Death Carries A Cane (1973)

APRIL 17, 2024

GENRE: GIALLO
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I picked up Forgotten Gialli Vol 6 at this year's Overlook, as Vinegar Syndrome had a table set up outside the box office all weekend and I wanted a "souvenir" from my trip (it might stun you to learn I'm not much of a knick-knack collector). But I was also delighted by this particular volume because it was only the 2nd time that it included a film I had actually seen before: The Bloodstained Shadow. I don't remember much about the film beyond the title, but according to my review it sounds like a pretty good "level 1" giallo: nothing special, but easy enough to follow and featuring enough of the genre's hallmarks to let a newcomer know if they should keep seeking other titles. Amusingly, I can say the same thing about Death Carries A Cane, so now I'm curious if the third movie on the set (Naked You Die) is the same way.

In fact the most disappointing part of the movie is the title. While Death Carries A Cane is certainly in line with any number of other entries produced at the time, the Italian title (Passi di danza su una lama di rasoio) translates to "Dance Steps on a Razor Blade", which is way more awesome. Why would they give it this comparatively bland one? Didn't they know that fifty years later we'd have easy access to online translators that could tell us what the on-screen Italian title actually meant in English? Fools.

At least it actually refers to something in the movie, for the killer does indeed carry a cane for his limp. I don't know if it's intentional, especially with the different language, but I applauded this plot point at the end when the motive is explained, because the killer also faked being impotent, which is (at least here/now) referred to as having a limp d**k. So he has two fake limps! I dunno, it amused me anyway.

Anyway, the plot is fairly basic: someone witnesses a murder and the cops are suspicious of their story, but eventually they partner up to find the real killer. The initial murder is one for the ages, because our heroine (the stunning Nieves Navarro, who has appeared in a few other gialli) accidentally sees it while looking through a coin operated telescope in the park, and the time runs out at a crucial moment. So she scrambles to get another coin in, by which time the killer has escaped but she can see that he clearly tumbled with a street vendor as he ran. She also can see the house number but not the street name, and I guess we just have to assume that she's unable to track a straight line from the telescope to wherever it's pointing to, because they can't even find a body at first. How powerful was this telescope and why were they wasting it on tourists?

Sure enough, the street vendor also ends up dead, as does someone else who witnessed the killer's panicked run from the murder scene, so he's covering his tracks and thus that puts Navarro in danger. It's a pretty good setup, I think; the "we can't find the street" thing doesn't entirely make sense but the frenzy of the scene sort of covers it up. And the murder scenes are well done and fairly suspenseful, checking the boxes at an even clip (the J&B bottle appears just past the half hour mark, for the record) while also adding in more skin/sex than average. Not in a sleazy way like Strip Nude For Your Killer (unwanted a**l sex is not played for laughs here!), though Navarro's boyfriend tells her to either get back in bed or he will slap her around, which is a weird choice.

(She chooses the former, thankfully. And he's quite gentle with her!)

It's also got enough of the weird little things that seemingly only happen in these movies and never stop amusing me, like the cop is always sharpening pencils. There's also a part where a guy has some info for the reporter, but forgets a detail and asks to use her phone to call his girlfriend who'd remember. He gets what he needs, but then keeps talking to her about what to make for dinner. It's so charming! I also had to laugh that their big plan to trap the killer involved having Navarro dress as a hooker and sport the bag the killer knows a witness had, but when a car pulls up and the driver has a cane, it turns out to just be the police captain who was, you know, just looking for a hooker. Whoopsie!

The ending is kind of a letdown though, as it's one of those ones where the culprit is shot down before they're even unmasked, and then someone else just explains everything real quick. The historians actually talk about this as a sort of "feature, not a bug" of the genre, and while they're probably right (they're the historians, I'm the guy listening at home while eating Little Debbies), I feel that the best ones don't do that and thus it shouldn't be something to shrug off as an unwritten rule. At least it involves the line "He pretended to have become impotent to protect me from his mental illness, which would have forced him to kill me," so there's something. The rest of the track is the usual bios and such, though there is one really weird part where one historian (who is recorded separately from the other two) is talking and then suddenly they edit in the other two over him, so for twenty seconds you're listening to DUAL AUDIO COMMENTARIES! Very Spielbergian. The only other extra is an interview with the editor, and it's in Italian and he covers his whole career so I can't say it held my interest. Looks like he has a nice house though, good to know editors make bank over there.

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FTP: The Wax Mask (1997)

DECEMBER 16, 2023

GENRE: GIALLO, MAD SCIENTIST
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

There’s kind of a heartbreaking moment on the bonus features for The Wax Mask (Italian: Maschera di cera), where Sergio Stivaletti notes that the movie never got a fair shake from horror fans. Not a direct quote because I don’t have the patience to go back and find where he says it (more on that soon) but the gist is “It was never seen as the exciting debut movie from a FX artist they liked – it was always the movie Lucio Fulci was going to make and I replaced him when he died.” And he’s right; you’d be hard-pressed to find a single review or article about the film from the past 25 years that doesn’t practically lead with “This was supposed to be a Fulci comeback movie,” which is unfair to Stivaletti (for those not privy to the history: Fulci died weeks before production was set to begin). The closest equivalent I can think of would be A.I. being directed by Spielberg instead of Kubrick, but it’s not like the ‘berg was making his debut, you know? We trusted him.

But one thing that’s not mentioned as much is, you know, it’s very likely the movie wouldn’t have been very good with Fulci calling the shots, either. At that point he hadn’t made a good flick in over a decade, and the Italian film industry’s decreased interest in horror (Stivaletti notes it may have been the only major Italian horror film being produced at that time, saying they were more interested in distributing American disaster movies of the era) meant that they weren’t afforded the same resources they had access to in the early 80s. With the story being a period piece, I feel it always would have come off as underwhelming at best, and (ironically) some of the film’s only real memorable moments were apparently things Stivaletti added that wouldn’t have been in Fulci’s version anyway.

I mean don’t get me wrong, the movie’s not terrible – at times it’s actually fairly entertaining. It’s just one of those things where the names you see in the credits (in addition to Fulci, who wrote the majority of the script, it was also co-written and produced by Dario Argento) elevate expectations. If you snipped off the opening titles and showed it to someone without context, they’d probably walk away thinking it was a decent enough spin on House of Wax, where a reporter and the museum’s new employee work together to solve the mystery of why those wax figures look so darn realistic and if it has anything to do with a string of disappearances. There are a few gory murders, some goofy mid-90s CGI shots that I find charming now (man did they love their morphing FX back then!), frequent sex scenes with actual nudity (also charming since such things don’t exist anymore), and a fiery climax that gave off low-key Hammer vibes. Nothing too exciting or memorable, but, you know, it’s fine!

That said, it never really looks all that well, which kept me at arm’s length. Cinematographer Sergio Salvati was Fulci’s DP for a number of his classics, but sadly it looks more like Salvati’s later work with Full Moon (including the OG Puppet Master), where everything is over lit and soap opera-ish. Honestly if it wasn’t for the time discrepancy I’d swear it was shot on video, so again I can’t help but think if Fulci had survived I’d have the same issues with it that I do under Stivaletti’s watch, and if anything I give him a little more benefit of the doubt since he’s a first timer whereas Fulci would have no excuse for it to look this phony (with the fact that it’s supposed to be 1912 even harder to buy when it looks like they shot it with something they bought at Circuit City). And as I mentioned, one of the best things in the movie is an out of nowhere Terminator-esque scene where the villain, revealed to basically be a robot wearing human skin, is melted down to his exoskeleton and chases the heroes for a bit as the fire rages behind them all. It’s delightfully batshit, offering the movie the sort of energy that it could have used throughout in order to offset its deficiencies.

Stivaletti, Argento, producer Giuseppe Colombo, and a couple others (none of the lead actors, alas) are on hand for a retrospective documentary that is annoyingly broken into several different featurettes, despite having the same people in all of them. Like I get that they want to pad the bonus features menu (indeed, I was kind of overwhelmed when I first loaded it up), but why not just have each interview separate? They obviously put together a 80ish minute doc and then cut it all up – next time make that “we need more bonus features” call before wasting the time of the editor who saw their work split into chunks. Especially since you kind of have to watch all of them anyway to get the context of what they’re talking about; like one just discusses the cast and even a child could be able to detect that it’s lacking a proper intro and stops suddenly. Also they’re all in Italian with non-burned in subtitles, so you can’t even cheat and fast forward at 2x (while reading fast) to get through them all. There’s a solid interview with Alan Jones about some of the project’s history and reputation, and a vintage featurette of Argento on the set, where it seems there was some Spielberg/Hooper/Poltergeist kinda stuff going on re: who was actually directing at times. And there’s a commentary, which is fine – I was most engaged by the Italian Stivaletti speaking English and occasionally asking moderator/Severin guru David Gregory to translate (“It’s a… word joke?” Stivaletti questions, with Gregory deciphering what he meant: “Play on words”). It’s cute! Oh and somewhere in there (again, if it wasn’t all broken up I might be able to find it again easier) Argento tells a delightful story about the lead actor Robert Hossein hooking up with one of the film’s actresses, only for her husband to catch them. But Hossein, thinking fast, told them they were just rehearsing their love scene and she was naked so she could start getting used to being undressed on camera. Hahahah, what a legend.

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Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key (1972)

JULY 31, 2023

GENRE: GIALLO
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Despite being one of the all time most giallo-y giallo titles ever assembled, Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key (Italian: Il tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave) is utterly meaningless to the story. It’s actually just an in-joke to a note seen in the earlier The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, which shares director Sergio Martino and star Edwige Fenech. Making it even more puzzling is that it’s actually a bit of a loose adaptation of Poe’s The Black Cat, so they coulda beat Fulci to the punch by nearly a decade. Silly!

But regardless of the title, this is a top notch giallo, and my favorite of the ones from Martino I have seen, or at least tied with Torso. Like Argento, he did a few decent ones before really nailing it, and I think this one was his Deep Red (making Torso his Tenebre, if you want to keep going with the comparison). It’s nowhere near as convoluted as Mrs. Wardh (which hilariously had the villains explaining the plot to each other at one point) or as unfocused as All The Colors of the Dark, but it’s still more involving than the usual “trying to get the inheritance and/or jewels” plot (though fear not, it still has one of those shoehorned in near the end; maybe it’s as obligatory as the J&B bottle and has to be in there somewhere?). What’s fun is that it starts off with a seemingly obvious story of a (married) man who just murdered his young lover, only for a second victim to come along and prove his innocence – but only to us, as the cops (and his wife) suspect him of both murders.

Here's the thing though: the culprit is caught with plenty of the movie left, giving you a “OK, where is this going from here?” feeling that is often lacking from these things. I mean don’t get me wrong, I enjoy most that I see, but they definitely get a bit samey, which along with the meaningless titles makes it hard to remember which ones I've seen and which I haven't. Here, Martino takes a few of the standard elements (like the aforementioned jewel stuff) but mixes and matches in a way that keeps it from feeling like a rerun. In fact when I put it on I thought I might have seen it before, only for a few things to assure me I would have remembered it, such as the fact that Fenech’s character seduces her aunt AND uncle in the narrative. Also, the cat is pretty hilarious; its name is Satan and it spends most of the movie tormenting the lady of the house, prompting her to carry out several unsuccessful attempts to kill it. And at the end of the movie it actually helps the police identify the murderer! So good.

Now, I have to warn it’s not all fun and games. The husband is an awful jerk even by the standards of these things, groping his Black servant (and encouraging his party guests to do the same) and sexually assaulting his wife more than once, plus slapping her around every now and then. I mean yeah he gets what’s coming to him, and I feel anyone watching a giallo should be prepared for such material, but there’s just more of it than average. The stuff with the cat and some other goofy touches (one of the all time best/worst “let’s throw a doll off a cliff and hope people believe it’s the human victim” shots, for example) more than makes up for the unpleasantness in my opinion, but your mileage will obviously vary. Maybe it isn't great that I usually shrug off these moments in older movies, because they are gross to be sure, but I feel it's a better attitude than the folks who will try to "cancel" an older film on these grounds. To me, it's a reminder that at least some things have improved, and thus it doesn't feel as childish to be optimistic that other things can someday be better as well.

Unusual for an Arrow release, there is no commentary track, something I was so confused by I actually checked every menu to see if it was just misplaced, and confirmed with a couple of reviews. However, there are five supplements, kicking off with an interview with Martino and backed up by a longer retrospective where he is joined by Fenech and Ernesto Gastaldi, who wrote the film. Some stuff is repeated, but they all enjoy talking about the film, with Fenech in particular being refreshingly open-minded about her work, as opposed to being apologetic for it despite a few decades' worth of changed attitudes in between. Then there are a pair of video essays, one on Martino's work and the other on Fenech's, and finally an interview with Eli Roth, who cast her in Hostel II (which I now realize was probably the first time I ever saw her in anything) and has some strong insight on her work and her placement in the giallo hall of fame, as it were. So while there's no traditional commentary, there's certainly enough here to give a fan a sense of the film's origins and making, plus its legacy in general. I continue to have the same petty annoyance with Arrow's subtitled interviews on these English language discs: they should be burned in as opposed to something you toggle on/off, so us speed readers can play them on double speed and still read everything (most players don't display the subtitles when on fast-forward unless, of course, they are permanently part of the image). Martino's interview runs 35 minutes, but he's not exactly a motor mouth, so it'd be nice to get through it in half the time without missing a thing, as other blu-ray companies have thankfully done. Not a dealbreaker of course, but still, I sigh.

Arrow has put out a series of "Giallo Essentials" sets (a new volume was released last month, I just learned - I'm slipping!), one of which houses Torso, but this one appears with two others from Martino: The Case of the Scorpion's Tail and The Suspicious Death of a Minor, the latter of which I believe is the last of his gialli for me to see. Hopefully someday I'll splurge on it since I don't own Scorpion and enjoyed this one enough to not mind a double dip. Honestly, of the four of his films I've seen the only one I'm not super high on is All The Colors of the Dark, as its more supernatural/cult elements (seemingly inspired by Rosemary's Baby) aren't as interesting to me and don't mesh well with the giallo stuff. So I have little doubt I'd enjoy Minor as well, but I'd like to save it for a rainy day, as it were, as I feel at this point it's going to be harder and harder to find little gems that stick out like this one (Vinegar Syndrome's "Forgotten Gialli" sets produce the occasional winner, but for the most part... well, there's a reason theirs are called "Forgotten" and Arrow's are "Essential"). Still, I'm glad they are preserving these films and putting them together in attractive packages, as they are obviously more niche than a traditional slasher and probably don't sell as well as the likes of junk like Madman (which both Vinegar and Arrow have released), which is why I like to keep buying them. One gem like this is worth a few forgettable entries if the alternative is never being able to properly/legally see any at all.

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FTP: House on the Edge of the Park (1980)

JANUARY 31, 2023

GENRE: THRILLER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Unlike most “pile” movies, I remember exactly when I got House on the Edge of the Park – it was my prize for winning horror trivia at last year’s Overlook Film Festival (donated from the good folks at Severin). And it’d probably stay there for a lot longer if not for two things: the fact that I just this week booked a flight and hotel to *return* to this year’s incarnation of Overlook, and the recent passing of director Ruggero Deodato, who died in December at the relatively young age of 82. I must admit I’m not a huge fan of Deodato's work, but I was a fan of the man himself – he was a “character”, as they say, and there aren’t a lot of such types left (read: filmmakers who feel free to speak their mind candidly, not worrying about who might take offense to their personal beliefs). And so, knowing perfectly well I probably wouldn’t enjoy the movie all that much (what little I knew about it compared it to Last House on the Left, a film I have zero intention of ever revisiting), I pulled it out of the pile just to basically get through the movie and then dive into what I was more interested in: the interview with Deodato (presumably one of the last he ever gave for this sort of thing) and the full length documentary on the auteur, housed on a second disc.

But for context and such, I had to watch the film, which I must admit wasn’t as grim/unpleasant as I feared. It really never gets much worse than the opening scene, in which David Hess (as Alex, but basically just a slightly more personable Krug) rapes and murders a woman (the actor’s real life wife at the time!) in her car. After that it’s relatively tame by the standards of these things – without giving too much of its 43 year old plot away, there is only one other death in the film and most of the subsequent sexual scenes are “consensual” in the movie’s own weird way (one woman resists at first, then plays along and even kind of takes control, another goes all Stockholm and aggressively pursues the guy you assumed would be assaulting her). Gray area stuff, basically, as opposed to the fully abhorrent scenes in Last House and other films in this sub-genre. But even the Hollywood remake of Last House left me feeling more in need of a shower after than this did, which I wasn’t expecting.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s still pretty dark at times (Hess slashing up a late arrival to the party is pretty rough, but she survives), but instead of reveling in violence it’s a sort of home invasion thriller, where Alex and his buddy (Giovanni Lombardo Radice in his first film) are a pair of mechanics who are invited to a party by a snobby couple, as a sort of thank you for fixing their car. Once they arrive they realize they’re looked down upon by the socialites, but while Radice’s character (a bit of a simpleton) tries to fit in, Hess of course takes offense to their attitude and starts terrorizing them. But again, it’s not about a body count – in fact it actually gets pretty repetitive: someone tries to escape, Hess or Radice chases after them and threatens them, then they are dragged back to the living room with the others. There are isolated moments of humiliation (when one guy tries to overpower him, Hess roughs him up a bit, tosses him in the pool, and pees on him – I mean, if you HAVE to be peed on by your attacker, there’s no better place to have it happen, if you think about it. Just duck under the water!), but the average shot of the movie is everyone just kind of hanging out while Hess drinks their booze.

Ultimately there’s a twist of sorts, but it doesn’t do enough to change the fact that this is too clearly a quickly made movie without enough of a story or characterization to remain compelling throughout its runtime. The last thing you should feel with one of these things is kind of bored, but while I was grateful that it wasn’t assaulting my senses with unpleasantness, I just didn’t connect to it either. Radice’s character unsurprisingly starts turning on Hess’, but Deodato doesn’t go far enough with it – Radice never commits to siding with the rich folks, so his protests against his friend are about as effective as merely shaking his head in disappointment as opposed to making much of a difference either way. And Hess’ character is too generic a psycho to pull you in the way something like Henry or Red Dragon might, but Deodato doesn’t really add much dimension to the rich people either, so it’s just all rather flat. As repulsive as Last House is to me, at least it has the intriguing concept of the coincidence that the villains end up at the home of the girl they just killed – the similar element here is left as a twist in the final few minutes, so it’s too little too late.

But like I said, it was all just precursor to what I was more excited about: Deodato Holocaust, in which the director holds court and walks us through his career (kind of like that Friedkin doc). It’s a bit uneven, as he obviously spends more time on his bigger films (this, Cannibal Holocaust, Cut and Run) while glossing over others, but there’s a lot of great stuff in here, including a funny anecdote about something he has over James Cameron. I kind of wish his collaborators were on hand to offer their own stories, but perhaps now that he’s passed on they can be wrangled for something that mixes tribute with "now we can laugh about it" kind of stories like the ones he was always happy to offer about them. Indeed, I recommend watching his new interview specifically about House, because he withholds an actor’s name from a story about the man’s coke habit nearly derailing a production, but in the full length doc he’s happy to share (and I was surprised to see who it was!).

House’s disc also has an archival interview with Hess, a long one with Radice, and a historian commentary, which along with Deodato’s own interview fill in much of the film’s backstory and why it’s so threadbare (long story short: it was shot with leftover money from Cannibal’s budget, in two weeks). Radice’s dog makes an appearance in his piece, which is something I’m always delighted by in these things, being reminded that even though we look up to them and maybe stood in line for their autographs or something, they still get annoyed at their pets like everyone else. The soundtrack is also included, making this a fairly exhaustive package for a movie that should fully satisfy anyone who loved it. I, on the other hand, will see that it goes to a good home at a reduced price. I wouldn't even keep Last House if not for my love of Craven demanding a complete filmography on my shelf (Carpenter being the only other one); I certainly don't need to own a minor copycat.

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Dark Glasses (2022)

SEPTEMBER 30, 2022

GENRE: GIALLO
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (BEYOND FEST)

After Opera, the output of Dario Argento became... let’s just say "spotty" and kindly leave it at that. But it also saw him largely working away from the straightforward giallo type fare that put him on our radars all those years ago, so it was exciting to hear that Dark Glasses (Italian: Occhiali neri) was a back to basics attempt, with no supernatural elements whatsoever. Plus, after a few projects have fallen apart over the past decade, it’s just nice to have ANY new Argento fare, as this is his first film since Dracula 3D all the way back in 2012. The only Master of Horror who is still around that’s made us wait longer is John Carpenter, who isn’t exactly trying to do anything else anyway.

Well I wouldn’t say it was worth the wait, but it’s certainly an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes, which is all I can ask of a guy in his eighties stepping back into the ring after such a long absence. The plot is vintage giallo: a woman named Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) is blinded after a car accident, and as she tries to readjust to life she realizes that she is still being followed by the serial killer who caused the accident in the first place. And that’s basically it; given the title (which refers to not only her post-accident reliance on sunglasses, but also the ones you use to watch an eclipse unless you’re a hapless moron) I thought there might be some psychic vision or the reveal that the killer was also blind or something, but nah – it’s actually so simple that it almost becomes weightless.

For starters, the killer reveal is a total nothingburger; the movie only has one suspect of note and he’s barely in it anyway. It’s one of those movies where a character needs to say something awkward just to help the audience remember who he was in case they had forgotten, which believe it or not is less preferable than the type where the killer wasn't even in it at all (like the OG Friday the 13th, for example). There’s also almost no police involvement; a pair of cops who do some routine investigation stuff pop up early on, but they are basically phased out of the movie after (spoiler) some other cops are killed, which is odd – wouldn’t that intensify their actions? And there aren’t even a lot of death scenes for Argento to do his thing; a gory throat slashing in its opening minutes seems to be him announcing “I’m back, baby!” but after that there’s relatively little violence at all.

Instead, it’s a surprisingly character driven thriller, focusing on Diana as well as Chin, a young boy who was orphaned in the car accident. Feeling somewhat guilty (she was fleeing the killer and rammed into Chin’s parents’ car) she visits him at the orphanage and tries to make amends by giving him a video game, but as he is bullied there Chin decides she can make it up to him by letting him just stay with her. So the two of them, along with her recently acquired seeing eye dog, become a little makeshift family – and it’s super endearing! I can’t apply the word “sweet” to a lot of stuff in Argento’s movies, but it’s how I felt here – with the added bonus of giving me flashbacks to Cat O Nine Tails’ lovable Karl Malden character.

It’s also easy to like Diana. Unlike some other protagonists who lose a sense, she never seems too angry or stubborn about her predicament – she quickly puts all her effort into having the same life she did. Asia Argento (supposedly meant to play the lead at one point) plays a social worker of sorts who helps her get the dog, shows her how to use a cell phone for the blind, how to use the sounds of the crosswalk meters, etc – and Diana takes to it all eagerly and appreciatively, instead of being bratty and pulling those kind of “This is pointless, I WILL SEE AGAIN!” theatrics we’ve seen in other movies. And she remains somewhat vain about her appearance; at one point she loses her glasses and has Chin pick out a new pair, with the only instruction to make sure they are cute.

So it’s kind of a mixed bag; there’s nothing particularly BAD about the movie, but it’s also a little too straightforward for its own good. Throughout the film I kept thinking “OK yeah but there’s gonna be a weird left field turn right about...” only for that “now!” to never come. At one point Asia takes Diana to a retreat where some other blind folks are, and you’ll probably think that this will produce some suspense highlights (the killer making his way around people who can’t see him, perhaps) but nothing is really done with it. Maybe the budget got trimmed or something and they had to make concessions, but whatever the reason it just feels a bit too stripped down, without the weirdness and wacky plot points that made his “Animal Trilogy” (not to mention Deep Red) so memorable. There’s a scene where Diana and Chin are wading through a little pond and find themselves attacked by snakes – the movie needed more of that energy! But that said, it’s entertaining enough and far from being hateable, so the folks who called for his head (or at least retirement) after Mother of Tears and Dracula (neither of which I minded much, I should note) should be happy to know he’s still able to make something that, while slight, is worthy of his filmography.

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Tropic of Cancer (1972)

SEPTEMBER 7, 2022

GENRE: GIALLO
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I knew it was unlikely that either of the other films on Forgotten Giallo v5 could measure up to my beloved Nine Guests for a Crime, so I wish I had started with Tropic of Cancer (Italian: Al tropico del cancro) as it’s a perfectly enjoyable giallo on its own but lacked that je ne sais quoi that made the other one such a delight, giving it a bit of an unfair shake. However, what it lacked in sociopathic (read: hilarious) characters and applause worthy reveals, it made up for in relative novelty and – for reasons both good and bad – a mystery that wasn’t too easy to figure out.

For starters, it’s the only one of these things I’ve ever seen that was shot in Haiti, a rather novel location for any film but truly inspired for what boils down to the usual stuff (black gloved killer, red herrings, infidelity, booze. etc). And it’s not just the unique scenery – the island’s history of voodoo factors into the plot. While the movie is ostensibly about an unhappily married couple (Anita Strindberg and Gabriele Tinti) who visit the island and get caught up in the murders, the real main character is Anthony Steffen (who I thought resembled Franco Nero a bit, only to amusingly learn that Steffen was his successor for the Django movies) as a doctor named Williams, who has come up with a new wonder drug using some of the voodoo-centric drugs that are available there. Naturally given the kind of movie we’re dealing with, people start turning up dead and they all have a connection to the formula – Williams’ assistant, a would-be buyer, etc.

Alas, the script (co-written by Steffen himself) neglects to really tie Tinti and Strindberg’s characters into the story, making them inconsequential to the whole thing until Tinti tries to sell the formula himself near the very end. So there will be scenes of Williams investigating this or that, or a murder, or someone scheming to get the formula, and then… this bitter couple going shopping or something. I recently watched that movie where Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston get caught in a murder mystery while on a late-coming honeymoon, and couldn’t help but think that if this movie was the serious version (I can’t say “less funny” since I probably laughed as much here as I did in that tepid junk) of that one it might have worked better, with the two of them playing detective and also maybe fixing their marriage in the process. Instead Tinti just gets more abrasive and Strindberg, surprising no one, ultimately beds Steffen, which barely fazes her husband anyway. Ultimately, like 90% of the plot would play out the same if they weren’t even there, which makes it hard to stay fully engaged by the proceedings.

That said, there’s still enough “oh, that’s new” kinda stuff to keep it fun. Starting with, well, male junk! A lot of it! I’m all in favor of equality, but when it comes to nudity there is certainly a huge imbalance as you maybe see one penis for every hundred shots of breasts. Here, I didn’t exactly grab a stopwatch but I swear we see more nude males than females, so good on them for trying to level the playing field. There’s a scene where a stoned Strindberg makes her way through a hallway of naked men (she herself is covered up) that is almost certainly the sort of hallucinatory thing that has likely burned into the memory of a younger viewer and has no idea what movie it’s from – hopefully this release unlocks the mystery for those folks. There’s also a flamboyantly gay man that no one ridicules or oppresses in any way, so the movie really feels like it’s progressive and a real standout in a genre that’s commonly more misogynist than not.

I should warn you though, there is some random (and unnecessary to everything) footage of a slaughterhouse at one point, with our “heroes” visiting a plant and Strindberg being rightfully disgusted by the sight of an animal having its throat slit. I know we shouldn’t be ignorant about these practices (especially if we consume meat, as I do) but there’s a time and place, you know? That it’s yet another scene of these characters doing something that has little to do with the plot makes it seem even more extraneous. Otherwise it’s pretty light with the violence; one of the showstopper kills is actually essentially off screen, as the victim is trapped in a paper mill of some sort and presumably suffocates, so it’s weird (though perhaps part of the point) that the most gruesome image in the film is that of a (presumably) legit death of an animal.

As for bonus features, there’s another essay by Rachel Nisbet, though as with the one on Nine Guests it plays out over a still shot of the title card, so I couldn’t really concentrate on it as my eyes needed to focus on something else after a while and, naturally, I merely got more interested in that. It’s important to play these things over photos or appropriate footage, even if it takes a little more work! There’s a lengthy interview with director Giampaolo Lomi that’s pretty good; he discusses his cast (there’s a pretty funny anecdote about how he tried to avoid showing that Strindberg’s breasts were fake but couldn’t; another first for me) and also Haiti, including a rather long discussion of its history of dictators – a rare history lesson on a giallo supplement!

The other film on the set was A White Dress For Mariale, which gets points for weirdness (the movie it most reminded me of was Gothic, of all things) but the lethargic pace and unfinished mystery left me cold for the most part. There’s a pretty funny scene where a guy is mauled by dogs (where they cut between the actor pretending to be attacked by the dogs that are clearly not doing anything to harm him, and the dogs tearing up the world’s least passable dummy) and an all timer version of the “a young child sees one of their parents being unfaithful” motif that finds its way into every third giallo film, but the fleeting moments weren’t enough to keep me invested. Luckily I watched that one after Nine Guests, so Tropic of Cancer was a step back in the right direction. Still, the ideal order if you're thinking of picking it up would would be Mariale, Tropic, then Guests.

Overall I’d say Nine Guests alone was worth the cost of the box, but Tropic of Cancer (and even Mariale) both offered some variety to their time honored body count traditions, making this an overall satisfying set and, perhaps needless to say, enough to make me hope that there’s a volume 6 (and 7, 8…). Even if the movies are hit or miss, the sheer variety they offer within the genre, plus the basic fact that they’re being rescued from disappearing entirely, make it a worthwhile endeavor every time. Plus it reminded me that I still haven’t gone through volume 4 (which I bought myself, they didn’t send it for review or otherwise I would have gotten to it sooner), so perhaps there’s another Nine Guests-level delight already sitting on my shelf. Hurrah!

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Nine Guests For A Crime (1977)

AUGUST 22, 2022

GENRE: GIALLO
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

For the past couple years, Vinegar Syndrome has been releasing three-film sets of "Forgotten Gialli", offering a spotlight to the ones that fell beneath the cracks for one reason or another (rights issues and, occasionally, the quality of the films themselves being the primary culprits). They're on the 5th volume now, and while I haven't watched every film on the previous sets, I'm comfortable saying that Nine Guests For A Crime (Italian: Nove ospiti per un delitto) may be my absolute favorite discovery on these sets thus far. If they could find a movie this fun on even *every other* volume, it'd be worth picking them up and keeping the series going until they run out of options.

Like The Killer Is One Of Thirteen, which appeared on an earlier set, the film is loosely based on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (aka... well, you can look it up. Oof), concerning a group of folks on a secluded island who all seem to have reason to be the killer that keeps whittling down their number. This particular group is a family comprised of patriarch Uberto (Arthur Kennedy) and his three children (two sons, one daughter) and their respective spouses, as well as his sister and his new, much younger bride. And the movie hilariously introduces them all by piling up the red herrings/potential motives: one of them asks if she brought her guns, Kennedy's wife and one of the sons' wives trade barbs about their respective infidelities, the two brothers don't get along, etc. We're also informed about how the boat is the only way to get off the island, and even when they arrive they're still adding more foreshadowing elements ("Where is my underwater breather?" someone muses, forty minutes before someone "drowns"). With so many gialli overloading their final ten minutes with exposition to explain everything, I was completely charmed that this one seemed to be trying to get everything out of the way quickly instead.

(Amusingly, one thing we see when they arrive is a giant cannon but it plays no part in the proceedings. Chekov must be weeping into his gun.)

It's also a supremely horny entry in the sub-genre, which you wouldn't think would be the case considering it's only a family unit (the one non family member, Kennedy's assistant, is the first to die). They're on the island for about twenty minutes before one woman is sleeping with her brother-in-law, and another son is also shacking up with his father's new bride (so, his own stepmother) in plain sight of the old man! And (spoiler for 45 year old movie ahead) while he dies before realizing it, it turns out his wife is actually his first cousin. You get the idea that if there wasn't a standard killer, these folks might end up just killing each other out of jealous rage over everyone being cuckolded by their own family members.

As for the killer plot, it's a pretty decent one, though the math is a little fuzzy when all the pieces are in place (too complicated to explain here, but basically the killer should appear younger than they do). Also it's a little hard to track how everyone is related; I had to laugh that the IMDb actually lists the genealogy next to the character's names ("Lorenzo / Uberto's son") but even they screw it up, listing someone as a daughter of a character they are actually older than. After I finished I rewatched the introductory scene, both to giggle at the foreshadowing (which was apparent even the first time around, but now 100% clear) and just to recontextualize everyone's interactions now that I knew how they actually related to each other. It's not impossible like some movies (looking at you, Home Sweet Home), but definitely takes a little bit of sorting out in your head to keep straight.

And now the most important aspect of any proper giallo: How is the J&B used? Well, I'm here to tell you that, in all the years of watching these things, I've never seen that familiar green bottle introduced so randomly. In the middle of a scene inside, they cut to Uberto's daughter (who is outside) as she makes her away across a patio, grabs a glass, then reaches inside a giant wooden duck (!) and pulls it out, pouring herself a glass. Then it cuts back to the woman inside. It's almost like they realized they had a contract to show the bottle in the first 15 minutes or whatever and desperately inserted the shot in the middle of a scene to make sure they didn't get fined or something. I was cackling for five straight minutes over the audacity.

Hilariously, the bottle is referenced during the disc's lone interview, with actor Massimo Foschi (who plays the son who is banging his own stepmom). It's a bit rambly, including a lengthy discussion of a prop liver he had to eat in a cannibal movie a few years later, but it's got some good stuff, including how he was instructed to make sure that the label could be seen whenever he had to pour a drink. He also keeps the film's vaguely incest-y theme extended to reality, seemingly suggesting he had an affair with the woman who played his sister (when asked about her he says something like "She was better off screen than on" and smiles before changing the subject). The only other extra is an audio essay, though it plays over a still of the film's title card instead of the appropriate footage, so I had trouble concentrating on it.

Honestly, even if the other two films on the set are duds, this one would be a worthy entry to the growing Forgotten Gialli collection (this is the 5th volume, to be clear). The discs aren't as feature-heavy as Vinegar's standalone sets, but ultimately that stuff doesn't matter - it's rescuing these obscure films and giving them a noticeable platform to make sure they find the audience they deserve. Plus, I still feel guilty writing up a review before I've gone through the extras, so when they're jam-packed I almost kind of sigh sometimes, as watching three commentary tracks (cough, the new Dog Soldiers 4K release, cough) means I could have watched three other movies in their entirety with that time. And they could be as fun as this! I haven't even mentioned the all-timer final shot before credits, which had me laughing even longer than I did at the J&B bottle. If you prefer your gialli to be serious, I'd steer clear, but if you, like me feel that the crasser the better, then by all means dive right into this one.

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Blu-Ray Review: Planet of the Vampires (1965)

JULY 26, 2022

GENRE: ALIEN
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

When most horror fans think of Mario Bava, their mental image is likely something from Black Sunday or Black Sabbath, maybe Shock if the big scare (the one they ripped off in Annabelle) is burned into their mind. But for me, who has never really taken a shine to the senior Bava’s work (Lamberto is more my speed), I just picture Planet of the Vampires; specifically, the astronauts in their goofy/awesome suits standing in their rather sparse spaceship, yammering on about this or that. And I know that sounds like my feelings are negative on the film, but on the contrary, it’s perhaps my favorite of his (or at least tied with The Girl Who Knew Too Much), and thus I was delighted to hear that Kino Lorber Classics would be reissuing it on Blu-ray with a new transfer and some more bonus features.

Because my mental image of the film is also blurry, as my only viewing was on Netflix back when a. it was called “Netflix Instant” (to differentiate from the DVD service that I’m not even sure if they still have) and b. Netflix would include 1960s Italian sci-fi among their offerings. Back then, the quality control wasn’t as tight nor was the service itself, so a lot of movies kind of looked like crap. But I had to laugh, because one of my issues with the film was that it was hard to tell some of the men apart, but watching now in proper high def it wasn’t really a concern. Ironically, even a 16K mega-remaster in immersive 3D wouldn’t completely solve that problem, because it’s partially baked into the film anyway! Per the commentary by Tim Lucas (who, when it comes to Bava, I tend to trust without question) one character is given two names, and another is seemingly recast halfway through the film. I assume that these are just mistakes stemming from the film’s dubbing (the actors spoke at least four languages among them, so almost nothing we are hearing is what they were actually saying), but still: nice to know that my “wait, who’s he?” kind of feelings aren’t just from a mushy transfer or my own mental shortcomings.

Also, it was my first time watching it since seeing Prometheus, which seemed to take influence from it and has had me wondering for a while now whether Ridley Scott and co. did it on purpose to be cute. Vampires’ influence on Alien has been noted but also debated over the years; Scott denied ever having seen it (as did Dan O’Bannon, though he apparently later recanted), so it's hard to levy any "intentional!" sort of claims at it. It’s also unknown if Bava ever saw it himself, though he definitely read the novelization (Lucas notes someone witnessing it firsthand), and he passed away in April of 1980, long before the rise of horror mags and blogs that would probably still be bugging him about it today if he was around. But back to Prometheus; I remember seeing it on opening night and chuckling that they were borrowing from Bava’s film again – the spacesuits alone seem to be proof that this time around the homage couldn’t be chalked up as coincidental. And it didn’t stop there; that film’s plot not only had the characters going back and forth to the other ship from their own quite a bit (as opposed to the single trip in Alien), but it also had a possession angle of sorts, with the crazed Fifield’s attack on the others feeling very much like the “vampires” in this film possessing the heroes and attacking their crewmates. Long story short; maybe it was a coincidence for Alien, but this time around, there was no denying that they were looking at Bava's film for inspiration.

Of course, Prometheus was also a polarizing film with regards to its answers to the mystery of the “space jockey”, so it was nice to go back and be reminded that there is no such explanation offered here when our heroes find a giant skeleton. One theorizes that it was another race of beings that was answering the same distress call that they were, but that’s all it is: a theory. Given the multi-national cast, I couldn’t help but wonder if there were more explanations for this or that in the script only for them to get wiped out due to the complications of dubbing everything, especially when so much of the dialogue is technical jargon as it is, with even simple things like “minutes” given different names. It’s ultimately all explained in a way (spoiler for 60 year old movie ahead: the astronauts aren’t from Earth as you might just assume), but I can still easily believe that they wanted to cut back on such stuff whenever possible in order to make it easier for everyone.

Kino’s Blu looks terrific and is loaded with extras, though most are trailers for other Bava movies as well as not one but two Trailers from Hell segments (one with Joe Dante, the other with Josh Olson). The two meaty supplements are the commentaries; the aforementioned one by Lucas (which appeared on their previous release in 2014), and a brand new track with Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw. Lucas’ unsurprisingly sticks to Bava and the actors, with some of the background history of AIP and their relation to Bava, while the other two have a little more fun and talk about its placement in the sci-fi genre as a whole, occasionally poking fun at some of its production design (the “meteor rejector” being in the middle of the room, for example). Both tracks note the Alien connections (as well as The Thing, albeit to a lesser extent) but don’t dwell on it, though I was surprised to hear how little Prometheus was mentioned, since as I noted, the influence is in my opinion even more direct there.

(Unfortunately “One Night of 21 Hours” - the original story the film was based on, which was included in their previous Blu - is not carried over here. Not a dealbreaker, but worth noting.)

It’s a shame Bava didn’t do more full on sci-fi; his use of color is a great match for the otherworldly landscapes the genre offers, and he clearly has a great deal of affinity for the “science” part of the equation (Newman notes that after Star Wars, sci-fi usually meant something else with very little “science fiction” involved). And he did a pretty good job of depicting an alien planet and a spaceship on a very low budget, all with in camera effects to boot! So imagine what he could have done in the 1970s when the budgets started getting bigger and the technicians learned even more tricks to pull off the impossible. Oh well. At least we got this one.

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FTP: Death Walks on High Heels (1971)

JUNE 21, 2022

GENRE: GIALLO
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Most "pile" movies are acquired (trivia winnings, unrequested review mailings, etc) but Death Walks on High Heels (Italian: La morte cammina con i tacchi alti) was apparently a purchase; as I tore off the shrink wrap I noticed a Fry's price tag. Fry's, for non locals, was a strange electronics store chain that seemingly specialized in outdated tech; whenever I needed an ancient kind of adapter or wire, I would almost always be able to find it there. Remember those "Game/TV" switches we used to have in the '80s for our 8-Bit Nintendos? I bought one there in like, 2013. So basically RadioShack, but with the size and scope of the glory era of Best Buy. The chain went belly up during Covid, but the writing was on the wall long before then - I remember going in 2019 and seeing several empty shelves, as if it were the last week of business.

It was probably on one of these final trips that I picked the movie up, since they for some reason always had a healthy supply of Arrow releases; it wasn't uncommon to see a Disney or Universal blockbuster be completely MIA but seven copies of something like The Stuff just sitting there. So it was probably on sale when I was getting something else and I was like "Hey, a Giallo I haven't seen!", but who knows. All I know is... it wasn't worth the wait. It's fine, nothing I hated watching or anything, but definitely falls in the "for completists only" section of the sub-genre, with only one solid twist at the halfway point setting it apart from a dozen others. It's a twist that has been done before (most famously in 1960, clue!) but it still surprised me all the same and gave the movie a little bit of a spark when it needed it most.

Alas, most of it is just too much "same ol" fare: the killer is after some stolen jewelry, there's a pervy guy across the way who is clearly NOT the killer but has to be there to give a red herring, etc. I tend to prefer the gialli where the killer is driven by some kind of psychological torment as opposed to a financial motive, but I can still be engaged if there's enough flair to the proceedings. Alas, the screenwriter even notes on one of the interviews that the director (Luciano Ercoli) was a guy who worked regularly because he could get the job done and on time, not because of his ability to dazzle audiences with his skills. So it's no surprise that the movie seemingly works from a checklist, with the script doing all the heavy lifting.

That checklist lacked one thing though: J&B whiskey! There's one (1) bottle in the middle of an arrangement, where you can't even see the label (the green glass and red top gives it away), breaking a longstanding tradition in these things. But on a positive note, it's slightly less misogynist than most of the era; a good chunk of the movie is about an older guy who is unhappy in his marriage and thinks the world of our heroine, so he treats her very well, and her previous lover isn't as much of a jerk as many of his counterparts. If not for a rather gruesome demise at around the hour mark, where the killer seems to be sawing the woman's throat with his knife, I'd say it was overall the least problematic (to modern audiences) one I've ever seen. So in that regard it might make for a good entry one for audiences who get easily offended, but at the same time it's so perfunctory that they likely won't be excited about seeing any others.

Even Tim Lucas seems kind of indifferent to it; his historian commentary is loaded with uncharacteristic stretches of silence - at one point I considered whether I had accidentally turned the regular audio back on. More often than not he's just sort of narrating the film and adding some insight about its themes, as opposed to noting its place in the sub-genre's canon, what its other actors did before/after, etc. There's some of that, of course, but nowhere near as much as average. The interview with screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi is also seemingly disinterested in the actual topic; he spends nearly fifteen minutes complaining about how Sergio Leone changed part of his script for Once Upon A Time in America!

So it's kind of fitting that I acquired the movie so randomly in the first place. I certainly didn't set out to buy it; very likely just grabbing it while I was getting other things that I presumably watched already. Because it likewise seems like it's an afterthought for most involved, though lead actress Nieves Navarro married Ercoli a year later, so I guess something nice came from- nope, they met on The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, I'm now seeing. Maybe this one helped pay for the wedding? I dunno. It's fine.

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FTP: Beyond Darkness (1990)

APRIL 19, 2022

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE, POSSESSION
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Many moons ago, Scream Factory put out three of the films that were at one point released as "La Casa" (Evil Dead) sequels in Italy, under their original titles. I wrote up a pair of them for HMAD (Witchery and Ghosthouse), but for the third, Beyond Darkness, I switched gears and included it in a BMD (RIP) piece about the wacky La Casa series. That was seven years ago, which meant I couldn't even remember much about the movie, up to and including why I ended up with a second version, this time from Severin with some new bonus features. But I made it my inaugural viewing for The Pile 2.0: Now It's A Shelf!

Yes, it has been upgraded, again. If you'll forgive the slightly bloggy diversion here, I recently decided to rotate my living room layout 90 degrees in order to cut back on the glare that has been severely impacting my Elden Ring adventures. But in the process of mapping that out, I realized that this would also allow me to put all of my DVDs/Blu-rays together for the first time in I think 16 years (they are currently in three different racks in opposite sides of the room), and that to honor such an occasion, I should ditch my older ones for newer, matching shelves since they'll be next to each other. In turn this meant I'd have a spare rack for "The Pile", which got so big that it had to be converted to "The Box", for which the only space it would fit was behind the couch where I never saw it. Hence: a vast slowdown in FTP reviews (out of sight, out of mind). Now that they're all in a rack where I can see them, I plan to get through them more often! I swear!

Anyway, Beyond Darkness. Well, it's easy to see why I couldn't remember much of it, because it's pretty low key and mostly just reminds me of better movies. Even a non horror fan could probably spot the influence of both Amityville (family moving into new house where a tragedy occurred) and Poltergeist (one kid disappears in the house and needs to be rescued from an alternate dimension housed within it), but there's also some Shocker in there, with a vengeful electric chair appointee coming back for revenge, and the score even kind of resembles that film's at times. For a little bonus (for me, anyway), the mom is played by Barbara Bingham, aka the nice teacher who gets blown up in Jason Takes Manhattan. With my mind constantly thinking about other movies, it didn't leave much time for me to focus on what it was bringing to the table, if anything.

I did spend some time thinking about the poor Italian saps who thought they were seeing "Evil Dead 5", however. The other two "sequels" created out of hucksterism weren't exactly Raimi-level energetic, but they certainly had some of that silly flair, which is sadly in short supply here. There's a (possessed?) black wooden swan that rocks menacingly, and at one point Bingham runs around with a meat cleaver, but I'd estimate 95% of the movie is either talking or people slowly walking around the house looking worried, which doesn't exactly produce the same kind of thrills that a legitimate round with the Deadites would provide. Interestingly, part of the plot DOES involve an ancient book that should be destroyed, but I assume that's more coincidence than a conscious storytelling decision to try to make it fit with the previous "La Casa" films. Long story short, while the movie isn't exactly good, I'm glad it has been able to live on with its proper title, so that people can give it a fair shake without the expectations that originally accompanied it. It's not a bad movie really, just a bit too uneventful compared to the films it was clearly inspired by, though it'd come off even worse if watching it as part of a series it doesn't resemble at all.

Severin's disc has a lengthy interview with Claudio Fragasso as well as co-writer Rossella Drudi, both of whom are seen fidgeting with their covid masks during the interview, which makes me think "Oh good, this could have been an ugly Zoom interview but they did it right." Fragasso isn't as candid as he's been in other things, only really getting animated toward the end of the piece when he talks about how his US pseudonym (Clyde Anderson) was mistaken as a new director from a critic who had previously trashed Fragasso, prompting him to call the guy, play along with the ruse, then tell him to F himself. Classic Claudio! Actor David Brandon, who plays the obligatory "priest who has lost his faith", also contributes an interview, but he was having trouble remembering anything specific about the production ("I was in New Orleans once for a movie, not sure if it was this one...") so I didn't last long with it. Still, considering Scream just put the movie out a few years prior (bundled with another movie, Metamorphosis) Severin was smart to (during covid!) put together some bonus features, all of which last over an hour, to sweeten the pot for any Beyond Darkness fans who likely already settled for the other release.

Anyway, I hope these "Pile" reviews are now more common now that its inhabitants will be staring me in the face instead of hidden in a box behind me. Though I assume I will need to finish Elden Ring before I can really start to put a dent into it. I think I'm like 3/4 of the way through? So it's 90 minutes for a movie or 90 minutes running through Caelid to boost my strength stat. A difficult choice to be sure.

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FTP: An Angel For Satan (1966)

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

GENRE: THRILLER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

One of my New Year's resolutions is to make a serious dent, if not completely obliterate, the dreaded "pile" that has long since become an overflowing box. For those uninitiated (or have forgotten since I haven't done one in a minute), these shorter "FTP" ("from the pile") reviews are derived from this surplus of discs that I've accumulated over the years; unwatched films that I either got for review (unrequested; if I *ask* for them I get to them right away), won at trivia, bought from a clearance sale, etc. The thinking is that these movies aren't *likely* to be ones I'll keep forever, but I can't handle the unknown element of getting rid of them without seeing them - there could be a Cathy's Curse-level treasure in there! So every now and then I grab one at random, such is the case for An Angel For Satan (Italian: Un angelo per Satana), and hope for the best.

And it's an ideal "pile" movie! By which I mean I enjoyed it but probably won't want to watch it again, so I have little need to make space for it on the permanent shelf. It's most famous for being Barbara Steele's swan song in the "Italian gothic" sub-genre that she began with Black Sunday, and luckily for her she went out on a high note with a role that lets her run the gamut. In some scenes she's a sweet, innocent love interest, in others she's devilishly conning every man in town to do her bidding. Sometimes she goes back and forth within a single scene, coming on to a guy and then angrily pushing him away when he responds, but being that this is Ms. Steele in her prime, we never once question why it's so easy for her to sway them or keep coming back after she's been so cruel. We get it.

The mystery of the film is why she is acting like this; sometimes she even identifies herself with a different name entirely, so is she possessed? Is there an evil twin? The answer isn't... too exciting (notice that "supernatural" or anything like that does not appear in the genre listing), but it's fun going on the ride all the same as she systematically turns everyone with a penis against each other or their pre-existing loved ones - a guy who seemingly loves his wife and children is later seen slapping them around in disgust that they're tying him down when he could be with Steele's character, heh.

Whatever the cause for her behavior is, it seems to have something to do with a statue that the hero, Roberto (Anthony Steffen) has been tasked with restoring. A stranger to the area, hired for an artistic task, he quickly falls for the local beauty and even has a lengthy bout of fever, so it unfortunately reminded me more than once of Mill of the Stone Women, which I only watched a few weeks ago. Whether it was a direct influence on this film I have no idea, and this isn't a carbon copy or anything like that, but the atmosphere and general vibe of the whole thing was similar enough to leave me feeling with deja vu more than once, so I wonder if I'd be more into it had it been months or even years between seeing the two films.

Severin's Blu has a pair of commentaries, one with Steele and two moderators (Severin guru David Gregory and historian David Del Valle), the other with Kat Ellinger. Naturally, the former is the more enjoyable; the specifics of what's on screen are rarely addressed but it's kind of hilarious to hear Steele getting increasingly bored with the process, shifting in her seat and seemingly even moving further away from the mic for a while as if she got up to make a sandwich or something. Her recollections are spotty (not an issue; they liken it to trying to specifically remember the first three weeks of 5th grade, i.e. who can blame her for not remembering every movie she did 50+ years ago) but the stories she does offer are a delight, and sometimes it's just funny to hear her interrupt one of their largely unrelated thoughts to actually point out something on screen. As for Ellinger, as I've said in the past I find historian commentaries are more fun when they're paired with someone, so as a solo effort it can be a little too academic/dry for my tastes, especially as she too rarely bothers with what is happening in the movie. There's also an interview with one of the poor sods that falls under Steele's spell in the movie, which is fun because my man hates horror and only did this one because his character didn't get involved with the scary stuff.

This is the sort of movie I think I'd enjoy more as part of a set of Steele's films or something, where the appeal of the whole package makes up for this or that shortcoming within the films themselves. On its own, it's understandable why it's more known as her last go round with this type of movie as opposed to being remembered for its actual plot or other characters. The disc is lovingly remastered, and it has a few hours' worth of extras for those who are so inclined... but all for a movie that doesn't quite have that same kind of pull that Black Sunday or some of the others from that era offer.

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Mill Of The Stone Women (1960)

DECEMBER 14, 2021

GENRE: MAD SCIENTIST
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

One fun thing about diving so deep into older films is that I (and I assume most others) can usually tell more or less when a film was made just by looking at the film stock; I can usually get within a five year period after looking at a single shot in motion, regardless of the fashions or the age of any recognizable actors. It was a skill that threw me for a loop when watching Mill of the Stone Women, because for some reason I thought it was from 1972 but could tell just by looking at it that it had to be at least a decade older. And I was right - it was produced in 1960, and is in fact the first Italian horror movie made in color. I love seeing the firsts!

Ironically, if my eyes (and looking at the back of the damn Blu case, which noted the year) hadn't told me otherwise, I'd be convinced the film was a response to not only the Corman/Poe/Price films, but later Hammer Frankenstein entries that made Peter Cushing into more of a villain than the 1958 original. But no, it (obviously) came before those, being produced more or less at the same time as Corman's first Poe film (House of Usher) and having only the first two Hammer Frankensteins to draw from. The real influence (besides the Frankensteins and other Hammer films from the late '50s) were the two wax movies: House of Wax and Mysteries of the Wax Museum, as the titular Mill is actually a museum of sorts where historical women made of "stone" can be gawked at by townsfolk and tourists.

Being that it's a horror movie, there's no real surprise to learn that they're not stone, but the plot is still more interesting than you'd think. Turns out it's kind of a two birds with one stone (heh) kinda deal, as the resident mad scientist is indeed killing women and using them for his attraction, but he's doing it for a noble (to him) reason: his daughter Elfie (Scilla Gabel, an absolute stunner - thank you, remastered Blu-ray) has a rare blood disease that kills her whenever she gets excited or distraught, so he and his assistant find women with the right blood type, drain them out to revive his daughter, and use their corpses to keep his museum going instead of using actual stone or whatever earthly materials. It's a very environmentally friendly horror plot, I must say.

But being that this is a genre film from the olden days (61 years old! They didn't even have feature movies that old when this came out!), it takes a while to get to that stuff. It can be a bit "slow" at times, even when you consider its age, but then again, being that it was their first attempt at something like this (in full lurid color - there's even a brief nipple shot, which kind of stunned me) it shouldn't be a surprise that it wasn't exactly roller-coaster paced. Luckily, the hero, Hans (Pierre Brice) isn't as dull as a lot of the guys in those Corman movies it resembles - in fact, the plot kicks into gear because he cheats on his girlfriend with Elfie on the day he meets her, the dog. And it's his "I shouldn't have done that, sorry" dismissal that leaves her emotional enough to instantly drop dead, so he's feeling justifiably guilty on two levels for the rest of the movie - it's one thing to cheat on your girl, but to basically cause the other woman's death as a result? Damn.

Most of it takes place inside the mill or their homes, but there are a few exteriors that were lensed in gloomy Holland, giving it that proper foggy atmosphere that will make this an easy recommendation for the Halloween season. But even the interiors are quite nice to look at; both DP Pier Ludovico Pavoni and director Giorgio Ferroni have a lot of "sword and sandal" type movies on their resumes and are thus accustomed to having bigger areas to shoot in, but they clearly didn't let themselves be hamstrung by the confines of relatively small sets - the mill in particular is top-notch work, at least inside (the exterior miniature isn't very convincing, alas). The colors are also all vivid and lush; apparently they wanted to assure the money men that color film was worth the extra dough. I can't say the movie wouldn't work in black and white, but when coupled with its occasionally sluggish pace, it'd certainly be less memorable.

Arrow's deluxe set for the film includes a whopping four versions, but alas I did not have time to go through them all. The one to go with is, naturally, the Italian version, as it is the most complete, but it should be noted that the film has an international cast all of whom are speaking their native tongues, so you're still going to encounter some dubbing. You can just go with the English version (the content of the film is the same, I believe?) if reading the subtitles is an issue, but as is often the case the dub track and the subtitle track offer varations on nearly every line, so basically no matter what you're dealing with compromise. On the second disc there's a French version, which has a scene that was added at the insistence of its French producers (a conversation that clarifies some of the character's histories with one another), but is missing a few others, so it wouldn't be the best place to start. And the other version is of no use to any newcomer, as it removes those scenes AND the added French one, from what I understand. But I like that they went out of their way to include it; I'm sure it's someone's preferred version due to having it on VHS or whatever, so hey, now they can have their hacked up take looking all lovely on the remastered high def transfer.

There are also some bonus features, including a video essay by Kat Ellinger (I am a big fan of these; they're like Cliff's Note commentaries) and an interview with Liana Orfei, who plays one of the unwilling eventual Stone Women. There's also a commentary by Tim Lucas, who is the go to guy for Bava and thus it wasn't much of a surprise that the conversation turned to him a few times (he launches a convincing argument that Bava actually ghost-directed a couple of key scenes), though I was cerrtainly not expecting a history of LSD to be included. Overall it's not a bad track but one of the ones where I wish he was paired with someone to bounce off of and keep it a little more lively, as Lucas always sounds like he's reading from a report and thus it can be a bit dry to listen to even when the information is sound. The deluxe edition also includes a book that has two essays (one on the film's overall legacy, the other tracking its multiple versions) as well as some review excerpts from the time, which is interesting as not all of them are exactly glowing.

It's definitely a "not for everyone" kind of film, as its horror elements are relatively muted and it will probably remind any seasoned viewer of more exicting films, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. The pre-giallo era of Italian horror is one area I am definitely not as well versed in (as I've noted, I "appreciate" Bava more than I "enjoy" his films, for the most part), so I'm always happy to fill that gap in a little more, and anything that might have helped influence my beloved Tourist Trap is obviously something I'm going to admire. And I love seeing so much care for it on Arrow's part; it's not exactly a film that people are beating down their doors for them to release, and yet they offer it this deluxe release with a book, a poster, four cuts of the film... basically, everything a fan could want, even if there aren't a lot of them out there. Every movie deserves this kind of treatment!

What say you?

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