Movies

The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972) Directed by Emilio Miraglia, also responsible for The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave. Of the two I think the latter is the superior film. This is the story of a centuries-old family curse in which every hundred years the evil sister kills seven people, the good sister being the seventh. Guess what year it is. It must all be a scheme of some sort, because the evil sister in this century is dead. Maybe. It's different from the run of the genre in that the mad stabber is a woman in a red cape who doesn't reserve her stabbing to women who have just taken their shirts off without locking all the doors and windows, and its tone is a bit more gothic than usual. What I found most enjoyable was the fact that the good sister, the Woman in Peril, is a fashion photographer so there were lots of fabulous clothes in picturesque settings. Also the most appalling and claustrophobic wallpaper I have ever seen. 6/10

The whole room is like this.

Death Laid an Egg (1968) Directed by Giulio Questi who, unlike these other directors, was not a studio hack - his list of works is quite brief. This is clearly influenced by the experimental approaches of the day and comes just short of being a satire of genre film. It is stylish and stylized and its ideas are unconventional. Set in an ultramodern automatic poultry farm, it's not a repetitive mad slasher film as it first makes you believe. The scenes and settings are striking, the dialog is slightly eccentric, and the addition of the poultry motif, with bizarre ad campaigns and the development of limbless spherical mutant chickens take it into the social-commentary realm of Godard and William Klein. This is quite an odd film for Gina Lollobrigida to be in, and in the dubbed print I saw, she is voiced by someone else. Not always what I would call a good movie, but overall quite a memorable experience. 8/10

The Case of the Scorpion's Tail (1972) Directed by Sergio Martino, one of the studio hacks referred to above, who has made some memorable and atrocious entries into western, giallo, cannnibal, post-apocalypse, and animal attack genres. A million dollar life insurance payout is the motivation for the leatherclad throat-slasher. The story proceeds rather mechanically - every attack is followed by a meeting in which theories are exchanged, then people are sent out to look for clues until the next attack. It's all explained in the end. The most notable thing about this for me was how frequently bottles of J&B Scotch intruded into the side of the scene. Kept my interest, but much of that had to do with the sculpted face and hemispherical bosoms of Anita Strindberg.

Three minutes into the movie - what are they drinking? J&B

What's that on the coffee table? J&B

Great by the TV - J&B!

Note the clamshell flip phone next to the TV. That's another thing I love about these, the endless variety of telephones.