Plot of Fear (1976)

Original title: E tanta paura

Various, mostly rich and influential, people are killed in gruesome ways. The killer always leaves a page of German old-timey sledgehammer education picture book “Struwwelpeter” at the scene of the crime.

When he isn’t sleeping with his model girlfriend, Inspector Lomenzo (Michele Placido) does some actual, proper, investigative work – and acquires a new model girlfriend in form of Jeanne (Corinne Cléry) during it. From Jeanne, Lomenzo learns that all the victims were involved in the sex and violence parties hunter and dealer in wild animals Hoffmann (John Steiner) held at his estate when he was still alive, and all of them were there the day a prostitute died under highly dubious circumstances.

It’s nearly as if someone were trying to punish the people involved through brutal violence as also happens to be the tradition of old-timey German picture books for kids.

Paolo Cavara’s Plot of Fear is definitely one of the better attempts at mixing elements of the giallo with those of the Italian cop movie, and making pretty successful attempts at subverting both of them while also delivering the genre thrills an audience would expect.

On the giallo side, while this is certainly a stylish and well-shot film, Cavara shows little interest into stylizing the violence as someone like Argento or Martino would (though he does clearly have some heterosexual guy kind of fun with the nudity). Where the often sexually non-binary identities of the killers in your typical giallo can suggest a rather conservative world view (if these aspects are meant that way is a very different question), the killer here comes out of a thematic concern about vigilantism, the misuse of surveillance and the misuse of power that reads very directly left-wing to me.

Police film-wise, Lomenzo is a very different proposition to the two-fisted – depending on your view point fascistically coded (though I would often not read them this way) – action copper as exemplified in someone like the great Maurizio Merli. While he does get into a couple of scraps (the genre demands, and Cavara is clever enough to accede), Lomenzo approaches the case with his head instead of his fists, though he is no Sherlock Holmes, either. He’s a softer, more thoughtful proposition, easily flustered but just as determined and uncorrupted as his more brutal antipodes – he just clearly does believe in due process and proper procedure as the basis of actual justice.

All of which is nice and interesting on paper, but wouldn’t be worth much if Plot of Fear weren’t an engaging genre mix. Fortunately it is, providing the expected genre beats with verve and enough style to keep my sleazier nature happy while pushing two genres into directions they not often go. Hell, Cavara even manages to add humorous interludes that are actually drily funny, which is not a sentence you’ll find me writing about many giallos.

In short: Tulpa – Perdizioni mortali (2012)

Corporate executive Lisa (Claudia Gerini) takes steam off her daily grind with the membership in one of the more adorable private sex clubs you’d be able to find, a place calling itself Tulpa. The club is a cheesy mix of harmless decadence and mock-Buddhist eso bullshit, and looks a lot like a cross between a Hollywood Buddhist’s bath room and the cover of a German 70s prostitute romance pulp novel (yeah, that’s a thing that exists) – mostly harmless yet with a lot of entertainment value.

Poor Lisa has to take time off from flirting with her boss (Michele Placido), indulging in threesomes, mild lesbian shenanigans and entry level SM, when she realizes that a lot of her sex club sex partners are murdered in long, drawn-out murder scenes by a killer in highly traditional giallo murderer garb. Of course, Lisa can’t go to the – utterly absent from the film – police to explain that connection to them, because clearly her career would be over if people found out she’s indulging in her most harmless sexual fantasies. So it’s up to her to kinda-sorta play detective and in the end accidentally find out who the killer is.

I was no fan at all of director Federico Zampaglione’s last movie, Shadow, so Tulpa came as a pleasant surprise in that I found myself quite entertained by it and appreciated the direction it was coming from. At least, I’m pretty fine with the existence of Italian movies that try to catch the old giallo magic again, and Tulpa is good enough to have been in the lower middle tier of movies made in classic giallo times, which ain’t half bad.

Of course, there are some pretty hefty weaknesses of the kind that could easily dissuade people from enjoying the film, most of them in the script area. The short synopsis should have made clear that this is – quite in the giallo tradition – not a cleverly constructed mystery but really a series of long, stylish (and quite unappetizing) murder sequences broken up by a bit of sex and Claudia Gerini walking around, looking confused and increasingly distressed. I don’t really have it in me to criticize this aspect of the film too much, because Zampaglione makes it clear right from the start that he’s not interested in the killing spree as a mystery, so it seems wrong-headed to expect differently from the film. On the other hand, it’s difficult not to find the film’s ideas about what makes for deviant sexuality a bit adorable.

The things Tulpa gets right are nothing to sneeze at, though: the acting’s fine for the sort of story this is (Gerini in particular is a satisfying giallo heroine), Zampaglione does a nice job with creating a mood of the weird and slightly grotesque that at the very least approaches the dream-like quality of classic European horror, even if it’s perhaps not quite there yet, and the murders are aesthetically pleasing and unpleasant at the same time. Which is more than enough to please me.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,horror,giallo,federico zampaglione,claudia gerini,michele placido