All The Colours Of Giallo

A Bava And Beyond
The Call Of Duty

All The Colours Of Giallo
USA 2017 Severin Films Blu Ray Zone A

There’s a moment during Kat Ellinger’s commentary track for a giallo trailer on Severin Films’ new release All The Colours Of Giallo, where she says “Thanks God for multiregion and bootlegs.” I’m so grateful someone finally said this because, for people who are accustomed to passing time in the shadowy world of the predominantly Italian giallo thriller, this is often the only way such films can be seen. If this kind of black market, cinematic contraband didn’t exist then I suspect the giallo film wouldn’t be experiencing the kind of popular resurgence that it has, internationally, since the dawn of the DVD age... for a number of reasons.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

All The Colours Of Giallo is a new, three disc Blu Ray set from Severin which you can/could buy either as a stand alone title or, as I did, with a special double slip case release (with a cool t-shirt and accompanying pin badges... always wanted an Edwige Fenech pin badge) housing both this and their newly restored, two disc edition of Sergio Martino’s All The Colours Of The Dark. I’m not cracking into the Martino film and accompanying soundtrack CD (which I hope is a remaster or is in some way different from the previous Digitmovies release) yet because I need to start watching and revisiting the genre with a fair few giallo Blu Ray upgrades from the last year or more but, I couldn’t resist breaking into the All The Colours Of The Giallo release before I watched anything else.

Imagine my surprise when I found out the main reason I was buying this set was, actually, the extras and not the main part of the release (although, frankly, that’s debatable because the extras are where the main meat of these discs are). The main attraction, so to speak, is supposed to be a feature length documentary about the genre which... I watched with interest but I certainly didn’t feel I was the target audience. I must have hundreds of these kinds of movies lining the shelves by now and I think the documentary from which this set gets its title is more for those viewers less experienced in the form and who would like a little more info about the history of the genre.

The documentary is predominantly one guy, Fabio Melleli, telling the audience about the history of the genre with a few other, ‘hands on’ talking heads from various movies of the time. Some of the usual suspects plus a few others. This includes discussing the meaning of the term giallo, which means yellow, coming from the yellow covers of the Mondadori thriller reprints in Italy and then goes on to cover some... but not all.. of the major players that were making these things. So, yeah, if you’ve been hanging around in the world of giallo for a while then you’re probably not going to have much of a takeaway from the documentary itself as you’ll already know it inside out but this piece, indeed the whole set, would be an absolute essential purchase for people who are only just starting to explore the field. Yes, there are some translation short cuts in the subtitles and, bearing in mind I know no Italian whatsoever, even I could see the damage done when the subtitles translate a very specific word, 'giallo', at one point as the resident expert uses it to illustrate a point, as 'gialli'... which is the plural and implies other films within the same genre, which isn’t what the guy was getting at in this particular instance. Even so, though, it’s a pretty good documentary for people who are new to this stuff and it also touches briefly on the influence of the German krimi movies of the time (okay... I’ll come back to that point a little later in this review).

I must admit, the documentary for me was a little disappointing but I didn’t mind that so much because the stuff I was after listed as extras was the real main course. However, before that main course there was another little starter, which is a mini documentary on the same topic called The Giallo Frames, an interview with John Martin, editor of The Giallo Pages and it’s something I found much more palatable but also a more or less compressed version of the other documentary on this disc. Again, like all the stuff here, this is an excellent introduction to the genre and I’m sure a lot of people who are just starting out watching these films will find it very informative.

And then we have 'the main course' of the first disc... the thing I was actually buying it for... the Giallothon. Which is 82 giallo trailers comprising just over four hours of viewing time. Now this is where the fun really begins... I’ve bought giallo trailer compilations before on DVD but this one, although it only has one trailer for each film it presents here, by far surpasses all of those previous trailer selections. Why? Well the reason is two fold. Surprisingly, two fold, in my case.

Firstly the quality of these trailers is amazing. I’ve never known some of these trailers to be in as good a shape as this and I can only assume the people at Severin have spent some time lovingly restoring them all... which is great. There are still a couple which are a of a slightly, dodgy quality but I suspect that speaks volumes about what terrible shape the material was in, in the first place. Seriously folks, the quality of these trailers is phenomenal.

Secondly, the whole four hours comes with an optional, continuous commentary track by Kat Ellinger. Now, I’ve read some of Ms. Ellinger's work in a couple of print venues and, I have to admit that in the past I have sometimes found her writing style a tad dry and academic for what she’s trying to say but, I have to say, after hearing this fantastic commentary I’m willing to give her another try and buy some more stuff with her writing in it (maybe her new book on Sergio Martino, one of my personal favourite giallo directors). Asides from the comfort issue of someone who sounds, just a little bit, like Eileen Daley... she really seems to know her stuff and comes across as quite chatty and knowledgeable about the subject. I was properly impressed because I’ve only seen about 70 of the movies Severin chose to showcase here (a few of my favourites were not included here, either) but Kat seems to know them all fairly well and, bizarrely, I found myself agreeing with almost everything she says on this track (yeah, that almost never happens).

Now, I have to admit, in regards to this commentary, I was expecting the subject to be about the trailers themselves and the way the companies were marketing the films but, no, this is actually Ellinger diving into various facts and figures about each giallo in question and giving a fairly good, informed critique of each one... not an easy thing to do with some of the shorter trailers and, I did note, that on a few of the promos she ran into the next one too, when she got really passionate about a subject. She also seems to have the same kind of knowledge of the home video industry of the last couple of decades that I have too so, there were some refreshing observations about availability of prints on here that I really appreciated.

Which brings me back to her brilliant “Thank God for multiregion and bootlegs” because, yeah, I suspect the popularity and availability of a lot of these movies over the years has increased because of these kinds of supplies, as people finally got to see the films and were able to appreciate them and look for better quality sources and transfers. So good for her and, again, if you are just starting out to explore the genre then you will find Kat Ellinger’s commentary track absolutely indispensable here. There were a few films trailered here which I personally didn’t think quite belonged in the giallo genre (and I suspect if I were to ever meet Ms. Ellinger we might come to verbal blows as to the validity of The Perfume Of The Lady In Black as a giallo... as great a film as it is... although that’s also not included here, either) but that just opens up people to seeing other Italian genre movies too so no real complaints from me here on that score. I would say that you might want to not try and watch all four hours (with or without commentary) in one straight sitting but, if you do attempt that, make sure you have a bottle of J&B by your side.

Okay so, after the main course of this set, as it were, we are given two discs of really great dessert...

Now the second disc is great for me because the subject matter is something I am a complete novice in... the German krimi. There’s a short, fairly informative documentary called The Case Of The Krimi which is presented by an interesting guy called Marcus Stiglegger and which does a similar thing to the documentaries on the other two discs. He talks about the origins of the Krimi in the red covered paperbacks of authors like Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and, of course, as a giallo fan, I could immediately see the parallel. He also talks about the way the krimi and giallo films kind of overlap by influencing each other at a certain point in their respective cycles, which I also found fascinating. And then, of course, there’s the really great feature of this second disc... 32 beautifully restored Krimi trailers. No commentaries this time, which is a shame but, as someone who’s never had the bulk of these available to watch in my home country, I found the whole slew of trailers both fascinating and, in many cases, hilarious. And, my gosh, these krimi films must have kept the young Klaus Kinski in steady employment for years, by the looks of it. And Karin Dor, who Bond fans may remember from You Only Live Twice, is in a fair few of these too. And there’s even a couple which feature a young Christoper Lee here. I loved the fact that almost all of these were based on Edgar Wallace films and were almost all set in London which, as Stiglegger explained in his mini documentary, were almost always shot in places like Hamburg with English signs going up and cars imported to ‘do London on the cheap’, as it were. I absolutely loved this stuff and I’m so glad Severin included these because I would have never had known to bother to explore this strand of films until now.

Oh... and the third disc in this package is another thing I was highly anticipating. It’s a CD called The Strange Sounds of the Bloodstained Films... presumably as a mixed gialloistic, parody/homage of the title What Are Those Strange Drops Of Blood Doing on Jennifer’s Body? (which was an alternate title for The Case Of The Bloody Iris) and The Bloodstained Shadow. It’s basically a musical compilation of tracks from various gialli and, while I love this, I have to confess I was slightly disappointed because I have already got the full score CDs to all but one or two of the films represented here and I was hoping for some more obscure, previously unreleased tracks, truth be told. Still, that being said, it’s a lovely compilation and something people unfamiliar with some of the famous giallo scores outside of Argento’s collaborations with Goblin and Ennio Morricone might use as a kind of music sampler to allow them to go off and explore the full albums at some point.

So yeah, all in all, All The Colours Of Giallo is a blisteringly good release from Severin, who have really gone ‘a bava and beyond’ the call of duty to bring us this beautifully packaged set (I love that double slip case) and it’s something which should be on any cinephile’s movie shelves, as far as I’m concerned. Especially if they’re not into this material in the first place. This is an excellent place for newbies to start and I wish I’d had something like this to hand a few decades ago when I started being drawn into the genre. An absolutely first class release and something which shouldn’t be ignored. Try and grab one of these if you can... it’s one of the best releases of the year, so far.

Masks

Death Odd Acting

Masks
Germany 2011
Directed by Andreas Marschall
Lighthouse Blu Ray Zone B

I’m not sure what one could classify Andreas Marschall’s Masks as (should one want to do such a thing). I’d like to say it’s a horror film but, at the end of the day, there’s no content in this to suggest that it’s any such thing... although I’m sure the odd viewer might find some of the murder scenes somewhat horrific. However, one person’s horrible is another person's jacket potato so, you know, slightly horrific does not a horror film make. I’d be more tempted to say it’s a giallo although, while certain genre tropes like the fetishisation of the weapon of choice for the killer are certainly in evidence here, I felt it didn’t quite really make the count on being a part of the wide variety of gialli which have come before it in cinematic history, either.

I guess then I’d have to call this one a drama/thriller but, to be fair, Andreas Marschall certainly uses the tropes and visual/audio syntax of these aforementioned genres and homages both the Italian giallo and the Italian horror film throughout the running time here... in particular the popular works of Mario Bava and Dario Argento. In the end credits, there is even a written dedication to both these directors and one other, the wonderful Sergio Martino but, to be honest, while it’s very easy to see either Bava or Argento’s influence in pretty much each and every frame of this movie, I couldn’t personally see anything specifically of Martino in the DNA of this film. So maybe this was just too subtle for me on the first watch.

Let’s be a little clearer, though, because it definitely uses the visual style of a certain famous Italian horror movie as its guiding principle and I’ll break it down a little more for you to call this what it really is. That is to say... I’ve never seen a movie which so much wants to be Dario Argento’s Suspiria than this one. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way... far from it. I might, if the film lacked any of the kinds of visual panache or intricate sophistication of that particular tour-de-force but this one, Masks, really does it all so well. Fans of the Argento classic should really take a look at this one.

It has its own story, of course, but the resemblances in even the structure and basic plot points, while being quite different, have huge similarities and it would be impossible to imagine this film being birthed in any other way than for the director to be writing in all the elements that he loved of both Suspiria and it’s first sequel, Inferno, at the script stage. For example, there’s no ‘ballet school’ in Germany where the main protagonist goes to study... instead we have an infamous ‘acting school’ somewhere in an 'off the beaten track' location in Berlin... where the heroine goes to study.

The film opens with a look at the ‘method’ of the school's founding teacher, Matteusz Gdula, where a girl is tortured as incentive to improve her performance and make her craft more convincing. We then go into a title sequence where some footage is posterised to a great degree and turned red. It’s the absolute dead spit of one of the famous trailers for the 1971 Mario Bava movie A Bay Of Blood (aka Twitch Of The Death Nerve) in tone and I’ve seen a fair few title sequences from around that time done in this manner over the years too (mostly Spaghetti Westerns, to be fair). The similarity between the A Bay Of Blood trailer and this (albeit A Bay Of Blood kept changing the colour wash while this one stays in red) is quite astonishing and, given the director’s dedication at the end, I can’t see that there was any way in which this was a coincidence.

We then cut to contemporary Berlin (of 2011) where a not so great actress, Stella played by Susen Ermich, is failing her audition to get into a drama school. Then one of the judges breaks this to her he tells her of a certain ‘other’ school where he thinks she might do better. From that point on, if not sooner, the films plays out like a compressed and stylistic cross breed of Suspiria and Inferno with a little nudity thrown in, on occasion, for good measure.

For example, when her boyfriend drops Stella off at the 'kooky old school' they nearly run over a woman who is hurrying away from the school in a distraught manner. A little later in the film (and certainly not as early as Argento’s own pay off to his version of a similar scene in Suspiria), the girl goes back to the apartment of her friend. Since I remembered the opening ten minutes of Argento’s classic horror movie, I knew right away that the two girls wouldn’t be surviving the film for more than another few minutes... which, of course, was quickly proven correct. This is quite unfortunate in a way because it makes the film very predictable if you’re familiar with Argento’s body of work.

Another specific example would be the guy working the lighting when Stella has her audition for this specific school. He shines it in her eyes and, although not quite as subtle as the reflected light sequence which stuns Jessica Harper’s character in Suspiria, the effect and atmosphere are exactly the same. And the film goes on like this, using both familiar visual and audio tropes (the film has a somewhat Goblinesque score by composers Sebastian Levermann and Nils Weise which comes on a bonus CD with this deluxe, limited German edition of the movie) to create a patchwork quilt giallo/horror movie which, ultimately, doesn’t get to really be of either genre but, no matter... because the way it’s put together here is amazingly competent and riffs on all those great moments cineastes will remember.

So, yeah, you get the voyeuristic, smooth camera movement stacked together with shots of a black rimmed eyeball, the half drugged girl who is trying to investigate what is going on through the hazy miasma created by the pills she has been given, long corridors with fluid camerawork, large blocks of primary colour lighting and shots which are almost POV of the murder weapon chucked in and mixed around in the most stylish manner.

For instance, there’s an incredibly beautifully designed shot near the start of the picture where Stella climbs the stair well and we can see her, plus another character in the background on a different level and the screen is split by the various vertically diagonal sections created by the bannisters. It’s a remarkable shot, thrown away fairly early in the picture but a promise of things to come and very much a calling card to make you aware that you are watching a film put together by a director of some considerable talent.

There are also some not so great things about the movie too, though.

Asides from the ‘familiarity breeds predictability’ issue, for instance, there’s a scene when Stella sees a photograph of the girl who was fleeing the school and we get a flashback of that moment to really drum the point home as to who it is... except that it’s maybe less than three minutes since that scene actually happened so, seriously, who needs a flashback at this stage? Also, I hate to say it but by the end I was getting a little tired of the whole thing. I think the last half an hour of this movie, which is the point where it should be reaching a crescendo, could have been severely shortened in the edit. I was beginning to find the denouement just a little dull and sleep inducing, truth be told.

However, at the end of the day, this doesn’t detract from the fact that if you are either an Italian giallo or Italian horror enthusiast (or possibly a thrilling and hedonistic combination of the two) then Masks is a lovely little homage to some of the, admittedly, mostly popular films and directors in both those genres. Definitely a movie to track down if those areas are your thing and certainly an interesting film to run as the second feature on a double bill with Argento’s Suspiria, if you are in the mood. Not quite a giallo, not quite a horror but still pretty entertaining and with enough traits of those streams of cinema to hold the interest for most of the running time.

The Mountain Of The Cannibal God

Ursula Undress

The Mountain Of The Cannibal God

aka Primitive Desires

aka La Montagna Del Dio Cannibale

aka Slave Of The Cannibal God

aka Prisoner Of The Cannibal God

US 1978

Directed by Sergio Martino

EC Entertainment Region 0

Warning: This may have some very light spoilers, depending on what spoilers you think there could possibly be from a film with such a “does what it says on the tin” title.

So where do I even start with the illustriously entitled movie known to many simply as... The Mountain Of The Cannibal God... or even, "that movie where that Bond girlie takes her clothes off?"

Well, for me, it has to start somewhere in the mid 1990s when my sleepy little town of Enfield got “cabled up” by an enthusiastic company and we all had access to about a gazillion cable channels for the first time ever (yeah, okay, it’s also about a half a gazillion less than most digital services these days but, hey, we only had five channels before then so what do you want from me?). This service lasted for four or five years until the cable company decided we were getting too good a deal and tried to hike the prices up. This had the effect of making a lot of people, myself included, ditch the cable service and thus, for the time being, return to a simpler way of life. I don’t know if the cable company survived but knowing the inhabitants of my town like I do... I’m guessing they didn’t have much take up.

Okay then, so there I was with my fresh cable channel and we had a weird channel called HVC which, once it came on at about 10pm every night, seemed to be intent on showing the people of Enfield soft core porn movies... or, to be more precise, what were once hard core porn movies which had been rendered less hard and... erm... more soft by the use of various edits and optical zooms enforced on the poor customers of this particular cable company by whatever self appointed moral guardians felt it was right and proper to do so this time. But don’t get me started on the evils of censorship...

Now then, I’m sure you all know that I wouldn’t want to watch any of those nasty porn films (butter not melting in my mouth anytime soon) but, you know, I was interested in film so felt it best I watch some anyway, just to check on the levels of artistic and educational content that such films had to offer... and one of the things this channel used to show was a watered down broadcast of... um... a “porn programme” (?) called Electric Blue. With me so far? Good...

Now one of the episodes of this Electric Blue was a “celebrity special” showing clips from various porn films or steamy scenes from movie featuring as near as they could get to bona fide celebrities who had been in such things. You know the drill. It can be a bit of a stretch tenuously filling up this kind of compilation programme I’m guessing. So they had Sylvester Stallone on there, of course, in his “early” Italian Stallion phase. And the likes of La Cicciolina, Madonna, Koo Stark, Charlie Sheens ex-girlfriend (I’m sorry but the name escapes me), Helen Mirren (in a clip from Caligula) and... former two time Bond girl Ursula Andress in a clip from a movie where she is tied up naked to a pole and has red paint rubbed suggestively all over her body by two equally naked native gals. Now, at the time, I’d not seen any of the movies that these dubious gems were taken from but, after now having seen The Mountain Of The Cannibal God... I can say I have finally seen the movie where the Ursula Andress clip was taken from. Classy.

There were three reasons, really, why I wanted to get around to watching this movie at this time. Number one on that list is, naturally, the appreciation of the curvy nakedness of the film’s female lead... but I also wanted to see this one because it’s directed by the director Sergio Martino, who has made, in my opinion anyway, some of the greatest movies in the Italian giallo genre there are (some of which give Dario Argento a good run for his money). Thirdly, I have to admit, was the tempting allure of the discount boxes at the Camden Film Fair where I was able to purchase an uncut edition of The Mountain Of The Cannibal God for the less than princely sum of... £2 or three for a fiver. I like a good bargain.

So there I was, getting ready for the second half of a double bill on a late Friday night (I’d just watched Umberto Lenzi’s giallo Eyeball), armed with a big bag of popcorn and a can of shandy... I doused the lights, hit play and... the film commenced.

Okay... so The Mountain Of The Cannibal God is not a great film. Sergio Martino’s directing is pretty competent and he certainly tries hard with this tale of a brother and sister penetrating the jungle to gain access to a forbidden island in a search for the sister’s lost husband who is missing, presumed dead. He even tries to add depth to a lot of the shots by shooting through trees and using angles made by branches (many of which I’m sure have been strategically placed for just such a purpose rather than having been found growing naturally) to make the compositions more interesting. He also has a nice thing he does in a few early scenes where a person who is standing in medium to long shot and addressing a couple of people also in shot who are, say, siting down, walks across the set in time with a tracking shot swivelling around the composition... but it has to be said that, for all the artistic effort put into this movie... it’s more than just a little boring.

There are hangovers from the mondo and cannibal movies which were popular enough to obviously have necessitated Martino’s involvement with this kind of shock sensationalist entertainment (none of which I’ve seen as it happens). So you have various scenes of pseudo people eating scenes juxtaposed with actual footage of animals killing each other and so on but, even with this shock material inserted (and it’s way less than shocking compared to what I expect is to be found in the other films of this nasty little sub-genre), it has to be said that this film really does start to drag.

Andress is not particularly convincing in this one and the director seems to take every opportunity he can to get her wet... be it walking through heavy rain or falling into white water... but that all seems a bit of a waste when his camera quite astonishingly fails to linger on any of Ursula’s wet bits... refraining from all such instances of cheap sexual exploitation until we get to that later sequence which was lifted for the Electric Blue video programmes years later. Seems a bit pointless to have gone to all that trouble of getting her wet in the first place if you’re not going to linger on the effects of said wetness on the clothed female form. But enough of that...

The film is of interest, probably, only to those who find the Italian Cannibal genre something worth exploring or to those, like myself, who admire the movies of Sergio Martino... and, of course, for those of us who are intrigued by Ursula Andress’ on-screen presence. And even then, I had to sit through an extended and painfully paced piece of footage of a snake eating a live monkey and, also, a scene where... there’s no way to put this delicately methinks... a guy happily shags a pig... or possibly a wild boar come to think of it... yes, he bores a boar. And I had to sit through Stacy Keech’s performance too... that’s no easy thing.

Frankly, this movie wasn’t that hard to watch but wouldn’t exactly fit the term “pulse pounding” either. There really are a fair few more worthwhile movies I could have been watching rather than putting up with this and I was also disappointed that Ms. Andress didn’t “go all Conan” and deliver muscle-bound, nipple-poking, she-wolf justice as she appears to have been doing on the DVD cover art. Now that’s the film I wanted to see!

Mightier Than The Wardh?

The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh

aka A Blade of the Ripper

aka Next! Italy/Spain 1971

Directed by Sergio Martino

Shameless Screen Entertainment

Region 0

Before I get into this review proper, I’d just like to give a huge shout out of thanks to Shameless Screen Entertainment for sending me a review copy of their new release of one of my all-time favourite gialli. Since this is the first UK release of this on DVD, I’ll try to refrain from peppering this review with the usual spoilers.

Whenever you see two or more of the names Edwige Fenech, Ivan Rassimov and George Hilton sharing the same billing on a movie directed by the great Sergio Martino, you know you’re in for a treat... and Martino’s second proper feature, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, sets the trend for these remarkable movies as a) it was his first giallo and b) it stars all three of these understandably famous genre actors.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that this movie, apart from being one of my personal favourites, is one of the truly great non-Argento gialli ever made. It’s definitely a standout movie (as anyone who’s seen it and knows the genre well will probably confirm) but I think it also, in many ways, helped set the style that the generic giallo-thriller would aspire to over the years. Made only two years after Argento’s breakthrough movie, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, this movie definitely sets a high benchmark when it comes to a lot of the visual and audio props which the Italian giallo has come to be known for over the decades and, although it does play with the elements initially explored and then popularised by Mario Bava and Dario Argento... it penetrates past the surface of standard homage (which is what a lot of the early gialli tended to be in some ways) and really pushes the limits as to what can be done with all those little stylistic devices which still makes the genre so beloved by its fans (myself included).

It’s a film that uses those devices but does so to further explore the boundaries of what can be done in the format... or at least throw out the gauntlet to other directors as to what directions the genre could be taken in. If Dario Argento is the D.W. Griffith of the giallo movie, then Sergio Martino is this genres Orson Welles and The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh is definitely the Citizen Kane of giallo. A Citizen Kane in the sense that it utilises a whole host of camera techniques and ways of telling the story which in itself becomes almost a summary of where that particular strand of Italian cinema is at that point... all encapsulated in one, vastly entertaining movie.

The film starts out with one of the first of many little sequences which you’ll recognise as turning up in other, later gialli which were obviously “inspired” by this movie... a man kerb crawling, on the look out for a “lady of the night” to keep him company. He picks a young lady up who undresses in the car (this movie definitely doesn’t shy away on it’s nudity quotient) and then promptly finds herself gorily slashed by the driver/murderer. Immediately following this, the movie does a seventies freeze-frame and a quote from Sigmund Freud appears on the screen. I’d like to think this was a really pertinent quote which gives the audience an insight into the mind of the killer but, in all honesty, I suspect this was just studio/directorial flim-flam to attempt to justify to the audience the large quantities of nudity, death and sexual fetish they are about to see up on the screen for the rest of the movie. This movie must have been a bit of an eye-opener for the majority of audiences back in Italy in 1971 I suspect.

I mention sexual fetish because that is what the “strange vice” referred to in the title is referencing in association with the titular character Julie Wardh... played by giallo legend Edwige Fenech.

Now then, I have to pause a moment here to say a quick word about my favourite giallo actress, the wonderful Edwige. There are many great and beautiful women in the history of the Italian giallo... I might mention the likes of Nieves Navarro (aka Susan Scott), Anita Strindberg or Florinda Bolkan, but Edwige Fenech has got so much going for her that she really stands out in these kinds of movies. A brilliant personality she can play smart, strong (as she does in the excellent Strip Nude For Your Killer), slightly evil or intensely vulnerable (as she does in this movie) and she also sports another standout pre-requisite for appearing in the Italian Giallo genre... she looks gorgeous naked. As you’ll see when you watch this movie (and yes, as I write this review I am, indeed, drinking a cup of tea from my Edwige Fenech in The Case of the Bloody Iris Mug... yeah, I’m sad).

So anyway, after that digression, where was I... oh yeah, we meet Mrs. Wardh and when someone uses the words “sexual pervert”, we are treated to a flashback of Mrs. Wardh and another main player in this movie (and the genre in general) Ivan Rassimov... playing a character called Jean. He and Edwige are in a forest and getting into some extremely rough sex in the rain... it’s all so beautifully shot and features a haunting flashback leitmotif on the soundtrack, courtesy of score composer Nora Orlandi.

We pop out of the flashback soon enough and we join Mrs. Wardh, the wife of a successful political secretary, as she wanders around her apartment. And it’s here that the voyeuristic style of the camerawork which paces the film really begins to come into it’s own as it wanders around the apartment, following our main protagonist only very languidly, allowing her to wander off of screen without being in a hurry to catch her. The shot compositions in this film mainly seems to be built around angles and movements that highlight upright sections in the frame and this is particularly enhanced and played against in this particular apartment set where the wallpaper is all based on horizontal stripes... which are then blatantly truncated and split into vertical sections... which I’m sure I’ve seen Martino favour as a stylistic choice on more than one occasion in his movies.

In this scene this kind of slow lulling, splitting of the shot is brilliantly rewarded as we see Edwige exit right of shot into another room and... while the camera is still, languidly trying to catch up to the intersection where this character split off to the right, she returns entering screen right and going into a room opposite her (screen left) but this time she is naked... since she’s had time to remove her clothing while the camera slowly wends its way to the back of the apartment. This little shock of naked flesh against the horizontal stripes intersected by the upright composition sends a little jolt into the visual cortex of the viewer and it’s clever little tricks of perception like this one which are dotted throughout Martino’s gialli that make his films stand head and shoulders above most of the rest of the pack of the directors working in this genre at the time.

And those beautiful, vertical based compositions really pervade the atmosphere of the film and make this particular giallo an absolute joy to watch. There’s even a Psycho styled shower murder where the naked, young lady in question is seen inside the confines of the shower curtain... but instead of staging this shot in the traditional manner, Martino even here has three plains to the shower curtain so said victim can be beautifully framed in her own upright vertical section.

Another stylistic flourish which becomes very apparent in this particular sequence is the fact that there are three different styles of camera viewpoint going on. Number one being the audience/voyeur/third person narrative way of shooting a shot and the other two being hand held, rapidly moving POV shots which seem to alternate between killer POV and victim POV during the murder sequences... going so far as to turn the camera upside down as the victim in the shower dies from her stab wounds.

And the more this movie plays out... the better it gets. After a bizarre “dress ripping” party scene very early on in the picture... where two naked women end up wrestling... we are treated to another flashback scene between Edwige and Ivan where Mrs. Wardh’s particular brand of BDSM (that’s the modern politically correct terminology for what a lot of us would simply call good old, plain S & M) is made clear when, after Jean has done pouring a bottle of some kind of alcoholic substance over Mrs. Wardh’s naked body, he smashes the bottle over her and the shower of glass on her body is used by Jean to cut her body as he has sex with her, to highlight her blood fetish to the audience in what is actually a really beautifully shot scene (I’d expect nothing less of Martino). It’s all handled in loving slow motion... this in direct contrast to the way in which this character is presented in the present/non-flashback level of the story in the previous party scene, pulled to our attention in a crashing and arresting three quarter to close up shot which is in some ways a little reminiscent of the way Sergei Eisenstein would pull out stray “characters” from a crowd rather than just zoom in on them (which he possibly wouldn’t have been able to do anyway when he was making such famous movies such as Strike and Battleship Potemkin). To be fair, Martino does use a zoom here and in a lot of places in the movie, but the way he uses it is with an intensity and passion that never once makes its use feel overused. This is all good stuff.

Even the more familiar trappings of the giallo format are exquisitely mastered and rendered almost super-real by Martino’s techniques. The shiny, black gloved hands of the killer and the glint of a highly polished razor blade are done so stylishly that one can’t help but wonder if the original US title of this movie, Blade of the Ripper, wasn’t inspired purely by the visual style of the movie.

Now I’ve never really appreciated George Hilton much but my friend really likes him (well he kind of looks like him actually so maybe that explains it) and he certainly seems to appear in some good gialli... and here he’s yet another possible suspect as the killer... along with Ivan Rassimov and... oh, no. I’m not giving away all the suspects because, even though at times this particular giallo looks like it’s given up all it’s secrets... it owes a little more than just a shower scene to Alfred Hitchcock and it has a few little tricks up its sleeve towards the end of the picture which you might not quite see coming... and I don’t want to spoil those for you here. But these are all par for the course for the giallo fan and the solution and reveal of the solution to this movie is bound to make most fans of the genre smile.

Another thing that will make fans of the genre smile is one of a series of threatening notes Mrs. Wardh is sent throughout the course of the movie. It ends with a phrase which was to become the title of another great Sergio Martino directed giallo starring both Fenech and Rassimov... Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key! Perfect.

And to top it off, naturally, we have Nora Orlandi’s incredible score which ranges from bubbly exuberance to deeply haunting (such as the leitmotif lead melody structure I suggested earlier for the flashback sequences) and this really deserves a more commercial release than the extremely limited (double figures?) release by Hexachord... a release, I heard through the grapevine, that was so limited because it wasn’t known at the time who owned the rights to the music. I have a bootleg of this a record producer gave me once but someone like Digitmovies really needs to do a proper commercial run on it because this score is so brilliant and would sell well... especially after some of it was included in Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2.

The Shameless edition of this movie boasts a beautiful print and an excellent transfer and I have to say, although I’ve seen this movie before, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this movie looking any better than it does here. The preview copy I was sent is one of the “check discs” for the company but... if the final release is anything like the quality on here then fans of this particular giallo are really in for a treat.

There’s also a fistful of great little extras which include pre-menu trailers for some of Shameless up-and-coming releases (which I won’t spoil by revealing here), a new interview with director Sergio Martino, a brief but well put together mini-history on Edwige Fenech and a “trailer park” featuring the promo trailers for the first 30 movies in the Shameless stable.

As usual, Shameless have done a phenomenal job here which I’m sure their loyal fanbase will appreciate.

Manic Minor

Suspected Death of a Minor

(Morte Sospetta

Di Una Minorenne)

1975 Italy

Directed by Sergio Martino

Sazuma Region 2

Warning! I suspect this blog

post will contain minor spoilers! :D

I’ve always really liked the films of Sergio Martino.

He’s done some of the better giallo’s of the early 70s which certainly gave Argento’s films in the genre a run for their money and the sense of sheer artistic “oomph” in his works when it comes to the way they are framed and lit help (along with people such as Bava, Lado and the aforementioned Argento) to raise the giallo genre up from its appallingly acted and dubiously scripted surface detail into examples of great visual and audio art masterpieces. Films of his like Your Vice Is A Locked Room and Only I Have The Key, The Case of The Scorpions Tail and, one of my special favourites, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh are milestones in the genre and amongst a number of good examples one can reference in an argument of the giallo film as art. Plus, quite often, his movies have Edwige Feneche in them and... well, she’s frankly hot!

I won’t mention his horror movie Island of the Fishmen... besides, I already reviewed that one here!

Suspected Death of a Minor is a film I splashed out more than my usual, miserly film buying budget for because it’s on a German DVD label which do some great giallos and the packaging and blurb on the back made it look like it was itself one anyway. When I asked the stallholder who sold me this DVD if it was a giallo... I got the reply that there’s certainly a giallo style murder in it. This didn’t fill me with much enthusiasm until he added... "it’s a bit sleazy."

Hmmm... well that did it. Sergio Martino and sleaziness... a winning combination if ever thre was one!

Well I finally got around to watching it and, it has to be said, that although the opening sequence does start off with a stalk and slash, very much in the style of a giallo, that’s where the similarities between this film and that particular entertainment genre end. Also, although the film does deal with crime and prostitution, Sergio shoots it all too nicely and perfectly for this movie to really get itself worked up into full sleaze mode.

So what have we got here.

Well it’s kinda interesting actually. It starts off with a man stalking a woman who tries to lose her stalker by dancing with a man who has glasses and long hair and looks a little like a badly watered down version of Peter Fonda in Easy Rider. Aha, thinks the audience... this guy is obviously generic dodgy giallo loser creep number one! Why? Because we’ve seen this kind of throwaway character loads of times before in various giallo movies to the point where we’ve almost become used to them.

However, Martino is smarter than this. The girl runs off and gets her throat slit by dodgy mirrorshaded stabby up geezah and it is not until this point that “loser creep number one”, Paolo Germi as played by Claudio Cassinelli (who died in a helicopter crash on another Martino movie), returns to the screen quite unexpectedly. He seems to be playing a crook.. or at least that’s what Martino wants you to believe for a while but it will be readily apparent to most audience members within the first five minutes of screentime that Paolo is actually an undercover cop and it’s not long before he acquires a criminal sidekick to help him smash a ring of kidnappers who are abducting the “minors” of the title and ransoming them back to their rich parents.

This is where things take a bizarre turn which place this film very much within a strange realm of Italian cinema which tends to juxtapose brutal violence and on-screen murder and a general malaise of depression with... unbelievable amounts of over-the-top and completely inappropriate slapstick comedy.

I first became aware of this bizarre juxtaposition of inappropriate elements in certain genre films in 70s Italian cinema in the Ursula Andress retread of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Loaded Guns... which evolved (or possibly devolved) from scenes of hard crime and brutality (like Ursula Andress getting punched unconscious in the stomach) to a blisteringly stupid, over the top, climactic fist fight bonanza with people like Woody Strode emulating the popular fight scenes of those Italian comic legends Bud Spencer and Terence Hill but going so far wrong in the subtlety department that it makes Bud and Terry’s efforts seem like a gentle contest of witty one-liners as opposed to the high octane slap-fests they really are. Bud and Terry’s films were obviously hugely influential because Martino’s Suspected Death of a Minor also features less than subtle comedy scenes between the hardcore shocks and unexpected twists and turns to be found in this movie. Such as a dodgy car chase where “innocent generic road-crossing citizen” is swiped by a car as it goes past... only to land on one shoulder and spin around on it like a manic breakdancer in a grotesquely comic manner before finding his feet to get side-swiped by another car and spin around on his shoulder again like some mime artist on acid.

Stuff like this and the facial expressions of ignorance from Paolo’s preposterous but endearing comic sidekick all seems very weird in close proximity to teenage hookers being shot in the stomach and death of said “endearing comic sidekick” along with his teenage girlfriend from a parcel bomb... milked with prolonged scenes of lingering on death of ignorant sidekick as he’s hooked up to life support machines in hospital... Oops! Time for Paolo to step up the pressure for the final act and kick some kidnapping arse... this time it’s personal.

Ok... I’m possibly making this out to be a film with some seriously bad artistic choices and if I am... well then I’ve done my job because it is. But... you have to remember to put this movie into context with a lot of the stuff coming out at the time in Italy... this highly comic slant was nothing new. One only has to remember back to classic Argento gialli like The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Deep Red to see a fair share of overly comic scenes in awkward juxtaposition with the rest of the movie. And this movie does have some strong points... it never quite plays out like you expect it’s going to and the mise-en-scene is typical of a Sergio Martino movie... that is to say, it’s excellent.

At the end of the day, Suspected Death of a Minor is a fairly minor work but Martino’s flair for pacing and an eye for beauty make it very watchable and if you’re a fan of either Martino or the Undercover Cop sub-genre of the Italian Cop thriller which was popular at the time then this is definitely a worthwhile entry and worth pursuing. If you’re not then you’re probably better off giving it a miss as it won’t really add anything to your life.

Death Fish

Island of the Fishmen 1979 Italy

Directed by Sergio Martino

Mya Communication DVD Region 0

Over the past 6 or 7 years I’ve been exploring all kinds of different strands of cinema, mostly trash cinema (and I burden it with that label only for the purposes of this article) because, frankly, since the advent of multiregion DVD players we are finally able to see all the stuff which wasn’t allowed in the country in an unmutilated form before... so I'm kinda making up for lost time after all the classic movies I've seen over the years. Admittedly, a lot of it still isn’t sold in this country, which is why a lot of the film fiends I know import their movies from other countries.

During my inquisitive wanderings of this much maligned genre of film-making I’ve discovered that what people tend to label as "trash cinema" can take roughly four subjective forms (at present count, I’m sure that will change when I see a movie that demands a new way of looking at it from me). Here are my “four forms” so far...

1. The trashy exploitation movie that actually transcends - via use of music, cinematography, general atmosphere - the misplaced labelling it’s had to put up with and rise above this as a piece of great cinematic art that deserves to be taken seriously (in my opinion a lot of giallo belong in this category).

2. The trashy exploitation movie which is really not trying to be that trashy but tolerates the trash element (aka Zombies in Zombi aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters), does the best it can with the material, tells the story very seriously and tries to rise above it all. It’s not an artistic masterpiece... but it manages to maintain a certain gravitas despite the exploitation ingredients.

3. The trashy exploitation movie which possibly didn’t even start off that way but is just so stupid and fun and ticks all the right boxes that you can just laugh along with the sheer stupidity of it and be entertained for hours. I love these ones almost as much as category 1.

4. The trashy exploitation movie that tries to tell the story it’s got but really does it so badly that even the entertainment value vanishes and you’re just left with a genuinely bad, almost unwatchable movie. Haven’t seen too many of these but the century is young.

Okay, so that’s my four categories... I’m using that set up so you can see exactly where I stand on Sergio Martino’s Island of the Fishmen!

Now Sergio Martino is actually a director that I have a lot of time for because I really like gialli and he’s made some of the better entries in giallo films in general with great movies like The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Scorpions Tale, All the Colours of the Dark and Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key. One of many directors who disprove the popular misconception that all the best gialli were made by either Mario Bava or Dario Argento.

Island of the Fishmen is probably the least entertaining and certainly my least favourite of the films I’ve seen by this director... but it does try hard and it has some excellent actors in it to try to keep it afloat - the always excellent Richard Johnson (one of the more interesting Bulldog Drummond actors and a consummate professional), Barbara Bach and, in some brief scenes, Joseph Cotton. I think though, for me, the film falls firmly into Category 2 and you can tell that this film was targetting the same kind of marks as Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (as I’ll refer to it for any confused British readers)... I don’t know which movie was shot first that year but it wouldn’t surprise me if Richard Johnson (who plays a prominent role in both) just walked from the set of one movie to the set of the other in the same location... in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if he was shooting both at the same time! Not that his performance is "off" in any way because it isn’t.

The film starts off with a small boat full of convicts and a prison doctor as survivors of a sinking ship... their boat is wrecked by the titular Fishmen and they wash up on an island where Richard Johnson is exploiting Joseph Cotton’s experiments to turn men into fish people so they can dive the depths of the ocean and gather treasure from the lost city of Atlantis... and that really sounds like a tongue in cheek film doesn’t it? Kind of a Mysterious Island deal with Richard Johnson playing a more villainous version of Nemo and with some “hot fish action” thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately... everything is taken deadly seriously and it really does share the same kind of atmosphere as Fulci’s infamous Zombie flick... but instead of shuffling zombies you have shuffling fish people with not very convincing costumes (which look a little bit like the Sea Devils from the Pertwee era of Doctor Who) slicing and dicing random characters whenever the director feels like we need a thrill kill to get us past the unfeasibly sombre scripting.

Also, it kinda lacks some of the visual style of Fulci’s film... when I first saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s I was startled about how similar it was to Zombie Flesh Eaters in terms of the cinematographers preference for vertical compositions (something I may bring up again in my next blog review... stay tuned readers). I kinda missed that kind of focussed art direction on this picture... I’m not saying it doesn’t have any... I just didn’t notice it and when you’re watching these kinds of films it’s quite often the appreciation of the shot design where the most pleasure is to be found.

All in all though... I’m glad I cottoned on to Island of the Fishmen and it is a film I would watch again (probably as a double with the Fulci) and am pleased to own... I just wouldn’t recommend it for anyone else!

Warning! Apparently Martino directed a confused sequel to this movie in 1995 called The Fishmen And Their Queen... gotta get this one!

Being a defence of the giallo movie and the place it holds in popular culture.

I read a book about two years ago called La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film by Mikel J. Koven and all this time later... it’s still really irritating me. The giallo film has been generally looked down on and has suffered, along with both the horror genre and the giallo’s less appetising (to this writer) illegitimate child the “American slasher movie”, onslaught after onslaught of critical attack as it struggled to rise above the accusations of being an artistically devoid and trashy sub-genre of film coupled with the usual accusations of anti-feminist misogyny often levelled at this kind of genre.

Okay then. Time to take a strong stance at this collective sneering and attempt to let people “wake up and sniff the Kafka” so to speak. I will go on the record right here and now and say that, judging by the sixty plus giallos I have seen, I not only think the genre is one of the most artistic genres of film-making anywhere, but it can also be held up as having an extremely positive, pro-feminist attitude towards women. Furthermore, the giallo should be celebrated and re-evaluated in a much more serious manner than has been attempted before, certainly in the aforementioned book.

Now then, before going any further I am going to announce that the following article will, indeed, contain paragraphs associated with that wretched word “spoilers”. I hate spoiler warnings on anything other than reviews because I always assume that the reader is going into reading an article with his or her eyes wide open and especially so in this case since, for my own part, the principle interests in a giallo movie lie not with the stories, which are almost always rubbish, but with the overall cumulative effect on the collective audience psyche of the sheer power of the mise-en-scene in these kinds of films. However, I know that some people will moan at me when they read the identity of killers in certain films so, please, treat this paragraph as your special spoiler warning.

“really irritated me...”

Okay then... I don’t want to pick on Mikel J. Koven here because the guy has put all this effort into what is effectively the only mainstream printed tome to date on the subject of giallos in the English language, and it will at least provoke discussion of the genre but, I must admit, that his book was off to a very bad start for me even in the introduction where, and this really irritated me, the author says that various films were not taken into consideration because he could not obtain copies of the prints to view or because ebay merchants were charging too much for them.

Okay Mr. Koven just lost me right there. It surprised me because, lets face it, I am not a scholarly writer doing serious research and writing on a film genre... I just lay claim to watching and enjoying the odd movie here and there. But I have got most, if not all, of the movies Mr. Koven purports to not be able to get to view. Something’s wrong here. For starters, most of these films, if they’ve not been released legitimately, can be purchased as bootleg prints transferred to DVD from any of the well known... um... events in this country.... for maybe a fiver or a tenner! Another source is the various internet outlets offering this stuff also at a very reasonable price. This stuff really isn’t, for the most part, that hard to get hold of and even if there was some question of Mr. Koven’s ability to access this work in this fashion, for goodness sake man, pay the money! You purport to be doing a serious critical analysis of the genre but instead you are skimping on your main avenue of research... actually watching the movies for yourself. If you can’t be bothered to do that then just don’t write the damn thing in the first place.

Secondly, and this really hurts this writers chances of being taken too seriously by me, Mr. Koven “defends” the giallo by restating the context of the giallos’ primary audience as responding to the lowest and therefore, in his mind, popular ingredients of these films (the high levels of nudity and bloody violence which the genre is, perhaps wrongly, recognised by) and saying... okay they are not that artistic and are not going to stand up to the same rigorous scrutiny of, say, a Fellini or a Visconti movie, but that’s okay because they are not aimed at that kind of audience.

I’m sorry but that’s plain wrong (and a little insulting). Some of the most interesting and vibrant shot set ups in cinema history are to be found in the giallo and more than compare to the works of the perceived upper echelons of the Italian movie-makers. And guess what people? They were popular. For every La Dolce Vita or NIghts of Cabiria knocked out and released to critical attention on the international stage (and I’m not knocking Fellini here folks, I think his movies are great) there’s a Blood and Black Lace or a Profondo Rosso (Deep Red) raking in the cash. In fact, when the, then, young actor Michael Brandon (of Dempsey and Makepeace/Jerry Springer The Opera fame) was starting out in the seventies, he got interested and accepted Dario Argento’s offer of the starring role in Four Flies on Grey Velvet because his agent was telling him that Argento was “bigger than Fellini” in his native country and that was pretty much the case... Argento was already established as “the Italian Hitchock” just on the strength of his directorial debut which popularised the giallo, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage.

Okay rant over, for now, on La Dolce Morte. You know one of the things I’m defending the genre from. I would urge anyone with an interest in these movies to pick up Mr. Koven’s oh-so-quickly out of print book from a legitimate source because, like it or not, you will learn something of interest from this work and he seems to really want to sell the giallo to a wider audience. But please don’t, I implore you, be taken in with the widely popular theory that Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up is a giallo. It seems a lot of people are trying to legitimise the giallo as an art form by counting Blow Up as a masterpiece of the genre... and for all I can make out, just because it has David Hemmings in it!

Again, don’t get me wrong, Blow Up is a great work of cinematic art but... it’s just not a giallo. There is an ambiguity about whether there has even been just one murder over the course of this film (guys, you at the very least need a “series” of murders to classify a giallo) and there is an even bigger ambiguity as to whether the main protagonist of Blow Up even exists in the film. Probably not because, you know, he kinda winks out of existence at the end of the movie. Antonioni’s film is not a giallo movie, it’s about playing with the medium of film itself, both the medium of the still photograph and the medium of the film being projected at the cinema. Please realise that the giallo movie really doesn’t need Antonioni to legitimise its quite obvious status as an important artistic phenomenom in it’s own right.

“protective arms”

I’ll talk about the perception of these kinds of movies as an affront to the fairer (and in my opinion, tougher) sex a little later on in this article but right now let me get down to brass tacks and figure out, first, what a giallo is and isn’t before I throw my protective arms around the genre.

The term giallo is, obviously, Italian for “yellow” and the giallo takes it’s name from a series of books first published in Italy starting in 1929 by the Mondadori publishing house and “branded” with predominately yellow covers and the term Il Giallo Mondadori. These were various crime thrillers and whodunnits which were Italian prints and reprints of authors such as Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace. The giallo film seems to be a much more narrow field than the basis of it’s genre title suggests in that the movies tend to share several common features which will mark them out to any fan of these movies immediately as a giallo. A list of these common features will be at least, say, half of the following 11 common signature points which I think define this style of movie-making...

1. A series of murders (an absolute necessity) which are usually quite brutal and violent and not necessarily, as popularly conceived, against a mainly female cast of victims.

2. A killer who remains unknown until the last five minutes of the movie - the only giallo I saw where the killer was revealed within the first five minutes was Luigi Cozzi’s absolute masterpiece “The Killer Must Kill Again” aka “Il ragno.”

3. More often than not, the killer will wear black gloves, a mask, a trilby hat and a long trench coat. This is always seen as a very stylistic signature of the giallo but I personally suspect it grew through the more practical reality that these kind of props will help disguise from the viewer (and also the killer’s victims and hunters within the context of the story) the identity and sex of the killer. It also means that anyone can stand in for the killer in various scenes when the killings are being done. In fact giallo-master Dario Argento used to pride himself on always playing the “hands” of the killer in his early films.

4. A convoluted and often ridiculous plot with more red herrings than you can comfortably shake a fishing net at and all in the interests of not allowing the audience for one moment to suspect the true identity of the killer. The film-makers want to surprise their audience at the end so will usually go to great and bizarrely imaginitive lengths to provide a pointed suggestion that each and every one of the key characters could be the murderer. Not one person is presumed innocent... even the “dead” victims, as they have also been known to pop up as the killer at the end of the movie too.

5. An international cast, all of whom are speaking their own language (these films were not recorded with live sound and Cinecitta studios are based near an airport so it’s no wonder) and who are later dubbed, very badly, into both Italian and English for their respective markets with no real regard for actual lipsynch in either case.

6. There is quite often a slightly well known B list American or English actor playing the main male lead in the film in an effort to more easily sell the movie to the more profitable American market. So these films will regularly have people like David Hemmings, John Saxon, Karl Malden, George Lazenby or, recently, Adrien Brody turning up in them.

7. Terrible and often unintentionally amusing dialogue and scripting and even worse acting by almost all the cast with the exception of the American or English actors mentioned previously. If you are wanting to watch a movie for its story or acting performances then you really shouldn’t be bothering with a giallo.

8. Exploitative and gratuitous glimpses of female nudity. Now I’m a bloke so I’m certainly not going to make a fuss about this but I know the audience for these films were not just male so I’m not going to try to defend or attack this ingredient here. In most countries, censorship is more inclined to allow a female nude than a male nude so it’s not as if the balance could be redressed legally by the people who make these movies.

9. Absolutely gorgeous scores by great masters of musical composition like Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Goblin and Stelvio Cipriani.

10. Absolutely stunning photography and elaborately contrived shot compositions.

11. For the most part they have really silly, complicated titles which don’t always have much resemblance to the movie itself... here are a few of my favourite giallo titles: Seven Blood Stained Orchids, Seven Deaths in a Cat’s Eye, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion, Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Iguana With A Tongue of Fire, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Your Vice Is A Locked Room and Only I Have The Key, What Are Those Strange Drops Of Blood On Jennifer’s Body? (aka The Case of the Bloody Iris), The Black Belly of the Tarantula, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tale, Short Night of the Glass Dolls, Strip Nude For Your Killer, In The Folds Of The Flesh, The House With The Laughing Windows, Death Walks At Midnight, Death Carries A Cane, Death Walks in High Heels and Spazmo!

The giallo movie is generally thought to have started with master director Mario Bava’s 1963 monochrome classic The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Not only is it a classic giallo but it has strong moments of humour and a central, female protagonist who clearly enjoys reading the very giallo thrillers from which these movies take their collective term. He made a couple of these kinds of films including the style setting masterwork Blood and Black Lace but the giallo was not popularly received until Dario Argento’s genre classic The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, which was unofficially based on writer Fredrick Brown’s popularly adapted novel, The Screaming Mimi.

This film was an even bigger hit with audiences than the very popular Italian “Spaghetti” Westerns which were playing to packed cinemas at the time and so, in typical Italian style, the Italians started making hundreds of giallos with the same passion with which they had appropriated the American western and peplum (sword and sandal epics) genres before them. And so an explosion of giallo were unleashed upon an unexpecting and mostly censorous international audience.

Now these films have two main levels of interest to viewing them (ignoring the obvious sex and violence portion of the audience which I suppose also exists but whom I would like to think are in a minority). The first and fun level on which these things can be watched is the puzzle element. Can I, as a viewer, figure out who the killer is before the characters in the film can?

Well, unlike most American movies these days, the answer is usually a resounding no. These films are hard to solve because there are so many red herrings scattered among the clues. More often than not the person you think is doing the dastardly deed is dead within 10 minutes of you suspecting him/her (with the exception of perhaps the aforementioned The Bird With The Crystal Plumage which seems pretty obvious from the first five minutes). So there is this element to these movies and, really, if this was the only element of interest to be found in this genre then it would have been relegated to cinematic trash long ago.

The more interesting way in which these movies can be viewed is to to watch the psychedelic colours (Mario Bava’s hallucinatory and unnatural ways of lighting sets with juxtaposing reds, greens and purples etc for no apparent reason was later appropriated by Argento - indeed, Argento even employed both Mario Bava and his directing son Lamberto Bava on the odd occasion to help on his own movies) and the amazing, crisp compositional experiments, all set to a kick ass, half-melodic/half atonal and sometimes progressive rock soundscape courtesy of the cream of Italian score composers.

This is a group of films that really wears it’s mise-en-scene on it’s sleeve, so to speak, and my personal theory on why these films look so good and so interesting is simply this: The scripts and acting on these films are so boring and rudimentary and probably so deadly dull to actually shoot that, I think, the directors and cinematographers just used to want to keep themselves amused by, if you like, “over-stylising” the look of the films. But whatever the reason, the majority of these movies look fantastic.

These films are high art in, at least, sound and look so I really don’t think they deserve the lack of critical attention that has been payed to them so far.

“orgy of blood and violence”

Okay... the other and much more expected criticism of this style of cinema, and it’s also always levelled at horror and slasher films too (there wouldn’t be rubbishy slasher cycles like the Friday the 13th series or the Scream series without the much more stylishly thought out Mario Bava giallo Bay of Blood - aka Twitch of the Death Nerve), is that of treating women as objects to be sexualised and then brutally excised in an orgy of blood and violence.

Well okay then... putting aside the more obvious defence that there are just as many male victims as female in these movies... the fact that there usually is a lone woman in peril near the ends of these movies speaks volumes on the strength of the female roles therein. If you’ve got a female protagonist near the end of the movie getting ready to fight off a serial killer then you’re probably going to have a script which spends time setting up that character and strengthening her position in the minds of the audience. And this is not a phenomenon to be sneered at. Long before Sigourney Weaver donned her boiler suit and her alter ego Ellen Ripley ushered in the so-called age of the strong female leads in genre movies, giallo were doing exactly the same kind of thing in no uncertain terms (and so were studios like the British pseudo-gothic Hammer Films... check out Susan Strasberg’s role and ultimate twist reveal in Hammer’s Taste of Fear if you want a good place to start).

The strong female lead is nothing new but has never been as widely recognised as it is now. Most Hollywood actresses would tell you that finding a strong role for a woman is a hard task these days. For every Lara Croft, Beatrice Kiddo and Lilith Silver there’s a dozen twist-yer-ankle damsels in distress to be rescued by their male counterparts.

And not only are there female survivors but it is really not uncommon for the murderers in giallo movies to be women too. I’ve not studied the numbers but I reckon it might even be more than 50% female killers in these movies. Take Dario Argento’s first four giallos for example. Only the second of these movies, The Cat O’ Nine Tails, actually has a male murderer. In the other three instances it is a strong female character doing the killings.

Even Argento’s famous horror film cycle, The Three Mothers Trilogy comprising Suspiria, Inferno and Mother of Tears - aka The Third Mother, are, obviously, three strong female presences- in this case famous witches inspired from a page or so long passage in the follow up chapters to Thomas De Quincey’s famous Confessions of An English Opium Eater.

If this doesn’t show that the films are not content to just objectify and eradicate the female form then I don’t know what does.

“trashy throwaway junk culture”

In conclusion then, I think what is demonstrated here is that far from being the trashy throwaway junk culture they are often perceived as being, the giallo films were for the most part, not only a major provider of strong female roles to actresses like Suzy Kendall, Susan Scott and the unsurpassed queen of the giallo, Edwige Fenech... but they were also a stylish and vibrant form of cinematic art and their influence was far reaching. For a view of how these things were obviously received on an international level, check out some of those beautifully shot “pinku” and other Japanese exploitation movies of the early seventies such as Bohachi Bushido: Code of the Forgotten Eight, Sex and Fury or the Female Convict Scorpion films to see exactly the kind of intense colours and strong compositions which were the strength of the giallos.

At the end of the day... there really is no need to stand up and say, okay you’re looking at these things in the wrong context and what you need to take into account is the taste of a populist audience. Because in the cases of some of those directors like Argento, Bava, Sergio Martino, Luigi Cozzi and Umberto Lenzi... at least in terms of the look and sound of these films, these directors easily hold their ground with the Bergmans, Kurosawas, Kieslowskis and Tarkovskys. And there can be no greater compliment than that.