I guess Giallo just wasn’t enough Argento for me for the week, so I decided that today’s movie should be one of his more notable: it’s his first feature made in the United States, the first time he directed his daughter Asia in a film (and as a result the first time he filmed her naked, something he’s also done every subsequent time she’s appeared in one of his films), and it’s the film most of his fans point to as the one where he started to fall apart creatively. Of course, the real question for me was, is the film really as bad as everyone makes it out to be, or is it just bad compared to his earlier work?
Of course, such questions are fairly meaningless when you can just look at the star rating tag; still, it’s a worthy question, and in answer to it I must acknowledge the film to be merely fairly middling, and not outright lousy. The film follows David (Christopher Rydell), who befriends a young European lady named Aura (Asia Argento), an anorexic with a dark past who escaped from a mental clinic after having witnessed her parents being murdered by a brutal serial killer named ‘The Headhunter’. The rest of the film is mainly just the two of them trying to find and stop the killer before he manages to kill them too.
First, let’s talk about what this film does right. That’s mainly the violence, with gore effects by the always helpful Tom Savini (though the opening decapitation features a delightfully fake-looking papier-mâché head). In proper giallo and slasher style, Argento throws in another grisly murder right at the precise moment when the plot starts to bore us a bit (occasionally he spices it up by throwing in some nudity instead, but it’s mostly violence). On a related note, the pacing is mostly good too -- it takes too long to end the damn thing, because of the giallo tendency to reveal the killer at the end, and then show how clever the filmmakers are by revealing that the killer they just named isn’t the real killer after all, but is actually this character, but until we hit that plot speed bump it moves along pretty quickly, with all the creepy POV shots and random madness present (one of my favorite moments: a psychiatrist tries to get Aura to eat some berries for her condition, and after she says she doesn’t want any drugs, he yells at her “It’s not a drug! It works on the memory!” Well, that just makes perfect sense then).
Of course, that just rather naturally segues into some of the problems I had with the movie, one of which is that the dialogue is at best ridiculous and at worst horrible. This is forgivable when he’s making movies in Italian and some third party is doing a slapdash effort to overdub them, but it’s much less understandable when the film was originally designed for English. There’s also the matter of the wildly inappropriate music. According to IMDB, Argento had wanted to go with longtime collaborators Goblin, which would have been a completely awesome choice (go listen to the soundtrack for Suspiria if you don’t believe me), but the studio demanded he go with a more American sounding score, leading to the oddly sprightly and cheerful soundtrack that we wind up with. Truth be told, I’m not really certain that this should count as a negative; it certainly doesn’t help make for a legitimately better movie, but it is so absurdly out of place that it sort of loops back around and becomes rather inspired.
There’s also, as mentioned earlier, the problems with the plot, but really, you can count the number of gialli with coherent stories and plausible killers on your fingers, regardless of whether or not this was made in America (by the way, I do consider it somewhat clever of Argento to flip the traditional giallo story of an American trying to solve a string of murders in Italy by here having an Italian trying to solve a string of murders in America).
While this wasn’t as good as I would have hoped for, it also isn’t as terrible as I had feared, and I’m glad I bought it, as it brings me closer to my end goal of owning everything Argento has ever done. Indeed, all I have left to see of his “bad” period is Sleepless and The Card Player, so I’m very close to have as full a collection as one can have without The Five Days being available in the U.S. I know you’re all very interested in this. I know I certainly am.
Rating: **
Type rest of the post here
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Trauma
Monday, November 1, 2010
Giallo
Given the history of the giallo genre, it seems a little crazy that a movie like this had never been made before now. Just think, an entire film subgenre that’s called by the Italian word for yellow, and it took Dario Argento almost forty years since his first entry in the genre to think of making one about a villain whose skin is actually yellow.
Argento has been in a pretty major renaissance lately, after his career hit some pretty big snags over the course of the 90s (full disclosure, I’ve only seen two of his films from that decade -- The Stendhal Syndrome had its moments, but was overly long and fairly dull, and Phantom of the Opera was just terrible). Giallo, however, comes at a much better time in his career, following as it did Do You Like Hitchcock?, his two Masters of Horror entries, and Mother of Tears. Quite frankly, he’s been on fire lately, and I’m eager to see what kind of film he does next (more supernatural stuff, please).
Anyway, the plot: a serial killer is going around, picking up attractive foreigners with his cab in Milan, and dumping their carved up bodies several days later. He eventually makes the key error of abducting Celine (Elsa Pataky), an American model, while she is on the phone with her sister Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner), prompting Linda to seek help from the inspector (Adrien Brody) tasked with tracking the killer down. The two of them team up, as inspectors and civilians in gialli often seem to, and it soon becomes a race against time to find the killer before he finishes Celine off.
The film has almost everything you could want in a giallo. It’s got sexy women being cut up and murdered, some astonishingly obtuse clues that lead to the killer (seriously, if that one girl actually wanted her abductor caught, she could have tried not reciting poetry while she was dying), a killer that looks at photos of his work on the girls on his computer while jerking off, some really cool scenery, and just a whole lotta blood. There’s only a couple things it gets wrong, really: the title actually connects logically with the film without even so much as throwing an animal into it, and the killer is both revealed rather early and is largely known solely as a killer, rather than being a seemingly random cast member whose killer status is revealed with five or ten minutes left to go in the movie with no plausible explanation given. Some might say the lack of these two elements was an improvement, but really, if you can’t respect tradition then what can you respect?
If anyone has been hearing about the giallo genre but was worried that it might be too weird or Italian for them, this is a good choice to dip your toe into the water. Argento has long been the unparalleled master of the genre, and while this isn’t quite his best (that would be Opera), it’s definitely the best one to show to a potential new viewer. While Opera was more of a filmed nightmare, of the sort that he frequently made in the late 70s-mid 80s, this one will be more appealing to regular thriller fans -- at least the ones that don’t mind a nice hard R rating. And if they do mind, let’s be honest, there’s not a single Argento movie they’ll ever approve of, the uptight tools.
Rating: *** ½
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
The House with Laughing Windows
Did you know that it’s been over a week since I last had an Italian horror movie in the HROHFYSSBYD? Indeed, I haven’t included an actual giallo since Amuck!, which you all of course remember as being the film that kicked off this whole deal. To rectify this great problem, I bring to you now Italian director Pupi Avati’s most famous (admittedly not setting the bar high here) film.
The film follows the adventures of Stefano (Lino Capolicchio), who is hired to venture out to a small town in the Italian countryside to help restore a badly damaged painting in an old church. The painting is a surprisingly gruesome effort for a church (well, for an American church at least, all the European churches I ever see seem to have demons and shit inside them), with a man being repeatedly stabbed while screaming in agony. The artist, he is told, was a bit of a madman, obsessed with the transcendence brought on by death, and to help capture it properly in his art his sisters would help find him victims to kill for his art. Lest the film be too obsessed with past murders, however, he now discovers that people are once more being murdered as his restoration continues. Can he figure out who is committing these grisly crimes before it’s too late?
This one may throw off casual giallo fans a bit, as it’s a good deal more slow-paced and chaste than most gialli, focusing on developing the mystery and establishing the feel and look of the film rather than throwing lots of blood and nudity out at us. Indeed, I was more than a little amused by the astonishingly chaste sex scene early in the film, where the girl strips down to her underwear, then slips under the covers before removing the rest, and keeping herself firmly covered through the whole sex scene. Compare that to virtually any other giallo ever made, where it’s almost surprising at times to find a girl dressed at all while indoors.
This is not to say that it’s a totally bloodless affair, mind you. The film slow builds to a pretty gruesome climax and ending, culminating in murder, rape, and a twist ending that I doubt anyone sees coming their first time through. Indeed, most of the criticism of the film comes from the distastefulness of the rape scene, which absolutely seems like it was included solely due to fears that the film wasn’t exploitative enough for audiences otherwise, but it hardly goes so far as to ruin the film or anything.
It’s a similar level of slow moodiness as his zombie film Zeder, which is not only the only other Avati film I have seen, but which appears to be the only other horror movie he’s ever made. It’s a shame, as he had a real talent for them, though since he’s still making movies to this day (his latest drama, Una Sconfinata Giovinezza, comes out in Italy in October), I suppose there’s always still the chance he’ll return to horror now that he’s in his 70s. It’s just how people deal with growing old in Italy, right?
Rating; ***
Saturday, February 14, 2009
The Cat O'Nine Tails
I don’t know that I can stress enough just how much I adore the films of Dario Argento. He is easily the greatest Italian horror director of all time, and while his output after the 80s generally doesn’t come close to matching his earlier work, he is still responsible for many of the greatest horror films and gialli ever made. This is one of his earliest, most unheralded films, but it definitely holds up as well as his more famous gialli like Bird with the Crystal Plumage or Tenebrae.
The film partners up two sleuths (an elderly blind puzzle maker played by Karl Malden and a young reporter played by James Fransiscus) as they try to solve an increasing series of murders centered around a robbery at a research institute that’s studying the effects of the XYY chromosome on violent crime. They find a series of loose clues, nine in all (hence the title), but find that they have attracted the attention of the killer, and every time they get any closer to solving the case, they put themselves and their friends in harm’s way.
There’s quite a few of what would become Argento’s standard “killer’s POV” shots, several years before films like Halloween and Friday the 13th would make such shots routine in American horror, and a number of creepy quick closeups of one of the killer’s eyes. Argento has always been a very stylized director (indeed, part of the reason his more recent films have been so lackluster has been a sharp toning down of that style), and while he doesn’t quite hit the heights here of later films like Suspiria or Opera, he still infuses the film with a look and feel that helps to elevate it above most of its giallo brethren.
Another thing that helps is the refreshing viciousness of the kills. This is another area Argento has never shirked away from, and the brutality of such kills as a poor photographer getting strangled with a garrote for having unknowingly photographed a murder just makes the movie an extra bit of fun for everyone. If you like your thrillers flashy, bloody, somewhat incoherent, and ending with a chase through the rooftops, you need to check this film out. And then go see Argento’s other films, if you haven’t already.
Rating: *** ½
Monday, January 5, 2009
Amuck
Welcome to the debut of the 100 Rare and Obscure Horror Films You Should See Before You Die, or HROHFYSSBYD for short. As mentioned before, these are all done in alphabetical order, so that nobody gets their feelings hurt, and so we begin with an appropriately unknown giallo, Amuck.
Amuck (Alla ricerca del piacere) is one of those films that functions with more of a premise than a plot, and as such it finds itself developing a weird kind of mood as it lingers on moments far beyond what a more plot-intensive film would entail. Barbara Bouchet stars as Greta, a secretary that goes undercover at a mansion to try to discover what has happened to her friend that disappeared there the year before. The bulk of the film is taken up by her growing odd relationship with the two homeowner, Richard and Eleanora (Farley Granger and Rosalba Neri), as she is captivated by them even as she uncovers evidence that one or both of them might have been involved in killing her friend.
There are two main things worth noting about the film. One is that the two leading women are just amazingly attractive. Furthermore, in the grand Italian tradition, roughly two minutes after Greta moves into the mansion, Eleanora seduces her, giving us a fine lesbian sex scene to get the movie started right. Seriously, they start making out almost immediately after they first meet each other, and good on both of them for it. This film keeps the nudity going for the duration of the film, which (to me at least) more than makes up for the film’s big flaw.
That flaw, as you may have already figured out, is that not enough really happens in the film. It does a pretty good job at building mood, but it would have been a better film had a good ten or fifteen minutes have been trimmed from it. Indeed, with such a small cast (only five or six notable characters), two of which are potential villains, there’s not all that much that can happen fright-wise before the climax. Writer-director Silvio Amadio seems to have realized this, though, and dealt with it in the most sensible manner possible: by having Greta fall into some quicksand while duck hunting about halfway through the film. What can I say, not all gialli can be made by Argento or Fulci.
One final note: I had planned on including trailers of each film in the HROHFYSSBYD collection, and yet all I was able to find on Youtube was part of the film’s score. Further proof of the rarity and brilliance of this film! Enjoy!
Rating: ***
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Halloween Spooktacular # 8: Torso
I realize I said that gialli may not hold up perfectly in general upon repeat viewing, but this one actually managed to hold steady at about the same level of ability that I thought it had upon first seeing it. Part of that is no doubt due to how it mostly doesn’t seem to care about the required mystery of who the killer is, in favor of just giving us occasional murder scenes and filling the rest of the film with as many gorgeous women as it can fit in its running time. I for one salute them in their efforts.
The plot mainly concerns a killer who’s been murdering beautiful young women and cutting their bodies up near a university, so four girlfriends decide it’s high time they got out to a villa in the countryside until the killer is caught. Sadly, our heroine potentially knows too much about the killer, so he follows them there and wreaks further havoc. It's not the most elaborate plot, compared to some other gialli, but it serves its purposes well.
For one, it’s got an absolutely fantastic murder scene fairly early on. A woman walks away from a party, and after realizing she’s being followed, runs into a set of woods that are one of the great triumphs of location scouting. It’s one of those patches of woods where, upon seeing it, you’d never for a moment believe a series of murders hadn’t been committed there. There’s also a great bit of tension nearer the end, too, as another character has gotten locked in a room while hiding from the killer; thinking she’s finally safe, she slides a newspaper under the door and tries to knock the key out of the keyhole on the other side of the door onto the paper so she can free herself. We see from outside the key falling just off of the paper, and as she starts to pull it in to retrieve the key, the gloved hand of the killer helpfully places it on the paper so she can greet him.
See, it’s called Torso because he removes them from his victims.
This film is as trashy as they come, so it’s no wonder it was chosen by Tarantino as part of the double bill he showed all the actors in Grindhouse to get them prepared (the other film he showed was Zombie) for their roles. I wasn’t kidding when I said it flooded this movie with beautiful women. This movie has the most stunningly attractive ladies I have ever seen in a giallo, and if they spent any more time unclothed I’d probably have to tag this as porn. As it is, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable sexy thriller, the sort of film movies like Basic Instinct and Jade have aspired to be, but didn’t really match up to. If you’re in the mood for that type of film, this would be a fine choice to check out.
Rating: *** ½
Halloween Spooktacular # 1: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
This film didn’t hold up quite as well as I’d remembered it being, and I suspect this may be a fairly common problem among gialli. After all, so much time is spent on the mystery of whodunit in each one that, when you watch it already knowing, it decreases the value a bit. Still, while I no longer consider this to be far and away the best giallo I’ve seen, it still ranks as a superior entry in the genre.
The plot, while still noticeably giallified, is actually a bit different than normal. An American vacationing in Italy witnesses a woman being stabbed in the lobby of an apartment building, and, while stuck in between the glass walls at the entrance, manages to attract a crowd and get the police to arrive before the dark figure who stabbed her can finish her off. Naturally, his position as a witness cannot be tolerated, and so the killer begins to try to finish him off as well. What follows is a number of great twists and turns, as we slowly assemble a pile of clues about the killer that are mostly taken from a few threatening phone calls made to our hero’s apartment. Where the film really shines is during a few scenes of incredible tension, such as a grand chase through the streets and an auto yard, with someone shooting at him who may or may not be the killer, or another, even more powerful scene, when he decides to do one last bit of sleuthing before he and his girlfriend fly back to America, only for his girlfriend to be targeted. These moments are as tense as anything you’ll find in any Hitchcock film.
This is about as useful as he gets the whole film.
The main problem here, that brings its score down a bit, is the incredibly wooden acting of our lead. Tony Musante, known for pretty much nothing else of note outside of this movie, delivers a terrible performance. Granted, the acting isn’t really the main highlight of a giallo, but all the same he does bring the movie down a good bit. Outside of him, though, the movie is still golden. You should definitely check it out.
Rating: *** ½
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Don't Torture a Duckling
Whatever your feelings on gialli, one thing is certain: they have the most awesome titles ever. This is another giallo from Lucio Fulci, and it came highly recommended by the frequenters of IMDB as his best movie. This would be high praise indeed, were I a bigger fan of his, but the film certainly managed to impress me all the same.
The film revolves around a murder mystery, as several young boys are being murdered in a small town in the Italian countryside. With the police at a loss, it’s up to an intrepid reporter and his recovering junkie girlfriend to figure out who’s committing these foul acts. The visual flair on display in this film is great, as Fulci is truly in fine form here. If anything, it almost feels like he was trying to channel the style of Dario Argento, who was his big competitor at the time. The film is appropriately nasty, as a film revolving around children being murdered should be, but what’s more interesting is how the plot is as close to being sturdy and plot-hole free as any I’ve ever seen from him. It’s also got a great deal of tension to it, and just keeps ratcheting it up higher as it approaches its climax.
Of course, I’d be lying if I said there were no problems at all with it (anyone with a more than passing familiarity with the genre will be able to guess who the killer is as soon as they first appear), but it is still a superior example of the genre, and easily the best film I’ve ever seen from Fulci. If you were thinking about seeing what all the fuss is about this giallo nonsense, this would be a good place to start.
Rating: *** ½
Lizard in a Woman's Skin
This was an early effort by famed Italian horror director Lucio Fulci. While I’m not as big on him as I am his contemporaries like Mario Bava and Dario Argento, I had heard enough good things about his early gialli that I felt I had to at least try them. Fortunately, his early work seems to have been a bit better and (slightly) more coherent than his later horror movies were.
The plot is about a woman in a high rise apartment (women in gialli always live the high life, you know) who, after describing to her therapist a series of erotic dreams she had had about her loose neighbor, finds that her neighbor was murdered in the exact same way that she had described in her last dream. While this would normally seem a pretty open and shut case, but as her father is the head of the police force, he is determined to discover who might be setting her up, and why. So yes, the plot is somewhat incoherent, as all gialli are, but it is quite entertaining all the same. For one, being a Fulci movie, it doesn’t shy away from violence, and there’s a scene with cut open dogs that’s more gruesome than anything you’ll find in his more famous film Zombie. There’s also a great scene where our heroine is chased through a cathedral and barricades herself in a dark room filled with a vicious army of rubber bats.
There are some pacing problems, as there are in most Fulci films, and the first half of the film, largely taken up by the police investigation, is a tad boring whenever her insane dreams aren’t being shown. The second half is much better, though, and ranks up with the best of his horror films. If you’re not already a giallo fan, this is not going to change your mind, but to genre fans, it won’t disappoint.
Rating: ** ½
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
The Stendhal Syndrome
Considering how revered a filmmaker Dario Argento is, it’s a little surprising that his films after the 80s have gotten such poor DVD treatments. This film, for instance, until last month was only available in a heavily edited, full-screen version. I’d say that such a thing would completely butcher the film, and if we were talking about most of his films from the 70s and 80s, that would be true. However, having now seen this film uncut and widescreen, as it had been intended, I’d have to say that nobody really butchered this film but the filmmakers themselves.
It’s not really a terrible film, to be honest, but it does commit the crime of being a fairly dull film. It’s a good two hours long, and frankly would have been a good deal better if Argento had been able to restrain himself and cut a good quarter of that off. The plot is surprisingly linear for one of his films, and concerns a cop played by his daughter Asia that is trying to track down a serial rapist/killer only to get caught up in his madness. Dario Argento is known for his creepiness and violent bloodbaths, and both are certainly present in this film, the latter from a number of murders in the grand giallo tradition, and the former in how he doesn’t shy away from filming his own daughter being raped twice. The film also has an interesting second half, as after dispatching the killer so thoroughly that even Jason or Michael would have needed a sequel to bounce back, she begins instead to be menaced by…well, I won’t reveal it, though it won’t be hard to figure out while watching.
Here’s the problem, though. There are some great, really effective scenes in this movie, but they are surrounded by a greater amount of dull, plodding scenes that do nothing but grind the film to a halt. It makes the film extremely schizophrenic and, while certainly not terrible, is the second weakest of Argento’s films I’ve yet seen. For the record, his version of Phantom of the Opera, which was his follow-up to this, was his worst film by far. Clearly the mid-to-late 90s were not a good time for him.
Rating: **
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Short Night of the Glass Dolls
We turn a new corner on this blog, as we have reached the final film in the Giallo Collection with this. This one was placed last in my box set most likely at random by whoever was stuffing the cardboard case with the individual DVD cases, but I choose to believe they were placed in an intentional order so that this could be the coda to the whole experience.
The film feels like a proper ending to the “series”, at least, as it’s got by far the most callbacks to other films. First and foremost, it’s by the same writer-director as Who Saw Her Die? (Aldo Lado) and, like that film, also features a score by Ennio Morricone, though this one is admittedly not as good. Further, its plot is kind of a mashing together of Johnny Got His Gun and that episode of the Twilight Zone where a guy is paralyzed but conscious and has to find a way to convince the doctors that he’s not really dead before they start an autopsy. You may have guessed by now what the film’s plot is. I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say that it somehow involves a guy who is paralyzed but conscious and has to find a way to convince the doctors that he’s not really dead before they start an autopsy.
Most of the film is told in flashback, however, with him remembering the days leading up to his unfortunate condition, where he meets a girl and, in true giallo fashion, she suddenly disappears and he takes it upon himself to lead the search for her after the police show their normal level of uselessness. It’s not exactly difficult to figure out the various twists and turns of the plot even without factoring in how cobbled together from spare parts this film is, and I can’t claim the visual feel of the movie is anything but a bit of a step down from the other three films (You never really notice how visually necessary Venice is until you can no longer look at it, you know?). I suppose its biggest weakness is simply that it comes after three films that were all better movies than it, making it even more difficult than it otherwise would have been not to notice how second rate it is. It doesn’t even manage to go entertainingly over the top when it should to salvage the whole operation, it just sort of plods along at its own meandering pace, never really getting the voom needed in a giallo. I made fun of the Bloodstained Shadow yesterday, but that was at least entertainingly bad, this one’s just…dull. It so does not live up to its fairly interesting name. Don’t check it out when you’re watching the others.
Friday, September 14, 2007
The Bloodstained Shadow
This is a much more standard, and quite coincidentally much less good, giallo than our last entry, which is a bit of a shame because the back of the DVD helpfully informs me that this film contains one of the final scores by the legendary Italian rock band Goblin, and anyone familiar with Italian horror movies would not want their talents wasted on a weak film. Unfortunately, the band seems to have somewhat phoned things in for this film, much like everyone else.
The plot concerns a professor returning to his old hometown to visit his priest brother just as a series of murders begins rocking the small community. Reminding them of murders that happened in their childhoods, the two begin to investigate the murders in the hopes of finding and stopping the killer. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, in a movie like this, you generally actually would like the standard giallo cliché of having about a dozen or so characters that could conceivably be the actual killer, leaving you to try to guess which one it might turn out to be. Here, though, your options are a tad more limited, as both brothers act dangerously insane from the first time you meet them up until the end, where *SPOILER one of them is revealed to be the killer. When one of your main characters makes his first appearance by ranting about how sinful and evil everyone in town is, and the other main character is constantly having mental attacks and flashbacks to a childhood murder, you’re not really going to cast the widest net you could in search of who the killer might be.
After praising it yesterday, I’m going to staunchly ignore that this film seems to have also been filmed in Venice, except to note that the nice location shots are indeed the primary appeal of this film. There’s not too much else to recommend, really. What can I say, into each box set a little crap must fall.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Who Saw Her Die?
I am rather baffled as to how this got included in a box set of giallo films, as it bears only the most superficial similarities to them. There are no models to be had in this film, and a depressing lack of nudity as well. Indeed, it plays much closer to Don’t Look Now than it does to the Case of the Bloody Iris, and not least because it’s set in Venice and involves an English speaking actor (George Lazenby, still recovering from being thrown to the wolves as the replacement for Connery in the Bond franchise) coping with the death of his daughter.
I trust mentioning his daughter died isn’t spoiling anything, since it’s kind of the entire premise of the film (indeed, the title of the film does sort of mention it in passing). Indeed, one of the weirdest moments of the entire movie comes when her body is discovered floating in a canal, and we see a group of rubberneckers, most looking completely bored, with a few actively trying to suppress giggles. I can only conclude from this that Italians are heartless monsters and should have been wiped off the map 60 years ago, but I guess the beauty of film is that you can all draw your own, possibly different and thus less correct, conclusions about this.
So yes, as I was saying, Lazenby is a Venisian sculptor (I got that from the back of the DVD case, as if they ever mentioned him sculpting I must have missed it) whose daughter is murdered, and after the kind of typical police incompetence one generally gets whenever a murder is committed, he takes it upon himself to hunt the killer down. This involves him visiting abandoned buildings that, if you saw them, you would not for a moment believe a murder had never taken place there. He also begins assembling the required group of suspects and witnesses, though in a way that’s unsubtle enough to tip off the killer and get many of his witnesses and suspects killed (one effective scene has him stumbling across a freshly strangled witness, but is unable to catch the fleeing killer due to the crowd assuming he himself was the killer trying to flee).
It all ends with a fairly nice climax and – shock of shocks – a killer that actually kind of makes sense, rather than just a character chosen at random, another sign that this doesn’t fit properly in the Giallo Collection. All in all, though, it’s a pretty damn good thriller. The use of Venice as an almost living entity in this film helps it a lot too; I’ve yet to see a film set in Venice that didn’t look amazing (the location was also the main appeal of the somewhat overrated Don’t Look Now). Furthermore, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film does not exist, so hush. So far this collection has been two for two – let’s hope it continues.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
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.
