I don't think you're ready for these gialli. Even if they're five months overdue.
Okay, so I'm a little bit late for Giallo July with this. By at least a couple of months. But, y'know... I've been a bit busy. Life not only finds a way, as Ian Malcolm so sagely spake, it can bloody well get in the way too. Still, better late than never I guess, and as the vacillating eye of Providence (that's not an H.P. Lovecraft reference: this is giallo) there's the event of Gialloween that I can repurpose and aim for. I'll let the wonderful Alex the Bookubus fill in the meaty deets on that for you if you care to find out.
'Meaty deets'. Fucking hell. What have I become? And anyway as you can tell, dear reader, I also missed the dates for the Gialloween weekend as well. Fingers crossed I can get this finished for actual Halloween*. I swear I'm getting worse than Douglas Adams for deadlines. The lines are dots to me.
(*Reader, I didn't. I should definitely have finished the piece before the 31st of October, but as I type these words I've come down with either a terrible case of the flu or a dose of the COVID, causing a fourth delay to getting this done. A very happy, very belated Samhain to all of you at home as well as a merry and maybe messy Christmas and the most joyous of New Years.)
And so Giallo July hath once more come and gone. That time of the year in which some of the braver and hardier denizens of Booktube venture into the sanguineous depths of that particular subgenre, replete is it is - in both the printed word and celluloid ribbon versions - with murder, mystery and suspense. Which, if memory serves, was the title of an ITV strand on weekend evenings with a truly terrifying (for a child) opening logo featuring thunder and lightning tearing the night sky asunder that showed a mixture of American TV movies - including occasional edition of franchises like Columbo and Ironside - featuring the titular themes. Certainly the murder and mystery parts: I suppose whether they were genuinely suspenseful or not is subjective.
For the as yet uninitiated, a brief history: the nomenclature for the subgenre, 'giallo', is the Italian word for the colour yellow. This was the hue (and cry!) selected for the pulpy paperback printings from the publisher Mondadori whose Italic translations of authors such as Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace made a curious yellow the shade of mystery, murder and mayhem; though as we shall learn, there are many other colours of the dark.
Gialloween seemed as good a time as any for me to finally take a deeper dive (making a bigger splash, mayhap, if one wants to get Hockney about it) into the directorial career of Sergio Martino. "Who he?" you cry - I shall endeavour to elucidate.
The man who would arguably be the fourth face on a putative Mount Rushmore of Italian genre directors - after Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci - Martino was born in Rome itself on the 19th of July 1938 (Wouldn't it have been nice if I'd managed to have written this in time to post on the day of his eighty seventh birthday? Alas, I only realised too late, so it was either write this as a belated tribute or put it off until next year [and at this point of repeated delays and disappointments I may as well have done, to be honest with myself]) into a family already steeped in the cinematic tradition. His grandfather was Gennaro Righelli who had been directing films since 1910 including a 1927 version of Svengali starring genre legends Paul Wegener (the Golem himself) and Alexander Granach (Nosferatu's Renfield knock-off, Knock) and had been a pioneer, helming the first Italian talking picture The Song of Love (La Canzone dell'amore) - an adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's In Silenzio - in 1930. Sergio's older brother by almost five years Luciano Martino also worked in the film field as a writer and director but was best-known as a pretty prolific producer who would work with his sibling on many famed and feted entries in the joyous giallo division, a number of instalments of which starred Italian scream queen par excellence, the absolutely incandescent Edwige Fenech (who at the time was the wife of Luciano; lucky Luciano I calls 'im), the gorgeous Franco-Italian actress who I think looks a bit like Alejandra Villareal Velez from The Warning if one squints just slightly. And if you don't know who they are, I'm afraid that I cannot help you and we cannot be friends. Because you are surely going to hell.
So am I of course, just for different reasons.
"Blood has a strange effect on her. It excites and repels her at the same time."
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The first pairing of Martino and the Fenech fox, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (originally Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh and also known as Blade of the Ripper Stateside and by the oddly absurd moniker of Next! in Britain) commenced filming in August 1970 and was released on the fifteenth of January 1971 for a limited Italian run, gaining a wider release in its home country a month later in February. The story starts with a quotation from the Freud dude himself before we join a mysterious driver on the night time streets of the capital of Osterreich (the film was known as The Killer of Vienna in Austria and Germany) scoping out the ladies of the night line up to select the latest victim of his slasher serial killer campaign. As this is going on, diplomat Neil Wardh (Alberto de Mendoza, familiar to fans of Euro horror as the Temu Rasputin-a-like Pujardov the mad monk in Eugenio Martin's superb Horror Express) and his emotionally and erotically neglected wife Julie (Fenech) fly in to be met at the airport by a couple of business acquaintances, leading to his neglected younger beautiful bride to take the ride home alone - a trip that involves a police traffic stop and the following exchange between her driver and the cops:
"Was it Sex Fiend?"
"Yes, and he's still using the razor."
Educational and informative. That's what we need. And a slasher wreaking a campaign of blood-flecked terror just might be what an unholy trinity of men conspiring to do away with a certain woman who intersects their lives might need as a cover for their Machiavellian machinations. In what might prove surprising news the initial script from Ernesto Gastaldi (probably European cinema's first horror specialist, starting in the genre in 1960 with The Vampire and the Ballerina and following it up with such monstrous delights as Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory, The Horrible Dr Hichcock, The Whip and the Body in 61, '62 and '63 respectively following by the feral flurry of Terror in the Crypt, The Vampire of the Opera and The Long Hair of Death all in '64) did not contain the giallo staple of the black gloved killer, being more in the mould of the '60s Gaslight influenced proto gialli before Martino suggested the addition - doubtless with an eye on the developing trends post Argento's L'ucello dalle piume di cristallo from the previous year.
At a party, Julie's fast friend Carol (Conchita "Christina" Airoldi) introduces her to George (George Hilton, also apparently a member of the extended Martino family), Carol's Australian (at least according to the subtitles, the dub actor in the English language version certainly isn't attempting 'Strine) - but sadly for Morrissey fans, not Alsatian - cousin. Sadly this budding romantic diversion from her ailing marriage and cold, perpetually absent husband is complicated by the persistent attentions of former lover Jean (Ivan Rassimov, with his devilish smile) with whom Julie was entangled in an obsessive sado-masochistic relationship which he keeps sending her notes reminding her about. Surely we must all feel for Julie's dilemma - looking for an alternative to her staid and stagnant domesticity with her husband and suddenly spoiled for choice trapped betwixt George Hilton's 'unrealistic handsomeness' and the dark magnetism of Ivan Rassimov, possibly giallo's hottest hunks. At least, according to the brilliant Katie of the Night on Youtube in both her top ten giallo actors video and her giallo hunks collab with Selis from Sweet 'n' Spooky. Essential viewing.
"Worst part of you is the best thing you've got, and it will always be mine - Jean."
The messages from the past paramour continue, and Julie vacillates betwixt husband, blossoming new relationship and being lured back into the thrilling danger of her her old lifestyle. Poor George. What's he meant to make of all these mixed signals? Almost like if a girl got increasingly flirty with one, including revealing her kinks ("Are you into choke fucking?") and then suddenly went as frigid as a nun in winter and talked about how much she loved her boyfriend. Can you imagine such a thing happening? No, nor can I. Ahem. Anyway... I'll get over that one day, I'm sure.
Is Jean not only a stalker, forever lurking on the peripheries of Julie's mind and vision, but also the maniacal Ripper? Or is far more going on than we or she might possibly know?
"Now I know you're trying to get away from me... But your vice is like a room locked from the inside and only I have the key."
This gnomic and evocative simile makes me smile, and portends a later Martino joint that was to come the following year. We'll get there, don't worry.
We suddenly smash-cut to a spot of Spanish scuba diving (these sunny Spanish seascapes situated in Sitges, famed for its Festival of Fantastic Film) and the film suddenly goes all Thunderball, with Hilton as 007 and Fenech as Domino. Actually, Edwige would have made a marvellous Bond girl; her fellow giallo ingenue Barbara Bouchet of course featured in the '67 parody version of Casino Royale (Daliah Lavi too, now that I think about it). Julie and George's idyll suddenly swerves from Thunderball to Casino Royale (the proper one) as Julie realises that her paradise has been invaded by a malevolent pursuer: but rather than the one-eyed Adolph Gettler who pursues Vesper Lynd, it appears to be the undead spectre of Jean who haunts her steps.
With a cry of "You're my wife now!" Neil channels The League of Gentlemen's Papa Lazarou. But a jealous husband who's planning to off the straying missus and pin the blame on the serial killer who happens to be running rampant is the least of Mrs Wardh's (the odd spelling, incidentally, is down to a real window by the name of Ward who allegedly threatened legal action for defamation) worries as multiple men in her life turn out to be plotting against it and Julie is trapped unconscious in the kitchen filling with gas, an ice cube melting under the latch to seemingly render this a locked room mystery, some real Jonathan Creek shit.
Accompanied by a wonderfully haunting score by composer Nora Orlandi, including the repeated haunting electronic organ and choral refrain over the electric organ in 'Dies Irae' ('Day of Wrath') - sung by Orlandi herself, without a credit for her vocals - that acts like a motif for Julie's fragile and fraying psyche that would by recycled / repurposed by Quentin Tarantino for the scene where Michael Madsen's Budd contemplates his oncoming death in Kill Bill Volume 2, the film builds on previous dark entries of Italian cinema like the Luciano Martino-produced The Sweet Body of Deborah and Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body to deliver a heady mix of sex and violence that set the trend for the giallo pictures of the '70s.
Killer in a wetsuit. I know, I know, it's serious.
Absent is Edwige Fenech, who was pregnant at the time (Lucky Luciano striking again) of filming, but on the bright side we have Galli/Stewart subbing for her (now there's an image) as our lead in the earlier part of the movie but with the Psycho-style twist - or a "change of horse", as writer Gastaldi phrased it - with Galli's Lisa initially presented as our central character to follow until she's offed around half an hour into the movie, after which Anita Strindberg (who also featured in Lucio Fulci's giallo A Lizard in a Woman's Skin the same year, and would go on to be utilised again by Martino the following year) fills the designer pumps of giallo girl as the indefatigable investigative reporter Cleo Dupont. So maybe if Fenech had been available she'd have played Cleo rather than Lisa. Carry on, Cleo - the scene where Cleo is menaced in her apartment lit in a crepuscular green lighting a la Mario Bava or Argento would seem to affirm her as our lead to root for, so I think this would have been Edwige's part for the taking.
Even though this was filmed and released after Strange Vice, in some ways the film feels more like the earlier Lenzi-lensed jet set gialli. Like Strange Vice's third-act change of scene and change of style from Vienna to the Catalonian coast, the switch of locale from still Swinging Seventies London (replete with requisite red buses and 'phone boxes) to the sun-drenched Athens locations ("A black-gloved killer stalks the streets of Athens" as the trailer tells us) giving the film a Fleming-esque travelogue sweep. Lisa makes her way to the Helios-blessed climes of Hellas after her husband Kurt's life is curtly cut short in an aeroplane 'accident', leading her to inherit a lot of money much to the suspicions of the authorities including urbane insurance investigator Peter Lynch (Hilton), Interpol agent John Stanley (de Mendoza) and police Inspector Stavros (Pistilli). Lisa meets her early fate at the gloves hands of the eternal black-clad murderer - who alternates the requisite black hat with variations in jet such as what looks like biking leathers and even a diving wetsuit - who also goes after involved parties such as the late Kurt's Greek lover Lara Florakis (Reynaud) during whose murder the blade of the straight razor poking through the crack in the door to hitch open the latch is very similar to the scene where Stefania Cassini's Sara Simms ends up amidst the razor wire in Suspiria; her henchman Sharif (Luis Barboo, another Franco star as he'd go on to essay the mute assistant Morpho in Jesus's batshit blessing Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein as well as Redbeard - no relation to Al from Youtube - from the 1982 John Milius sword 'n' sorcery classic Conan the Barbarian) don't like it. It's up to plucky girl reporter Cleo to untangle the threads of this web of mayhem and intrigue. Scorpions don't spin webs of course, but they're arachnids so I feel it still works.
Inspired by the scene where George Hilton quite obviously turns a bottle of J&B whisky so that the label faces the camera for the gods of product placement, I issue the challenge: if you the viewer are feeling especially brave and/or foolish, you too could try the giallo J&B drinking game: simply take a shot every single time you spot a bottle of J&B - but only if you live within wheelbarrow distance of a hospital and/or have your own stomach pump, as there is as definite and real a risk of death as if you were a sex worker in a slasher film. Attempt it at your own risk.
Cleo's deep dive discovery leads to the realisation that she is all at sea with the killer, and culminates in a Dead Calm-esque climactic sequence on the boat, with Peter suddenly code-switching from the Sam Neill to insane Billy Zane roles - if the flippers don't fit, you should probably quit. Lynch's citation of a quote from "a famous Frenchman" shows that he has been reading Balzac, and should knock back some Prozac.
Linger on, Pale Blue Eyes.
With Fenech at possibly her most luminously alluring (a highly contested award, it must be said) as the psychologically fragile Jane Harrison, who is suffering from recurring nightmares and high anxiety due to the knockout combo of the childhood trauma of her and Barbara's mother's death and a recent car crash which caused a miscarriage, For this trauma, she is prescribed drugs by her significant other, Richard Steele (Hilton) - wait, Dick Steele?!? Definitely a porn name, right? - rather off the books. He's not a doctor, he's a sales rep FFS. Can't be legal. Little blue pills? I don't think Edwige needs 'em. I certainly wouldn't. Feeling isolated and abandoned due to often being alone in their swanky London flat in Putney's swanky Kenilworth Court with only shady recreational pharmacology for company, Jane turns to her mysterious and alluring neighbour Mary (Marina Malfatti) who also feels that she has the cure for all Jane's ills - prescribing a visit to a Sabbat. Because, you know, why not.
There was a big 'black magic in suburbia' craze of the late '60s and early '70s (as detailed pretty well by Al Redbeard on videos such as this on his channel), akin to the weirdo heavy metal meets Dungeons & Dragons Satanic Panic of the mid '80s. Devil worshippers in an apartment block (I know, I know it's serious) a la Roman Polanski's 1968 adaptation of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, and Paul Wendkos' 1971 The Mephisto Waltz starring future Hawkeye from M*A*S*H Alan Alda and the lovely Barbara Parkins - a still of whom from said film leading a human headed dog on a leash stuck in my mind and haunted my dreams as a child. Jane didn't sign up for a greedy girls party - certainly not one where the liquid required to be greedy for is puppy's blood - at yet another recognisable location: the Satanic house was obviously typecast as a devilish edifice as West Sussex's Wykehurst Park would play the legendary Hell House itself the following year John Hough's wonderful adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel. Also, the mysterious man with unnaturally pale blue eyes (it's Ivan Rassimov again) who has been haunting Jane's steps makes an appearance and the cult's Satanist leader (D.B. McBride?!? What a name for a Temu Mocata. Sounds more like the kind of guy that would pull off a daring heist, leap out of a plane and disappear than someone who'd conjure the goat of Mendes) played by Julian Ugarte of Paul Naschy's werewolf debut La marca del hombre lobo with shiny metallic Fu Manchu talons looks like a cross between Mike Raven and Aslan Tennant - which was my little brother's nickname for Small from Big Chef, Little Chef as he thought he looked like David Tennant's Tenth Doctor but with a mane. We're getting into the deepest of deep cut references here when I'm dropping jokes only one other person on the planet would appreciate, and he doesn't even read my blog. The git.
There's also the recognisable autumnal environs of Putney's Bishop's Park, a menacing aura of dread belying the bucolic mise en scene, where Pegory Greck met Troughton's Father Wossface in The Omen. Clearly that area of London was rife with Satan in the Seventies. "Not all black magic is mumbo jumbo" as Rutger Hauer so rightly said in the Guinness ads. And who are we to argue with Roy Batty? It being the swinging early Seventies, nobody seems too fussed about using protection at the Sabbat gangbangs. One would think that winding up with a bun in the oven from all that coven lovin' would be a hazard to best be avoided. Oneiric. psychedelic and atmosphere-drenched, accentuated by an excellent Bruno Nicolai score, All the Colours of the Dark is a beautiful nightmare of paranoia and suburban Satanic swinger's shindigs that leaves an impression on the memory like a half-remembered dream or vitreous opacities dancing at the edges of the waking mind's field of vision. What's that in the corner of your eye?
He's coming to get you, Barbara.
"Hello there, Satan!"
We are here introduced to the struggling writer Oliviero Rouvigny and his much put-upon wife Irina (Luigi Pistilli and Anita Strindberg respectively, returning to the Martino fold after The Case of the Scorpion's Tail); the past his prime alcoholic author routinely holds drunken orgies in his picturesque countryside villa, inviting all sorts of hippy riff raff round for a gangbang and subjecting his tormented spouse to emotional and physical abuse. We also have the awful Oliviero's Oedipal obsession with his late mother, whose portrait hangs upon the wall overlooking these Bacchanalian proceedings. Forget the Freudian frolics of Julie Wardh - pertinent though they were to that film's Viennese setting - Siggy (as we Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure alumni know him) would have a field day with his guy. He may harbour a sublimated desire to mate with his mater, but he's soon going to meet his maker.
So sick, so perverse (oh wait, that's another film) we discover that in addition to degrading his spouse as well as their housemaid Brenda (Angela La Vorgna), whom he also routinely subjects to racial verbal abuse, the oh so odious Oliviero is also indulging in a fling with the feisty but fated Fausta (Daniela Giordano, who would go on to star in Paul Naschy's Spanish Inquisition - I bet nobody expected that), an ex-student whose bookshop the dissolute writer has been visiting to put his bookmark between her inviting pages if you know what I mean.
When bookshop doxy Fausta is offed, implicating Oliviero, and Brenda is killed rather nastily with a billhook rending her nice and tender flesh the shadowy mansion increasingly becoming a house of internecine intrigue and counter-plotting, like Gormenghast with gore. Gormenghastly? This is a house with secrets just waiting to be uncovered, some of them literally buried beneath the bowels of the building; "somebody's in my fruit cellar", as Evil Dead II's Henrietta would say but it doesn't want to stay there especially if the spectral Satanic cat has any say in the matter.
Seriously sleazy with a cast comprised of a cadre of thoroughly unlikeable and reprehensible characters doing - or planning to do - awful things to one another, Your Vice is like being dunked into the murky depths and taken on a tour of a Gothic sewer by Martino's masterful mounting of tension through the cinematography enhanced by another great Bruno Nicolai score; all anchored by an intense performance from Anita Strindberg that's a complete 180 degrees remove from her portrayal of Cleo in Scorpion's Tail.
Where WHORES meets SAWS!
Martino's next opus Torso was released under its original nomenclature of I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale (the rather literal The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence - vestiges of which made its way to the DVD release title of Torso - Carnal Violence) on January 4th 1973. The aforesaid DVD release also bore the legend "Where WHORES meet SAWS!" in lurid lettering on the front of the box, which as I recall earned me a suspicious look from the rather attractive girl behind the counter. Thanks a lot, Shameless releasing. Bad enough that the girl in the record shop doesn't think that I'm avant-garde enough without the lass in HMV thinking I'm some kind of a deviant. Alright, knowing I'm some kind of a deviant. I did buy The Beast in Space (and see here for more on that little gem) at the same time. Odd that it was Torso that earned me the glare, honestly. Maybe for a hot sparkle goth she was really conservative and vanilla and dull and I wouldn't have wanted to ask her out on a date anyway.
Yes, this is me coping. Anyway...
We open with a lecture on art at Perugia's university for foreign students, the specific artwork being the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, being delivered by professor Franz (John Richardson, as in the romancer of fur bikini-clad Raquel Welch in Hammer's One Million Years B.C. rather than the comedy panelist and ex Mr Lucy Beaumont) to a hall of students including honey blonde Jane (Suzy Kendall, Dario Argento's premier giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and the lovely brunette Dani (Tina Aumont). We also have the lovely Flo (Patrizia Adiutori) enticing us to go with the Flo (I'd love to, even risking the hazardous consequences of this particular date. Well worth it, I reckon) who meets a sadly early tragic end at the hands of the faceless killer in a Toolbox Murders-style balaclava/ski mask who's offing the campus's cuties.
Next up: Carol (Conchita Airoldi, Carol from Strange Vice... in this film as another killed Carol!), heartbroken after being dumped by her sugar daddy, takes off with a couple of biker guys to a very listless and un-happening orgy with terrible dancing. The complete opposite of the very happening happening that opens Mario Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon which had Edwige Fenech disco dancing like the video for Saint Motel's 'Just My Type'. Speaking of dolls as a metaphor for gialli victims, this film has the antagonist actually spell it out clear as day:
"They were only dolls... stupid dolls made out of flesh and blood... I hacked them to pieces like dolls."
Carol plodges through the muddy forest in her bare feet, and likely would catch her death from pneumonia if the masked killer didn't deliver it to her sooner
Wanting to get away from the slayings in Perugia (grimly amusing from today's point of view for those of us who are twisted is the realisation that the setting is the same, as well as 'foreign' Anglophone victim[s], as the notorious Amanda "Foxy Knoxy" Knox case) the girls head off to the countryside villa of Dani's slightly dodgy Uncle Nino (Carlo Alighiero), who likes to watch his nubile niece and her girlfriends when they're freshly showered and moist. And good for him, I'm not here to kink-shame. Also along for the trip are Ursula (Carla Brait) and her special friend Katya (Angela Covello) - Katya with her head nestled in Ursula's lap during the train trip, an openly Sapphic relationship that only becomes more explicit after they arrive at the mansion on a mountain top - as neither Shocking Blue nor Bananarana sang - and we get Ursula's Salome-esque dance of the veils and more lesbic canoodling. It's still representation even if it's exploitative is my take on it. And so all the young dudettes wind up riding to the villa on a tractor through the village at the foot of the mountain, ordering provisions to be delivered by the local yokels Withnail & I style. "Eggs and things", in the words of McGann's Marwood.
After Jane takes a rather nasty spill down the staircase, Luc Merenda's Doctor Roberto - which is almost a Beatles song, but not quite - prescribes painkillers for her busted ankle. Let's hope it doesn't wind up feeding... heh... Jane's addiction. Confined to bed and sleeping off the tablets for a while, Jane awakens from her somnolence to find the still unseen killer taking the corpses of the girls apart with a hacksaw, inspiring the DVD box strapline that I utilised above and was judged for so harshly. Still not over it.
Trapped alone in the villa, barred windows above a sheer cliff - like Jonathan Harker ensnared in Castle Dracula - Jane finds herself in the perilous predicament of having to deal with the killer while coping with a busted ankle like Laurie in Carpenter's '78 Halloween. Not that I necessarily think that Carpenter's Shape jape was consciously influences by this film; if it were then it wouldn't be so clear that Jamie Lee was the protagonist 'til near the end - here it really feels like Aumont's Dani will be the focus until Jane wakes up to find herself, to her surprise as much as ours, to be the Final Girl.
I'm tellin' y'all, it's sabotage.
Opening with a plangent and percussive theme from Luciano Michelini, which I think it's fair to say and the very least 'homages' Goblin, we are swiftly introduced to the young Marisa Pesce (Patrizia Castaldi) and her shifty businessman and upper-class deviant uncle Gaudenzio Pesce (Massimo Girotti) who is certainly up to something fishy. Pesce, you see? Never mind. The script, once again from Ernesto Gastaldi, gives us our dishevelled and decidedly anti-heroic protagonist Paolo Germi (Claudio Casinelli) - at first we don't know if he's acting in any kind of official capacity, or is he some kind of lone wolf rogue agent like Simon Templar (the original Leslie Charteris pulp version, rather than Roger Moore, Ian Ogilvy or - God forbid - Val Kilmer, whom Casinelli slightly resembles in the artwork on the reversible Arrow Blu-ray cover) taking matters and the law into his own hands? Germi encounters Marisa in what might be called a 'meet-strange' at a public dance where she is being followed by a menacing man in mirrored sunglasses (Roberto Posse, which sounds like the name of some Milanese gang or militia to me - "We think it's the work of the Roberto posse again") and briefly flirts and dances with Paolo in an effort to shed this unwanted tail, leaving Germi blue-balled and baffled with his spectacles shattered on the cement floor setting up a running broken glasses gag. The effort is all in vain, though, as her pursuer catches up with her in her flat and takes her out by slashing her throat and repeatedly plunging his blade into her in the way that Germi was interested in doing more metaphorically.
Taking up the cause of investigating Marisa's murky murder, Germi - with the aid of his new-found young hustler sidekick Giannino (Adolfo Caruso) - begins to uncover the shadowy world of an under-age call girl ring whose number includes student Floriana (ah, there's a recurring name) Gori, who meets a gory end at the hands of pimp Raimondo 'Menga' Menghini when he shoots and fatally wounds her in the side, is played by the striking French-Italian actress Barbara Magnolfi, Olga the sibilant student from Suspiria (who hisses "the names of snakessss!") before Menga himself suffers the same fate when Germi delivers the same kind of injury to him. Only fair, really.
Much mayhem ensues with thrills, kills and hilarious set pieces such as the attempted killer on the Big Dipper - as Ronan Keating told us, life is a rollercoaster, so I suppose death can be, too. Suddenly splatted by a train like the agent following Ned Beatty's Otis in Richard Donner's Superman, in quite a severe case of tonal whiplash. There's also Casinelli's car chase with his rickety car incrementally coming to bits in a way reminiscent of the 1984 Amy Heckerling knockabout action-com Johnny Dangerously
A more minor Martino is still a movie worth watching, crafted by a well-oiled machine of a team of professionals operating at the peak of their powers including Gastaldi on script duties (alongside Martino himself) and a score heavy on the prog-rock influences like the iconic Goblin soundtrack for Argento's iconic Profundo rosso from the same year courtesy of composer Luciano Michelini. It's an uneven and slightly schizophrenic film held together by a fascinating central performance from Casinelli, who would sadly meet a premature end when he was killed in a helicopter accident on the set of Martino's 1985 science fictioner Hands of Steel (which reunited Martino. Casinelli and John Saxon - Nancy's Dad himself - after The Scorpion with Two Tails in 1982), crashing into Colorado's Navajo Bridge. Man, the '80s were a rough time for chopper incidents on the set of genre movies, weren't they? At least we can't blame John Landis for that one.
Martino would go on to direct a number of entertaining genre movies, ranging from 1978's infamous video nasty entry in the grubby Italian cannibal subgenre Mountain of the Cannibal God (La montagna del dio cannibale) which pitted Bond girl Ursula Andress against the type of hungry jungle denizens first seen in Umberto Lenzi's Man From Deep River and sundry other less palatable even than longpig) fare, the 1979 Island of the Fishmen (L'isola degli uomini pesce, also released as Screamers) in which her fellow former Bond girl Barbara Bach tangled with unfriendly Gill Men on an Atlantean island, and Mad Max meets Escape from New York two for one mash-up 2019, After the Fall of New York (2019 - Dopo la caduta di New York) from 1983 with former Hollywood matinee star Edmund Purdom slumming it with elusive cult star Michael Sopkiw in the Children of Men-style infertile nuclear irradiated wastelands. None of these new adventures in genre cinema though, not even the aforementioned giallo at the tail end of the giallo wave The Scorpion with Two Tails (alias the more evocative or more prosaic [you pays your money, you takes your choice] Assassinio al cimaterio etrusco; or Murder in the Etruscan Cemetery) in '82 could compete with his early flurry of activity in the subgenre: a six flick stint of giallo goodness that in your humble correspondent's opinion is up there with the great pioneering works of Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Yes, I'm totally serious - they're that good. Check 'em out if you haven't already. Once you dive in, you may never want to leave.
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