WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Eye in the Labyrinth

Architecture porn is as integral to the giallo as operatic death scenes, bottles of J&B and winsome brunettes in peril, and just to make sure he’s got our attention from the off director Mario Caiano doubles down on the architecture porn in the opening sequence as psychiatrist Luca (Horst Frank) flees a knife-wielding assailant through the stark angles of a deserted building constructed in the brutalist style. His escape attempt fails. A knife rises and falls. Red gushes.

Turns out it’s a dream from which Luca’s girlfriend Julie (Rosemary Dexter) – Caiano doubles down on the winsome brunette factor, as well – awakes in a state of agitation. She gets even more agitated when she realises he’s disappeared. Enquiries at his clinic end with a deranged patient shouting a single word over and over. Cross-referencing it with a note in Luca’s appointments diary, Julie realises it’s the name of a small town and takes off to find him.

Arriving at said village, she’s coolly appraised by ex-pat American Frank (Adolfo Celli), and almost lured to her death by a manipulative local who directs her to a dangerously unstable building. If the opening sequence was giallo 101 architecture fetishism, then Julie’s hesitant exploration of the ruined house is the diametric opposite. It is to David Hemming’s 15-minute interrogation of a supposedly empty villa in ‘Deep Red’ what a three-minute punk single is to grand Italian opera.

Not that Julie seems to be doing herself any favours, engaging with all manner of dubious characters seemingly on a whim, and allowing herself to be led from situation to situation in wide-eyed complicity. Her attempt at amateur sleuthing is as if Nancy Drew were ten years older with a massive reduction in both IQ and the length of her skirts.

Eventually, she finds herself at the house of stern eccentric Gerda (Alida Valli), who seems to have some history with Frank. Gerda is playing host to a group of oddballs including gigolo Louis (Michael Maien), photographer Toni (Sybil Danning), actor Thomas (Gigi Rizzi), nervous and shifty Eugene (Franco Ressel) and mentally deficient teenager Saro (Benjamin Lev) who enjoys spying on pretty girls and painting weird canvases. Repeated close-ups of his latest opus and Frank’s clunky exposition that Saro has no imagination and can only paint what he sees point to a big clue. Or is it a red herring?

The coastal setting of ‘Eye in the Labryinth’ is apposite: entire shoals of red herring drift through the film. From the weird townspeople who are basically just there to wrongfoot you until Julie gets to Gerda’s villa, to the cat and mouse shenanigans at the villa itself, the narrative is less an exercise in plotting than an extended shell game. Indeed, the focus almost imperceptibly shifts from Julie to Frank as the amateur sleuth, the latter furthering his own agenda as he probes information from Gerda’s house guests.

Not that Frank ever becomes the default hero. When he’s not busy saving Julie from assassination attempts, he’s unsubtly trying to force himself on her. Nor does anyone else on the guest list emerge as even remotely sympathetic, particularly when it comes to light that Luca was known to them and all of them had good reason to wish him ill. Revelations about Luca quickly reveal him as a total bastard, at which point the film makes a sharp swerve from Agatha-Christie-with-topless-sunbathing and goes careering off in the direction of Roeg/Cammell style psychological head-fuckery. All of it accompanied by the most out of place lounge jazz soundtrack this side of the filmography of Jess Franco.

Caiano isn’t a name readily associated with gialli – he’s probably better known for a run of polizia in the vein of Fernando di Leo and the grubby exploitationer ‘Nazi Love Camp 27’ – but he does sterling work here, maintaining an excellent pace and getting the most out of the location work. ‘Eye of the Labyrinth’ is an incongruously sun-dappled example of the genre, and this as much as anything contributes to the film’s woozy and slightly disconnected aesthetic. An aesthetic that’s entirely in the service of the final reel.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Red Queen Kills Seven Times

"It’s just like a soap opera," remarks one employee of upmarket fashion house Springe to another as aristocratic photographer Kitty Wildenbruck (Barbara Bouchet) organises a shoot while her lover, and the vice president of Springe, Martin Hoffman (Ugo Pagliai) flits around.

With its haute couture setting (a la ‘Blood and Black Lace’), designer apartments, family conflicts, dark secrets from the past, and its myriad casual affairs, petty jealousies and everyday back-stabbing (in both senses of the word), Emilio Miraglia’s stylish giallo certainly has more than a touch of daytime melodrama about it. Only with a quota of knifings, shootings, drownings and nudity from which ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ would run screaming.

Springe is thrown into disarray with the murder of the firm’s president Hans Meyer (Bruno Bertocci), knifed while cruising for a hooker to make up a threesome with his bit on the side, the magnificent model Lulu Palm (Sybil Danning). Lulu and Hoffman had exchanged harsh words earlier, the VP threatening to fire her once he replaces Meyer.

Lulu’s not the only person apprehensive at Hoffman’s succession. Secretary Rosemary Muller (Maria Pia Giancaro), who had also been involved with Meyer, disagrees with Hoffman over his policies for the company. Nonetheless their rivalry and ambitious drive to succeed at Springe lead them to attempts at ingratiation with Hoffman.

Meanwhile, Hoffman himself is juggling his relationship with Kitty and his reluctant commitments to his mentally disturbed and hospitalized wife. Kitty, too, is juggling various issues: Hoffman’s inability fully to commit to her; guilt over the accidental death of her sister Evelyn; the recent death of her exceptionally wealthy – that’s exceptionally wealthy as in the dude owns a freaking castle – grandfather Tobias (Rudolf Schindler); and the reappearance of Evelyn’s white trash boyfriend Peter (Fabrizio Moresco) who’s not buying her story that Evelyn has moved to the States and is incommunicado. Then there’s the business of how Tobias’s last will and testament will affect her relationship with her remaining sister Franziska (Marina Malfatti) and Franziska’s husband Herbert (Nino Korda), both of whom were complicit in keeping Evelyn’s demise under wraps.

With Tobias’s death followed quickly by Meyers’s – and, this being a giallo, plenty of other offings in the offing – Kitty starts coming apart, fearing that the old family curse is coming true.

Oh yeah. Sorry. I forgot to mention the curse.

‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’ opens with the infant Kitty and Evelyn playing with their dolls in the grounds of the castle. Evelyn steals Kitty’s favourite doll and goes haring off into the castle. Kitty catches up with her in Tobias’s study where she’s staring in fascination at a macabre canvas depicting a noblewoman in black stabbing a noblewoman in red. Seemingly mesmerized by it, she grabs a knife and goes all ‘Deep Red’ on the doll’s ass. Or rather its head.

Tobias calms the sisters (by now locked in a hair-pulling tussle) and tells them the story behind the picture. Reader’s Digest condensed version: the red queen and the black queen; sisters; one kills the other; the murdered sibling returns from the dead to kill seven victims, the last being her murderer. The curse is said afflict a pair of sisters every generation. The tale told, Tobias despatches them to play in the garden. Evelyn’s malicious behaviour towards Kitty in the opening credits montage makes the parallel explicit.

Fast forward fourteen years and an appearance of the sinister figure of the red queen presages each of the murders. Is Evelyn striving for vengeance from beyond the grave or is the perpetrator more earthly? With its cast of suspicious characters, proliferation of motives and plethora of herrings as red as the titular monarch, ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’ is what Agatha Christie would have written if she’d got drunk with M.R. James and Coco Chanel and decided that what her whodunits really needed was less in the way of Belgian detectives and genteel Englishwomen and a whole lot more cleavage and outré fashion choices.

Excepting a weirdly integrated rape scene (which serves the questionable narrative purpose of depicting an ostensibly villainous character at their darkest only to paint them, immediately afterwards, as a would-be saviour foiled at the crucial moment by the killer’s intervention), ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’ is hugely entertaining, beautifully shot, playful in its circumvention of audience expectations and showcases an impressive talent on Miraglia’s part for misdirection and directorial sleight of hand. Two scenes in particular are amongst the best examples of cinematic find-the-lady that I’ve ever seen, one hinging on the ownership of a certain make and model of car, the other in the denouement where a revelation that most directors would be happy to end the movie on is superseded less than a minute later by a reveal that completely recontextualizes what came before.

If Miraglia never quite reached the heights of Bava or Argento at their finest, it’s only because he never quite goes for the grand guignol of, say, ‘Blood and Black Lace’ or ‘Deep Red’. His filmmaking style is more studied and (dare I say it?) classical whereas Bava and Argento are masters of feverish operatic baroque stylizations.

(Yes, I did just type “feverish operatic baroque stylizations” without any punctuation. No, I will not edit. Yes, I have been drinking.)

Ultimately, while my use of the Queen’s English perhaps deserves to be called into question, there should be no similar doubts about ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’. It’s a minor classic of the genre, deliriously ludicrous in some places and genuinely intriguing in others. Plus it’s as packed with eye candy as a giallo can get without Edwige Fenech featuring in the cast.