WINTER OF DISCONTENT: So Sweet, So Dead

It’s a subject that’s been covered in these pages several times before: Italian exploitation movies and their multiplicity of alternative titles. But in the case of Roberto Montero’s ‘So Sweet, So Dead’, it’s worth revisiting. The indigenous title is ‘Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile’, which even the non-linguist should automatically be able to intuit as definitely not translating to ‘So Sweet, So Dead’ based on nothing more than the sheer amount of words in the original title.

Known in Britain as ‘So Sweet, So Dead’ and in America as, variously, ‘Bad Girls’, ‘Penetration’ (a heavily re-edited hardcore version) and ‘The Slasher … is the Sex Maniac’, its original title translates as ‘Revelations of a Sex Maniac to the Head of the Criminal Investigation Division’. Which is not only magnificently unwieldy (it’s up there with ‘What Are These Strange Drops of Blood Doing on the Body of Jennifer’ and ‘The Corpses Presented Traces of Carnal Violence’) but a spoiler of the highest order, happily giving away what should have been an out-of-the-blue final act rug-pull where Inspector Capuana (Farley Granger), having embarked on a risky strategy to flush out the killer, receives a phone call from said nutjob and discovers that … But I’m getting ahead of myself.

‘So Sweet, So Dead’ opens in lurid fashion with a police photographer taking his time snapping the dead body of a naked woman whose throat has been cut (this on top of the multiple stab wounds). Snapshots of a compromising nature were left at the scene. Capuana tries to get a handle on the case: jealous husband, impotent psychotic, voyeur? Is the murder connected to the woman’s husband, a senior army officer? Forensic psychologist Professor Casali (Chris Avram) posits that the murderer is gay, though no real reason is expounded on; besides, Capuana is more concerned about Casali’s protégé Gastone (Luciano Rossi), a mortician whose interest in corpses seems a little unhealthy.

Further killings occur, always of society women, all of whom are conducting affairs. Always the slashed throat and stab wounds; always the photographs. Always the closing of ranks by the elite so that Capuana’s investigation never gains traction. His superiors demand results but are quick to upbraid him when he ruffles feathers. At home, he bitches about the job to long-suffering wife Barbara (Sylva Koscina) but refuses the easy way out of a job with her father’s manufacturing firm.

Dario Argento once famously remarked, when quizzed about the incipient misogyny of gialli, that it’s more aesthetically pleasing to watch a beautiful woman menaced by a killer than a man – an argument that’s as intellectually facile as defending the use of the word “fuck” in front of a group of five-year-olds by dint of it being marginally less offensive than saying “cunt”. Let’s consider the Argento protocol at a slightly – and I mean nanometrically – deeper level: it’s okay to be misogynistic about your choice of victim because women are nicer to look at. So much face; so much palm.

If ever there was a film that bowed, curtsied, fellated and generally loved Argento’s dictum long-time (even more so, I hasten to add, than ‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’ or ‘The Sister of Ursula’) then that film is ‘So Sweet, So Dead’. It doesn’t just want its share of eye candy – the female cast extends beyond the frankly gorgeous Koscina to include Femi Benussi, Annabelle Incontrera, Krista Nell and Susan Scott – but paints them as shameless adulteresses and engineers their death scenes to incorporate as much gratuitous nudity as possible.

Not only is the lack of a proactive heroine frustrating – the film flirts with lawyer’s daughter Bettina (Angela Covello) as witness to the killing and therefore potential amateur sleuth or next victim, only to completely abandon either narrative possibility – but to stuff a movie this full of genre icons and not give Benussi or Scott or Koscina or Incontrera a single fucking interesting thing to do is just criminal.

So, with the ladies of the cast devalued, the film’s giallo credentials rest on two things: the efficacy of Capuana’s investigation and the film’s effectiveness as a mystery. The former can’t be overstated: gialli are rife with fucking useless coppers. Any giallo drinking game would perforce include: number in the title, colour in the title, eyeball searing interior decoration, architecture porn, amateur sleuth, all-important clue that said amateur sleuth just can’t quite put their finger on, bottle of J&B, killer who favours black gloves and fedora, useless fucking copper. Capuana isn’t necessarily a useless copper, just an unengaging one. Farley, either a scenery-chewer par excellence or a somnambulist of the highest order, is on sleep-walk mode here. (Granted, I’d rather have a subdued Farley performance than one in which he mistakes the interior design for a mixed grill.)

As a mystery, ‘So Sweet, So Dead’ sucks donkey balls. In fact it sucks the balls of those depraved enough to suck donkey balls. I’d even go so far as to say it sucks donkey balls while reading The Daily Mail and listening to Justin Bieber. As a mystery, it’s fucking pathetic and hinges on Capuana’s final reel recollection of something that surely to God he’d have reflected was significant waaaay earlier in the movie; something, moreover, that hasn’t even been referenced by the lazy-assed script. The resolution of ‘So Sweet, So Dead’ hinges on a shoehorned-in series of flashbacks utterly uncontextualised by anything that has gone before. It’s like reading Conan Doyle’s ‘The Final Problem’ and only having one reference to Moriarty in a footnote appended to the last sentence. It’s not a twist, it’s a toss off.

GIALLO SUNDAY: Hatchet for the Honeymoon

The Italian title of Mario Bava’s all-purpose giallo/psychological mystery/tale of ghostly revenge is ‘Il rosso segno della follia’, which translates as ‘The Red Mark of Insanity’. It’s a more appropriate title, given that the film spends most of its hour and a half run time probing the broken mind of protagonist John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth). The better known English language title, while magnificently lurid, is glaringly inaccurate.

It’s a cleaver Harrington does his killing with, not a hatchet. Totally different implements. No hatchet misuse going on in this movie whatsoever, no siree.

What’s that? I’m a rotten bastard and a no-good review for throwing out that last paragraph without a spoiler alert? Au contraire: it’s not a spoiler. Bava reveals Harrington as the killer right from the off, and just as quickly establishes his motive. He’s murdering newly married women and each time he kills, another little piece of a buried childhood memory comes back to him. A childhood memory that may be at the root of his desire to kill.

Granted, this kind of locks him into a self-defeating pattern – and regular appointments with mental health professional would certainly have been a better way to resolve the problem – but, hey, you can dig why Harrington wants to get to the bottom of things. Getting this little issue sorted out would certainly allow him to focus his attentions more on other things, such as running his fashion house (shades of Bava’s earlier ‘Blood and Black Lace’) or trying to talk his shrewish wife Mildred (Laura Betti) into an amicable separation. Yup: John is experiencing a problem akin to that of Stefano in ‘The Designated Victim’, Marco in ‘Death Laid an Egg’ and Martin in ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’: a wife he can’t get rid of who wields both the whip hand and the purse strings.

But whereas Stefano, Marco and Martin simply want rid of their wives in order to be with other women, Harrington – for all that he’s attracted to models Alice (Femi Benussi) and Helen (Dagmar Lassander) – wants to wrest back financial control of the company his mother left him. It’s his mother’s death, gradually revealed in flashback, that’s at the heart of Harrington’s childhood trauma. Mildred, older than Harrington and as sharp as a stern parent in the way she talks to him, seems to be a mother figure – that is, if you take your mother figures straight out of the Brothers Grimm. Moreover, Mildred’s first husband was called John and her cries of “John … John …” at a séance (a scene that prefigures a key moment in ‘The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave’, made the following year) are eerily similar to Harrington’s dying mother calling out to him in the flashback sequences.

‘Hatchet [’s a fucking cleaver, all right?] for the Honeymoon’ is a slow-burn movie that, by and large, doesn’t peddle quite the same baroque stylizations and tense set-pieces as ‘Blood and Black Lace’, but it’s fascinating and eminently watchable for several reasons. Firstly, it sees Bava at his most Hitchcockian since ‘The Girl Who Knew Too Much’: the upfront revelation of the killer’s identity and the crafting of exquisitely tense moments despite this playing of the hand was something Hitch did par excellence (think ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ or ‘Frenzy’); the quasi-Oepidal confusions of the protagonist are a variation on Norman Bates’ mother fixation in ‘Psycho’; and a squirmly protracted scene involving a corpse on the stairwell, a reflective surface, the dripping of blood and a spectacularly ill-timed visited from dogged detective Inspector Russell (Jesus Puente) is played out with as much panache as anything in the maestro’s filmography.

Also, Bava plays with reality/perception/memory like a cardsharp shuffling a deck. Reflections, flashbacks, shadows, things seen and unseen. Watching ‘Generic Sharped-Bladed Instrument for the Honeymoon’, you’re never sure how much is real and how much in Harrington’s mind, particularly around the two-thirds mark when Harrington is haunted in manner that brings to mind a classic M.R. James ghost story. There’s also a beautifully handled transition early on when Bava cuts from a train – the scene of the first murder – thundering through the night to an obviously false shot of model train carriages. At first it seems as if Bava’s tried to get away with matching stock footage to a cheaply-effected close-up, then the director pulls back for the reveal: it’s a genuine model railway layout in Harrington’s old childhood bedroom, the first of two significant scenes which see the troubled Harrington surrounded by the things of childhood. It would take Argento’s masterpiece ‘Deep Red’ before the giallo depicted childhood mementoes in as fetishized and sinister a manner as Bava did here.

The English language title does ‘Il rosso segno della follia’ a disservice, perking anticipation for a sleazy and sexualized stalk ‘n’ slash opus. What Bava actually delivers is a well-thought-out, eye-on-the-ball piece of work that continually monkeys with your perceptions and expectations and proves as inarguably as ‘Blood and Black Lace’ or ‘A Bay of Blood’ just how important his contribution was to the genre.

GIALLO SUNDAY: The Killer Must Kill Again

Pop quiz.

Question 1: you’re a businessman with a cashflow problem, a rich wife who’s pissed off at you because of your philanderings and a business deal that’s about to go south. Do you:

(a) start seriously making it up to your wife in the hope that she’ll bail you out;

(b) file for bankruptcy and get realistic about the fact that divorcing proceedings are on the horizon;

(c) commit suicide and rid the world of your loathsome presence because you’re basically an incredibly shitty human being; or

(d) have a blazing row with your wife, storm out, and drive to a pay phone near the docks so that you can ring your mistress?

Question 2: while at the docks, you witness a psychotic-looking individual pushing a car containing a dead woman into the water. Do you:

(a) hide;

(b) sprint for your car and get the fuck out of there at top speed;

(c) redial and this time ask to be put through to the police;

(d) approach the gentleman in question and offer your silence re: his corpse-disposal activities in return for killing your wife?

If you answered (d) to either of these questions, you have just demonstrated a mindset akin to that of Giorgio Mainardi (George Hamilton), the cold bastard who sets the events of Luigi Cozzi’s ‘The Killer Must Kill Again’ in motion, and you might want to consider logging off and contacting a mental health professional.

The anonymous killer (Michel Antoine) – a gaunt, gimlet-eyed and utterly emotionless psychopath who could probably kill with his thousand-yard stare , never mind his recourse to strangulation and stabbing – goes along with Maindardi’s request, mainly owing to (a) Mainardi nicking his monogrammed (and therefore identifiable) lighter and (b) Mainardi offering twenty thousand on top of the lighter’s return. The plan goes swimmingly until the killer’s Mercedes – a car as distinctive as his lighter – is nicked by stud muffin Luca (Alessio Orano) in an attempt to impress his hoity-toity girlfriend Laura (Cristina Galbo).

Luca laughs off the fact that he’s just committed grand theft auto, something he wouldn’t be laughing about if he was aware that Mrs Mainardi’s lifeless body was in the trunk. In order to facilitate the removal of said cadaver – as well as to teach these wise-ass kids a lesson (although a murderer getting on his moral high horse about having his car stolen strikes me as a tad hypocritical) – our skull-faced killer goes off in hot pursuit. Something he achieves by stealing a car himself. Hmmm, definite tendencies to hypocrisy here.

Meanwhile, the police turn up at Mainardi’s hideously decorated apartment, led by a tenacious inspector (Eduardo Fajardo) who smells a rat from the off.

All this within the first twenty-five minutes. Excellent, I was thinking, rubbing my hands, the stage is set for a tense game of cat-and-mouse as the killer tracks down Luca and Laura, while Mainardi and the detective dance a verbal pas de deux as the investigation uncovers more inconsistencies and the questions get thornier .Good old-fashioned Italian exploitation shot through with Hitchcockian tension. Yeah, baby!

And there’s no doubt that Cozzi takes his pointers from Hitch. The business with the lighter recalls ‘Strangers on a Train’, as does the almost homoerotic undercurrent between Mainardi and the killer. Luca and Laura’s journey to the coast in the stolen car – specifically in the attention they invite from a suspicious cop – recalls Marion Crane’s flight with the purloined money in ‘Psycho’. The abandoned beachside property Luca is heading for, and at which much of the nasty final act takes place, is a stand in for the Bates Motel, the windmill in ‘Foreign Correspondent’ or the remote farmhouse in ‘Torn Curtain’.


Unfortunately, Cozzi doesn’t pull off his set-pieces with the same brilliance as Sir Alfred (how many directors could?) and a long middle section with the killer following Luca and Laura drains of tension the longer it goes on. The cuts back to Mainardi vs the inspector become increasingly less frequent and the mechanics of the web of deceit Mainardi tries to weave to satisfy his interrogator’s questions is quickly dispensed with.

That Luca and Laura are a fairly unlikeable couple who spend most of their time bickering adds to the tedium, while the genuine bits of suspense or flashes of violence are misogynistic to the hilt. Perhaps more so than the norm even for such a notoriously phallocentric subgenre as the giallo. Cozzi’s harshest directorial decision is to intercut a sleazily eroticized rape scene with a graphic (consensual) sex scene, scoring the whole grubby sequence to an ‘Elvira Madigan’-style tinkling piano theme.

Overall, women are treated like shit in this film, starting with the anonymous murder victim whose broken body is tossed in the back of a car which in turn is unceremoniously consigned to the deep. Mainardi’s contempt for his wife extends to her continued existence on the planet. Luca compels Laura to expose her breasts to distract an attendant during a gas station robbery. The ditzy blonde (Femi Benussi) whom Luca picks up after an argument with Laura is written in purely to up the sex and violence quota.


If you can get over that – and the draggy middle section – ‘The Killer Must Kill’ again is a decent thriller with good turns from Hilton and, particularly, Antoine. His skeletal visage and unblinking intensity are unforgettable, as much an avatar of the cold and unmerciful workings of fate as Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in ‘No Country for Old Men’.

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.”

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Femi Benussi in Strip Nude for Your Killer

Review tomorrow, once I've developed a linguistic technique sarcastic enough to describe how awful this unapologetic smear of sleaze truly is.