Giallos, Part 1:
I'm going to give a rundown of the more notable non-Bava/Argento movies in this subgenre. This is such a huge sub-genre (with so many hard-to-find entries) that I won't even attempt to be comprehensive. Think of this more as a representative selection of a much wider field, with most of the noteworthy directors and titles touched on, as well as a few lesser known but brilliant specimens. Unlike my previous guides, I'll put the recommended titles in
red. DVD editions
here.
All the Colours of the Dark (Sergio Martino, 1972): Martino was a prolific genre director in the Italian industry, and this is one of five giallos he made in the early-to-mid seventies. It also has perhaps the most evocative title of any horror film ever made. Unlike most Italian genre films with great titles, tho', this one is actually very good, one of the best of the non-Argento/Bava giallos. The movie cultivates an atmosphere of waking delirium in which you're quite prepared for just about anything to happen. Uncharacteristically for Martino, the film is alive with complex roaming camera shots and beautiful compositions. Even the dialogue scenes, often a drag in Italian genre movies, are blocked with an eye to keeping things from becoming static. It's also genuinely suspenseful, with one particularly well done sequence where the heroine is trapped on the top landing of her apartment, hoping that the elevator reaches her before the killer makes his way up the flight of stairs. The plot is on the loonier side, and it doesn't always make perfect sense, a common failing of this sub-genre. The movie is really worth watching for its style. This one will make my list.
Black Belly of the Tarantula (Paolo Cavara, 1971): One of the many
Bird with the Crystal Plumage imitators that sprung up in the early seventies. This one leans more toward the
poliziotteschi (police procedural) genre of Italian films, with Giancarlo Gianni playing a weary cop pursuing a killer who likes to paralyze his victims with an acupuncture needle to the spine before mutilating them. It's a fairly solid film, even tho' I correctly guessed who the killer was the moment that person walked onscreen. The movie numbers among the many decent but unremarkable giallos from the period--worth watching, satisfying, but not memorable.
The Case of the Scorpian's Tail (Sergio Martino, 1971): Another
Bird with the Crystal Plumage imitator, only it replaces the perversity and insanity underlying Bird's mystery with plain greed. A woman inherits a million dollars after her estranged husband dies in an accident, and a bunch of characters crawl out of the woodwork looking to get their hands on it, including a black-clad, knife-wielding maniac. A lot of gory deaths follow, with very little suspense and not much attention to the details of the mystery (you really begin to appreciate Argento's detail fetishism as you go on in this subgenre). The real problem with the movie is that it can't seem to stick to a central character for very long, something that kills the incentive to invest in anyone. Overwhelmingly, it strikes you that the makers of most giallos just lack passion for the material, the very thing that's needed to make these movies interesting. This is why Argento's giallos are so successful: you feel that the material delights him, and that imaginative delight in the details becomes infectious.
Don't Torture a Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972): One of a number of highly esteemed giallos that I'm not overly fond of. It has a solid first act and a great final reveal, but beyond that it's pretty usual. It's often praised for examining the bigotry and false moralism of small towns and how those things spill into vigilantism ala Lang's Fury. Except the movie doesn't do any actual examining. You get no sense that Fulci understands the workings of small towns: there are next no scenes of villagers riling themselves up, being manipulated by petty fears and group-think; just a scene or two of the police chief worrying about the possibility, and a single vicious scene of vigilante justice. The movie drops in its ideas as pre-packaged generalizations and lets the audience's familiarity with them from other areas do the rest of the work while the film moves on to more exploitative territory. The movie also includes a truly disgusting scene where the twenty-something female lodger sexually abuses one of the pre-teen boys for no reason at all except that the movie needed a red herring (and only for her to become the heroine later on!). Far from being a bad giallo, but not good enough to be at the top of the heap. A lot of people love this one, tho', so you owe it a view, if only to decide for yourself.
The Fifth Cord (Luigi Bazzoni, 1971): Of the three Bazzoni giallos I've seen, this is the most straight forward and generic. Franco Nero is a newspaper reporter whose friends are inexplicably murdered one after another following a New Years party. Bazzoni's interest in memory is present, with Nero occasionally replaying the events of the party in his mind; but these moments are perfunctory and echo Argento's (more effective) fascination with memory in
Bird With the Crystal Plumage more than anything in Bazzoni's other giallos. Missing is the way memory intersects with dream and fantasy, creating epistemological dilemmas for the characters. Bazzoni seems less interested in the creations of and solutions to mysteries than Argento, so the material doesn't quite spring to life, even if it is never less than competent, and not infrequently masterful. That said, as with Bazzoni's other films, he and Storaro have created a visually arresting movie, full of ominous, saturated colours, chiaroscuro lighting, geometric but disorienting architecture, and sweeping, fluid camera movements. Even if it does lack the thematic weight of Bazzoni's other giallos, it is every bit as visually beautiful and stimulating, enough so that it earns a spot among the best of this sub-genre. Not at the very top, but high enough to be essential viewing.
Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion (Luciano Ercoli, 1970): Because the giallo is a hybrid sub-genre, you find that some examples will favour one particular informing-genre to the point of blurring into it and almost ceasing to be a giallo. This one is more a domestic thriller than a murder mystery. A man corners our heroine, threatens her with the possibility of sexual assault, but promptly leaves after mentioning that her husband is a murderer. He then begins to blackmail her with evidence that may or may not implicate her husband. Not a bad thriller, actually, despite suffering from the same lethargic pace and lack of urgency that characterizes a lot of giallos. It also makes way too much use of that infuriating plot device where the men react to the heroine's pleas that she's in trouble by making concerned faces at each other and muttering the equivalent of 'there, there, dear, don't you worry your pretty little head about it. You're just imagining it all!' The ending is pretty ludicrous, too.
La Donna del Lago aka Possessed (Luigi Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini, 1965): A cold and spare giallo in which dreams, memories, fantasies, and reality begin to blur. More an existential quest than a thriller, it does not attempt to elicit thrills with scenes of suspense and violent murder, but slowly chill you with its stark atmosphere and increasingly slippery hold on reality. The influence of Antonioni's 60's films is apparent in the detached emotions of the lead and the way the movie uses genre tropes at the surface level in order explore deeper and more unsettling themes. A strange, slow, symbolic movie, far removed, stylistically, from the giallos Bava and his imitators made during the period. Really fantastic. This one will make my list.
Nude...You Die! aka The Miniskirt Murders (Antonio Marghereti, 1968): A surprisingly good early giallo set in an all girls school somewhere in the country. It's very sixties in a charming kind of way (bubbly score, bouncy outfits), and more interested in providing a bit of fun than unsettling anyone, so there's much light humour and little blood. Unusually for this sub-genre, it has a good sense of pace and a plot that not only makes perfect sense but has a surprising final twist. Worth watching, especially for its stylish opening sequence.
Le Orme aka Footprints (Luigi Bazzoni, 1975): This movie lies on the limits of what can be considered a giallo. Like a musical without any music numbers, this is a giallo without a murder mystery or murder set-pieces; and yet it has all the necessary structural and thematic elements to be in this sub-genre. It is an astonishingly stylish movie, too. Bazzoni and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro lend the story such a rich visual sense, with muted, glowing colours and deliberately paced gliding camera movements. The movie is so visually alive, yet poised and graceful, without the outrageousness or gaudiness that the giallo usually adopts as its visual style. The lingering unease of this movie is drawn directly from the great beauty of the images, which are not warm or inviting, but alienating and isolating. The images, however ravishing, are stark, and the colour palette is cold, even when using greens and yellows. The very deliberateness and preciseness of the compositions, tracking shots, and pace put you at a remove from the characters and the mystery and place you in a more thoughtful space. The movie's pristine beauty alone is enough to recommend it, but it has more to offer. Like
La Donna del Lago, this is a quest for memory and identity done amidst the slowly crumbling boundaries of dream, memory, fantasy, and reality. I don't think it is quite as thematically rich as its predecessor, but its visual style so heightens its thematic apparatus that when you watch it, it's hard not to feel that there are untold subtle riches hidden within, even when afterwards you feel so much is slipping through your fingers. Highly, highly recommended. List worthy.
The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Francesco Barilli, 1974): Stylish and visually inventive thriller whose increasing sense of delirium prevents it from totally cohering. It's hard to describe the plot since there isn't a unifying narrative so much as an episodic series of small, yet increasingly disturbing events that happen to the main character. The mystery is whether or not these events are connected, if the malice they suggest is real or imagined. Meanwhile, the film leaves you to question whether the heroine's visual hallucinations are dreams, memories, or fantasies. The questions raised are more or less answered, yet the movie feels as tho' it never quite comes together. Normally a giallo's failure to cohere, narratively, doesn't bother me, and may even add to its delirious atmosphere. Here, the movie is so visually coordinated and its symbols so skilfully organized that you can't help expecting it to resolve coherently. Perhaps that's why its failure to congeal feels slightly unsatisfactory: its confidence in its own techniques prepares you for a coherent whole that it fails to deliver. What you get is a strange, delirious, alienating atmosphere full of menace and suggestion that the movie isn't quite willing to pay off. And its ending, while memorable and effective, is unnecessary. One of the most interesting giallos ever made. Recommended, even if it comes up just short of making my list.
Pieces (Juan Piquer Simón, 1982): A late addition to the cycle that tries to make up for its well-worn narrative by upping the trash quotient. It's amazing how ridiculous this movie is. A third of the way through, the heroine is attacked out of nowhere by a random kung fu wielding Asian man who I guess was just hiding in an alley. He throws a bunch of kicks and screams some kiai's before the girl's boyfriend knocks him out. Turns out he's the local professor of Chinese, and he explains his baffling behaviour by muttering "must've eaten some bad chop suey" before walking off, the incident never to be mentioned again. I'm not joking, and oddly enough neither is the movie. If you care about the plot, local University girls are being murdered and their body parts stolen. This one enters so-bad-it's-good territory. A riot, especially if seen with friends.
The Psychic aka
Seven Notes in Black (Lucio Fulci, 1977): A later entry in the cycle and Fulci's first giallo since
Don't Torture a Duckling. A woman experiences a vision full of cryptic symbols that seem to show someone being murdered and then walled up somewhere while a strange seven note theme plays over and over. She then discovers not only that the room in her vision is located in her new husband's long unused villa, but that a skeleton is hidden in the walls. I'm a bit torn on this one. It's put together with some competence, a rarity for Fulci, and for the most part everything makes sense (tho' I did get kind of tired with the laborious way Fulci underlines every moment where the heroine encounters a symbol from her vision). My real problem with it is
that the movie robs itself of any narrative momentum by focussing on an isolated murder that happened several years ago and which seems in no danger of being repeated. So the second act is boring because there is nothing at stake: no impending murders, no active killer, nothing to give the mystery any urgency. That keeps it from being a great giallo. As well--and I'm not sure if this is very poor or very clever writing--the heroine's vision doesn't predict events, it creates them. She never could've encountered half the items in her vision if her vision hadn't made her aware of their significance beforehand.
Plus the third act just reveals the second to have been nothing but an improbable series of coincidences, to the point that it starts to be humorous. One of the better examples of this sub-genre, but it also stops short of being List worthy. Give it a try, tho'.
A Short Night of Glass Dolls (Aldo Lado, 1971): A giallo distinguished by its novel structural device: the lead is in a state resembling death, and as he is wheeled through hospitals and morgues as the bureaucratic system deals with his body, he must piece together the memories that explain how he ended up here. This is a more overtly political film than is usual for the sub-genre. The film is set in Communist Prague (just to make that clear, the movie includes a bizarre light-hearted jaunt through the old Jewish cemetery by two frolicking lovers), and the whole thing has an air of corruption, conspiracy, and repression hanging over it. The tone becomes increasingly sombre and fatalistic as things unfold until the plot transforms into a waking nightmare wherein the discourse of power is likened to a grotesque bacchanalian orgy of the old and the ugly. Oddly effective and novel giallo, even if it is somewhat loose with the investigative elements. Confidently directed.
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh aka
Blade of the Ripper (Sergio Martino, 1971): Martino's first giallo, and he shows a facility with the genre that isn't there in most of his subsequent films. It doesn't quite match the stylistic heights of his later All the Colours of the Dark, still his best giallo, but it sustains its visual inventiveness more than usual, showing a lively camera and compositional sense and an energetic mis-en-scene. There are a couple of very good suspense scenes. Tho' there are some last minute plot twists out of left field, the story is sadly straight-forward, and the titular vice possessed by Mrs Wardh ends up being perfectly irrelevant to the plot. Indeed, the main flaw with the film is that it doesn't really follow up on the intensity of the perversions it suggests. Was poised to be a more interesting psycho-sexual thriller than it ended up being, but it's still a solid giallo, with a few remarkable moments that put it above the entries on this list that are merely competent.
Torso aka
The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence (Sergio Martino, 1973): This one has a pretty high reputation among horror fans. That reputation, however, rests almost entirely on the final twenty or so minutes, in which the heroine plays a sometimes unbearably tense cat-and-mouse game with the killer inside a country-house. Apart from that, the movie is undistinguished. It's not visually interesting, the murder scenes are perfunctory, and while the movie tries to liven things up by having pretty much every female character take her clothes off at some point, even that gets boring (and kind of sleazy). I had no idea who the killer was when unmasked; I actually had to skim back through the movie to remind myself. Despite several Argento-ish flashbacks showing some cryptic event in the killer's past that explains his actions, the movie goes on to provide a second, more banal motive that makes the other motive redundant and those flashbacks irrelevant. Not one of the better giallos.
What Have You Done to Solange? (Massimo Dallamano, 1972): A competently made giallo that flirts with a whole host of transgressive themes, including the corruption of minors, clergical abuses, inappropriate teacher/student relationships, illicit abortion, and murder as a substitute for sex (the murderer kills his female victims by stabbing them in the genitals, something the film wisely chooses not to linger on). Despite the perversity lying under the surface, the movie is much more concerned with the slow unravelling of its mystery than in the actions of its killer, which get only perfunctory depictions. As a result the movie avoids much of the sleaze common to this subgenre. Unfortunately, while the mystery is absorbing, the narrative has little urgency or suspense, and once again, I had no idea who the killer was when his identity was revealed. One of the better examples of the sub-genre, but the ending didn't sit well with me:
It's troublesome how matter-of-factly the film concludes that an abortion is so heinous, the experience could only drive someone mad.
: Ennio Morricone's strange and haunting music is the highlight of this story of a man desperately trying to uncover who killed his ten-year-old daughter. Composed almost entirely of a-tonal, a-rhythmic chanting from a children's choir, the score resembles nothing less than a sinister and unbalanced Catholic mass. The film itself is handled with confidence and surprising sensitivity. Aldo Lado, based on the two films of his I've seen, is an above average director in this sub-genre, with an impressive, low-key visual sense (the way he uses long, tightly held close-ups of Anita Strindberg's impassive face to suggest the extent of her grief is masterful). But it's Ennio Morricone's score that really lifts this giallo above the merely competent ones surrounding it and brings out all of the sadness and pain hiding at its centre. A very good giallo.
Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (Sergio Martino, 1972): I don't know why, but Italian genre movies sometimes have these absurdly specific titles. This is Martino's least straightforward giallo. Rather than seeming original, however, it comes across more like an ill-assembled conglomeration of different genre films. While the first act is a straight-forward giallo, the second switches gears and becomes a tale of bedroom intrigue before again turning around in the third act to become a tale of plain intrigue with everyone plotting against each other. Overlying all of this is a loose adaptation of Poe's The Black Cat. It really is an oddly structured movie. While Martino can be stylish--and this movie has some good moments--he's never willing to sustain that stylishness in his films, with the notable exception of the superb
All the Colours of the Dark. For all its oddness, Vice just isn't that interesting, either from an aesthetic or a narrative stand-point. Edwige Fenech is positively adorable, tho', in her ear-length haircut, and she gets to seduce Anita Strindberg, which does a lot to liven the second act.