Movies

Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) Directed by Sergio Martino, music by Bruno Nicolai. I established an eight-word rule years ago - if a movie has eight words in the title, watch out. This has twelve and thus transcends the rule. In this one the black-clad slasher with the big hooked knife is pushed off into a subplot and the story focuses on the ugly relationship between a dissolute unsuccessful writer sucking down J&B Scotch and his abused wife (Anita Strindberg of the wonderfully sculpted countenance) in a decaying villa. A gang of Party Hippies, a motocross race, and a visiting niece (Edwige Fenech takes on the nudity duties) who sleeps with everyone - EVERYONE, add more detail. Once you get hipped to how the scheme is set up and who is really behind everything, and figure out that a major subplot is lifted from a famous literary source, there are few surprises left in the last few minutes, but the sheer lurid excess keeps it rolling along. They really don't make them like this any more. 6/10

Anita Strindberg and the BLOODY SCISSORS

J&B Scotch - Buy it by the case!

Death Walks on High Heels (1971) Directed by Luciano Ercoli, music by Stelvio Cipriani. A fortune in diamonds is the object of the black-clad slasher and it is extremely helpful that one of the possible possessors of it is a Parisian strip-tease artist. Set in Paris and England, but everybody still speaks Italian. The settings are interesting and colorful, the story convoluted and puzzling, with everyone a suspect and participant, and a big flip-around at the end. It doesn't get real stabby, but one of the main characters is an eye surgeon for some gross-out effect. Gets an extra point for the plot structure, which really goes beyond what you might expect. 7/10

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.

Movies

Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971) Directed by Paolo Cavara, who got his start in film as a shockumentarian with Mondo Cane. The gimmick this time is that the black-clad gloved fiend murders naked women by paralyzing them with a needle in the back of the brain and cuts their bellies open while they are paralyzed and fully conscious, as explained by a scientist in a white lab coat and stock footage of a fight between a spider and a Tarantula Hawk Wasp. This seems more a transitional phase between the Giallo and Eurocrime forms since the protagonist is not the woman in peril but the disillusioned police detective, played by Giancarlo Giannini. This is not a very strong story, rather baroque - lots of little offshoots spiraling into dead ends which were never made to seem important in the first place. There were some interesting scenes and settings, such as a room full of mannequins in the back of a furrier's shop, but nothing super-great.In fact the most interesting part of it for me was seeing mod decorative props re-used from Seven Bloodstained Orchids. Kept my interest but wasn't really enthralling. 5/10

Rectilinear b/w stereophonograph and abstract paintings in

Black Belly of the Tarantula

... and in Seven Bloodstained Orchids

Movies

I have decided to enjoy some Italian thrillers for the next week or so.

Seven Bloodstained Orchids (1972) Directed by Umberto Lenzi who would later gain notice for the grisliest zombie and cannibal movies, this is an exemplary entry into the giallo genre. Which is to say it is an example of it. A black-gloved killer is murdering women and leaving behind an enigmatic talisman. The protagonists must discover how the women are connected to prevent more murders. The story is excessively contrived with multiple layers of misdirection and concealment so that when discoveries are made they provide little emotional relief. It is made as lurid as possible with gratuitous female nudity and gay junkie drug parties, and the psychological implications of the violent attacks on vulnerable women at that sociohistorical period are obvious and have probably been investigated deeply and repeatedly. The two really good things about this are the settings and soundtrack. Each interior location has a completely different style of art on the walls, and one fabulous country hideaway is laden with as much freakish Italo-mod design as it can hold. Riz Ortolani's harpsichord-based themes are the perfect accompaniment to the numerous scenes of a convertible sports car tearing down country highways. 5/10

Seven Notes in Black (a.k.a. The Psychic) 1977, directed by Lucio Fulci (who also would go on to the most gruesome of zombie movies), is much more sophisticated in every way. Its basic conceit is perfect for a mystery thriller - a woman's clairvoyant visions of murder are a set of disconnected snapshots, puzzle pieces that can be put together in any pattern. This concept of providing the primary clues without a context works extremely well in setting up the maze of discoveries which must follow. Jennifer O'Neil must first convince a world of scoffing men that her visions are valid, then work with them to discover where and when and who. This seems to have passed beyond the crude emotional reactionism to societal change evident in Seven Bloodstained Orchids and most other films in the genre, but relies still on a woman in peril who must enlist the aid and strength of men. I think it is these social settings that interest me as much as the simple enjoyment of making it through a contorted plot. 7/10