The Case of the Bloody Iris

This was the first film in a box set called the Giallo Collection, which I picked up because, well, giallos are totally awesome. For those not in the know, giallos (I think the proper plural is actually gialli, but fie on that) are a sub-genre of Italian film that were fairly prominent in the 70s, and involved models, murders, models being murdered, gratuitous nudity, fairly nonsensical stories, and a mystery killer that almost always seems chosen completely at random from the cast. A more perfect genre of film I cannot imagine.

This one manages to fit into every last one of the criteria above, with a killer stalking beautiful women at a lavish high-rise apartment, a laundry list of suspects, each more outlandish and over the top than the last (an architect with a crippling fear of blood, a hideously deformed son of an elderly neighbor, etc.), and a cop that decides the best way to flush out the killer would be to use the new tenants as bait, and to hell with their safety.

I know I’m making this sound like a terrible film, but it really is quite entertaining in its own way. It moves at a fairly fast clip, there’s not a single one of those damnable “character developing” scenes that does nothing for us but slow the film down, there’s just tits, chase scenes, and murders left and right, and god bless Italy for it. There may only be a certain type of crowd that would like this kind of movie, and they already know who they are, and frankly, there should be more of them in existence. I can only hope the other three movies in this collection are just as good.