WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Top Sensation

I had, of course, heard of Ottavio Alessi's 'Top Sensation' (a.k.a. 'The Seducers'). What self-respecting exploitation fan hasn't? I started watching it online a couple of years ago with an eye to a Winter of Discontent write-up. The print quality was so bad, however, that it was like having my eyeballs vigorously buffed with a Brillo pad. Never mind that there was a Rosalba Neri topless scene ten minutes in, I gave it up as a bad job. Now, though - thanks to Shameless DVD Releasing - 'Top Sensation' is available in a version that's not onerous to watch. Although, in an otherwise laudable attempt to present as complete an edit of the film as possible, they've shoehorned in every bit of recovered footage they could get their hands on and to say there are quality control issues with these inserts is putting it mildly.

Coming on like a lurid remake of Polanski's 'Knife in the Water' (made seven years previously) and pre-dating that ne plus ultra of sex-on-a-boat movies, Deodato's 'Waves of Lust' by six, 'Top Sensation' boasts two locations (yacht; island), lifestyle porn aplenty, and world-class eye-candy in the form of Rosalba Neri, Edwige Fenech and Eva Thulin. It's also utterly cynical and requires us to spend an hour and a half with some utterly venal characters - but, hey, that's exploitation for you!

Here's the basic set up: control-freak entrepreneur Mudy (author Maud de Belleroche in her only acting role) has hired loose-living couple Aldo (Mauricio Bonuglia) and Paola (Neri) to crew her yacht for the duration of a trip designed to provide R&R for her mentally troubled son Tony (Ruggero Miti). Mudy, despairing of the retinue of shrinks and specialists who have been unable to cure him, is convinced that he just needs to get laid. To this end, Aldo and Paola have been tasked with finding a girl suitable to this requirement. Dangling the promise of a big fat pay cheque in front of her, they have persuaded Ulla (Fenech) on board. The film begins in media res, the yacht a-sail, and all of these characters locked into a duplicitous game, the sexual tension simmering away.

Immediate complications are twofold: (1) Paola wants more from Mudy than just a one-off payment and will stop at nothing to get a cut of Mudy's latest business deal; and (2) Tony remains blandly disinterested in Ulla, proving that the boy really does have issues. Actually, make that threefold, since Aldo swiftly compounds things by running the yacht into a sandbank on account of doing the nasty with Ulla when he should have been navigating. Just when it seems like Mudy's on the verge of tearing all parties a new arsehole, Tony slips ashore and, when the others eventually find him, he's made the acquaintance of butter-wouldn't-melt farm girl Beba (Thulin) and they appear to be getting along famously.

Aldo, never one to miss an opportunity, discerns that if he can get Beba onboard the yacht and away from her boorish husband Andro (Salvatore Puntillo), then shenanigans of the salami-hiding variety between simpleton and shepherdess are a foregone conclusion. Beba is thusly, and in remarkably short order, seduced onto the yacht, seduced into a bit of lipstick lesbianism, and pimped out to Tony.

But before the lad can get devirginised, Andro turns up in a rowboat and 'Top Sensation' segues from pressure-cooker sexploitationer to something like Brian Rix farce leeched of the actual comedy. This weird tonal shift isn't the only problem with Alessi's film.

There are two main problems: the first is that Alessi, directing his second and last film after 1964's 'Whatever Happened to Baby Toto? ', achieves about as much visual style as a wall coated with slowly drying paint of a boring colour. It's not much to ask, surely, that a film with such a lurid story also be visually lurid? That a film whose main female leads are so voluptuously appealing also have appealing cinematography or production design? Christ, even the yacht doesn't look sleek and sexy – and when 70% of your film is set on a yacht belonging to a spectacularly rich person, this does not bode well.

Secondly, for a film that clocks in at just 90 minutes in the most complete edit that Shameless can manage, there aren’t half some dull patches! Endless scenes of Tony moping in his cabin, playing with toys like the man-child he is. Endless scenes of Mudy ranting at people and scowling. Endless scenes of … well, filler. Even the film's most notorious sequence – it involves Fenech, a photoshoot and a goat and I'm saying no more other than warning you upfront that once you've seen it, you will forever refer to 'Top Sensation' as “that film with Edwige Fenech and the goat”* – exists for no other reason than to pad out the running time.

In fact, stripped down to its actual narrative stepping stones – introduce everyone on boat and their motivations; establish that Tony isn't going to get jiggy with Ulla; get various parties to the island, thence to the boat; Andro turns up; everything goes pear-shaped - there's probably about half an hour's running time to be had out of the material. The rest of it relies on Neri and Fenech to look good in bikinis. Of course, it goes without saying that both of them ace this requirement. Indeed, Fenech – 21 when the film was released and on the cusp of claiming her crown as giallo goddess – is va-va-voom made flesh, while Neri gets to rock the kind of outfit that would make your average jeweler shut up shop and sneak home for a hour or two’s private time.

But for all that, it's de Belleroche's appearance that stays with me. Winner of the Prix Broquette-Gonin for her debut novel, she had published 'L'Ordinatrice' – generally considered her magnum opus – the year before she appeared in 'Top Sensation'. Which is kind of like Annie Proulx coming off 'The Shipping News' winning the Pulitzer and saying yes to a Rob Zombie job offer on the understanding that it involved a girl-girl scene with Kelly Brook. Now that'd be a Winter of Discontent flick!



*I'm not sure what the life expectancy of the average goat is, but I'm guessing the goat dined out on the story of most of the rest of said lifespan.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #8: Five Dolls for an August Moon

Boasting one of the most spurious titles in the entire history of the giallo, Mario Bava’s essay in lifestyle chic and amorality proves that sometimes style over substance wins the day – particularly when you’ve got access to a beach house that would make Frank Lloyd Wright weep in envy, the retro-coolest set design ever, and a cast – including Edwige Fenech, Ira von Furstenberg, Helena Ronee, Edith Meloni and Ely Galleani – for whom the term “eye candy” could well have been coined.

Essentially, the narrative is little more than this: a bunch of dudes with hot wives/mistresses/girlfriends invite a dude who has something they want (as well as a hot wife of his own) to an island where they make him various offers to acquire the thing he has that they want. The dude who has the thing the other dudes want won’t sell, and as tempers run higher, a murderer strikes. And strikes again. And again. And … well, you get the picture.

Filling in the above paragraph, Professor Farrell (William Berger) and his wife Trudy (von Furstenberg) accept an invitation to stay at the island home of industrialist George Sagan (Teodoro Corra) and his wife Jill (Meloni); the other guests include Nick and Marie (a.k.a. Pook) Cheney (Maurice Poli and Edwige Fenech), and Jack and Peggy Davidson (Howard Ross and Helena Renee). Ostensibly, Sagan, Cheney and Davidson have formed a consortium to buy a formula for an industrial resin that Farrell has developed, but each is keen to cut a deal with Farrell directly and shaft the others. Offers are made to Farrell. Serious offers. At one point, there’s five million on the table.

Mind you, that’s in lire, and the best currency conversion I could come up with in the five minutes I bothered to spend on the internet – bearing in mind lire was replaced by the Euro over 15 years ago – is about $3500, or £2685. It was probably worth a bit more in 1970, when the film was made.

But I digress. Farrell refuses because he wants his formula to be used for the good of mankind … and just pull the McGuffin omnibus over to the side of the Fuck-The-Audience-They’re-Not-Bothered highway. An industrial resin? Like fucking glue? Like a particularly strong fucking glue? Seriously: this Farrell geezer has just reinvented motherfucking Araldite and everyone’s offering him blank cheques and a quick feel of Edwige Fenech for it?

Anyway, that’s the basic set up. Dude who has summat. Other dudes who want it. Hot wives. Fucking glue. And because this irresistible narrative hook ain’t never going to fill even the skimpy 77 minute running time, Bava throws a bunch of other stuff into the mix. Stuff like: Pook having it off on the quiet with the Sagans’ houseboy. Stuff like: Sapphic tensions simmering away between Trudy and Jill. Stuff like: island girl Isabel (Galleani, appearing under her pseudonym Justine Gall) flitting about all over the place and guiltily spying on everyone.

All well and good, except we’ve barely had a glimpse of Fenech sans chemise when the houseboy turns up dead, and the Trudy/Jill subplot is never developed in an aesthetically satisfactory manner. If you know what I mean.

But let’s get back to the houseboy for a moment. Not only is the poor bastard denied his liaison with the pert and prepossessing Pook, but the party who discover him are faced with the quandary of leaving him on the beach until the police arrive (immediate problem: sand crabs looking for a midnight snack) or wrapping his body in plastic and hanging it in the meat store. The increasing proliferation of bodies in the deep freeze, each new cadaver swinging merrily on its hook to the accompaniment of lounge jazz, is the best joke in a film that Bava seems to have conceived as an absurdist comedy from the outset.

It certainly doesn’t function as a thriller – we’re past the hour mark before he throws in the one single scene that even bothers to function as an Agatha Christie-lite “hey let’s all try to figure out how the seemingly impossible happened” mystery – and it only just makes the cut as a horror movie thanks to a couple of genuinely effective and grotesque images. Mainly, he just lets a group of rich, nasty, sexy people roam around a picturesque island, frequently cutting away from them to admire the architecture of the beach house.

Most gialli dabble in architecture porn; ‘Five Dolls for an August Moon’ is architecture eroticism. I’m not kidding. For the entire duration of the film – I watched the American release, which runs ten minutes shorter than the Italian cut and still feels like it drags – I wanted that beach house. And I wanted its 1970 interior design. And if Edwige Fenech and Ely Galleani fancied popping over for the housewarming, I wouldn’t have said no.

The eye candy at the end of the world

Just in case the Mayans got it right, this is The Agitation of the Mind signing off in the company of 13 favourite femmes fatale. It's been a pleasure.

GIALLO SUNDAY: The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh

After a two-month hiatus, Giallo Sunday returns with Sergio Martino’s 1971 giallo ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’, his first foray into the genre and his first teaming with Edwige Fenech. How is it awesome? Let me count the ways.

Firstly, its success kicked off a string of stone-cold classic gialli from Martino: ‘The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail’, ‘All the Colours of the Dark’, ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ (its title, one of the most magnificent in all of cinema, suggested directly by ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’) and ‘Torso’, two of which reunited him with Fenech.

Secondly, it features stellar turns from three giallo legends: Fenech, George Hilton and Ivan Rassimov. Rounded out by Cristina Airoldi (who has one of the most memorable scenes in ‘Torso’), Alberto de Mendoza (a character actor extraordinaire with an incredible eight-decade career in cinema), Carlo Alighiero (who played Dr Calabresi in Argento’s ‘Cat o’ Nine Tails’ the same year) and Bruno Corazzari (one of the “go to” guys for all-purpose villainy in Italian cinema), the cast is tip-top.

Thirdly, it marries stylish thrilleramics with a psychological imperative (the “let’s scare Edwige to death” syndrome: cf. ‘All the Colours of the Dark’) and delivers the whole thing in such a twist-heavy package (the last third of the film is pretty much one narrative curveball after another) that it’s deliriously difficult to keep your eye on the ball.

Fourthly, it delivers a generous helping of much-loved giallo tropes, including extended, operatic death scenes (a protracted bit of business in a park bears comparison with Argento’s ‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’, made the same year), bottles of J&B all over the shop, a beleaguered but still gorgeous heroine, and black-gloved killers with sharp implements. Seriously, take a look at this little collection of screengrabs and tell me if they don’t scream giallo:

I could continue enumerating all the ways in which ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’ is one of the defining examples of its genre, but I’d probably end of with a repetitive article that segued into a several thousand word love letter to Edwige Fenech, so let’s get things back on track with a plot synopsis.

Julie Wardh (Fenech) has entered into a marriage of convenience with career-obsessed diplomat Neil (de Mendoza) – a man so stultifyingly dull that he dishonors the name Neil (plus, how dare someone who’s obsessed with work share the same name as me? I hate work) – in order to get away from her domineering and possessive ex, Jean (Rassimov). Jean, it is revealed in flashback, is the chap who happily pandered to Mrs Wardh’s eponymous weird kink. And the kink in question? “Blood both excites and repels her.” Hence Jean making love to Julie on a bed of broken glass. (Don’t try this home, kiddies!)

Returning from a trip abroad with Neil, Julie is unnerved by the ministrations of a psychopath targeting women in their neighborhood, and by the fact that Jean seems to be trying to inveigle his way back into her life – the two, she worries, might not be unrelated. Hanging out with BFF Carol (Airoldi), Julie meets Carol’s playboy cousin George (Hilton), whose attentions provide a welcome distraction from her worries. When a blackmailer observes her passionate interlude with George and threatens to spill the beans to Neil, Carol offers to deliver the pay-off in Julie’s place. Things go badly wrong and Julie’s life spirals into chaos and paranoia.

Any fuller synopsis than that would lead us into spoiler territory, so many great things about this film will have to go by the board, particularly anything relating to that aforementioned last third. I will give a nod, however, to the way Martino seems to wrap things up with a bit of expositional dialogue between two characters which leads to much (perverse) hilarity between them; Martino plays the scene as if he’s about to homage Clouzot’s raised-middle-finger-of-irony ending to ‘The Wages of Fear’ (I was even prepared to forgive him the plagiarism, it was done so gleefully), only to subvert expectations and deliver an equally delicious irony but effected by quite different means.

As with any labyrinthine plot, too much analysis can sometimes be fatal. The climactic revelations depend on alibis aplenty for more than one character, and the lacunae are pretty tenuous in places. Still, it’s no small measure of the film’s success that Martino is pulling unexpected moments out of the hat right till the end.

His direction is energetic. The camera prowls with POV-centric menace à la Argento. The set-pieces – including a cat-and-mouse scene in an underground car park, and a nervy exploration of an old dark house lit only by the guttering flame of a cigarette lighter – are confidently handled. ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’ was only his second non-documentary feature (after the spaghetti western ‘Arizona si scatenò... e li fece fuori tutti’), yet every frame demonstrates that with the giallo Martino had found his métier.

GIALLO SUNDAY: Phantom of Death

Given that the last Ruggero Deodato title I approached was ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, I settled down very nervously to watch ‘Phantom of Death’. Please, no wholesale animal slaughter, I prayed as the opening credits commenced.

Fortunately, there were no snake, turtle or monkey eviscerations, although I did have to sit through Michael York doing the worst impersonation of a concern pianist ever committed to film. York plays Robert Dominici, an ivory tinkler of the classical persuasion. He’s involved with but unable to commit to the gorgeous Susanna (Mapi Galan) and lusted after by wealthy fashion designer Helene (the uber-gorgeous Edwige Fenech). Poor bastard – must be terrible for him.

As if decreed by the bit of cheap sarcasm in that last paragraph, things do get pretty awful for him very quickly. Susanna is murdered, the second victim of a brutal killer who has very recently despatched specialist consultant Dr Carla Pesenti (Carola Stagnaro). This inaugural killing is intercut with Dominici’s recital and sets up an interesting aesthetic: a very formal, slightly detached directing style punctuated by Argento-like set-pieces defined by prowling, subjective camerawork and grand guignol violence.

My very poor understanding of Italian translates the indigenous title, ‘Un delitto poco comune’, as something like ‘A Small Community of Crime’, which is an unwieldy title but one that contributes to the misdirection Deodato puts in place for the first half hour. With Dominici as a successful and acclaimed musician, the luckless Dr Pesenti an expert in her field, and the soon-to-be-in-danger Helene the head of that sooooo giallo of institutions, the fashion house, ‘Un delitto poco comune’ is the first indication that here we have a group of affluent types whose lives are under threat, either from a someone with a grudge, or an individual within their midst.

Added to this, Deodato throws in any number of expected genre tropes, from the bumbling copper, Inspector Datti (Donald Pleasance) seemingly unable to prevent each successive murder, to enough in the way of spiral staircases, rickety elevators, heads plunged through decorative glass, sharp instruments flashing in the dark, geysers of blood and non-linear editing to suggest ‘Phantom of Death’ was made in the glory days of the giallo and not a decade and a half later in 1988.

In fact, Deodato’s manipulation of his audience’s knowledge and expectations of two decades of gialli is the film’s biggest asset. For the first thirty minutes, you sit back comfortably convinced that Dominici is being established as the Sam Dalmas or Marc Daly du jour, the reluctant hero in the wrong place and the wrong time who’ll be required to turn amateur sleuth when Inspector Datti’s incompetence puts him in danger.

Not so. Deodato whips the rug out in commendably effective style with an hour still to go, shifting the focus to Datti and ramping up the tension as a cat-and-mouse game between cop and killer plays out, with Datti’s good-natured daughter Gloria (Antonella Ponziani) a potential victim and Helene’s role complicated as events take another unexpected turn.

Unfortunately, the English language title provides a heavy-handed clue from the outset (take the first two words, factor in the importance of musicianship, think of a very similar title in literature and film, and bear in mind the disfigurement of that anti-hero), the performances are all over the place (York chews the scenery like it had just got five stars in the Michelin Guide, Pleasance drifts through each scene on autopilot, and Fenech valiantly strives for more than the script gives her), and the dialogue is often embarrassingly bad. Particularly when Inspector Datti speculates “Why would anyone kill a doctor? Hmmm? Ah? Unless [pregnant pause] they had something to hide.”

Also, the film is riddled with inconsistencies. A file is stolen from Dr Pesenti’s office and yet a crucial appointment is noted in her diary, but Datti never thinks to cross-reference them. Dominici keeps fit by training with an oriental fencing expert – what the fuck??? A concert pianist engaging in a physical activity that could damage his hands?!?!?

But there are also plenty of genuinely creepy moments (the most effective involving nothing more than a peripheral character on a swing), as well as an unexpectedly melancholy subtext about mortality, the existence of God and, if He does exist, the cruelty of His grand design. ‘Phantom of Death’ is half-and-half an extrapolation of Argento-style aesthetics and an inquiry into what a giallo directed by Ingmar Bergman would be like.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Strip Nude for Your Killer

This is purely hypothetical – mere conjecture on my part – and I would ask anyone who represents the director or producers of ‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’ to please bear this in mind – as well as the fact that there is no malice whatsoever intended in these remarks – but I reckon the first production meeting for ‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’ (in its equally unambiguous Italian title: ‘Nude per l’Assassino’) went something like this:

“Andrea, baby, we’ve got a great script for you. A giallo. It’s gritty, it’s pacy, it deals with contentious subject matter. It screams you, baby.”

“I’d rather make a porno.”

“But Andrea, this has got huge box office all over it. Edwige’s schedule is good. We’ve got Femi Benussi on board. Hell, this movie is going to be filled with gorgeous women.”

“Cool. Let’s make it a porno.”


“No, no, no. It’s a murder mystery. Hell, we can throw in some nude scenes, but first and foremost it’s a mystery. It starts with a really gritty and controversial scene as an abortion goes wrong and the two men involved conspire to cover up the girl’s death.”

“Guys, why don’t we scrap the abortion and concentrate on how she conceived in the first place? We could do it as a porno.”

“But Andrea, baby, the abortion sets up the rest of the plot. The scene shifts to a health spa where fashion photographer Carlo – we’ve got Nino Castelnuovo lined up for the role – picks up a foxy redhead played by Femi Benussi and they make out in the steam room. Whaddaya think, Andrea? Your kinda thing, baby?”

“I’m interested.”

“Then he takes her back to the studio he works for where there’s jealousy from one of the other models. Also, the predatory lesbian who runs the studio takes an interest in her.”


“Do they make out?”

“Um, I guess we could address that in rewrites. Anyway, it’s at the studio that we meet our other main character, Magda. That’s who Edwige’s playing. Magda’s an up and coming photographer who has a professional relationship with Carlo and they team up when a spate of murders –”

“Hey, how about she’s a photographer but what she really wants is to be a model and she gives Carlo a blow-job in the dark room to convince him to give her a shot. Because, you know, fuck the feminists.”

“Um, yeah, I guess we could do that. So anyway, Carlo and Magda find out that –”

“Does the redhead buy it? ’Cause I was thinking, maybe we could have her walk around a strange house stark naked for five solid minutes before she gets viciously knifed to death.”


“Andrea, baby, that’s why we called you! That’s what we want on this production: creative thinking, dynamic filmmaking, exciting set pieces. And tits.”

“Don’t forget the ass.”

“That’s what you’re here for, baby. You bring the T&A game. How about it, Andrea? Shoot it quick, don’t bother about composition or continuity. Nobody cares about acting performances. Let’s get this fucker in cinemas in two months’ time. Your usual fee and we’ll throw in crate of J&B. Whaddaya say?”


“Guys, I’m on board. What’s this thing going to be called?”

“We’re thinking either ‘Seven Deaths in the Camera’s Lens’ or ‘Death Wears Motorcycle Leathers and a Gender-Disguising Helmet’. Although the pizza delivery boy prefers ‘Six Drops of Blood on a Naked Corpse’.”

“Good call from the pizza dude. But, guys, how about ‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’.”

“Love it, baby. We start shooting in half an hour.”

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

Okay, let’s get the checklist out.

Magnificently ludicrous title? ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’. Check!

Genre stalwart in the director’s chair? Sergio Martino. Check!

Twisty turny plot? We’ll attempt a synopsis in a minute (minor spoilers will apply), but for now: Check!

Black gloved killer? Uh-huh, and with a penchant for using a scythe. Check!

J&B? Let’s put it this way: play the giallo drinking game (rules here) while watching ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ and you’re liable to be carted off to get your stomach pumped long before the viciously ironic denouement. Check!

Edwige Fenech? Present, correct and indulging in mucho plenty kit-offery. Check!

I stumbled across this movie on a video sharing site last night. Never released in the UK and with the Region 1 DVD out of print and changing hands for stupid amounts of money (anywhere between £50 - £70; ie. $80 - $110), I’d pretty much written off any chance of seeing it in the near future. Then, having cruised said site for ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ and a certain notorious Ruggero Deodato film, I decided to chance my luck and fed Edwige Fenech’s name into the search box. Like the Promised Land revealed to Moses, like the doors of perception cleansed to Aldous Huxley, like Hugh Hefner surveying the Playboy mansion and reflecting smugly that he ain’t doing bad for an old dude who wears his dressing gown all the time, I beheld the glory and majesty of … oh well, fuck it, let’s just call it a midweek Something For The Weekend and post these three shots:

Okay. Now before you rush out to splurge that £50 (or $80) you saved for a rainy day/found down the back of the couch/mugged a little old lady for [delete as applicable], let me just mention that there is a very slight downside to this movie. La Fenech doesn’t put in an appearance until almost the 40 minute mark. In a 97 minute flick, this presents something of a test of the patience. Particularly since we have to spend that first third in the company of the resolutely shitty Oliviero Ruvigny (Luigi Pistilli) and his brittle, much put-upon wife Irene (Anita Strindberg).

Oliviero is a once-successful writer whose books are now out of print and who uses his grumblings that “the novel is dead” as an excuse that he hasn’t been able to write worth a damn for years. When Hemingway decided he couldn’t write worth a damn any more, he chewed on the business end of a shotgun. Oliviero channels his failure differently: he hosts decadent parties for beatnik friends, obsesses borderline Oedipally over his dead mother, sexually harasses his maid and humiliates his wife. That’s on a good day. On a bad day, he beats her. Oh, and he runs around with other women, too. Like bookshop assistant and his former student Fausta (Daniela Giordano). When she meets a nasty fate (business end of a scythe) while waiting for him at a tryst, the police come calling. There’s no hard evidence and, of course, Irene takes his side during questioning. She’s too scared to do otherwise.

Then the maid buys the farm (same modus operandi) and Oliviero panics and hides the body. He insists that he didn’t kill her but daren’t risk the police discovering she was killed in his house. He demonstrates his innocence and deep-cleaned conscience by walling her up in the wine cellar. By now, Irene is fearing for her life and freaking out every time Oliviero’s cat, the charmingly named Satan, leaps out at her or gets nasty with its claws. (‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ is nominally based on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’. As in: there’s a cat, it’s black and somebody gets walled up in a cellar. Oh, and the mechanics of the denouement follow Poe’s template as well.)

It’s not a happy household and these aren’t particularly likeable people. Mercifully, it’s at this point that Oliviero’s sexpot niece Floriana decides to pay them a visit and all kind of shenanigans ensue. Turns out that Floriana’s not exactly a nice person either, but what the hell, she’s played by a never more gorgeous Edwige Fenech and she’s often naked. I hate to sound shallow, oikish or hairy-palmed, but in the world of gialli this is the kind of thing that can make or break a film.

What follows is kind of like ‘Knife in the Water’ without the boat and with the pressure cooker atmosphere of sexual tension actually resolving itself. In short order, Floriana worms her way into Irene’s confidence via the simple expedient of worming her way into her bed (thank you, Sergio Martino, you are great and wonderful man); catches the eye of local delivery guy and motocross rider Dario (Riccardo Salvino) and gives him an altogether different form of ride (Christ, my usual cerebral standards of film writing are taking a nose-dive!); and finally gets Oliviero hot under the collar in a scene that’s as sexy as hell so long as you keep your eye on Fenech and don’t remind yourself that Pistilli (grey-haired and wearing a crap sweater) is actually onscreen as well.

Then there’s a surprising revelation about the murders and the film takes a different turn. Martino has fun playing with convention and pulling the rug. What starts out as a study of a dysfunctional and sado-masochistic relationship, with the odd sidestep into the more easily recognisable giallo territory of fetishistic death scenes, suddenly veers into the realms of the erotic thriller, while teasing the viewer with subplots about the black cat and Oliviero’s mother which weave in and out of the narrative seemingly at random, before a series of reveals paint the last 15 or 20 minutes in the darkest shade of black. As well as the brightest shade of red.

Even in a genre not renowned for happy endings, redemptive character arcs or a sunny depiction of human nature, ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ is singularly cynical and mean-spirited. You can’t empathize with or root for anyone. If Fenech wasn’t so throat-tighteningly beautiful, you’d lose interest in Floriana pretty quickly. More than one character gets their just desserts, but there’s no catharsis. ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ is a damn good giallo – arguably one of the greats – but fuck me, it’s bleak.

All the Colours of the Dark

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: gialli / In category: 1 of 10 / Overall: 4 of 100


Check out the image above. Off-kilter composition, bottle of J&B, Edwige Fenech. Yup, we’re in giallo territory.

‘All the Colours of the Dark’ is one of five terrific gialli Sergio Martino directed between 1971 and 1973, following on from (and reuniting the stars of) ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’ and the magnificently titled ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’.

Fenech stars as Jane Harrison, the increasingly harassed and distressed partner of London-based pharmaceutical rep Richard Steele (George Hilton). Still plagued with nightmares about the murder of her mother many years previously, Jane is also recovering from the trauma of a car accident (an incident for which it seems Richard is blameworthy) which caused the miscarriage of her baby. Richard favours prescription drugs to treat her nervous condition, while her sister Barbara (Nieves Navarro, appearing under her Susan Scott pseudonym) is keen for Jane to enter therapy with the psychiatrist for whom Barbara works.



To make matters worse, the piercingly blue-eyed killer from her dreams – a man with rather phallic tendencies to knife-wielding – seems to have stepped living and breathing into the real world. Jane’s already fragile condition deteriorates as he begins stalking her, following her on the Underground, keeping sinister vigil outside her apartment building.

Martino establishes a ‘Rosemary’s Baby’-style atmosphere of mounting dread from the outset, probing his heroine’s borderline hysterical mental/emotional state as effectively and unremittingly as Polanski did in his classic of the macabre. The influence of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ is writ large, but it’s to Martino’s credit that ‘All the Colours of the Dark’ comes across as more than just a knock-off or a cash-in.

Martino gets the ball rolling with a zonked-out dream sequence structured around quasi-Freudian imagery that mirrors Jane’s state of mind. Many more dream/fantasy/paranoia sequences will follow, Martino segueing between Jane’s inner world and the (supposedly) real one with such sneaky aplomb that, for much of the film’s hour and a half running time, he maintains ambiguity as to whether everything we see is simply a product of Jane’s troubled mind. (Lucio Fulci achieved a similar effect, albeit using a different cinematic bag of tricks, in ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ made the year before.)

If proof of Jane’s mental turmoil were required, it’s provided by the scene on which the film entire hinges. Panicked after a perhaps-real-perhaps-imagined appearance of the stalker, Jane seeks solace from her alluring but mysterious neighbour Mary Weil (Marina Malfatti).



Jane: I'm sure someone is chasing me, someone coming very deep from my childhood. Do you believe in that sort of thing?
Mary: I believe in a lot more .. I had my problems, too. Not as serious as yours, but I got rid of them.
Jane: How?
Mary: Do you know what a black mass is?
Jane: You're scaring me.
Mary: It makes sense to be afraid sometimes. You have to find it and it'll disappear.

At this point, ‘All the Colours of the Dark’ could easily have lurched into the realms of the risible, the carefully established atmosphere and giallo tropes swamped by this explicitly horror/supernatural-themed narrative development. And, it has to be admitted, Martino’s staging of the black mass/orgy does come close to parody. Bruno Nicolai’s wordless vocal score is unintentionally hilarious while actor Julian Ugarte’s portrayal of the cult leader is less high priest than high camp.

Yet somehow Martino manages to fuse the disparate elements into a decently-paced and never less than entertaining hybrid. He makes good, non-touristy use of the London locations and conjures as many striking compositions and memorable set-pieces as you’d expect from a giallo, culminating in a vertiginous rooftop chase.

Fenech turns in a full-throttle performance as a woman in meltdown. Navarro and Malfatti add to the glamour quotient, even if their performances prove somewhat by-the-numbers. Hilton is dependable, but badly dubbed in the English language version. (Subject of which: the Shriek Show DVD release, while presenting a beautiful anamorphic transfer, suffers from murky sound that renders entire chunks of dialogue nearly indecipherable; fortunately, an Italian language/English subtitles option is available.)

‘All the Colours of the Dark’ arguably stops short of being one of the all-time great gialli, though. It flags a little towards the end. The fantasy vs. reality riff is recycled perhaps once too often. The eleventh hour inclusion of an exposition-spouting police inspector is arbitrary even by giallo standards. A just-as-eleventh-hour subplot involving an unexpected inheritance threatens to steer the mystery from the esoteric to the mundane. More annoyingly, a flashback to a crucial but initially overlooked clue requires a cheat on Martino’s part.

Still, these are relatively minor gripes and gialli often rely on endings that are abrupt, arbitrary or outright baffling (even such richly atmospheric, slow-burn entries as ‘Who Saw Her Die?’ and ‘The House with the Laughing Windows’ register high scores on the WTF-o-meter. ‘All the Colours of the Dark’ sees its prolific and versatile director on good form and gives the achingly gorgeous Fenech one of her best-remembered roles.

The Case of the Bloody Iris

Making it a hat trick for the Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies Italian horror movie blog-a-thon ...

Fired up after reviewing 'Don't Torture a Duckling' and 'A Lizard in a Woman's Skin' for the blog-a-thon, I spent a fruitless hour in the garage yesterday digging through still unpacked boxes (the house move was nearly two years ago!) in search of some old videos on the Redemption label. I knew there were a few Mario Bavas kicking around, as well as Antonio Bido's 'The Cat's Victims' and 'Blood Stained Shadow' and Massimo Dallamano's 'What Have You Done to Solange?'

Could I find them? Could I hell.

The only title that came to light, and perhaps the least of all the gialli in my collection, was 'The Case of the Bloody Iris'. So on it went. My estimation of it didn't improve all that much, but it's worth writing about for a couple of reasons: (a) it presents a decent checklist of giallo tropes, and (b) it stars the deliriously attractive Edwige Fenech.

So what makes it an archetypal giallo? Everything but the title, really. If director Giuliano Carnimeo had only put a number, a colour or an animal in the title - something like 'Six Bloodstains on a Yellow Canary' - it could have been a textbook example of the genre. As it is, Argento's 'Four Flies on Grey Velvet' retains its crown as the ultimate giallo title. I actually prefer the original Italian language title, 'Perche quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer' (literally: 'What Are These Strange Drops of Blood on the Body of Jennifer'). It's so unwieldly and bludgeoningly literal that it's almost genius.

Setting aside the title, what 'The Case of the Bloody Iris' offers the (un)discerning viewer is:

1. The glamour model milieu of 'Blood and Black Lace' and 'Strip Nude for Your Killer' ... and the liberal helping of nudity that said milieu implies.

2. A rain-coated, leather-gloved killer (okay, tan leather gloves instead of the regulation issue black but I'll let that one slide) who also wears a stocking-cum-face-mask type affair that makes it look like Rorshach from 'Watchmen' has made a stop-off in 1970s Italy for the express purpose of menacing our Edwige.

3. A pass-the-parcel selection of potential suspects including a disfigured recluse, a psychotic ex-husband, a dodgy nightclub owner, a predatory lesbian and a too-smooth-by-half property baron.

4. Two stupendously useless coppers: a casually racist, casually homophobic licenced thug ("You know the reputation we have for police brutality?" he asks a suspect before punching him in the face; "It's a good reputation to have"), and his comic relief sidekick who indulges in a little stakeout voyeurism and completely misses a murder committed slap bang in front of him because he's too busy tucking into a sandwich.

5. A series of fetishistically depicted murders including stabbing, drowning and scalding to death.

6. A beleaguered victim-in-waiting, failed by the police, who resorts to amateur sleuthing in an attempt to unmask the killer.

7. Vertiginous camera angles including the obligatory staircase shot. (I don't know what it was with giallo directors and staircases, but they're as omnipresent in these kind of films as bottles of J&B.)

8. Speaking of which, I can't actually swear to the stuff putting in an appearance in 'The Case of the Bloody Iris'; whenever Edwige Fenech was on screen, I wasn't exactly scrutinising the background.

9. A psychedelic tinge to the camerawork, set design and randomly incorporated flashback sequences.

10. A denouement in which the killer's motivation is as arbitrary as their identity.

11. Edwige Fenech looking gorgeous. I may have mentioned this already.

'The Case of the Bloody Iris' opens with a woman (possibly a hooker) making a call from a phone box. She's summoned to a swanky apartment block. Taking the elevator to one of the uppermost floors, she's stabbed with a scalpel and left for dead. Mizar (Carla Brait) - an Amazonian type who makes a living from a sub-dom style nightclub act - discovers the body. Not unsurprisingly, she's the next to die. It's into her now vacant apartment that our heroine Jennifer (Fenech) moves, along with her flibbertigibbet room-mate Marilyn (Paola Quattrini).

Jennifer is trying to make a new life for herself having run away from her husband (Ben Carra), a member of a cult whose initiation ritual seems to consist of all and sundry getting it on with Jennifer. The trauma of his intermittent reappearances, where he variously tries to drug her and rape her, is exacerbated by the tendency of Jennifer's neighbours to either turn up dead or give off the kind of menacing vibes that lead her to suspect the killer is just a few doors away.

'The Case of the Bloody Iris' holds no surprises, but provides an entertaining 90 minutes. Carnimeo - better known as a director of spaghetti westerns - stages the set-pieces proficiently. The murder which our sandwich scarfing policeman fails to notice is particularly memorable, Carmineo interweaving POV shots and effectively exploiting the bustle of a busy street, most passers-by not even realising what's happened even as the victim stumbles forward, clutching their stomach, blood gouting from between their fingers. Elsewhere, a scrapyard and a boiler room provide appropriately shadowy backdrops for scenes of suspense.

The performances are generally utilitarian and not helped, at least in the Vipco DVD I watched, by some shoddy dubbing. Paola Quattrini in particular is overdubbed by someone who sounds like they'd ingested a large amount of helium prior to the recording session. The cinematography is decent, but never shoots for the baroque brilliance of Bava or Argento. The murders are bloody and often brutal, but more shocking is the script's unreconstructed racial and sexist epithets.

'The Case of the Bloody Iris' is, at best, a good giallo starter kit, offering viewers new to the genre a comprehensive grounding in what to expect, as well as introducing them to the charms of Ms Fenech; the pleasure will be in discovering just how many better gialli there are - and how many of them feature the lady herself.