It’s been a while, and we’re way overdue for continuing the vast survey of Italian giallo films that predated many of the 80s and 90s American slasher films. Many giallos are as bad as the bad U.S. slasher films that followed them, but no U.S. slasher film has scaled the stylistically cool heights of many of the really good giallos. 1975 is a good mix of trashy sleaze, hip art direction, dizzying plot twists and vicarious guilty-pleasure thrills.
We’ll get the straight-up trash out of the way first. Strip Nude For Your Killer (Nude Per L’Assassino) (Italy, 1975) borrows from far better giallos like What Have They Done To Solange (1972) and Blood And Black Lace (1964) and includes a few satisfying twists. But director Andrea Bianchi has his own ideas about what the audience really wants to see – naked women and bloody murder, and we’ll squeeze in the narrative where we can. That’s the M.O. for Bianchi’s fairly prolific output from the 70s to the 90s – this film may be his only one worth watching.
The film starts on a bleak note, in a doctor’s office where an abortion has just gone wrong, leading to a terse phone call and the disposal of a body. Later that night, we get our second body – an assailant in a black leather motorcycle suit and helmet pounces and takes a knife to our hapless abortionist, repeatedly.
Weeks later, we meet Carlo (Nino Castelnuovo), who makes friends with women by promoting himself as a fashion photographer; turns out he is a fashion photographer. Despite his frat-boy demeanor, he manages to recruit the fetching Lucia (the always-welcome Femi Benussi) for the Albatross modeling agency, run by the no-nonsense Gisella Mayer (played by Amanda), who seems pleased with this new girl, despite the snarky skepticism of Carlo’s photo assistant Magda (Edwige Fenech, doing God’s work). Amanda’s husband, Maurizio (Franco Diogene) already knows Amanda will be “occupied” for a while, and heads out for a drink with Patrizia (Solvi Stubing), one of the other models. But she’s unimpressed with the flirty slob, despite his throwing money around, and leaves early.
There’s another murder coming up soon, so Bianchi needs some unmotivated nudity right away, and Carlo and Magda oblige, hooking up in the agency’s darkroom. Another of the studio’s photographers, Mario (Claudio Pellegrini) gets a knock on his door at home – it’s the biker assassin! – but they’re both surprisingly chill. After having a scotch together, Mario delivers a recent group photo of the studio’s employees that the biker requested from him. Now he gets stabbed to death. The next morning, his body is discovered by Patrizia, and the police start looking in on the studio.
Lucia, meanwhile, seems to be Gisella’s newest kept girlfriend, just as her husband figured. And, despite her performative protestations, she has no problem hanging out au natural while Gisella goes out for a business dinner. Lucia is stalked in a surprisingly well-constructed cat-and-mouse sequence through the small apartment until the inevitable dispatching.
Most of the other studio employees are prone to do dumb stuff that gets them killed as well. Maurizio, having no side-piece luck with Patrizia earlier, outrightly kidnaps another model, Doris (Erna Schurer), but can’t hold up his end, as it were; she consoles him, then leaves, then he’s killed. Gisella is blackmailed over Lucia’s death, delivers the ransom – dies. But Carlo gets a photograph of the attacker, just before he’s hit by a car. Stuck in the hospital, Carlo has Magda develop the film. It shows Doris’ abusive husband, Stefano. But then Doris and Stefano are butchered by the biker assassin, too.
By now we’re wondering who is left, and can we please wrap this up. Carlo incessantly barking at Magda has worn me out.
The big reveal is reasonably satisfying, even though there aren’t many suspects left, so it’s a lesser twist. The perpetrator is vanquished, but part of the revenge is never fulfilled, and the film ends on a weird, lasciviously sleazy note. Somehow, Edwige coaxes a smile at the end, but I think she, like us, knows that Andrea Bianchi could be a pretty good director if he gave a shit. But hacks get paid, too.
Let’s improve our prospects with Armando Crispino’s Autopsy (Macchie Solari) (Italy, 1975), featuring the always-intriguing Mimsy Farmer. Crispino had earlier directed the not-so-great The Dead Are Alive (1972) but struggles manfully here to pull a very good movie from a very iffy script. Crispino gets our attention quickly with a series of seemingly unconnected suicides; there’s no hard evidence, but many researchers have posited that solar flares and sunspot activity (the macchie solari of the Italian title) can increase suicide rates (flu rates, too) at specific periods in time. So let’s run with that, shall we? Mimsy plays Simona Sanna, a medical student doing her internship in a busy urban Emergency Room that, today, in the summer heat, has a disturbing run of messy suicides. It’s been a long and tiring shift, and Simona starts to see things that aren’t there. As it becomes apparent that she’s not holding up very well, the ER staff convince her to go home. But not before pulling a nasty prank on her with the help of her photographer boyfriend Edgardo (Ray Lovelock). (There’s an unfortunate streak of derisive misogyny underlying a number of scenes here.)
The apartment building she goes home to is owned by her father, Gianni (Massimo Serato), who deals in antiques among other things, and he tends to let out his own upstairs apartment to attractive women. An attractive redhead knocks on her door late that night – she’d like to borrow an envelope (all Simona has is an orange one). She doesn’t know Simona’s Dad, but a friend gave her the key for a few nights. They chat for a bit, then the redhead leaves to answer her phone, and, later, meets someone at a church in a run-down neighborhood. The next day, the ER admits a dead blonde with a disfigured face from a point-blank bullet wound under her chin. Ivo (Ernesto Colli), an ER tech with hateful horndog manners but a light touch with reconstructing disfigurements, goes to work on her. Simona leaves early to have lunch with her father, who tells her he’s going to marry again. His fiancé doesn’t show, though, and Simona is still having issues with odd associative visions. Later, Simona returns to the ER to test a theory or two with the blond, and the priest that met the redhead in the church at night shows up, declaring she couldn’t have committed suicide – he’s Father Paul Lenox (Barry Primus), and the corpse is his sister, Betty Lenox (Gaby Wagner). Father Paul recruits her for a trip to the murder scene, but when they get there, Simona bolts. She’s just not ready to turn detective over one corpse among many in her morgue.
Simona meets up with Edgardo again – they go back to his place, a beautifully restored historical building. She wants to take her mind off things, and make love with Edgardo, but the autopsy visions return again, and she can’t go through with it. Edgardo is understanding, though, and they start talking about Betty and Father Lenox. Edgardo remembers that Paul Lenox was a race car driver who took out a section of bystanders in a horrible accident at Le Mans – Edgardo is a driver as well, and finds old photos of Paul. Institutionalized for a few years, they conclude it must be the same man – “No one is closer to God than lunatics.” Gianni has a wounded war veteran for a caretaker at the apartments, and Gianni wants him to keep an eye out to protect Simona. When Paul comes by unannounced, the caretaker sets his dog on him. The two fight, and Paul, having bested him, is called off of him by Simona. Again, Paul tries to convince her to help him find his sister’s killers. But they argue, and Paul has a fitful seizure. He finds a cabbie who takes him home, but he’s in bad shape until he gets his medication. Simona, meanwhile, picks up all of Betty’s things from Gianni’s apartment (she indeed was the redhead), and talks to Uncle Lello, Gianni’s brother – Gianni hasn’t been around for days to help him with any of the business. But just as she’s about to leave, someone else comes in to search the closets, fans through some of his antique books, but doesn’t find what they want therein. Returning to her own apartment, she hears the caretaker’s dog whimpering, and discovers the caretaker has committed suicide. Those darned macchie solari again…? Later, Paul practically accuses Gianni of the caretaker’s murder, and Simona is understandably angry.
Danielle (Angela Goodwin), a mutual ‘friend’ of the Sanna’s (one of Dad’s exes), runs a Crime Museum in another part of their building, featuring nasty images and displays of lurid crimes. We caught a glimpse of her earlier wearing the red wig similar to the one Betty wore when she was killed; she wears it today as well but yanks it off in anger when Simona derides her for her boozing her and leaves. Someone’s been using Simona’s typewriter to write a suicide note ‘signed’ by Simona, and has left a clue in one of Danielle’s galleries. It turns out to be a first attempt on Simona’s life, but why? Paul finally meets up with Gianni, who comes clean that Betty was the woman he was going to marry, but he believes she committed suicide. Arriving home, Gianni meets Uncle Lello, who had gotten a piece of mail for him at the office in an orange envelope. In the note, she sadly breaks off the engagement and apologizes for another document she took but is returning now. But it’s not there. Gianni accosts Lello, but there’s nothing to do – it’s not there.
More bodies fall, more suspects are eliminated, and more loose ends come together. For such a seemingly busy and verbose script, everything ties into everything else fairly nicely, and it all hinges on the 1966 Flood of the Arno, where thousands of volunteers worked to save rare books and artworks. (Crispino wrote the script with Lucio Battistrada). Pay attention – there are lots of characters to keep track of here. But we have another Mimsy-powered winner here – overall, very good stuff.
Another smartly-done giallo (two in a row – pinch me!), The Killer Must Kill Again (L’Assassino È Costretto Ad Uccidere Ancora) is a nasty semi-classic with a very dark sense of humor. The director is oft-admired genre journeyman Luigi Cozzi, perhaps best known for 1978’s Starcrash, a heedlessly unoriginal but much-revered low budget space opera featuring Caroline Munro, Christopher Plummer, David Hasselhoff and a musical score from John Barry. (Here’s a typical missive on its cult bona fides.)
Giorgio Mainardi (the prolific and adequate George Hilton) fancies himself a free-lance business wheeler-dealer but would be dead in the water if he didn’t have his wife Norma’s (Teresa Velázquez) sizeable bank account from which to draw his father-in-law’s fortune. Giorgio uses a phone booth along a canal far on the sparse outskirts of town for business and pleasure, but tonight there’s, of all things, an assassin (Michele Antoine) disposing of a car with a female victim in it by submerging it in the canal. “Pardon me, sir,” says Giorgio, and starts his own Hitchcock-ian pitch on how this chance meeting could benefit the both of them. They have two quick meetings over the next few days, at an ice rink and in a movie theater (showing a Luigi Cozzi movie – go figure). On the appointed night, the killer rings at Norma’s door and tells her Giorgio’s on his way and told him to meet him there, using a client’s name as the account they’ll be working on tonight. He’s in. He’s offered a drink, he prefers water, and an aspirin, if he may, and wanders a bit in the apartment. The shiny yellow walls are a nice touch – glossy vinyl or lacquer. Norma brings the aspirin back – and is accosted from behind, fabric around her throat, strangled in a disturbingly efficient fashion. The killer goes back outside, pulls up his car, brings her body out to the trunk, closes it, and heads back inside to clean up – fingerprints, drinking glass, handprint on glass desk, turns the lights off; he remembers it all. Heads back outside – and the car’s gone. His car is gone. He left it unlocked with the keys still in it. It’s been jacked by Luca (Alessio Orano) and Laura (the always reliable Cristina Galbo); they’re off to the seaside for a little couple’s retreat, and found a wide-open Mercedes to get them there. But someone else knows how to hot-wire a car, too, and isn’t far behind.
Meanwhile, Giorgio went to a party while his wife was being throttled, and is surprised to find the police in his apartment when he gets home. They were following up on the neighbor’s stolen car; Giorgio’s front gate had been left open, inside were signs of a struggle and the phone cord had been ripped out. Neighbors saw a man in the vicinity, but how did he get in? It seems like Giorgio’s wife has been kidnapped, but y’know, the inspector’s (Eduardo Fajardo) just not sure…
Seagull Rock is a small resort villa along the coast that’s been abandoned for a few years, but Laura has fond memories of the place, and thinks she and Luca can use these few days to get more serious about consummating their couplehood. “Oh, Luca, it’s just like I dreamed. Please be nice to me. I didn’t want it to just be an adventure.” “Happy now?” “You bet!” “You’ll have to prove it to me.” “I know you mean making love, but emotions are important to me. I want it to mean something.” Upon finding it, finally, they soon discover it’s easy to get into, and, while messy, it’s not uncomfortable, and they settle in over the next hour or so. But before things get too cozy, Laura decides she’s hungry, and sends Luca out to find them something to eat.
Luca drives the Mercedes back towards the highway, but doesn’t get too far before happening upon a stranded blonde with a dead car (seasoned bit-of-crumpet Femi Benussi) who could use a little help. Luca forgets about the food and attends to another need at leisure. Meanwhile the deserted Laura is inconveniently discovered alone in the house by our killer, and experiences the cruel, and frankly tough-to-watch, inside-out and backwards version of the lovelorn wishes she had imagined with Luca.
There’s been a dark and goofy parade of “now-what-can-go-wrong?” events over the course of the film’s crimes, and the actor, Michele Antoine, has played everything just right – hapless but not exasperated, and totally straight-up without a wink or an aside. But with the rape of Laura, and the subsequent events thereafter, Cozzi’s Wile E. Coyote vibe is abruptly pulled out from under us, and the twists thereafter are mean-spirited but surprisingly satisfying. Cristina Galbo carries the latter half of the film with both youthful charm and credible torment, and is given a measure of grisly redemption. Overall, an engaging and disturbing horror outing, even though it was really Cozzi’s only giallo.
Erotic Games of a Respectable Family (Giochi Erotici Di Una Famiglia Per Bene) (Italy, 1975) is a bit lower-key than most watchable giallos – it’s the erotic psychological thriller scenario rather than the serial-killer-in-black-leather scenario. But our bonus here is that it’s written by reliable filone goofball Renato Polselli, and features his usual quotient of grimacing testosterone-fueled jealousies and furious fleshy retribution. Francesco Degli Espinosa is the credited director, but, if so, it’s his first. I suspect producer Vincenzo Matassi either relieved himself and/or Polselli of the job (Matassi had a few directing credits before and after this film), then hired Espinosa to clean up what the others had managed. It’s chronological, and makes narrative sense, but there isn’t much flair or style to any of it. But Polselli’s plot is really good, and it’s a shame more effort wasn’t brought into it.
Professor Riccardo Rossi (Donald O’Brien) is a conservative academic preaching the evils of allowing divorce to married couples. “Everyone has the marriage they want and deserve,” he explains. Later, in the car with a colleague, he goes on – “The press is another institution that should be resized… prostitution, the alcohol industry…” He, of course, assumes his own marriage is irreproachable. His colleague convinces him to pass on the meeting they’re heading to and take some time at home. Arriving home early, he’s clearly interrupted an upstairs bedroom tryst between his wife Elisa (Malisa Longo) and a fleeing lover. Gun in hand, he’s too late to catch the roue red-handed, but slaps the wife around a bit, calling her a whore. A back-and-forth begins between them, with Elisa insisting there’s an explanation, and they should talk, but Riccardo won’t have it. He settles down nonetheless, pours them each a whiskey and Elisa gets dressed to leave. Riccardo still doesn’t know what he’ll do, but they hop into the car and he starts driving. Perhaps he’ll take her into the mountains and exile her there, he posits. He pulls over and tells her he wants to make love, but he’s really just stalling until the pills he put into her drink take effect. After she passes out, he wraps her up in a big sack and rolls her down the hill and into the lake to drown. Despite a strange car passing by, he’s sure his efforts were undetected.
Returning home, he starts drinking again – trashes her closets and thinks he sees her for a minute, assuring him she’ll be there forever, but disappears just as quickly. He hears the judges’ voice in his head enumerating the details of the murder of Elisa. Finally he wanders outside, taking the bottle with him, to an area down the road a bit frequented by streetwalkers. There he meets working girl Eva (Italian B-movie all-star Erika Blanc), who figures out in ten seconds that He’s Been Done Wrong. Drunkenly amazed at her deductive abilities, he invites her home, they drink some more and commence canoodling. But this time, instead of hallucinating the ghost of Elisa, it’s the vision of his young niece Barbara (Maria D’Incoronato) over on the couch in a flimsy negligee caressing herself . And we now have a pretty good overall picture of who Riccardo really is – a closet alcoholic with a horny imagination far past his regard for his (late) wife.
There’s a predictable twist, followed by another twist, then things seem to be wrapped up, but OMG another twist followed by a final coup-de-grace that brings all of the karma to seemingly just conclusions. Ho-hum. As mentioned, there’s raw material for a real scorcher here, but they should have just shelved the whole thing when they drew straws for who would direct.
Periscope In The Bathtub 