Django The Bastard (Italy, 1969)

If you prefer your Italian Westerns dark, as I tend to, the waning years of the sixties is your vintage of choice. It was during that period—roughly all of 1969 through the first half of 1970—that some of the cornerstone films of the gothic western genre were released, among them Antonio Margheritti’s And God Said to Cain, Robert Hossein’s Cemetery without Crosses, and the bastard that I’ll be discussing today, Django The Bastard.

Django The Bastard is one of the only, and perhaps the only, of the Django films that could be considered a direct sequel to Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 original. That’s because, rather than simply slapping the name Django on its protagonist for marketing purposes, it honors Corbucci’s conception of Django by presenting him as a blunt archetype; a specter of vengeance who strikes terror into the hearts of evildoers by merging in and out of the shadows, much like the American pulp anti-hero The Shadow. Of course, here, rather than showing up in town with a coffin dragging behind his horse, he shows up bearing a grave marker on which the name of his intended victim is written. In both cases, he’s a pretty morbid dude, is what I’m saying.

As directed by Sergio Garrone and portrayed by co-writer/star Anthony Steffen (aka Antonio De Teffè), the film’s incarnation of Django could rightly be called two dimensional, but can’t be faulted for lacking flesh and blood. That’s because, by the end of the film, the filmmakers are pretty clearly suggesting that this Django is not flesh and blood at all, but rather a straight up ghost. As such, the traditional way for a villain to greet him is by first shouting “but you’re dead!” before trying and failing to kill him. This interpretation is leant weight by the surfeit of spooky atmosphere that Garrone and cinematographer Gino Santini bring to the task of telling the story.

At the picture's opening, Django arrives in whatever godforsaken burgh this movie takes place in (when not specified, I tend to think of all Spaghetti Westerns as taking place in a fabled every-land much like the Shaw Brothers’ oft-visited Martial World) carrying a cross-shaped grave marker bearing the name Sam Hawkins. Hawkins (Victoriana Gazzara) is one of several turncoat confederate officers who betrayed Djangos army unit and left him for dead. (There is a surreal flashback to this event that lends Django the Bastard a similarity to another supernaturally tinged western, Giulio Questi’s Django Kill!] Now it’s some fifteen years later and Django is looking to track down those officers and subject them to some variably poetic and uniformly violent justice. Fortunately for him, all of them seem to have settled in the same town. Hawkins, in particular, appears to have done very well for himself in the years since screwing over Django and his comrades, and now rules over the town like some kind of personal fiefdom.

 

At Hawkins' side is his son Jack, an overgrown cretin played by Luciano Rossi, whose bleached mop of hair signals that his part might otherwise have been played by Klaus Kinski. Hawkins has paid Alida (Rada Rassimov) a money-obsessed bar girl to marry Jack and give him grandchildren. The fact that Alida, a cold hearted gold digger if there ever was one, is the movie’s primary female character means that there is little potential for Django to make love connection while on the vengeance trail.

Not that Alida doesn’t try. Indeed, it is Django’s exchanges with her that provide some of the script’s most pithy lines, such as when Alida offers to split Hawkins’ fortune with him. “I’m not interested in money,” Django says grimly. “You can’t buy much with hate,” Alida replies.

On a similar note, Alida tells Django at a later point that, with Hawkins’ money, they will be “rich forever.” “We won’t live forever,” says Django flatly.

And so Django goes about surreptitiously strangling, shooting, garroting and otherwise dispatching his betrayers, along with many of their minions. It gets to the point that the respective gangs have been driven into such a paranoid panic that they begin to war with each other. It is against this chaotic backdrop that Django and Jack hunt each other down, each hoping to kill the other before being killed themselves. Their final confrontation is, of course, violent and, for that added dash of sacrilegious frisson, staged in a darkened church.

I have seen Django The Bastard referred as a “horror Western” and I suppose that works, though I think the film’s reliance on fast-paced action plants it more squarely in the Western genre. Also to be considered is the fact that the film ultimately leaves open the question of whether or not Django really is a supernatural being. In this way, the filmmakers get to capitalize on the story’s spooky elements without sacrificing the credulity of audience members who came to the film expecting a straightforward Western. I don’t think those filmmakers had the ambition—or the stones—to do otherwise. If the film was an equal combination of the genres, it would wreak havoc with audience expectations. The horror aspect of the story would push us to see Django as some kind of monster, and empathize with his victim's suffering, while the Western would encourage us to identify with him as a hero, and revel in the suffering he inflicts upon his victims, who are, after all, the bad guys.

Because that’s the way Westerns work: the lone stranger who arrives in the strange town at the beginning of the picture is usually the one whose viewpoint we take, as his situation mirrors ours as we cautiously trek, guns drawn, into the strange new narrative that awaits us. While Django The Bastard is not the strangest Spaghetti Western that I’ve seen, its genre blending does sets it aside from the more prosaic films of its ilk enough to make it well worth seeing.

LSD: Flesh of Devil, aka LSD: Inferno Per Poshi Dollari (Italy, 1967)

Given LSD: Flesh of Devil’s (sic) fervent anti-LSD rhetoric—“the most powerful hallucinating agent yet known” says one character, the effects of which on the human mind are “terrifying”—you’d hardly know that the drug was still legal in the U.S. at the time. But LSD: Flesh of Devil was not made in the U.S.; it was made in Italy, and, as such, takes a very Italian viewpoint on its titular scourge. Devilish the drug may be, it seems to say, but watching someone under its influence is pure comedy.

The film begins admirably, with lady secret agent Sheila (Mariella Zanetti) in mid pursuit of a shady jewelry dealer named Alex Corey (Isarco Ravaioli), who is acting as a drug courier for an effete crime lord named Korba (Mario Valgoli). Aiding Sheila is her partner, secret agent Rex Miller, who watches the chase through a periscope from his hiding place within a repurposed tanker truck. Finally, upon Rex’s direction, a sniper takes Corey out. His car crashes and, of course, explodes, whereupon Miller runs over and pulls his presumably contraband-filled brief case from the flames. Then he and Shiela go back to their hotel room and screw—because, hey, this is an Italian spy movie from the 60s; what do you want?

Rex Miller is played by Guy Madison, the American cowboy star-turned-Italian exploitation hero who we previously saw in The Devil’s Man, a Eurospy film memorable for both its pitiful impoverishment and the elliptical minimalism necessitated by same. The usually straight-laced Madison makes LSD: Flesh of Devil all the more interesting for some of the goofy stuff he has to do in it.

Miller’s plan is to impersonate Corey and make the delivery to Korba, who is just part of a much larger drug smuggling operation headed by one Mr. X (Adriano Micantoni), who must have been last in line when the diabolical pseudonyms were being handed out. Miller hopes by this means to infiltrate the gang and unmask its leader. In this he is superficially successful, although Korba remains suspicious, perhaps because Miller is too rugged and handsome for such a dissolute profession.

LSD: Flesh of Devil is at its arguable best when depicting the effects of LSD. This usually happens when Korba and his gang test their product on an unwitting innocent, but the most outstanding instance is during Miller’s briefing, when he is shown a newsreel-type film of an entire army platoon who have been dosed with LSD as part of a military “experiment.” While some of these soldiers are inexplicably frozen in place like statues, others, made gay by the drug, are dancing with one another and skipping arm-in-arm like children. Others writhe on the ground and others pray on their knees, while those remaining slam their hands to both sides of their head and scream. This appeared to me to be improvised by the young actors, who were no doubt making the most of this opportunity to demonstrate their grasp of The Method.

When a subjective view of the LSD experience is called for, it is accomplished with lots of red gels and the crude superimposition of dime store fright masks atop the actors faces. At other times what looks like either a white flower of a piece of popcorn is superimposed over the actors to make it look like their heads are exploding into bloom. Timothy Leary was obviously not consulted.

Perhaps because so many show business types had used LSD by 1967—often at the behest of their overpaid psychoanalysts—the movie industry seemed to be unable to keep a straight face where the drug was concerned. How else would you explain something like Jackie Gleason’s notorious 1968 drug comedy Skidoo? In the case of LSD: Flesh of Devil, director Massimo Mida seems to feel honor bound to take the tone of a highschool scare film while at the same time being unable to keep from snickering behind his hand at the drug’s imagined propensity to make uptight people act silly. To use a dated analogy, it makes the whole thing come off like an uneasy combination of a Dragnet episode and a Laugh-in sketch.

Anyway, once accepted by Korba and his men, Miller manages to exacerbate tensions between them and the gang of a Turkish drug lord named Cioglu. In this he finds an unexpected ally in Virgnia Blair, Korba’s assistant, who is played by Operation White Shark’s Franca Polesello. As the genre demands, his cover is blown soon afterward, and the combined forces of Korba, Cioglu and Mr. X close in on him – though not before he is able to call in a massive raid by the police. This allows LSD: Flesh of Devil to end with a scene in which dozens of people shoot at each other while helicopters fly around overhead.

Though, of course, that’s not how it ends. Because after that there is a comedic coda in which the characters played by Madison and Polesello are accidentally “dosed” with LSD, forcing the actors to caper around spacily in a manner that they imagine a person who was tripping balls would. Their colleagues watch them and laugh knowingly. As you would.

If LSD: Flesh of Devil’s treatment of its subject sounds dated and corny, it is. But it is also the one thing that prevents the film from being what it might otherwise be: a fairly by-the-numbers Eurospy entry. For, as beloved as the Eurospy genre is, its films often fall victim to a kind of rote sameness which makes any whiff of novelty—be it a startlingly low budget or a confused stab at cultural vogueishness--more than welcome. In the case of this film, it’s the next best thing to watching it on drugs.

Femina Ridens, aka The Laughing Woman (Italy, 1969)

Ok, ladies, a question for you: Who among you would not feel that a lifetime of male domination and constant humiliation would be a fair trade for being the kept woman of a wealthy, narcissistic pervert? Hmm, let’s see… all of you? Alright, then.

Granted, that’s not a very appropriate question to ask at this particular cultural moment. But I had to ask, because that type of man-up/woman-down relationship is a constant fixation of Western popular culture, even as the audience for it shifts. After all, the Fifty Shades of Gray novels and their screen adaptations are squarely aimed at the women folk, essentially being modern day bodice-rippers offering Harlequin Romance with a Desadean twist (with a nice dose of wealth porn thrown in for good measure.) But such stories have traditionally been engineered with an eye toward male titilation—from John Fowles’ The Collector¸ the many iterations of The Story of O, and, in the mainstream, 9 1/2 Weeks, and even Pretty Woman. Each of these works posits the existence of an actual human woman who finds having her sexuality bought and paid for by a man of means somehow liberating. The appeal of this idea to the masculine ego is not too mysterious, but to women? Could it be that this world is such a dangerous place for women that some of them would pay any price—forfeiting their dignity, even their humanity--to be protected from it by a buffer of wealth and privilege? I’m looking at you, Melania.

This fantasy is so powerful that even a film like Femina Ridens, which seems to pride itself on subverting that power, cannot do so without delivering a lot of fan service to the raincoat crowd. Granted, as sexploitation films from the late 60s and 70s go, Femina Ridens (aka The Laughing Woman, but released by Radley Metzger in an English dub under the telling moniker The Frightened Woman) is pretty tame. Which is to say that, if it were Japanese, there would be enemas in it. And maybe eels.

As it is, the film sticks with a pretty literal expression of sado-masochism, which seems to be the default fetish of Western fiction. It seems hard for popular cinema to imagine any type of off-kilter sexual proclivity that does not involve someone hurting someone else or being hurt by them. Apparently, though the range of human fetishes is limitless, those fetishes’ appeal to straight society is limited to those that serve us up with a heady cocktail of sex and violence. In other words, no one is going to pay to see a movie in which a beautiful woman is absconded with by a mysterious count with a diaper fixation. But, of course, that’s just a choice, not the result of sexual violence being any kind of broad cultural fetish, or anything like that.

Femina Ridens stars A Hatchet For the Honeymoon’s Dagmar Lassander as Mary, a pretty young journalist who, after succumbing to a drugged highball, finds herself decorously imprisoned within the pushbotton-everything, mid-century modern dreamhouse of Sayer, a wealthy philanthropist played by The Night Porter’s Phillipe Leroy. Here she is subjected to constant ritual humiliation, as well as Sayer’s constant voyeuristic gaze. Sayer, it turns out has a lot of interesting (read: paranoid) ideas about female liberation, seeing the movement's first tentative steps as the prelude to a full on insurrection that will see the removal of men from the birthing process and their eventual extermination. Thus Mary, an educated and assertive young career woman, becomes his stand-in for the feminine gender as a whole, setting the stage for the archetypal battle to come.

Some of Sayer’s methods are boilerplate movie psycho stuff—chopping off Mary’s hair, whipping her, soaking her with a firehose, etc.—but others are more peculiar. At one point he tapes her mouth shut and forces her to watch as he slathers half a baguette with marmalade and eats it. At another, he shows her a hogtied female figure in constricting bondage gear that’s suspended from the ceiling, only to reveal that it is only a mannequin. He also forces Mary to make love to a mannequin version of himself and, later, makes her play a chamber organ as he fondles her body invasively. But by far his creepiest contrivance is a double bed divided in half by a moving panel, which he sometimes draws back to reveal to Mary that he has been lying beside her during a moment of presumed privacy, to drive home that he is always watching.

Throughout all of this, Phillipe Leroy, while indulging in all the evil chuckling and delivering of maniacal proclamations we all expect, takes pains to show us Sayer’s pathetic insecurity and preening self-absorption. It becomes obvious that his fantasies of coming female domination are  expressions of his anxiety over his own waining physical prowess, as exemplified by a scene in which he forces Mary to watch him do naked pull-ups from a bar suspended over his bathtub. It’s easy to imagine that his fetishes are the only way that this sad beast can get off, as there is nothing about him that doesn’t scream impotence (in an early scene, he angrily castigates Mary for her views on male sterilization as a means of birth control.) At times, Mary seems to be aware of this fact, and tries to sell Sayer on the idea of romantic love and mutually pleasurable sex. When this fails, she tries to exert the natural power that she, by virtue of her sexuality, holds over him, at one point preforming a topless go-go dance in her quarters, all the while aware that he is watching inertly from the other side of a two-way mirror.

And then, after Sayer revives Mary following a suicide attempt, love blossoms between the two—with results as chilling as anything we’ve seen so far. I’m talking about scenes of the couple frolicking in the fields and cuddling in the shower as whimsical music plays. This inexcusable audience torture ends with a scenic trip by amphicar to a seaside castle where Mary laughingly cajoles Sayer into overindulging on fried oysters. But amid all this lovey-dovey frivolity, one has to ask oneself—or Femina Ridens director Piero Schivazappa, if he happens to be in the room—whether Mary’s affections are real, or if she is just playing on Sayer’s feelings to her advantage. You might, in fact, ask yourself ..


…HAS THE HUNTER BECOME THE PREY???

Another inopportune thing about the current cultural moment is that it prevents me from discussing a silly movie like Femna Ridens with the flippancy it deserves. Because, despite whatever subversive--or even feminist--intentions its makers might have had, it is indeed very silly—and it is silly because it undermines those very intentions in two ways that are directly tied to how much it conforms to the practices of the typical European sexploitation film of its day. For one thing, while it’s fun to look at Francesco Cuppini's ultra-mod production design  and groove to Stilvio Cipriani’s slick, pop-inflected (and excellent) score, both of those elements are aggressively employed to embue Sayer’s money-driven world of decadent excess with a seductive glamour, and, while Mary’s turning the tables is a foregone conclusion, it appears to be a conclusion that the film's male creators have some ambivalence about.

It also has to be said that the filmmakers do themselves no favors with a couple of instances of  laughably on-the-nose symbolism--which, to be honest, is what a lot of us watch these old Italian exploitation films for. The first occurs during the pair's romantic idyll, when Sayer pulls his car over beside some railroad tracks to receive some road head from Mary. As she goes to town on him below the camera's view, an engine passes by towing a flatbed car bearing an all female band. A close-up shows us the clarinetist salaciously mouthing her instrument. Get it? It's exactly the kind of seedy, winking coyness that makes hardcore porn seem wholesome by comparison.

Another of the film's blunt force metaphors is the statue of a giant pair of spread female legs with a vagina dentata at its nexus. At the film's opening, a group of business men are seen filing listlessly into its maw and then,  at a pivotal moment, Sayer himself is seen stepping inside, only to emerge as a skeleton. This less than subtly signifies the moment at which Mary goes from being the victim to the femme fatale.

On the other hand, thanks to some goofy musical cues (babbadabbadip-doowah!) and sound effects, plus a few instances of romantic slapstick, the film at times adopts a tone that is downright breezy. This is typical of the European ‘sex romps” of the day, which positioned themselves as clarions of the Sexual Revolution, spreading the word that sex was no longer something to be taken seriously, that it was instead something fun… even zany! And sadly, Femina Ridens was not the only of these films to portray as fun and zany sex that was practiced upon those without agency or choice, or used, in tandem with wealth, to callously exploit them. (I can’t help recalling the running gag in When Women Lost Their Tales concerning how Senta Berger is routinely gang raped—zanily!--by her caveman companions.)

Now I’m not saying it’s not possible to surrender to Femina Ridens’ charms and simply enjoy it as a stylish piece of European pop cinema, which it is. I’m just saying that, to do that, and then turn around and write about it as if it's not problematic on a number of levels, would be an act of bad faith I’m not ready to commit, no matter how sprightly the soundtrack. And so I gaze forlornly through the window at the kids on the other side of the pane, the ones without scruples, who happily cavort in the sprinkler while jazzy Italian pop music plays, shouting out bad words like “boobs” and “tushie” with gleeful abandon. Sigh.

Seek the forbidden

Keith Allison, the dark overlord of Teleport City, has a new bastion in his ongoing quest to fill the internet to absolute bursting with "cinema, sin, and swinging style." It's called Mezzanotte, and Keith is kicking it off in an appropriately stylish manner with a series of reviews of Italian Giallo films. My first contribution is a piece on Luciano Ercoli's The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, a movie whose combination of sexy business, threatening atmosphere, and outlandish mid-century design makes it as Giallo as all get out. Check it out, won't you?

Don't Torture a Duckling (Italy, 1972)

I’m not alone in thinking that Don’t Torture a Duckling is Lucio Fulci’s best film, although I may not be qualified to make that call.

You see, I’ve never been a big fan of Fulci’s movies and, as a result, have seen far from all of them. For one thing, I feel that the mean-spirited and discomfortingly personal nature of the violence in his films is rarely, if ever, supported by the special effects used to represent them. When Fulci goes in for an extreme close-up on one of his signature acts of savagery, what he’s really giving us is a too-close look at the stretching and snapping of latex and the rending and tearing of foam rubber. Although the obsession evident in those sequences is always fascinating, the net effect of them is to make the films surrounding them look a little silly.

Don’t Torture a Duckling, however, goes against the grain of what we’ve come to expect from Fulci in a couple of significant ways. It is by far the most compassionate film of his that I’ve seen, in that Fulci lets down his clinical detachment enough to allow a strain of tragedy to infect the proceedings. At the same time, I’d say that it is also his most feminist film—which is not just my way of saying that it his least misogynist, but that he shows some actual empathy for his female character here, especially the one played (beautifully) by Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’s Florinda Bolkan.

The story takes place in a remote seaside town on Italy’s Northern coast whose people are so provincial in their attitudes that one might think they inhabited a previous century. That is, if not for the modern highway that winds its way through the mountains nearby, which seems to be the town’s only connection to the contemporary world. At the film’s opening, a young boy surveys the empty highway from a cliff overhead and, upon seeing a lone car heading his way, run’s off, excitedly shouting “they’re coming!” to his friends nearby.

What he’s referring to, in this case, is a pair of Rubenesque prostitutes who are making a routine visit to the town. But he might as well be referring to literally everybody, as that is who is about to descend on the town in the aftermath of it being the site of a string of shocking child murders. Among this crowd is Euro-sploitation stalwart Thomas Millian, who this time, rather than playing a somewhat grubby looking villain, is playing our somewhat grubby looking audience surrogate.

Millian is Andrea Martelli, a big city newspaper reporter who is in town to get to the bottom of the murders. In the process, he alternately clashes and cooperates with the town’s police commissioner (Virgilio Gazzolo) and, once the State Police arrive to aid in/take over the investigation, Ugo D’alessio’s Patton-esque Captain Modesti. Needless to say, the townspeople, being a gossipy and untrusting lot, are able to point the authorities toward no small number of suspect outsiders as potential culprits. Giuseppe, the town pervert, is quickly cleared, leaving two local women at the top of the list.

The first of these is Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet); a young woman taking temporary residence in her wealthy father’s abandoned home--a starkly modernist structure lording over the town from an insolent remove on a nearby hilltop. In her personal style, Patrizia seems to be trying to bring her own little corner of Carnaby Street to the town, and the residents reward her with no small amount of resentment and disdain for it. One of them seems to imply that she has brought bad luck to the town, and that “funny things” have been happening since her arrival. The townspeople also seem to judge her for being sexually promiscuous. I cannot argue with that assessment, as, when we met her, she is flaunting her naked body in front of a ten year old boy.

That ten year old boy, Michelle, eventually becomes one of the murder victims, along with two of his friends. Fulci, perhaps satisfied with breaking the taboo of depicting child murder, does not focus on the brutality of the killings—the kids are beaten, strangled, and drowned—but instead ramps up the tension in the stalking scenes. As he's pursued by an unseen assailant through a pitch black forest, the young actor playing Michelle does a superb job of portraying raw panic and sheer, pants-soiling terror. Finally, he takes shelter under a crucifix. Unfortunately, Fulci’s hatred of the church is still in effect here, and he is killed anyway. This murder leads Martelli to the town’s young priest, Don Alberto Avallone (played by the ethereally pretty Marc Porel), who ends up assisting him in his investigation.

The second woman of interest in the investigation is Maciara (Bolkan), a disturbed woman who lives in the mountains on the outskirts of town after being banished for practicing magic. In a flashback, we see her come upon Michelle and three of his friends digging in a place where she has buried the body of her stillborn illegitimate child. In a rage, she puts a curse on them and, upon returning to her stone hut, fashions a wax doll of each boy that she sticks pins into. After each boy’s murder, we see her carefully bury the corresponding doll.

When Maciara is arrested, after being hunted down like an animal by the police and suffering an epileptic seizure, she confesses to the murders, believing it is her magic that has killed the boys. The authorities, knowing better, set her free. Unfortunately, the only thing the townspeople know is that she has been arrested for the killings. And so, shortly after her release, she is cornered by a trio of male vigilantes and beaten to death with clubs and chains.

To me, this last described scene is the centerpiece of Don’t Torture a Duckling for a couple of reasons. If you are someone who comes to Fulci’s movies for the gore, this is the scene you are looking for. But, rather than prurience, what Fulci goes for here is pathos, making it, as a result, agonizing and nearly unbearable to watch. Interestingly, he chooses to score the beginning of the assault to the kind of hard rocking musical track you’d expect in an Argento movie, but, when Maciara starts to go through her death throes, switches abruptly to a mournful ballad (“Quei Giorni Insieme a Te”, or “Those Days Together With You” by Ornella Vanoni). Maciara's death is clearly a martyrdom, both operatic and traumatizing. Once her murderers have left, she uses her last bit of strength to crawl her way to the edge of the highway, where her last breath is witnessed by a family of tourists who speed by without stopping.

This scene, as well as one in which a brutal fight is witnessed through the eyes of a terrified little girl, seems to underscore one of Fulci’s main themes here—that of innocence ruined, not by evil, but by those who see themselves as being in opposition to it. The director also seems set on portraying an old world being rapidly overtaken by a modernity as indifferent to its beliefs and desires as those tourists were to Maciara’s suffering—and the reciprocal hatred and mistrust that breeds (wow, this all seems so familiar somehow…)

While Don’t Torture a Duckling is rich with symbolism, Fulci doesn’t get so caught up in it that he doesn't present a well structured and compelling mystery with a satisfying ending, which he does in spades. Of course, he is aided in this by a terrific cast. In addition to the stellar Florinda Bolkan, there is Irene Papas, who portrays padre avallone’s mother, a woman entrusted with the care of a mentally disabled little girl who holds a key to the murders in the form of a headless Donald Duck doll (hence the title?) Barbara Bouchet, a somewhat cryptic actress, is perfect as Patrizia, a very cryptic character who provides Millian with both a vague love interest and someone to trade expository dialog with. And Millian? Well, as I said, he’s a stalwart, bringing just the right amount of grizzled world weariness to his portrayal of our chain-smoking protagonist.

I think it’s a testament to Don’t Torture a Duckling’s quality that it has inspired me to re-examine the rest of Fulci’s filmography. Where watching a film like The Beyond or New York Ripper is tantamount to staring into a frigid abyss, Duckling is a film that wears its warm, beating and very human heart on its sleeve for all to see. (It was also, tellingly, Fulci’s favorite of all his films.) I’d go beyond that to say that it is not only Fulci’s best film, but also a very good film in its own right, as well as a great film within the giallo genre. Check it out.