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Naked You Die **
Original title: Nude... si muore
Italy: Antonio Margheriti, 1968
So far, all of the gialli that I've watched for this project have demonstrated a wide variety of influences. Naked You Die is where this all changes, as its sole frame of reference seems to be Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, with an all-girl boarding school standing in for the earlier film's fashion house and its various pupils replacing the models. Margheriti, however, doesn't have half the visual flare of Bava, and the cinematography is overall flat and unattractive, particularly when it comes to the lighting which, day or night, has the same harsh brightness. Nor does he possess Bava's imagination: almost everyone dies as a result of a straightforward strangling, which seems to take little more than a couple of seconds.
Margheriti does, however, make occasional use of the subjective camera to represent the killer's point of view, beating Dario Argento to this technique by nearly two years. (One of the interesting things about tackling these films chronologically is that you begin to get a sense of at what points various trends began to become popular.) There is also a rather effective moment in which a girl strangled in a basement drops to the floor, her head angled directly at the camera - staring, as it were, at the audience. That's about it for creative kills, though, and the film's title turns out to be incredibly misleading as most of the victims are fully clothed when they are murdered.
Elsewhere, a bland cast and unbelievable, perfunctory dialogue kill pretty much any potential interest in the plot itself. Mark Damon is hopelessly ill-equipped as riding instructor Richard Barrett, while the fact that virtually every girl on campus seems to be on the verge of swooning at his feet just boggles the mind - "I think I'm in love; he's the man I've always dreamed of!" is an actual line, spoken within minutes of his arrival. Naturally, he has his own ideas about the students, and ends up romancing one hapless girl who - coincidentally - is deathly afraid of horses.
Naked You Die can pretty much be summed up by the first couple of minutes, as a woman sheds her clothes, takes a bath and is promptly murdered: Margheriti teases but shows very little with regard to violence and nudity. This is effectively an exploitation film without any exploitation, and there certainly isn't anything more intellectually stimulating to compensate. It just amazes me that a giallo about a killer stalking the pupils of an all-girl school can be so damn chaste! One for completists only.
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(*) Death Laid an Egg ***
Original title: La Morte ha Fatto l'Uovo
Italy/France: Giulio Questi, 1968
Marco (Jean-Louis Trintignant) has married for money, which comes in the form of the chicken farm owned by his wife Anna (Gina Lollobrigida). It's a state of the art affair, employing all manner of high-tech machinery and avant garde music to get the chickens in the correct psychological frame of mind. Marco, however, has a few sordid secrets up his sleeve. Not only is he carrying on an affair with Anna's cousin Gabriella (Ewa Aulin), he also takes regular trips to a hotel, where he indulges in the murder of prostitutes. Nothing is quite as it seems, however, with multiple conspiracies brewing beneath the surface, and everything eventually explodes in a cocktail of mind games, backstabbing and, yes, headless chickens. (From my review at DVD Times)
I defy anyone to claim that the giallo was a movement aimed exclusively at grindhouse audiences, as Mikel Koven's book La Dolce Morte suggests, after watching this film. The clearest frame of reference seems to be Jean-Luc Godard, as evinced by the wildly experimental editing, while the sweltering heat that can be palpably felt throughout the entire film recalls the Western Django, Kill... If You Live, Shoot! for which Questi is best remembered. You won't find much Bava here... then again, you won't find much Antonioni either. Death Laid an Egg sports one of the most bizarre titles in the entire giallo catalogue, and is a baffling mindfuck of a movie. As an experiment, it's an interesting one, but as a commercial film, the end result is somewhat less than the sum of its parts, for, while the various avant garde techniques of narrative and editing that co-writer and director Giulio Questi exploits are definitely interesting and give the film a tone unlike any other giallo, they ultimately serve to make the film more frustrating than engaging.
This is a film that seems to be off-kilter right from the start, as the opening titles play out over stock footage of microscopic close-ups of living organisms, set to the crashing and banging of Bruno Maderna's weird, jaunty, atonal score, which manages to be both incredibly annoying and incredibly catchy at the same time. This segues into a truly baffling scene showing various hotel guests doing a mixture of mundane and bizarre things in their rooms - polishing knives, combing hair, preparing to commit suicide, and so on. Like much of the rest of the film, this first scene promises much but ultimately delivers little: a series of non-sequiturs with little pay-off. In a sense, it doesn't work because, despite using experimental editing techniques and throwing in a whole bunch of inexplicable cutaways and seemingly irrelevant plot strands, Questi still insists on tying it all to a relatively straightforward narrative structure. The thriller element, which doesn't really surface until well into the second half, and has more in common with a domestic melodrama than the urban slashers popularised by Dario Argento, doesn't really fit, while what seem to be various criticisms of commercialism don't really go anywhere meaningful.
What does work very well, however, is the claustrophobic atmosphere. The film seems to take place in the middle of the Italian summer, with the light so bright and the heat clearly so intense that at times it feels as if the characters are actually being suffocated. Even during the night scenes, the characters (or is that the actors?) look as if they are on the verge of collapse, while the fact that everyone looks (and sounds, at least in the English version) incredibly bored and tired seems somewhat appropriate given the film's rather biting portrayal of this section of society. In true giallo fashion, everyone is deceiving everyone else (the constant allusions to masks are perhaps just a little too bludgeoning), and the glee with which certain characters approach the prospect of pretending to be someone else just serves to underscore how thoroughly tedious their everyday lives are.
Death Laid an Egg has built up quite a following in certain circles, most likely on account of its obscurity and weirdness - how could a film which features genetically mutated chickens that are basically falls of meat with pulsating veins and feet not be embraced by the cult circuit? A film doesn't, after all, have to be brilliant in order to develop a cult following: often, simply being weird is enough. While Death Laid an Egg is not a bad film per se, it is an unsuccessful one - one that add two and two together and doesn't quite make four.
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Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy ***
USA: Adam McKay, 2004
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(*) Blowup *****
UK/Italy: Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966
"Slowly, slowly... against the beat." - The unnamed photographer of Blowup
"What's the meaning of this?" you ask. "I thought this was the Giallo Project?" It's a valid enough question, and I thought long and hard about whether or not to include Blowup in this rogue's gallery, but eventually I came to the conclusion that I couldn't afford to ignore it. You see, while I don't believe it possible to describe this as a giallo in the truest sense (although both Blood and Black Lace and The Giallo Scrapbook 2 do so), I suspect that it had a profound impact on virtually every giallo beyond a certain point in history. It undoubtedly had a huge influence on Dario Argento, who adapted several of its themes into The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and indeed all of his 1970s gialli, and, in turn, the various directors who set out to imitate Argento's work ended up adopting these same themes and stylistic traits second-hand - imitations of an imitation, as it were. Besides, I thought it only right that I do something to acknowledge Antonioni's recent death.
Beyond the plot, which, if you break it down, is basically the same as virtually every Argento giallo - an artist living as an outsider in a contemporary urban space, flitting around unable to settle, witnesses (or believes he has witnessed) a crime taking place, the solution to which lies in a single image or memory that he can't quite understand - it's the very atmosphere that so closely mirrors everything from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh: a sort of decadence, a society of bourgeois excess, where people are obsessed with useless commodities and avant-garde art, and seem to have to real purpose in life. I wasn't around to experience the 60s first-hand (far from it!), but I can easily see this as a defining statement of the atmosphere and mood of the period. In some respects, it makes the same point as Blood and Black Lace, and yet the bleak urban landscapes are a world away from the gothic opulence of Bava's film.
David Hemmings' unnamed photographer is clearly the forerunner to Sam Dalmas and Marc Daly - and indeed, Argento even cast Hemmings as Marc in the seminal Deep Red, itself a clever inversion of Blowup which actually manages to outclass its predecessor. In many respects, though, he's a far nastier piece of work than the two of them put together. Daly had some rather antiquated ideas about the place of women in society, while Dalmas seemed to treat his girlfriend as a commodity, but they pale in significance to the character in Blowup (referred to as "Thomas" in many sources but never actually named in the film itself - actually, names are almost completely absent, a reference, perhaps, to the characters' lack of identity and failure to find a place for themselves in the world), who manhandles several models, forcibly "posing" them and berating them for being useless, not to mention toying with blackmailing a woman (Vanessa Redgrave) who objects to having her picture taken on the sly. That's effectively Antonioni's (and Argento's) point, though: he is a vain, self-absorbed prick, continually searching for a perfect image that doesn't exist, and searching for meaning where there is none. Of course, it's therefore entirely appropriate that the central mystery is a single image whose very meaning continues to elude him (and the more he focuses on the image, the more he loses perspective).
In many regards, Blowup is about as anti-giallo as you can get - there are no on-screen murders, and the film is famous for its deliberate refusal to provide a solution to its central mystery - and yet in orders, you can see the roots of so many 70s gialli in it that it's impossible to ignore it completely. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the giallo of the golden age is effectively a marriage between Bava's early efforts and Blowup, filtered through Argento's sensibility and adopted by a slew of imitators - a reinterpretation of the form in the context of the post-1968 cultural revolution. It's a brilliant, baffling, mesmerising film in its own right, but when you consider the knock-on effect that it had on the giallo movement, its importance becomes all the more clear.
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(*) Blood and Black Lace ***½
Original title: Sei Donne per l'Assassino
Italy/Monaco/France/West Germany: Mario Bava, 1964
Whenever the topic of Blood and Black Lace comes up, I always seem to find myself apologising for not liking it more. I've seen it four or five times now, and on each occasion I find myself feeling strangely distanced from it and unable to see it in quite the same light as its many, many admirers. Maybe it's the fact that it lacks a single clear-cut protagonist to whom I can relate, or perhaps it's because, to date, there has not been a satisfactory presentation of the film on DVD (it's fickle, I know, but there have been occasions when a better transfer has improved my appreciation of a film, particularly those that are visually-oriented). In any event, for whatever reason, Blood and Black Lace is an entry that I see as important on account of its influence, but considerably less interesting when taken on its own merits.
Dubbed "the first authentic body count movie" by VCI on the cover of their (frankly pretty poor) DVD release, Blood and Black Lace builds on the thematics that Bava developed in his previous two gialli, The Girl Who Knew Too Much and The Telephone segment of Black Sabbath, and injects a vital new component that would come to characterise so many other films in the genre: the protracted, deliriously violent murder sequence. While Girl's death scenes, such as there were, were pretty perfunctory, they are Blood and Black Lace's raison d'être, and are quite shocking in their intensity. The very first, occurring in a windswept park at night within the first five minutes, is brutal and frenzied, unveiling the fedora-clad, black-gloved killer (his face concealed with a mask), who, thanks to his sheer viciousness and lack of identifying features, feels more like a force of nature than an actual person.
Actually, it's difficult to fault the murders at all - they are all incredibly well-executed and almost always incredibly sadistic. One unfortunate victim is slapped about before having her hand and then face scalded, while another receives a blow to the face with a spiked glove, prefiguring the killer's modus operandi in Death Walks at Midnight by several years. A further death, occurring late in the film, also sets the template for many a giallo bathtub drowning. However, the scenes designed to connect them together (and I believe that this is all they really are) are considerably more mundane, with the plot never sustaining my interest in that way that Girl's does. Thomas Reiner's wooden Inspector Silvester plods from scene to scene without doing anything particularly interesting, and the various women of the fashion house around which the events revolved are given only enough characterisation for us to know what dirty deeds they have been getting up to in between shows.
Admittedly, some of this really is quite clever. In typical giallo form, everyone is hiding something, whether it's drug addiction, thievery or blackmail, and to an extent you can almost imagine the killer representing a force of brutal retribution. Bava also indulges in one of his favourite pass-times in opening up an outwardly respectable society and revealing it to be corrupt to the core. Furthermore, I don't need to tell you that it's impeccably shot, with Bava's trademark gel lighting giving the various locations an otherworldliness while still anchoring them firmly in reality. However, Blood and Black Lace remains, for me, a stepping stone in the giallo's journey rather than the landmark that many consider it to be. I like it, but I would never afford it masterpiece status.
Sorry again...
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(*) Seed of Chucky ***½
USA/UK/Romania: Don Mancini, 2004
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Mr. Bean's Holiday ***
UK/France: Steve Bendelack, 2007
It's no masterpiece - but you probably knew that already, didn't you? The critics gave it a complete slating, but in my opinion it's really not that bad, and considerably funnier than The Simpsons Movie, the only other 2007 comedy I've seen so far. I actually laughed out loud several times, and if the plot doesn't appear particularly substantial, then at least it's more faithful to the original television series than the previous movie, which rather clumsily shoehorned Mr. Bean into an American family and a rather unconvincing storyline. This one is mainly an excuse for Rowan Atkinson to indulge in various extended episodes of physical comedy, and as a result it really does feel as if someone has given the TV show a larger budget and plonked it on the big screen. Like the previous film, it tends to reuse gags (with Atkinson even delving into a routine from his stand-up days on one occasion), but it's undemanding, and its good-naturedness is quite infectious.
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Black Sabbath ****
Original title: I Tre volti della paura
Italy/France: Mario Bava, 1963
Note: the review below covers only the first segment, The Telephone.
I hadn't originally considered including The Telephone in this project, as I was originally planning on only covering feature-length gialli, but Marcus over at Dark Discussion suggested I give it a look. In the end, I'm still not completely sure that it should be included here, since I would only consider it to be a giallo in the broadest possible sense, but it has an important place in history nonetheless, since not only was it the first film of this sort to be shot in colour, not to mention having a profound influence on everything from Black Christmas to Scream in its use of the telephone as a device of dread, it also potentially marks the first instance of the iconic black gloves later to be donned by many a giallo killer!
The plot takes place entirely within a single location, focusing on the protracted terrorising of Rosy (Michèle Mercier) by phone by a voice claiming to be that of Frank Rainer (Milo Quesada), a man who, having been put away as a result of Rosy's testimony, has now escaped from prison... only there's more to this than meets the eye, as it turns out that the calls in fact originate from Mary (Lidia Alfonsi), Rosy's former friend and (as is strongly implied) lover, as part of a bid to rekindle their friendship (and relationship). There is, however, a twist in the affair. Can you guess what it is?
Black Sabbath is introduced by host Boris Karloff as "three brief tales of the supernatural", but, at least in the Italian version (the US edition, like The Girl Who Knew Too Much, features a radically different edit), there is nothing supernatural whatsoever about The Telephone. Rather, it's a very straightforward thriller mixing that perennial giallo cocktail of sex and violence: the voice on the phone discusses killing Rosy in decidedly erotic terms, while a strangling by stocking only serves to underscore the manner in which the two are conflated. As the protagonist, Michèle Mercier is certainly easy on the eyes, and Bava seems to delight in tantalising the audience with the briefest flashes of bare shoulders and legs (of which the voice on the phone approves so much). However, despite looking the part, she lacks the pluckiness and spontaneity that made Letícia Román so appealing in The Girl Who Knew Too Much; she seems more like a forerunner for what would eventually end up becoming the Edwige Fenech role in later gialli of the harangued, attractive victim. Lidia Alfonsi, meanwhile, is rather more effective as the ice-cold femme fatale.
More psychological than most gialli, the horror of the situation comes not from sadistic violence (there isn't any till the final few minutes) but from the fact that the speaker on the phone knows Rosy so intimately, while the room in which the entire segment takes place, despite being quite spacious, takes on an incredibly claustrophobic quality. The transition from black and white to colour, meanwhile, has not harmed Bava's ability to make the most of light and shadow to create tension, while the richly saturated hues, especially on the excellent transfer provided on Anchor Bay's recent DVD, at the same time provides a drastically different aesthetic (one can only dream of Blood and Black Lace looking this good on DVD). Roberto Nicolosi's score, meanwhile, starts out with some of the jazzy lounge aesthetic of Bruno Nicolai's contributions to later gialli, but quickly gives way to a more menacing, sinister tone.
In many ways, this is a minor entry in both Bava's filmography and the history of the giallo - a sub-heading rather than a full chapter, if you like - but it shows many of the tropes that would be established in Blood and Black Lace in a smaller-scale, more rudimentary, form, and works rather well as a short, sharp exploration of mounting dread.
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(*) The Girl Who Knew Too Much ****
Original title: La Ragazza che sapeva troppo
Italy: Mario Bava, 1963
We all have to start somewhere, and I can think of no better film with which to begin this lengthy and probably foolhardy project than this 1963 offering from Mario Bava. While I doubt that you'd ever be able to find two people who completely agree on the definition of the word "giallo" and every single title that it encompasses, it's more or less unanimously agreed that The Girl Who Knew Too Much was the film that launched its cinematic form (unless you count Luchino Visconti's 1943 Obsession - Gary Needham, I'm looking at you!). It's ironic, then, that the first true giallo film is one of the most tongue-in-cheek of the cycle. Almost a parody of thriller conventions, it sends up heroine Nora Davis' (Letícia Román) obsession with paperback gialli and her less than accomplished attempts at amateur sleuthing.
Bava and his five co-writers use the "foreign tourist in Rome" framework that would become so popular with other filmmakers as the giallo gained popularity, placing the wide-eyed Nora against the backdrop of a series of killings known as the Alphabet Murders (actually the title of a Poirot novel and a very self-conscious reference to the giallo's roots in Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and Mickey Spillane novels - all of whom are referred to by name in this film) and forcing her to team up with the charming Dr. Marcello Bassi (John Saxon) to solve the mystery herself when she is met with the same disdain and disbelief that The Establishment would dole out to so many other giallo leading ladies. A rather likeable heroine, Nora is a bit silly and possesses an over-active imagination, not to mention a tendency to faint when things get a bit too much, but a lot more independently-minded than many an Edwige Fenech or Suzy Kendall. It also helps that Román has a decent sense of comic timing, playing the slapstick romance scenes between her and Saxon well and not afraid to make a fool of herself when the script calls for it. Indeed, the banter of the pair in many ways prefigures that of David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi in Deep Red, while the running gag of one or the other continually causing injuries to Marcello is a good one and helps lighten the tension.
Indeed, this is a decidedly light-hearted giallo, with its tongue firmly in its cheek at all times. The Italian version (the American version, released under the title of The Evil Eye, is substantially different, featuring a number of alternative scenes and a different music score) features a male narrator continually commenting on Nora's plight which, in addition to providing a lot of humorous moments also serves to highlight the genre's literary origins. On the other hand, the manner in which it is shot is anything but frivolous: one of the few gialli to be shot in black and white, Bava, who was also the cinematographer, makes superb use of his monochromatic palette to create a world of great foreboding, foregrounding extremes in light and shadow and turning many of the familiar Roman tourist traps, including, most famously, the Spanish Steps (which provides the film with its key set-piece), into places of mystery and dread. Bava takes the Rome of picture postcards and rips open its seedy underbelly, and Marcello's insistence that the Rome of bright sunshine and milling tourists is the "real" one never quite ring true.
This is clearly a very prototypical giallo, and while some elements are already in place, others are either not yet fully formed or else absent entirely. There is no hidden, black-gloved villain - all the potential suspects are unmasked - and the outlandish murder set-pieces that would later become the format's hallmark are nowhere to be found. "One moment and it's all over," the killer promises Nora when finally unmasked, a far cry from the protracted stalk-and-slash scenes that would later delight audiences. There are only a handful of murders, and they are largely committed off-screen, with the body count aesthetic that would emerge in Bava's next giallo, Blood and Black Lace, not yet established.
Of all the Bava films I've seen so far, this is actually the one that I enjoy the most, and in fact I would put it ahead of Blood and Black Lace, for reasons that I'll explain when I get round to discussing that film. It lacks both the depth of a Deep Red and the camp sleaze of a Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, but it got the giallo movement off to an impressive start, and it holds up today as a thoroughly enjoyable stand-alone film.
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(*) Resident Evil ***
UK/Germany/France/USA: Paul W.S. Anderson, 2002
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The Simpsons Movie **
USA: David Silverman, 2007
At the beginning of The Simpsons Movie, the world's most famous yellow family are at the local theatre watching the latest exploits of cat and mouse duo Itchy and Scratchy. Homer, unable to understand why anyone would pay to see on the big screen what they can get for free on TV, chastises the audience for being suckers. It doesn't take a genius to work out that this is a reference to those viewers and critics who will say exactly the same thing about The Simpsons Movie - the message being, presumably, that the film does offer more than an extended episode of the TV series. Unfortunately, that's really all it is, and, depending on how you feel about the series, this is either a good or a bad thing. Personally, I would have been more than happy if it had captured the tone of the early seasons, back when the show was still good. Unfortunately, despite being in the making for four years and featuring the combined talents of many of the writers responsible for the best episodes of the early seasons, The Simpsons Movie definitely feels more like the tired, unimaginative dreck that Fox has been shovelling out for the past few years.
Its biggest problem, and a pretty major one for what is meant to be a comedy, is that it isn't funny. In 85 minutes I laughed out loud twice, and one of these was at a joke that has already been used at least three times in the show. Seriously, it took eleven writers and 158 drafts to come up with this? (Then again, maybe that's the problem: too many cooks continually refining it until the whole thing has been completely watered down.) Instead, all we get is the Simpsons shoehorned into a generic adventure story with a hefty dose of fake pathos injected in an attempt to give some semblance of sincerity.
Even the animation is more or less the same as the TV show. Despite a supposed budget of $65 million, it still has that lame, farmed out to Korea appearance (and yes, it seems that the bulk of the animation was indeed outsourced, to regular Simpsons sausage factory Akom), with only a handful of scenes showing anything more than the bare essentials. Yes, the colour palette is richer, and some soft shadows have been applied to the characters, but it still looks third-rate. The celebrity cameos, meanwhile, while taking up comparatively less screen time than they tend to on the show itself, are still incredibly annoying in the "Hi, I'm..." vein. One can only assume that it was them, and the regular cast, rather than the animation crew, that received the bulk of the aforementioned $65 million.
I can't say that my expectations were all that high, and yet I was still incredibly disappointed by this. I never for a minute kidded myself that I was going to see a masterpiece, but I had at least expected to be entertained and get a few decent laughs out of it. Sadly, it couldn't even manage that.
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Movies
Welcome to the movie checklist!
This section is an archive listing every movie I've seen from January 1 2005 onwards. Films I have already seen are included and will be marked with a (*), but probably won't be reviewed except under special circumstances. I will be including a rating for each film (in stars, out of 5), and hope to be able to include a brief 1-2 paragraph review of each film, although due to time constraints that won't always be possible.
Archives
Films Viewed This Month
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