, to which Carlo says that he's 'learnt his lesson' and is taking no chances from now on, then proceeds to flip Magda over as she protests and begins to anally rape her. Freeze frame as credits play over Magda's look of shock!
What a gobsmacking ending! It is both extremely flippant and disturbing but also the perfect way to end a film where the murders are in many ways the least upsetting element of an overall sleazy milieu, and to underline that the biggest monster of the film is our lead character who only took away one lesson from everything that transpired, and it was a terrible one!
So I think this is a very interesting film, though it most definitely should not be approached casually (the rather explicit title perhaps helps in that respect), and perhaps should not be one's first experience of a giallo film as it trades so much on a foreknowledge of how events normally occur in the subgenre. It also takes a fair bit of reading between the lines to get past the sleazy, superficial surface casual about the cruelty being inflicted on women often passively accepting it into the truly disturbing aspects underneath where the male characters are perhaps the most pathetic of all, even if they are often in the position of being able to inflict that pathetic behaviour back onto women.
