Whirlpool

Whirly Gig!

Whirlpool (aka Perversion Flash)
Denmark/UK 1970 Directed by José Ramón Larraz
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilerage as to the end of the movie at the end of this review.

Whirlpool is one of a few films directed by José Ramón Larraz in the UK in the early 1970s, this one under the pseudonym J. R. Larrath. It’s also the first of three of his movies featured in the new Arrow Films Blood Hunger - The Film Of José Larraz boxed set which, just on the strength of this film alone (although its a wonderful set anyway) is worth purchasing before it goes completely out of print.

The film starts out as it goes on... fairly oppressively and without a huge amount of dialogue. A man out rowing a boat in a forest lake comes across a boot in his search which he seems to know more about than he should, if his body language is anything to go by. This whole opening credits section of him rowing the lake and then walking the forest is a nice set up but it also has some interesting and somewhat bizarre edits in it... which is not out of keeping with the rest of the film. For example, a long shot of this lead antagonist called Theo, played by a suitably bizarre looking individual called Karl Lanchbury, has an unexpected series of cuts on movement as he is walking... the POV darting around between long shot, medium shot and close up but from all the same angle as he walks through the densely textured wood.

Theo lives with his aunt, Sara, played by Pia Andersson. She also runs a photographer’s agency in London and when she visits her studio and sees new ‘just starting out and needing a career’ model Tulia, played by Vivian Neves, she offers her to stay at her house for a while so her nephew, who is a brilliant photographer, can take some shots of her and increase her chances of getting work.

However, this is not the first time that Auntie Sara and Theo, who is totally obsessed with his aunt, have done this kind of thing before. We know from early on that a former ‘visitor’,  Rhonda, played by Johanna Hegger, had a sexually charged ‘threesome’ relationship including Theo and his aunt before something ‘happened’ and necessitated the two of them to look for another girl to complete their ‘intimate games’. And, it’s a bit of a blast with loads of nudity and bisexual shenanigans but also permeated by both a thick atmosphere of dread and a somewhat dreamlike quality which never quite lets up.

It doesn’t take long for Sara and Theo to corrupt Tulia with their alcohol and wacky backy but Tulia is obsessed by the unseen presence created by the departure of Rhonda and there’s even a nice little dream sequence where Rhonda and Theo are having sex in his darkroom which is, of course, bathed in red for the duration, with the two characters literally making love in a ‘red light district’, so to speak. The scene ends with a double whammy as Tulia wakes up and is actually just pulled into another dream moment (I think, if I was reading the imagery right... or at least the aftermath of it).

And it’s an interesting film with various moving camera shots, some interesting compositions (especially in the interior shoots) and the odd Dutch angle or two thrown in for good measure. It slowly builds a picture of a mystery withheld... you know there’s something afoot when Tulia is forbidden to go into Theo’s darkroom (usually kept locked and with a door adorned with a poster for ‘Rasputin And His London Monks)... and an act of murder committed by, pretty much, the only male suspect in the film for any length of time. Things get even crazier when Tulia covertly enters Theo’s room and sees naked dolls nailed to the walls and, presumably, a wig and handbag belonging to the much missed Rhonda. And crazier still when Theo takes her and his drug dealer friend into the woods, where said friend rapes her and generally triggers her fight or flight reflex... although, once Theo drives the under dressed model back to the house after this distressing scene takes place, Tulia seems much more into having a threesome with Theo and his aunt, as much as she was in getting into Theo’s pants the night before, after a bizarrely long and protracted ‘strip poker’ sequence. So I wonder if the forest rape scene was improvised and then didn’t quite fit back into the final edit comfortably later because it’s not mentioned again. Although the reveal of the significance of a man playing a pipe would lend credence to the scene being in there from the beginning, to be fair.

It’s a film that feels oddly of its time while, simultaneously being somewhat out of step with those times but it’s all made watchable by the lurking sense that some kind of resolution is just around the corner.

There is, as I said, some nice cinematography too, with a shot of Tulia looks down stairs towards camera to where the darkroom would be, full of twisted shadows bouncing off the bannisters, giving it an almost Caligari feel to it. In the scene mentioned earlier, where she discover’s Theo’s room, everything is in deep shadows and mainly it’s just the girl and anything the director wants to highlight peaking out through the light in the shot... an almost colour film version of a chiaroscuro vision. Or how about a nice shot of Sara and Tulia’s naked bodies on a bed in repose shown in reflection on a small mirror on the wall to the right of the bed before the camera pans around towards the left of the scene to show us the same content from an alternate angle without cutting the shot.

There are also some terrible things too... such as some bizarrely awful timing where Theo repeatedly slaps Tulia around the face near the end of the movie but the two actors can’t get their timing right so every time he hits her on one side of her face, she throws her head into the slap rather than the recoil sending it the other way. I’m surprised the director left this shot in the movie, to be honest but, I guess these two really couldn’t get their physical performance together here. Also, there’s a piece of source music from the film’s composer, the always listenable Stelvio Cipriani, which is supposed to be background for an English pub but which is so psychedelic and out of place that the whole scene feels fake. Maybe if the director had buried it more and toned it down in the mix he might have got away with it but, as it is, it’s way too ‘in your face’ for the context required.

That being said, Cipriani’s score is, of course, one of the great things about the movie. Its mostly low key and often very sinister... which is in keeping with the astonishingly downright creepy look of the actor Karl Lanchbury. It’s got a kind of ‘dark baroque’ edge to the thing, sometimes punctuated by stabbing harpsichord and, in one sequence, what sounds like piano strings being scraped with something. There’s also a recurring music box jingle which sounds very similar to Ennio Morricone’s watch chimes from For A Few Dollars More dotted about the score. You get the feel that this is going to reveal a dark heart to the mystery and somehow be connected to the naked, children’s dolls which Tulia finds nailed to the wall but... this whole idea seems to peter out unanswered by the end of the movie. Cipirani’s score for this was released on CD by Digitmovies a number of years ago and is worth picking up.

The end of the movie is fairly strong, actually, with the thing that is being threatened to happen throughout the entire movie coming to pass which, in this case and given that the director sets up a chase scene at the eleventh hour, is quite surprising. It also dovetails onto a wonderful final, static shot of a photograph earlier in the film, where a shot of a character silently screaming is held for a while as a sort of comment on what you’ve just seen. The European cut of the movie, which is not included on this release as... with much apologies from Arrow (all they could find of it surviving was a very dodgy looking pan and scan VHS bootleg of the film)... had a ‘don’t worry, he won’t get away with it’ soundtrack of the police entering off screen and reassuring the audience but this would have really undercut the effectiveness of the ending here where, indeed, the villains of the piece really do get away with things.

Arrow’s new Blu Ray is a truly superb restoration and there’s a comparison featurette which shows you the difference in deleted shots and the order in which certain scenes play out differently between the pristine, US cut transferred for this release and the dodgy, bootleg version of the European cut which shows exactly why they didn’t try and release this version. Other extras include a great little interview with Kim Newman about the early British films of Larraz as well as a commentary by Tim Lucas (which I haven’t got around to listening to yet). There’s also a 1972 interview from Michael Parkinson’s old interview show with Vivian Neves which kind of concentrates on questions about her status as an adult model and taking her clothes off which, frankly, is quite uncomfortable to watch now but it would have been perfectly acceptable and run of the mill for audiences like myself at the time.

And that’s all I have to say, at present, about Arrow’s stonkingly good presentation of Whirlpool... other than I really enjoyed the film and the dreamlike atmosphere it creates. The Blood Hunger boxed set is definitely one to get your hands on if you are interested in these quite obscure gems from the early 1970s and I’m looking forward to exploring the other two films in the set sometime soon.

Piercing

Giallo Jukebox

Piercing
USA 2018 Directed by  Nicolas Pesce
Vertigo DVD Region 2

Okay, so let me start off by saying that, despite the title of this review, Piercing is not in any way, shape or form, a giallo. However, what it does do, like a fair few modern movies just lately since the resurgence of the giallo movie as a popular genre of home entertainment, is take certain aspects of the cinematic language of the genre to use on a film which, in this case, certainly isn’t an example of that particular form. This is often a successful choice with movies like Amer (reviewed here) and The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (reviewed here) successfully mining certain aspects of this cinematic legacy to enrich the experience.

Now I didn’t realise that Piercing would be going down this route when I bought it. I was basically laying to rest a ghost because it clashed with something else I wanted to see at last year’s FrightFest and I was awaiting a local cinema release only to find it didn’t get any kind of general theatrical release over here at all... which is a shame because at least then I would have known not to bother with this DVD release (oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here, aren’t I?).

The other reason I wanted to see this is because it’s based on a novel by Ryû Murakami (no relation, as far as I can tell, to the other famous, literary Murakami) and I was curious because I’d read his book In The Miso Soup and also I kinda found interesting (though ultimately not great) another film I’d seen based on one of his books, Tokyo Decadence (reviewed by me here). So, yeah, this plus the promise of sexualised BDSM play invoked by the title and the film’s limited marketing combined with one of the lead protagonist’s/antagonist’s being played by Mia Wasikowska, who seems intent on picking very interesting roles and bringing something unusual to them, had me wanting to see this one.

So I popped this into the smart drive hooked up to my Mac (the one advantage of not being able to get an easily accessible Blu Ray release in the UK of this film) and the first thing that surprised me was the menu of this bare bones release. The main theme of one of my favourite Bruno Nicolai giallo scores, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, is used for both the menu and, bizarrely, various cues from this and other gialli and exploitation films are also used liberally throughout. So that’s one of the two main gialloistic elements used in this movie and I’ll get right back to the music shortly.

Preceding the opening logos we have one of those old style, distressed film stock “Feature Presentation” graphics to announce the film. This seems to have caught on with a few film-makers since Quentin Tarantino did something similar on Kill Bill. This is followed by all the company logos being on a distressed film stock and... it’s a pretty mixed message to be honest because as soon as the actual film starts, we are into pin sharp, high definition images in direct contrast to the style of those opening graphics. So I don’t know what’s going on there because the film is definitely not the kind of grindhouse experience you would expect from something introduced like that.

Now, I’m pretty sure the opening titles are a beautiful pan over what I suspect is a model of a big city skyline, with various scenes showing through the windows. And this is scored by what I believe to be Stelvio Cipriani’s score for What Have They Done To Your Daughters? Which got a big shout out on the soundtrack to the aforementioned Amer, too. That being said, although there is a long list of music credits at the rear end of the movie, I didn’t catch this one listed so... maybe I’m confused. Can anyone else confirm that this is definitely this soundtrack used in this and one other sequence on the movie... it definitely sounds like it to me. Back to the music again soon.

The film starts with Christopher Abbott as Reed, who is clearly a little psychotic as he obviously wants to kill his baby and nearly does that until the mother of his child interrupts him. He soon goes off to rent a hotel room and hire a prostitute, Jackie played by Mia Wasikowska, with the intention of murdering her and cutting up her body before putting it all in a bag for disposal. And when he is in the hotel room there’s a nice scene where we see him rehearsing the whole murder with certain sounds of what the murder should sound like... the slicing of flesh, the splashing of blood, the tying of the bag etc... thrown into the scene. Now, I didn’t have a shred of empathy with Reed’s character here, who seems to be the Walter Mitty of serial killers... neither with that of Wasikowska when you finally get a taste of her true character, but I have to say both actors did well with their roles and Reed comes off as a somewhat driven but reluctant psycho... which just made me dislike him even more to be honest but you can’t deny that Abbott does a good job here.

When Jackie arrives at Reed’s hotel room, to the strains of Goblin’s main them for Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red), you assume nothing will go as planned because, why else show us a rehearsal scene showing what should happen? And, yes, it doesn’t and once Jackie goes to have a shower, when Reed goes in to see what’s taking her so long, you’ll get your first real surprise of the movie. I won’t ruin this for you but I will say that, after Reed has taken Jackie to the hospital and waits for her outside, he has a conversation with his wife on a phone about the murder. Except, you know she knows nothing about it in real life so the conversation is obviously in his head. Things like the ‘talking baby’ telling him that he knows what he has to do at the start of the movie are pretty much a dead giveaway about Reed’s mental state through all of this.  This kind of takes the punch out of pretty much anything else that happens after this point where Jackie takes Reed back to her ‘red room’ and starts to turn the tables on him... in really obvious, unsurprising ways, it has to be said.

Okay, you’re probably getting a sense that I didn’t really like this movie now and... well... I did and I didn’t. The stylistic mise en scène and framing of those old giallo movies, the second element that this film borrows from that particular strand of cinematic heritage, is beautiful. People are sectioned off in sometimes overly tidy and crisp shot designs and even a split screen sequence recalling the early ‘American gialli’ of Brian De Palma is in evidence and goes a long way towards making up for the film’s short falls. The colours are beautiful too and I love those old scores being used... especially for the end titles, a lot of which uses a truncated version of the main theme from Argento’s Tenebre and I assume the accompanying pan through those same models (I’m still convinced they are models) of the cityscape is an homage to Argento’s ‘moving camera over architecture’ moments from films like that. Even if it’s not... it works for me. Of course, the cynical amongst us (I’m waiting for a comment from one of my friends after he reads this review) would say that the director has just got a bunch of old giallo tunes and thrown it at the film in the usual needle-drop manner and... I’d have to say I wouldn’t disagree with that either.

Actually, one of the big stumbling blocks about using music like this is the game the audience is suddenly playing about ‘what film does that come from’ as they are watching. However, I don’t mind this aspect but I do believe that the director really makes a bad call in a couple of instances in this movie because, sometimes, music can also have strong emotional baggage attached to it and such is the case here, in a couple of scenes where he’s used Piero Piccioni’s wonderful score to Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000 (reviewed by me here) which immediately brings up the sympathies of young lovers, tragically doomed which... well I may be wrong but I don’t really think that’s the emotion he’s going for in the scenes where he uses one of Piccioni’s most poignant themes, to be honest. Still, he’s not the first contemporary director to needle drop excerpts from this score into his film but... I think it could have been done with a more appropriate deference to the on screen images here.

So, summing up then... this film has beautiful performances by the two leads, stylish camera work and shot design, wonderful stolen music and... those are its main pluses. Alas, I can only assume this is a pretty good adaptation of the novel because, as a film exploring the kind of subject area touched upon here, it completely disappoints and never really goes far enough. The fetishistic sexuality and violence are never really pushed into the kinds of extreme territory you would hope they would go into to give a more accurate and less whimsical approach to this kind of exploration and, ultimately, I don’t think I could completely recommend this one to people unless you are purely in it for the music and cinematography. Ultimately, despite the strength and vibrance of those elements, it still manages to be fairly bland and unambitious as a film and I really was expecting a little more from it than what we got here. Even with Mia Wasikowska's customary off-kilter take on her character, this film really didn’t feel edgy in any way and I felt that, as someone who quite enjoys the odd film exploring extreme sensations and situations, I probably wasn’t the more virginal, vanilla target audience that I suspect this one was designed for. So not my cup of tea despite the spot on stylistic sensibilities inherent in the film’s DNA, to be honest. Piercing could have done with some boundary pushing, I think.

Nightmare City

Halt! Hugo’s There!

Nightmare City (aka Incubo Sulla Città Contaminata)
Italy/Mexico/Spain 1980
Directed by Umberto Lenzi 
Arrow Films All Region Blu Ray/DVD dual release

I’ve been wanting to see Nightmare City for a year or so, since catching up to Stelvio Cipriani’s score on a CD reissue put out by Digitmovies. It’s technically a zombie movie and therefore, I would argue, does indeed belong in the horror category of movie, although I’m sure many people would mistake it for a gory thriller. This is understandable, since the plotline does deal with supercharged, atomic infected humans who have all gone loopy and start killing everyone in various ways... but I’d have to argue the case that the film’s reputation as being a movie in the zombie genre is pretty spot on since, after seeing the zombies riddles with bullets and otherwise killed, they are technically reanimating from the dead to carry on their addiction to blood-letting. This brings a supernatural element into the film which elevates it, depending on your point of view as to which direction the movement goes, and places it firmly into the realm of the horror movie.

This one has a very simple story, for what it is, but the main start off point of a plane full of passengers landing at an airport without permission and, when the doors are opened at the request of the police, delivering a huge outpouring of crazy, zombie people who attack an entire city, was an interesting enough premise to make sure I sought this one out. That being said, I’d caught wind of this Arrow restoration being underway a couple of years back, so I waited until this was released a month or so ago before I made my purchasing decision. In the wild world of film, especially with genre horror and its unwanted attraction from the scissor crazy hands of the censors, the modern film buyer has to be careful and do the research.

The film mainly follows the plight of a TV reporter called Dean, played by Hugo Stiglitz (fans of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds might recognise an homage to this actor in one of the character names of that movie), who witnesses and manages to escape the slaughter at the airport. When he returns to the TV station and finds himself silenced by the military, he then sees the studio who are putting on a live 'contemporary dance show', which obviously involves lots of women in tight fitting leotards, similarly pulled apart by the zombies. He escapes and tries to find his wife Anna, played by Laura Trotter, who is a nurse working at the local hospital... the most obvious place for the contaminated zombies to strike next, as they are rushed in as victims before becoming rampant antagonists themselves. Dean and Anna again manage to escape and they travel about trying to avoid zombies while we cut between them and a couple of equally “are my lovers and relations safe” subplots involving a couple of the military personnel, as we watch the government and the army being thwarted at every turn by the creatures.

Now the zombies in this are, it has to be said, quite intelligent although, it should also be pointed out, they seem to have no consistency in their attitudes or actions when it comes to their murderous attacks. They are quite intelligent and are good at cutting phone wires and disabling electrical power to buildings and areas with a quite deliberate snip of their varied cutting implements... but they seem to approach their killing of innocent victims in a manner which can either be simply ripping them apart and drinking their blood or, with more sophisticated methods like machine gunning them down or slitting their throats, for example. Which doesn’t give them a lot of credibility, especially when some of them stop to aggressively disrobe the female victims before “goring them up good” as you might expect from both a movie which was one of those listed in the notorious Video Nasties scare of the 1980s and, well... an Italian movie of that period where female nudity was pretty much an essential ingredient in films intended for an adult audience. And when I say adult, as is always the case with these brutal but enjoyable romps, I use the term strictly in terms of age restrictions rather than to unwittingly accredit these films with a level of moral responsibility or maturity.

That being said, there is usually an interesting element of hidden sophistication in some of the most excessive exploitation films and it would be hypocritical of me to say I didn’t enjoy these kinds of affairs. However, I much prefer the movies which have a measure of visual elegance about them and, while fan favourite director Umberto Lenzi does have an eye for putting together a fast paced, understandable movie, this one left me a little cold in terms of creative cinematography it has to be said. Although this one does try to rise above the simple nature of the format by bringing up the zombie threat in conversation as the fulfilling of the blight of human nature at some point... it’s mostly paying lip service and is very brief on this point.

As usual though, there are some nice moments in here which are worth watching, including a scene which made me smile when the zombies crash through some doors into an operating theatre and the chief surgeon responds by elegantly throwing his scalpel across the room and into one of the zombies. I don’t know why but the timing on this moment just made me chuckle midst all the crazy carnage. Another scene with an unmanned lawnmower moving across the grass, however, just demonstrates the stupidity of one of the central protagonists and it almost seems like an ironic form of justice in terms of the value of characters like this in the film when they come to a bitter end.

There’s also a strange moment where the realm of the non-diegetic soundtrack of Cipriani’s excellent score... well apart from those horrible 1980s source music sections... blends with the action on the film in a way that it almost imposes on the action. By this I refer to a scene where Dean and Anna suddenly turn, presumably as we discover, to the sound of a group of zombie footsteps. However, when Hugo Stiglitz expression changes, the sound of the footsteps isn’t audible yet on the foley, but Cipriani’s slow and ambient baseline has just kicked in, like it does in a lot of sequences to conjure up the atmosphere of a zombie attack. The result being that, at this moment, it looks like Dean is getting his cue from the score as opposed to anything visible or audible on the screen... kind of a bizarre juxtaposition, I thought.

Now, this really isn’t, as far as I’m concerned, a genre classic like George A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead or Lucio Fulci’s Zombi (aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters - reviewed here) but I am glad to have seen it because I love the premise and, although the film is pretty repetitive and not in any way scary, as a lot of zombie pictures are, I never really got bored with it and am happy to have this one on the shelf. Arrow have done as bang up a job as they can on the restoration which, in this case, has given them a few problems. They have put two different source print transfers on the discs and you can choose which option you would rather watch and, if you’re into the reasons why this is so, then you can watch one of the many extras, Nightmare City And The Limits Of Restoration, to find out just what the issues are. I found this pretty interesting and informative which, frankly, is the sign of both a good package and, in this case, a conscientious production team on this particular incarnation of the home video version.

The ending section of this film has come in for a lot of criticism over the years and, unfortunately, I was already primed for it because it’s famously not what people wanted from it. Indeed, it is a terrible cliche of an ending and, alas, I can’t really tell you the last intertitle which comes up on the film before the credits run without giving you a huge spoiler... but I have to say that I didn’t mind this ending too much myself. That being said, though, if I wasn’t already prepared for it I’m sure I would have let out a huge moan and had a bit of a rant about it. I can see why the ending has the reputation it has and.... well... I think it’s possib;y deserved. All in all, though, Nightmare City, while not exactly a classic in my book, is the kind of enjoyable rubbish it’s easy to pass a bit of the afternoon with. Being as it’s completely unscary, it would certainly fall into my personal “comfort horror” category and I’m sure fans of the genre in this period will be well up for it. Not the best I’ve seen but certainly not the worst and if you’re into this kind of stuff, the new Arrow version is an essential purchase. Give it a go sometime if late 1970s to mid 1980s zombie movies are your thing.

The Lickerish Quartet

Radley Of The Lost Arc

The Lickerish Quartet
1970 Italy/USA/West Germany
Directed by Radley Metzger
Arrow Video Blu Ray A/B/C &
DVD Region 0 Dual Edition

Okay. So why I found myself finally getting into The Lickerish Quartet is because I was in Fopp records and they were selling Arrow Video’s BluRay/DVD Dual Edition for £6 and, since I’d never actually gotten around to seeing a Radley Metzger branded sexploitation movie before, I figured I might as well start with this one. I’m very glad I did because now I’m hooked. Anyone expecting a mere piece of exploitation cinema from this one should think again... this movie is the Last Year In Marienbad of sexploitation movies and I can’t believe the critics weren’t a lot kinder to it when it first came out.

The film starts off with a quote from Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search Of An Author and I groaned a bit at that, not because it’s the only work by Pirandello that I’ve read, but because I’ve seen Pirandello referenced on this work in movies and books so many times and the connection is usually... well, pretentious and tenuous at best. What I didn’t realise, until I was about a quarter of an hour into the movie, is how appropriate in a way this play is to the work that Metzger has plotted out here.

The film starts off with a well worn black and white pornographic movie being projected in a living room while an aristocratic husband and wife (there are no character names and really only about four characters in the entire film, give or take a couple of scenes and some variations) make comments and wonder about the kinds of people who star in these things, while the son looks on with contempt. The husband and wife are played by the always watchable Frank Wolff and Erika Remberg. The wife’s son is played by Paolo Turco. Wolff would tragically commit suicide about a year after this film was released but he’s always an actor I’ve liked. The opening sequence is quite long and there’s a fair bit of interesting dialogue... and that’s because the director needs certain key things to stick in your mind.

As the film plays we slowly zoom out and the full colour sides of the frame infringe upon the visual space. Then the sex film breaks and, after a shot of the projector, continues again. What happens next is amazing. As we get our first glimpses of the characters, the director uses a split screen, contrasted against black, to slide portions of frame of the husband and wife into shot in the space where the coloured sides of the shot housing the 4:3 aspect ratio of the black and white porn film were... and this is just the beginning.

All through the film we are treated to really quite stylish edits, juxtaposed against long tracking shots and zooms. Visual metaphors such as one of those tall, thin, drinking ducks is used as a cross cut for sexual intercourse, resting in it’s drink and motionless at one point as a metaphor for post-orgasm afterglow. There are also various little flash forwards and backwards, which reminded me of the cinema of Nicholas Roeg, but which have no audio fanfare as a distraction and this allows the quick cuts to creep up on you totally unawares and happen sometimes before you even had time to consciously register them before you’re thrust back into the scene you were in.

At first it just seems like a confident director and editor playing with their film but, as the story develops, you realise that the people involved in this movie are actually using the film to shape the story themselves... although the story itself disappears due to... wait I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

When the husband, wife and son go to see a Wall Of Death act in a carnival, the main girl on the motorcycle is the dead spit of the main girl in the pornographic film they’ve been watching in the opening sequence... so for a laugh they invite her back (she is played by the very “easy on the eye” actress Silvana Venturelli) to see her reaction when they show her the film...

But wait. Something is wrong. When they play the film back for her, the lead character’s face is no longer visible and... that’s when things start getting interesting and more like Pirandello in the execution of the film. The edges between the reality of our four protagonists and the film they were watching becomes blurred. Plus, what’s all the footage of a GI in the war liberating a prostitute and her son about? Well it all makes a little more sense as the film continues on its way.

As the weekend in the mansion home of our original three protagonists wears on, their guest seduces all three of them in turn and has sex with them at various locations. Frank Wolff’s library room is a perfect example of the sheer visual and creative flair of the director, as the floor is decorated with blown up dictionary definitions and the guest and the husband throw out the books as they ponder the true value of words and knowledge They then strip off and make love on the floor which, as they have sex, you realise is all definitions of sexual words... it’s all pretty amazing, actually.

There’s lots of good stuff in this movie all the way through. For example, a story being told simultaneous to a showing of a porn film is intercut with the camera space travelling and exploring a large painting to re-enforce the words in a not dissimilar way to the great Russian director Andre Tarkovsky would use the camera to explore art in many of his movies.

But this is minor compared to the structure of the movie, which slowly becomes more elastic and unravels before your very eyes...

At one point, for instance, Wolff makes a comment about his guests hair and she tells him he shouldn’t have mentioned it. The film, which is just about still our objective reality, suddenly rewinds at fast speed (as Wolff’s character is so fond of doing with his porn films) and replays the reality with the comment excised... this is all really interesting stuff and the movie just starts getting more and more surrealistic from there as Metzger and his crew start playing around with the blurring of identity between fictional and real characters. This brings us to a point at the end of the movie where that original opening sequence with the porn film and the conversation around it now becomes crucial to take any kind of understanding away from the film at all... even if the final destination of the various characters and our perception of them takes us to exactly where we have started to suspect we are going by the end of the running time.

The film is beautifully shot, has some interesting acting styles, is wonderfully edited, is colourful and vibrant to the eye and it’s all matched by a gorgeous score by Italian composer Stelvio Cipriani. I think the wordless vocals which pepper the soundtrack like little breaths of gold syrup are probably supplied by the famed Edda Dell’Orso... but that’s just a guess since the IMDB has absolutely no idea (she did a lot of this stuff uncredited, which is about what you’d expect from a solo artist within an orchestra or choir, to be fair).

And that’s all I really want to say about this film, I think. It is a sexploitation movie, it’s true, but with Metzger the barriers between exploitation and high art are blurred and broken down in much the same way as the four characters in this movie are slowly transformed into something both much more and much less than themselves. There’s a fair bit of nudity, to be fair, but I’m certainly not complaining about that and it really shouldn’t put you off watching this one. I was truly dazzled by this movie and I think it’s fair to say that it’s not what I was expecting. I really do have to track down some more of this writer/director’s movies now, if I can get them uncut, because I think this director deserves some of my time. A definite recommendation from me, especially if you like films which dazzle in terms of the way a shot is designed and edited. Truly great stuff.

The Killer Is On The Phone (L’assassino... È Al Telefono)

The Bald and the Beautiful

The Killer Is On The Phone 
(aka L’assassino... È Al Telefono)
1972 Italy/Belgium
Directed by Alberto De Martino
Camden Collection DVD Region 0

The killer on the phone is not the best giallo I’ve seen, but it’s certainly nowhere near the lower tier of some of these films and it’s got some quite interesting stuff going on it. This held my attention for the full running time without me even looking at my watch... and that in itself is a good thing these days.

It’s a little unusual for the majority of films in this genre... and this one joins the likes of Luigi Cozzi’s The Killer Must Kill Again (helping to create a little sub-genre of giallo all its own, perhaps), in that this is one of the few, the very few that I can even recall, where the identity of the main killer is pretty much known to the audience right from the start of the picture. What we don’t know until the end, although you really will begin to suspect this from very early on... is who the killer has been hired by. Therein rests the mystery, such as it is, in The Killer Is On The Phone.

Now there’s one big problem with this specific giallo and it’s the story/writing. The principal idea is okay and we watch Telly Savalas play a hit man who goes to kill a woman, five years after the death of her husband... an event in which she was a witness. Don’t ask me why it’s taken him five years to figure this out because, frankly, I don’t know. Anyway, when Telly approaches the main protagonist/ heroine, Eleanor (as played by Anne Heywood), she has a bizarre memory thing going on and feints dead at his feet. I don’t know why he doesn’t just finish her off there and then... except that they are out on show to the general public at large to a certain extent... although why you would then confront her in public at all and tip your hand is anybody’s guess at this point.

Anyway, when Eleanor recovers she goes to her house to find it’s been knocked down. When she goes to ring her husband, she asks for her “other” husband who died five years ago, not her current geezah on the spot. It’s clear by now that Eleanor is finding herself a little plagued by memory problems and as, throughout the film, her amnesia has brief signs of clearing through dreamlike flashbacks... including knife murders and bondage sequences opposite both her previous husband and Telly Savalas... our lovable hit man is stalking her and waiting in the wings to see if her memory comes back, delaying his next contract killing so he can sort out his loose ends here.

It sounds okay but the execution in terms of the writing is really not great and while the premise itself is actually quite strong, the writing is just not dextrous enough to pull off any real surprises or take the audience unawares, it seems to me. Right from early on a character is introduced into the proceedings and by then you’ll probably have your suspicions as to just who has been (and is) killing off people around Eleanor... although, it has to be said, the pleasantly surprising motivations behind these murders kinda makes no sense when you think about it... unless Telly Savalas is actually acting completely alone. Which he’s obviously not. So, yeah, I think it’s fair to say that this is one of those gialli when it’s really best not to scrutinise the story content too much and just try and go with it.

Which isn’t a bad thing to go with on this one.

Story issues aside, the movie is a visual and aural treat with performances by all the leads, who are particularly strong for this kind of movie. There are a fair few sequences throughout the picture with little or no dialogue and this makes the majority of this picture just about physical acting... and I’m not talking about action sequences either. Some of these scenes get into the whole aesthetic of stripping the craft of acting down to something along the lines of silent cinema, where a walk across a street can be as interesting as anything else that’s going on during the movie.

This not only gives the actors a breather away from some of the terrible lines they have to say (the version I saw was in Italian with English subtitles but this didn’t blunt the mediocrity of the dialogue as it often can in foreign films) but it also gives the cinematography, set design and music a chance to shine just a little brighter. And they do.

The director does what a lot of his “giallo comrades in arms” do on these things and goes for elaborate camera shots which frame and sub-divide the scenes beautifully. My theory has always been that the scripts on these things were so bad that the directors distracted themselves from the tedium by crafting the most complex mise-en-scene you can get in cinema. Whatever the reason, this film is no exception and De Martino splits shots into smaller blocks to frame different parts of the screen and even goes as far as to add texture or reflection to different plains to push your eyes right where he wants them to be in the frame. He also has some quite dynamic moments with combinations of movements and characters in a single frame falling naturally into each other. An example of this would be fairly early in the film where Eleanor gets into a car and we pan round as it drives off to the right of the shot... and then turns a bend and is driving away from us... then Telly Savalas will enter from screen right as the car is driving away from us and we’ll track back round to the left and follow him to where he ends up. Stuff like this always resonates with me and I find these kinds of films relaxing.

The score, by giallo stalwart Stelvio Cipriani (which was released last year as a 500 limited edition pressing from Digitmovies) is a departure from some of the writing I have come to expect from this guy in the past. It’s not a trippy bass line with beats and a big swooping melody like some of his scoring from around this time... it’s much more sedate and haunting and, it has to be said, a little more mono thematic than I would expect from him. With the exception of just a couple of typical “atonal jazz crime” cues, the score is mostly variations of one theme played repetitively and, mostly, slowly over the course of the film. It’s not bad but you won’t be able to stop humming it for a while... not because it’s particularly catchy but because of the amount of exposure it gets in the film. Still, a good support for the movie and nicely done.

The version I saw is known to be an uncut version but the film is, with the exception of one “giallo-typical” naked lady stabbing, mostly bloodless... even when Telly Savalas dies a particularly nasty death towards the end of the picture... before the, not so big, reveal of the person behind the whole plot. The camera cuts away at his slow dissection just at the last minute... which is curious for a genre of cinema which would normally revel in the amount of gore and arterial spray it can get up on the screen to satisfy an ever jaded audience. This is not a criticism... merely the pointing out of an oddity within the course of a giallo which, to be fair, is decidedly odd itself.

As I said, the performances are great but not particularly character based, although you do get a real sense of some of these characters as you follow them around and little details such as Telly’s collection of toy soldiers flesh the people out just enough without straying too far from the expected territory in that sense. Savalas does an excellent and very subtle job on this one which is kind of strange when you compare it to the role he’d just completed in the same year before shooting this, the over-the-top cossack in Horror Express (reviewed here).

All in all, I would say that if this kind of movie is really not your thing anyway, then I wouldn’t bother with this one... it’s not a jumping on point to get you hooked on the genre by any means. If, however, you are already invested in this genre to some extent, then The Killer Is On The Phone is certainly one you should see if you know what to expect, to a certain extent, from the Italian gialli of this period. Not a great giallo but certainly a competently made and watchable one.

The Iguana With The Tongue of Fire

Fiery Tongue In Cheek

The Iguana With The Tongue of Fire 
aka Lizard With A Tongue Of Fire 
aka L'iguana Dalla Lingua Di Fuoco 
Italy/France/West Germany 1971
Directed by Riccardo Freda
New Entertainment World Region 0

Wow. The Iguana With The Tongue Of Fire, eh?

People who know me or know my reviews should know by now that I adore the form of, predominantly Italian, cinema known as the ‘giallo’. I’ve mentioned my passion for the beautiful camerawork, overwrought shot design and fantastic music at the expense of bad acting and scripting on numerous occasions but, if you want to familiarise yourself with my summation of the giallo as a worthwhile, collective cinematic achievement, then please see my article on just that subject here. So what I want you to realise is that it’s quite a rare thing for me to say, or type, the statement that follows...

The Iguana With The Tongue Of Fire has got to be the most unintentionally, hilariously bad giallo movies I have ever seen.

Like most gialli, I wanted to see this one because of the gorgeous score to the movie, courtesy here of the wonderful, popular Italian composer Stelvio Cipriani. However, it has to be said that this is pretty much the only really decent thing going for it.

The film stars Anton Diffring (everybody and their pet iguana's first choice of multi-national, intimidating German), giallo favourite Dagmar Lassander and, as the main protagonist (although he doesn’t turn up for about 20 minutes or so into the flick), the one and only Luigi Pistilli. Pistilli is seen here in a rare portrayal of a hero figure, rather than a villain of some description. I’d have to say that, although he turns up in tonnes of stuff before his tragic real life suicide, this film really shows that he had what it takes to be a major star of a movie, rather than just the lead villain or a supporting role.

Now then, it has to be said that the version of this movie I was watching wasn’t, from the outset, being screened in the best conditions. Although not a bootleg copy, the official German release of this movie I was watching had one of the worst and faded prints I’d seen of an official release. Honestly, some of the establishing location shots at the start of the movie, and near the end, looked almost as yellow as the word this genre takes it’s terminology from... literally a yellow giallo! I can’t really comment on the transfer of the print because I just can’t tell how much of the picture is the transfer and how much is the print.  After having seen the film though... I would have to say I can understand why nobody has bothered to pay out for a new print from the negative as yet.

Dealing with a set of murders in, of all places, Dublin... the story involves a German diplomat (yeah, that’d be Diffring then) who gets involved in some acid in the face/throat slash murders while staying in Dublin with his family in the German embassy.

Did I just say acid in the face and throat slash murders?

Yes I did. Starting off with a sequence where a woman has her throat cut after acid has been splashed on her, making her face all red... just to make doubly sure. One has to assume that the motives of the murderer on this one are “better dead than red.” Now this all sounds quite ghastly, I’m sure, but I have to tell you that the special effects on this, and other sequences like it, are absolutely awful. Remember that taylors dummy which scrapes down the side of the cliff edge taking off its face at the start of Lucio Fulci’s Seven Notes In Black? Well this same kind of terrible dummy is used for close ups of the acid in the face in this one. Fortunate for me because, lets face it, I really don’t want to be subjected to a woman getting acid thrown in her face but, simultaneously, unfortunate for the film because the lameness of the technical effects makes you laugh out loud at the silliness of the problem solving going on here.

So there’s that.

Then there’s some other crazy and mostly laughable stuff going on. Like the killer wearing sunglasses at the start of the movie means that every time during the movie that any of the characters decide to pull out a pair of sunglasses, and they do, frequently, whether you are expecting them to or not, there is this highly charged and ever so over dramatic musical sting to accompany a close-up shot of said sunglasses. Honestly, this is so funny you’ll be wishing every character in the movie has a pair of sunglasses to pull out so the sound guys can whack you over the ears with another musical sting.

And there’s the accents. Most gialli are shot in several languages with the predominate language usually being English to help lip synch any of the UK or US actors in the film. The sound, is then, very badly dubbed with no regard to lip synch in any language you happen to watch it in. You will never, I would guess, see an Italian giallo where the spoken word matches up to what you are seeing. This particular film is dubbed into English for the print I was watching, which would be the correct way to view it but... it’s a terrible and highly comical Irish accent that everyone in the movie, apart from Anton Diffring, has been dubbed with. Seriously. Even Luigi Pistilli is talking in this highly fruity Irish accent all the way through and I’m sorry but I was not always able to contain my mirth at this viewing.

And little details that the production design slipped in didn’t help matters either. When questioned if the chauffer of the German family was going to get some laundry done, he is asked to confirm the receipts when shown them by the investigating police. Noticing, in the top right hand corner that the washing was done by a company called “Swastika Laundry Ltd” did nothing to relinquish the sense of accidental comedy on display in this one.

To be fair to it, the story was actually quite a good one for a giallo and it even had Luigi Pistilli living with his mother and his daughter, with the mother referencing both Agatha Christie and Miss Marple as she gives her son pointers as to who the killer is. It also takes a quite nasty turn near the end when the killer is revealed, with Pistilli’s mother being severely battered (possibly to death) and his young daughter having acid thrown in her face. This is quite sobering in the face of the unintentional comedy on display throughout the movie, but utterly wasted as, days or a week after this scene in terms of movie time passing, Pistilli doesn’t see fit to reference or comment on this turn of events, not rushing back to hospital by his daughters bed but instead going off with his boss for a cheery pint down the pub... presumably a nice, clichéd pint of Guinness.

If the film had been in the hands of a better director, is my guess, then this would have seriously been a giallo to contend with. But it’s just limply and half heartedly put together... although the acting in this one is mostly pretty good. Pistilli really was a great actor and this should be better recognised, I feel.

I looked at the director’s biography on the IMDB and it was very revealing. I noticed two of his films were I Vampiri and Caltiki - Il Mostro Immortale... two films I know Mario Bava had to unofficially finish off directing due to problems with the director on the set. Similarly, his last entry on the IMDB is for La Fille De D'Artagnan, a film I really love, from which it says he was “fired” and “uncredited”. I’m guessing this particular director may have been a little highly strung to say the least. I notice that one of the gialli I have in my “to watch” pile, Murder Obsession, is also directed by this guy... so I’m not really looking forward to watching that one so much now.

The Iguana With The Tongue Of Fire is a well plotted and well acted (for once) giallo that is in every way terrible to watch... in all but the musical score, which is excellent, as you’d expect from composer Cipriani. The score is free on a separate feature on the German DVD release although I’d personally recommend getting the limited edition Digitmovies CD release if you like the music as it has more of the score on there (plus, you know, it’s a CD).

Cipriani and Pistilli fans will definitely get something out of this movie and some people will also, like myself, get a good laugh. But to most people I would say... “stay away from this one”. There are much better gialli out there and very few that are as badly put together as this one.

I Amer Camera

Amer 2009

France/Belgium Directed by

Hélène Cattet

& Bruno Forzani

This film currently

screening at

UK cinemas

Amer is, simply put,

a wonderful movie.

Go see it.

Oh, okay. You want me to elaborate on that, don’t you? Right, here we go then...

It would seem, perhaps, overstating the obvious to identify that Cattet and Forzani’s Amer uses all the techniques and visual/musical trapping of the brilliant genre of the Italian giallo movie (explicity, those made in the period of the classic gialli of the 1960s and early to mid 70s ). Pretty much everyone who’s seen this movie and who is familiar with the genre (which I wrote a very long article about here) have picked that up.

Of course, the section of the audience who are not “up” on their gialli are not going to recognise that... and so I expect a fair number of the people who are going to be looking at this movie are going to find it very fresh indeed. To us long-in-the-tooth veterans, however, there’s still a certain freshness and pacing to the way in which these stylistic techniques are revitalised and, dare I say it, “adrenalised” which make Amer a movie to be reckoned with. Let’s call it retro-fresh then! ;-)

For starters, though, I should put out a warning to people who like dialogue laden movies or ones which tell a story, to be the sole choice of celluloid food on their menu of film... this movie really doesn’t have much in the way of story and very little dialogue for its 90 minutes. If you want something which is a linear ride from point A to B then you’re in for a disappointment. It is a narrative, linear structure to be fair but... it doesn’t really add up to anything really coherent or resolved without you as an audience bringing your own interpretations to bear and impose quite strongly on the visual evidence presented before your eyes.

I can summarise Amer for you very quickly but it won’t lead to closure or even enlightenment in terms of narrative structure... although, to be fair to this consideration, it does at least have a framework on which to hang a semblance of ideas on... but the essence of Amer is that it’s very much, in some ways, a surrealist movie. Here you go then. Here’s my brief summary...

The film is split into three parts.

Part One tells the story of a little girl running around a spooky and frankly disturbing and scary house as she tries to deal with her mum and dad, a dead body and a female monster presence (presumably one of her grandmothers) who you never really get a proper look at as it pursues her to regain a “magical” charm in the form of a pocket watch with an eyeball on it. At least I think that’s what’s happening. I need to see it again.

Part Two is the girl as an adolescent teenager who goes into the local village with her mother (who is having her hair cut) and there she kicks a teenage boy’s football away before chasing after it and feeling sexual attraction to a gang of bikers as she walks past them... for which her mother slaps her.

Part Three is about the same girl grown to womanhood who returns to the abandoned house, gets freaked out by the taxi driver who brought her there (who may or may not be the boy who got his football kicked) and who may or may not be the guy who is now pursuing her through the house and trying to stab her... although that figure could also be herself chasing herself in her minds eye. Not made my mind up yet... only seen it once (and will watch it many times more in my life I suspect).

Ok... that probably sounds quite weird as a plot summary but, if it does, then I’ve done my job because it will hopefully convey the surreal atmosphere created by the movie.

There’s a lot to look at here and people who are into “movies about movies” (like the perverse pleasures offered by the cinema of extremely referential directors like Quentin Tarantino) will love this movie. It hits all the right spots. The opening section of the three sections which comprise the movie is very similar in mood and tone to master giallo maker Dario Argento’s horror movie Inferno. The whole movie, of course, in its homage to the giallo film is using that highly stylised, extreme colour lighting scheme favoured by both Dario Argento and Mario Bava (who helped Argento out on Inferno) but certainly this opening with it’s “monster” figure in barely glimpsed aggression is very similar to the earlier New York sequences of the afore-mentioned Argento flick.

The first section also wears on it’s sleeve the “eyeball watching” shots that Argento favours in such movies as Tenebre and even alludes in some sequences to those great Italian giallo and spaghetti western title sequences which had posterised, single colour versions of the film’s protagonists moving around the screen against a black background (like one of the original trailers to Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood aka Twitch of the Death Nerve). In fact the whole “giallo-stew” approach sounds like it could fall apart quite easily but the techniques using the age old voyeuristic “something-is-watching-this-unfold-and-it-may-just-be-you” approach combined with very dynamic editing, some of which seems like the fast-cut editing on Hopper’s Easy Rider but with a slightly less intrusive, won’t-pop-you-out-of-the-movie sensibility are very skillfully and assuredly approached by the writer/directors and the whole thing is a complete joy to watch.

What hasn’t been mentioned much, or so it seems to me, is the less than giallo-like ingredients to the movie. The middle section is an impressive and subtly made (if less than subtly conveyed) homage to burgeoning sexual desire which would be less influenced by Italian giallo and more heavily influenced, I would suspect, by British and American movies of the early to late sixties. And the joyous and kinetic explosion of visual and sound editing that is the “chasing after the football sequence” is such an assault on the senses (at least in the cinema) that I heard it already being mockingly parodied by members of the audience on leaving the cinema (it has to be said that of the three people I went to see this with, only one of them liked it a bit while the other two seemed to fairly actively dislike/ridicule it... always a sign of a good movie).

The third part is, again, great for fans of gialli in that it features such iconic images as the black leather gloves, the big bugger of a stabby knife and even at one point, a briefly and deeply redish reference to David Hemmings attacking the plaster wall in Argento’s Profondo Rosso!

And all this done with a brilliant, enhanced sound design which sounds just like the exaggerated sounds you would find in Alan Splet’s wonderful soundscapes for the early movies of David Lynch (so think giallo mixed with Eraserhead and Blue Velvet and this will give you some idea of what to expect).

And then of course, as you inevitably do with many of my reviews, you come to the music... and in Amer it’s quite important. Any doubt in your mind that the directors aren’t consciously employing a “giallo style” to their movie will evaporate as soon as your hear the first notes of the music used in this film. It’s one of those needle drop scores which has been assembled from music from other films and this one quite specifically uses the music from three famous gialli... and what a thrill it was to hear them belting out in really great, crystal clear sound from the speakers in the cinema. More specifically, the music mostly comes from three movies which have a very distinct and visual style... and since their are two very distinct visual approaches to scoring gialli (there is the atonal meets jazz style scoring of films like The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Short Night of the Glass Dolls and there is the Goblin inspired progressive-rock style scoring used in movies like Deep Red, Tenebre and Sleepless), it’s interesting to note that the makers of Amer went with one specific style as opposed to a mixture of the two. Specifically, the three most blatantly used scores in Amer seem to be from (to my tired old ears)... Bruno Nicolai’s The Case of the Scorpion’s Tale, Ennio Morricone’s The Black Belly of the Tarantula and Selvio Ciprianni’s What Have They Done To Your Daughters? I think there are probably a couple of others in there but certainly those ones are fairly prominent. The musical selections are also very sparsely spotted so they are certainly quite stand out, in that they’re not buried in the usual wall-to-wall musical overkill which a lot of modern movies are burdened with.

All in all, then, I can unhesitatingly recommend Amer to anyone who loves looking at the way the raw building blocks of the language of the cinema can be used to manipulate the senses and attitudes of an audience... this is definitely “future text book” stuff and I can’t wait to see what this writing/directing team do next. A genuine, for once, roller coaster ride of a movie with sounds and images which will be haunting you long after the last frame of celluloid has uncoiled from the projector and I can’t wait to pick up the DVD! Lucky for me the R2 rush-release DVD comes out towards the end of this month then! Hurrah!