Murderock (1984)

Murderock (AKA Murder-Rock: Dancing Death) is a 1984 Lucio Fulci giallo.

The setting is a dance school in New York. This was 1984 so it has a bit of a Flashdance vibe. There’s fierce competition. Out of more than a dozen young dancers only three will be chosen for bigger things.

Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos) runs the class. She was once on the brink of a glittering career, until she was knocked over by a motorcyclist. She recovered, but not fully. Not fully enough to have a career as a dancer. Now she teaches.

One of the girls in her class is murdered, in a rather odd way - a hatpin through the heart.

Lieutenant Borges (Cosimo Cinieri) has insufficient evidence to make any moves. It appears likely that someone in the dance school was the killer. Likely, but not certain.

There’s a second murder. Another girl pupil. The same murder method.

There’s no certainty as to whether the killer is male or female. The victims are knocked out by chloroform first.

Candice is worried. Her boss Dick Gibson (Claudio Cassinelli) is worried. He knew some of the girl pupils. He knew them intimately. That makes him a suspect but there’s so much jealousy and backbiting within the school that everybody is a suspect.

Candice has strange dreams. There’s a man in the dreams trying to kill her. She knows the man from somewhere but she can’t remember having actually met him.

There are romantic entanglements between the various students as well as entanglements the students and the staff. There has been a relationship between Dick Gibson and Candice. Candice also has a hot new boyfriend, male model and unsuccessful actor George Webb (Ray Lovelock).

There’s another murder. This time the killer was photographed but frustratingly the photo shows nothing useful. The paranoia builds. Everyone is jumpy. And nobody believes that the killings have stopped.

There are a lot of interesting aspects about the way Fulci made this movie. It’s a giallo with almost no gore at all. I don’t mind that. There are other things that matter more in a giallo. Style is more important, and this movie has style. An atmosphere of indefinable menace matter, and this film has that. Hints of sexual motivations are essential in a giallo and they’re found here as well. And while there’s no gore there’s a hint of kinkiness in the murder method.

Many giallo fans consider plot coherence to be of minor importance but in this case the plot does all come together even if there are some offbeat outrageous elements. Offbeat and outrageous elements are always welcome in a giallo.

And there are plenty of clues. Lieutenant Borges does not rely on inspiration. He has spotted those clues and he has noted their significance. He’s a good cop. He notices clues and he thinks about them, about what they really mean.

When the solution is revealed it makes perfect sense. The motivations make sense.

I love the automated message that warns the students to vacate the premises within fifteen minutes every night before the whole school is locked down tight by electronic means. It adds to the suspicion that the murder was an inside job and it also adds a touch of paranoia. The school itself is a character in the story.

There are cameras everywhere in the school. Everybody is being watched by somebody - and not just by those authorised to be watching. There’s visual surveillance and auditory surveillance. This is a movie with a definite interest in voyeurism of various kinds.

I love the way Fulci shoots so many scenes in a fragmented way. The frame is fragmented. Some parts of a shot will be lit while other parts are unlit. Lights keep flashing on and and off. Music recordings switch on and off. It’s as if reality is being splintered. It’s very unsettling, and deliberately so.

I’m increasingly fond of 80s Fulci. This was a fascinating extremely varied phase of his career, and Murderock is Fulci in top form. Highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray looks great.

Other 80s Fulci films that I recommend - The Black Cat (1981), The Devil’s Honey (1986), Aenigma (1987).

Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972) rewatch

Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling was released in 1972. It’s usually regarded as a giallo but it’s not quite a conventional entry in that genre.

The setting is a very traditional poor rural small in southern Italy, whereas most gialli have wealthy modern urban settings and if they’re set in Italy are more likely to be set in northern Italy. Don’t Torture a Duckling takes place in a world still dominated by superstition.

A young boy is kidnapped, or at least he has disappeared and there is reason to think he has been kidnapped. We see him and his two friends and they appear to be no wilder than most young boys.

In the very early stages of the movie we are also introduced to a number of rather odd characters. There’s Guiseppe Barra. We see him spying on a couple of prostitutes servicing their clients in an old warehouse. Barra is a bit simple-minded but is generally regarded as perfectly innocuous. There’s a woman wandering in the woods who looks like she’s stepped straight out of the Middle Ages. We later find out she is Maciara (Florinda Bolkan) and she seems to practise witchcraft. Of course it’s unlikely that she has any supernatural powers. She is probably a bit crazy but totally harmless.

There’s Francesco. He practises magic but he’s widely respected even by the local police and clergy.

Then there’s Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet), a beautiful young blonde with a rich daddy. She had a reputation as a bit of a wild girl. We see her flaunting her naked body in front of a young boy. She might be twisted and perverse, or she may be indulging in good-natured teasing.

We’re also introduced to the popular young parish priest, the experienced levelheaded older cop and the much keener young detective lieutenant. And lastly persistent newspaper reporter Andrea Martelli (Tomas Milian).

There are several murders. The victims are all young boys. None were sexually assaulted.

The police arrest suspects which only leads to disasters. Andrea plays amateur detective and uncovers some clues.

The major problem is that once you’re ten minutes into this film you know exactly how it’s going to end and the grindingly obvious ending you fear and anticipate does indeed come to pass. A potentially great movie ends in a trainwreck.

The acting is pretty good. Seeing Tomas Milian in a sympathetic role took some getting used to. Barbara Bouchet is extremely good. It is however Florinda Bolkan who effortlessly steals the movie with her powerhouse performance. An extraordinary actress at the top of her game.

The violence in the first half of the movie is very restrained and the potentially disturbing murder scenes happen entirely off-camera. Later on we get an incredibly brutal scene which really is disturbing and powerful. And at the end we get a totally pointless exercise in crude gore which makes the disastrous ending even worse.

This is a giallo but it lacks all the superficial giallo trademarks.

The setting is interesting and the location shooting looks good. There’s not much here in the way of impressive visual set-pieces. This is much less stylish than other Fulci movies I’ve seen.

The Blue Underground DVD which I bought years ago still looks fine although it’s lacking in extras. There have been other DVD releases and the film has since been released on Blu-Ray.

I’m a major Lucio Fulcio fan and I still regard The Devil’s Honey (1986), One on Top of the Other (AKA Perversion Story, 1969) and A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) as authentic masterpieces. I even liked Aenigma (1987). Which makes Don’t Torture a Duckling all the more disappointing. I saw this movie fourteen years ago. I hated it at the time and seeing it again just confirms my very low opinion of it. A poor movie from a very very good director.

The Black Cat (1981)

The Black Cat is a 1981 Lucio Fulci movie and I’m becoming very fond of Fulci’s 80s work.

There have been countless Edgar Allan Poe adaptations but very few have been faithful adaptations, for the obvious reason that apart from one short novel he wrote nothing but short stories. Any film version is going to have to expand those stories considerably. The most effective approach has always been to use a Poe story as the initial inspiration and then build a new story around it. That’s the approach taken here.

We don’t get an initial explanation. We see a series of odd sinister events. People are killed in apparent accidents, but the accidents are puzzling. There is always a particular black cat in the vicinity. He seems to be a bad-tempered cat but of course that does not make him evil. Some cats are just bad-tempered.

We get lots of shots from the cat’s point of view.

The setting is a small village in England. Scotland Yard, in the person of Inspector Gorley (David Warbeck), become involved after the disappearance of two young lovers. They have eloped. The audience knows better. They have met a very unpleasant end.

That’s not the only strange thing going on. The elderly and rather eccentric Professor Robert Miles (Patrick Magee) spends a lot of time in graveyards talking to the dead. He does this in the interests of science. He has various scientific instruments with him. He seems to believe he can contact the dead.

In fact he believes himself to be a medium but he wants to put the process of communicating with the dead on a more scientific footing.

This attracts the interest of an American woman, Jill Trevers (Mimsy Farmer). She’s visiting the village to photograph the ruins.

There are other deaths that seem to be brought about by the cat.

Jill becomes acquainted with the professor and discovers his odd relationship with that feline. He believes the cat intends to kill him. He also believes that while he and the cat hate each other they also need each other. There’s a weird bond between them, and possibly some kind of psychic link.

Jill is convinced that the cat is involved in some way with all those fatal accidents but Inspector Gorley is a straightforward commonsense copper and he doesn’t buy into such nonsense.

The plot may appear to have some holes and some incoherencies but I’m not convinced that is really the case. The business about the professor’s attempts to contact the dead may not be tied in directly to the central plot but it serves a purpose. It establishes that the professor is well-versed in the occult and in fringe areas of science. This makes it plausible that he might have the knowledge, skill and power to forge a psychic link with an animal.

It also adds the suggestion that these strange events may have a supernatural cause or alternatively the explanation may lie in some kind of esoteric science. It adds to the ambiguity.

I do think Fulci was aiming for a degree of ambiguity and that he did not want the link between the professor to be explained by witchcraft or magic. He wanted us to consider more interesting possibilities.

Mimsy Farmer and David Warbeck are perfectly competent in their roles but of course it’s Patrick Magee who dominates the movie. He’s both sinister and strangely frightened. At times he feels in complete control, at other times he feels that events have spiralled completely out of his control. The viewer is not sure if the cat is controlling the professor or if it’s the other way around and maybe the professor is no longer sure either. It’s always great to see Patrick Magee in any movie and it’s even better here seeing him in a starring role.

This is a nicely shot movie that makes good use of the English locations. A picturesque peaceful quaint little English village makes a fine setting for terror and mystery.

The movie has a pretty tenuous connection with Poe’s story but it has a distinctive flavour of its own. It’s by no means conventional gothic horror. The Black Cat is intriguing in its own right and it’s highly recommended.

Arrow have released this movie on DVD and Blu-Ray in a lovely anamorphic transfer with a wealth of extras. The highlight of these is, as you might expect, Stephen Thrower’s informative and perceptive video essay. The Arrow release offers both the Italian and English dubbed versions. In Italian movies of this era it’s pointless worrying about which is the original version - the Italian language versions were post-dubbed as well. In this case most of the key cast members are English speakers are dubbed their own voices so in this case the English version is obviously preferable. And you don’t want to miss out on hearing Patrick Magee delivering his own lines.

A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971)

A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is a 1971 giallo written and directed by Lucio Fulci although its giallo status has to be qualified. We’ll get to that later.

It’s an Italian-Spanish-French-British co-production (although the extent of British financial involvement in the project is debatable) which accounts for the casting which is very multi-national even by the standards of European genre movies of that time. It’s set in London with some location shooting done there although the studio shooting was done it Italy.

This movie hits the ground running. We get a crazy WTF opening sequence on a train and a crazy WTF sequence with two women and a fur coat. Then we get a woman talking to her psychoanalyst. We get the half-naked blonde woman but now she’s the crazy woman’s next-door neighbour. And a hippie freak-out party with lots of naked chicks. Way to go Lucio. We’re already totally fascinated. Who is this dark-haired woman? Is she crazy? Is she drugged-out? We don’t know but we want to find out.

The possibly crazy woman is Carol Hammond (Florinda Bolkan). She is married to successful lawyer Frank Hammond (Jean Sorel). Her father is one of England’s most eminent barristers, Edmond Brighton (Leo Genn). Carol has a stepdaughter, Joan Hammond (Ely Galleani).

The young woman in the adjoining flat is not at all respectable and Carol strongly disapproves of her. We will later found out that this woman is Julia Durer (Anita Strindberg).

Carol doesn’t really seem to be crazy but she suffers from insomnia and has disturbing dreams. She does all sorts of naughty things in these dreams, such as having sex with a stunning blonde woman. In the dreams she also takes a knife to the blonde.

Her psychiatrist is very Freudian (Freudian psychoanalysis was still a big thing in 1971) and he isn’t worried. Everything is under control. Carol is just working out her inner conflicts in the dreams. In fact the dreams are a sign that she is making good progress.

Then a murder takes place. It’s puzzling at first until the police forensics guys turn up a vital clue that narrows the range of possible suspects drastically. Then a further clue makes the case cut-and-dried. The evidence is overwhelming.

Inspector Corvin (Stanley Baker) should be delighted but he isn’t. He’s a good copper and his copper’s nose tells him this case just doesn’t smell right. He is convinced that something very important has been overlooked.

After this the plot twists kick in and there are plenty of them. The possibility of a second murder seems quite real. Someone certainly seems to have murder in mind.

What makes this movie extra special is that it’s a psychiatry murder thriller and I just love psychiatry murder thrillers. We get lots of psychobabble and half-baked Freudianism. Bliss. There are some obvious nods to Hitchcock’s Spellbound with cool dream sequences. There’s a fair bit of Hitchcock influence at work here. In fact lots of Hitchcock influence.

Fulci offers us some gore (and it's full-bore gore), but not too much. He does offer some effective visual set-pieces with some wonderfully executed nicely scary paranoid chase sequences. And we get a really good scene with bats.

Fulci is trying to keep us in a state of uncertainty about Carol and Florinda Bolkan’s very effective performance keeps us very uncertain indeed. Jean Sorel is good, as always. Leo Genn is excellent. This was not a particularly demanding role for Stanley Baker but Baker is always watchable.

While Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace may have been the first giallo it was Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970 that pretty much defined the 1970s giallo. Prior to Argento, at the tail end of the 1960s, there had however been quite a few movies that could be called proto-giallos or phase 1 giallos. These included Romolo Guerrieri’s The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968), Fulci’s own One on Top of the Other (AKA Perversion Story, 1969), and several Umberto Lenzi movies including So Sweet, So Perverse (1969). These movies lacked a lot of what we think of as the classic giallo trademarks (serial killers, black-gloved killers, extreme visual excess). They were essentially stylish erotic thrillers almost invariably set against a backdrop of 1960s jet set decadence. I personal love these proto-giallos.

I would regard A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (which was made in 1970 although released in 1971) as belonging to this proto-giallo sub-genre. There are no serial killers and in fact only two murders. There’s a very strong atmosphere of decadence, interestingly blended with counter-culture stuff. The events of the movie are precipitated by a collision between the world of the very rich and the world of the hippies, both decadent worlds but decadent in different ways.

There’s also an element that is found in most of the late 60s proto-giallos - the possibility (but not the certainty) that one or more key characters might be mad.

Don’t think too much about the plot of this movie. And don’t expect a gore-fest. There is some shocking gore but it’s very brief. Just enjoy the atmosphere and the visuals and let Lucio Fulci play with your head for a while. I rate this as top-tier Fulci. Highly recommended.

Mondo Macabro’s Blu-Ray looks great and is packed with desirable extras.

Aenigma (1987)

I’ve recently developed a bit of an interest in 1980s eurocult movies, especially 80s Italian genre movies. I’ve long been a fan of 1960s/70s eurocult films but I had rarely ventured into the 80s. And I’ve started to get interested in late period Lucio Fulci movies. Which is how I come to be reviewing his 1987 offering Aenigma. This was an Italian-Yugoslav co-production.

Within the first ten minutes one thing becomes crystal clear. This is going to be one weird movie. Which is OK, I like weird movies.

It starts at an exclusive girls’ boarding school in Boston. Kathy (Milijana Zirojevic) has two strikes against her. Firstly, she’s poor. Secondly, she’s unpopular. But at this school being poor automatically makes a girl unpopular. Kathy is not merely poor, she is the daughter of the school’s maid Mary (Dusica Zegarac). Being the daughter of a servant is the ultimate social faux pas. The other girls along with hunky gym teacher Fred (Riccardo Acerbi) play a particularly cruel prank on Kathy. It ends with Kathy lying in a hospital bed in a coma. Which causes the other girls even more amusement.

Dr Robert Anderson (Jared Martin) is the neurologist treating Kathy. He sees very little reason for hope. Kathy appears to have no brain activity whatsoever. She is to all intents and purposes brain-dead. Except that something is happening. It’s not like normal brain activity but it seems to be some uncanny emotional response. Dr Anderson is disturbed and the nurse is totally freaked out.

Shortly afterwards a new girl arrives at the school. Her name is Eva (Lara Lamberti). She tells her roommate that her one ambition is to have sex with as many cute guys as possible. She decides to start with Fred.

Then seriously bizarre things start to happen at the school. Bizarre fatal things.

And what’s going on with Eva? She seems odd, but in a subtle sort of way.

Then things start to get clarified. We figure out the basics of what’s going on although we have no idea how it’s happening. And there are still some more weird things that will get thrown at us.

Bad things are going to happen to a lot of girls at the school. It’s like a revenge movie, but Kathy is now a vegetable so who is the avenger?

There’s an obvious connection to Carrie, and to Patrick. Borrowing ideas from other movies is fine provided you then do something totally different with those same ideas. In this case Fulci takes basic ideas from those movies and then does seriously weird and fascinating stuff with them. It’s not the ideas that matter in a movie, it’s the execution of those ideas. And the execution here bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original sources.

This is Fulci getting seriously surreal and twisted. Aenigma is unsettling and perplexing but it’s unsettling and perplexing in a way that is original and distinctive.

The acting is mostly rather flat but that works in the movie’s favour. This is not a character-driven horror movie or a psychological horror movie. The characters really don’t matter. The one cast member whose performance stands out is Lara Lamberti (or Lara Naszinski as she was also known). It’s not that her acting is all that great but she really does manage to be disturbing and strange and that’s exactly what the part requires.

Fulci pulls off plenty of creepy scary visual set-pieces. Fulci might not have quite the artistic baroque touch of an Argento but his set-pieces here are weirder and cleverer. The visuals overall have a nicely spooky feel, but subtly spooky.

Personally I like this movie more than I like Carrie even though I’m a De Palma fan.

Fulci wisely doesn’t offer us explanations for the events in the story. We’re left to ourselves to figure out what it all means and how these things could have happened.

The movie was shot in Sarajevo.

By 1987 Italian genre directors were working on shoestring budgets which presumably explains the co-production deal. Shooting in Yugoslavia would have been a lot cheaper than shooting in Italy. The fact that it’s set in Boston doesn’t matter much. Presumably this was an attempt to give it more appeal to the American market. The movie really takes place in a nightmare world in which reality plays little part.

Fulci manages to be visually inventive and the incredibly tight budget isn’t as much of a problem as you might fear.

From what I’ve seen of his 80s work I’d say that far from being in a creative decline Fulci was just starting to reach his peak. The strange disturbing masterpiece that is Aenigma came just a year after the strange disturbing masterpiece that is The Devil’s Honey. I have to say that most Fulci fans don’t seem to rate Aenigma very highly but it’s the sort of movie that really appeals to me and I loved it.

Severin have released this movie on both DVD and Blu-Ray. The transfer is excellent and there are some cool extras including a commentary track by Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson.

Aenigma is very highly recommended.

Warriors of the Year 2072 (1984)

By the 80s Italian popular cinema was on the ropes. The new wave of Hollywood blockbusters was completing the work of destruction begun by television. Budgets for Italian genre movies were getting tighter and tighter, that’s assuming you could get any kind of financing at all. There was desperation in the air, and a frantic search for new genres to tempt audiences back to movie theatres.

The post-apocalyptic science fiction thriller seemed like a good bet. In the wake of the success of the first two Mad Max movies and John Carpenter’s Escape from New York it seemed like a very commercial proposition. So it’s not surprising to find Lucio Fulci making such a movie in 1984.

Warriors of the Year 2072 ( AKA Rome 2033 - The Fighter Centurions, Italian title I guerrieri dell'anno 2072) more or less fits into this genre. There’s no mention of an actual apocalypse but clearly there’s been extreme social disintegration leading to a totalitarian society that maintains order through bread and circuses. Mostly circuses.

The circuses are ultra-violent TV shows. Like so much science fiction of that era it fails to predict the internet but it does predict the popularity of reality TV based on cruelty.

Drake (Jared Martin) is the current TV superstar. He’s the main attraction of a killbiker show, killbiking being guys on motorcycles trying to kill each other.

Sam (who owns a rival network, World Broadcasting System or WBS) has a plan for a new series that will be even more violent - gladiators fighting in a recreated Colosseum in Rome.

The gladiators will be criminals condemned to death. The one who survives gets his freedom. These guys are not just murderers. They’re psycho killers.

The trick will be to persuade Drake to participate. That’s easy enough - just frame him for the murder of his fiancée.

Drake is inclined to be less than coöperative right from the start. The gladiators are subjected to conditioning to make them even more violent and hate-crazed but Drake is not only determined to resist, he hopes to lead a rebellion. So as well as all the other movies that have obviously influenced this one you can add Spartacus.

Of course it all leads up to mayhem in the arena, and it’s mayhem on motorcycles. And motorcycles used as chariots.

There’s going to be a major double-cross and just about everybody is going to be betrayed. Drake and his newly acquired girlfriend Sarah (Eleonora Brigliadori), who works for WBS but he thinks he can trust her, will have to figure out a way to avoid a disaster on a huge scale.

The similarities to a movie like Rollerball are obvious but this film is also at times reminiscent of Westworld. The world of Warriors of the Year 2072 is run by super-computers and WBS has its own AI, known as Junior. Whether he’s a benevolent AI or an evil one remains to be seen.

I’ve already mentioned Mad Max, Escape from New York, Rollerball, Spartacus and Westworld among this movie’s influence. One could also add A Clockwork Orange. Italian genre movies were notorious for ripping off foreign big-budget movies but in this case there’s such a bewildering mishmash of influences that Fulci ends up making a movie with a certain flavour of its own.

Tight budgets are not usually a problem for people like Fulci who have actual talent, but it is a challenge to make a science fiction movie like this on a tiny budget. This is a movie that aims for, and needed, a bit of an epic feel. Having said that, on a visual level it mostly works. It has style and energy. For those who like gore there are a few decapitations and a fairly well executed face-melting scene. The motorcycle combat scenes are excellent crazy fun.

The plot gets a bit complicated but if you’re a fan of Italian genre movies you’re probably not overly worried about plot coherence. The plot does create the right atmosphere atmosphere of paranoia.

The performances are fine. They’re what the movie required. None of these people were expecting to win Oscars.

Warriors of the Year 2072 delivers action and excitement and interesting visuals and that’s enough to keep me happy. I liked it. Highly recommended.

The Devil’s Honey (1986)

The Devil’s Honey is a 1986 psycho-sexual thriller directed by Lucio Fulci.

The fact that it’s a thriller doesn’t become obvious for quite a while. In fact it seems to be more of a sexual/romantic melodrama. In this early part of the movie there are two separate plot strands which don’t seem to have any connection. There is a connection of course. Or at least there will be. What the two plot strands do have in common is that both deal with what might be called the darker side of sexual desire.

Cecilia (Blanca Marsillach) is in love with saxophone player Gaetano (Stefano Madia). She is clearly the submissive partner in a sado-masochistic relationship. It’s clear that she enjoys it as much as he does but she has problems admitting it. He has no problems at all admitting that he likes having her as his slave. She is however completely obsessed with him.

Meanwhile the marriage of prominent surgeon Guido (Brett Halsey) to his wife Carole (Corinne Cléry) has struck a rough patch. A very rough patch. Carole is both love-starved and sex-starved. Wendell isn’t interested in having sex with her but he’s very interested in having sex with prostitutes. Sex with a kinky edge. There’s certainly a hint that his tastes also run just a little in the direction of sado-masochism. He seems to like the idea of having his prostitutes play the submissive rôle.

Then the two plot strands collide, in the operating theatre.

Guido is trying to save his marriage. He is trying desperately to persuade himself that he wants to have sex with his wife. It’s obvious that he doesn’t want her to leave him and that in his own way he needs her but she’s not going to be convinced of that unless he can perform in the bedroom.

His efforts to revive his marriage are hampered by the fact that a girl is now stalking him. She considers him to be no better than a murderer. He doesn’t know if she is going to be content with harassing him or if her intentions are more drastic.

He finds out that her intentions are very drastic indeed although neither Guido nor the viewer can be sure exactly what those intentions are.

By the way, the character’s names in the English and Italian language versions are quite different. The English names are not just Anglicised versions of the Italian names. Guido becomes Wendell, Gaetano becomes Johnny, Cecilia becomes Jessica. The only name that doesn’t change dramatically is Carole. She just becomes Carol.

This movie answers several questions you may at some time have asked yourself. Such as, can you use a saxophone as a sex aid? Can you perform sexual acts on the the back of a motorcycle while said motorcycle is travelling at high speed? It turns out that the answer to both questions is yes.

This is an erotic thriller with the emphasis on the erotic. The eroticism is decidedly kinky. What’s more interesting is that it’s not just sexually kinky but emotionally kinky. It’s a movie about dominance-submission games. It addresses yet another interesting question - what happens when dominant-submissive rôles get reversed, when a masochist becomes a sadist? And in a sado-masochistic relationship which partner is truly dominant?

It’s also obviously a movie about madness. Cecilia becomes more and more unhinged. Guido’s behaviour becomes much stranger. This is sexual and emotional obsession leading to madness.

There’s a lot of complexity to the key relationships in this movie - the Guido-Carole relationship, the Gaetano-Cecilia and Cecilia-Guido relationships. There’s love and hate mixed up. There are power games being played out. The relationships are all obsessive and all driven by out-of-control sexual passion. Sometimes one partner seems to be getting more out of the relationship than the other. It’s not always certain to what extent both partners are willing. There’s a sense that maybe all of these characters are to some extent out of control. The sexual and the emotional are not always in sync. In some of these relationships one character (or sometimes both) is not sure at all sure of his or her own feelings.

Cecilia is sexually excited by Gaetano but is horrified by the things he persuades her to do. But she does these things anyway. Perhaps she does them because she thinks he loves her. Perhaps he does, Cecilia can’t be sure, and nor can we.

There is some violence but (despite Fulci’s reputation as a director of gore films) there’s no gore at all.

There is definitely a lot of sex. There’s a lot of frontal nudity. There are pretty strong sex scenes (although definitely softcore). It’s a sleazy kinky movie, but it’s sleazy and kinky in an intelligent and provocative way. It’s a movie about sex and sexual obsession and it confronts those subjects in the kind of direct way that very very few American movie have ever done.

Brett Halsey and Corinne Cléry are very good. Corinne Cléry is of course best-known for The Story of O (1975), coincidentally another movie dealing with sado-masochism in a fairly complex way. Stefano Madia is extremely good as the charming, sinister, disturbing but oddly innocent Gaetano.

It is however nineteen-year-old Blanca Marsillach who gets the juiciest rôle, as Cecilia. She gives a powerhouse performance. She’s frightening and vulnerable and angry and sad and crazy and sympathetic at at the same time.

I made my first attempt to get into Lucio Fulci’s films quite a few years back and was rather disappointed by a couple of his most admired films. After that I kind of give up on him. Then a couple of years ago I saw his 1969 proto-giallo One on Top of the Other (AKA Perversion Story, 1969). I was surprised to discover that it was a very stylish well-crafted film and I was even more surprised to find myself loving it. So suddenly Fulci was very much back on my radar.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray offers a nice transfer. The image is just a tiny bit grainy at times although it’s possible the graininess may have been intentional. On the whole though it’s a superb transfer. With a host of extras - several interviews, an audio commentary by Sam Deighan (she manages to be both perceptive and enthusiastic) and two short pieces on the film by Stephen Thrower.

I reviewed Fulci’s excellent One on Top of the Other (Perversion Story, 1969) a while back.

The Devil’s Honey is a terrific movie. Very highly recommended.

Lucio Fulci’s One on Top of the Other (Perversion Story, 1969)

Lucio Fulci’s One on Top of the Other (AKA Perversion Story) is a 1969 psycho-sexual thriller that perhaps doesn’t have enough blood and violence to qualify as a true giallo. It doesn’t have the suggestions of horror that we usually associate with that genre. It does however have some definite giallo stylistic touches.

Those who think of blood-drenched gore when they hear the name Lucio Fulci will be in for some surprises. There’s none of that here. It’s just not that type of movie.

I have never considered myself to be a Fulci fan but after this movie I may have to revise my opinions. One on Top of the Other is well-crafted and very stylish.

It’s also very decadent. The San Francisco setting is another of the surprises (it’s not just set there but filmed there). The film has (naturally) a very European feel and at first you might think that Rome would have been a more appropriate setting. As you get into it you realise that perhaps Fulci was right after all. If decadence is what you wanted then California in 1969 had plenty of it. It’s a different kind of decadence, a very non-European kind, so the movie is an odd mix of cultural influences.

Dr George Dumurrier (Jean Sorel) runs an expensive private clinic in San Francisco, a clinic that tends to eat up money very quickly. His marriage to Susan (Marisa Mell) is well and truly on the rocks. His life is made more complicated by the fact that Susan is extremely ill, she refuses to give a divorce and he’s under pressure from his mistress Jane (Elsa Martinelli).

Then Susan dies, and to his surprise he discovers that he’s the beneficiary of a huge insurance policy she had taken out, enough to solve all his problems. But given that his wife hated him why has she done this?

In a topless bar he meets a girl named Monica Weston. She’s a stripper and part-time prostitute, she’s very beautiful and she reminds him of Susan. She reminds him of Susan to an uncanny degree.

Of course he sleeps with Monica. Maybe he’s just trying to convince himself that she’s not Susan, or maybe he’s trying to convince himself that she is Susan.

There’s a very obvious Hitchcock influence here. There are some definite shades of Vertigo, reinforced by the San Francisco setting.

It has to be admitted that if you stop and think about Fulci’s script for even a second, it makes no sense at all. It’s just too ludicrously improbable and implausible. It also has to be admitted that the ending, although undeniably tense, takes too long to get where it’s going.

None of this matters for two reasons - the visuals, and Marisa Mell. Mell is best remembered for Danger: Diabolik but her rôle in One on Top of the Other is possibly the best of her career and she makes the most of it. The Austrian beauty is of course gorgeous. That goes without saying. She looks fabulous in this movie (her striptease scene is memorable to say the least) but it’s her acting that really impresses in a rather challenging rôle. If she’d made one false step the whole movie would have collapsed, but she handles things to perfection.

As for the visuals, Fulci pretty much won me over with the first sex scene in the movie. It’s very cleverly shot, very classy and very arty, almost Radley Metzger-ish although also slightly disturbing. You get the feeling that George is trapped in a web of sex. Fulci manages quite a few other fine set-pieces. The scenes in the Roaring Twenties club are terrific, with an amazing number of almost-naked young ladies and a general ambience of expensive sleaze (which suits the mood of the film).

Jean Sorel is OK as George Dumurrier. Elsa Martinelli is rather distant as Jane.

Mondo Macabro’s Blu-Ray offers both the English and Italian versions. Since Italian movie were always post-dubbed which one you choose is up to you. It should be noted that there was a different cut of this film for just about every market and trying to figure out which is the definitive or even the preferred version isn’t easy. The earlier DVD release from Severin offered the much truncated French cut. The recent Blu-Ray release from Mondo Macabro offers a much longer cut and is obviously the one to buy. Extras on the Blu-Ray include interviews with Jean Sorel, Elsa Martinelli and a very informative overview by Stephen Thrower.

The excellent visuals and Marisa Mell are more than enough reason to to watch One on Top of the Other. Highly recommended.

Don't Torture a Duckling (1972)

I know Lucio Fulci has an extremely high reputation among many cult movie fans. After seeing The Beyond I was somewhat bemused by this - it’s just a total mess of a film I wondered what I was missing in Fulci’s work. But I decided to give him another chance. And now after seeing Don't Torture a Duckling (Non si sevizia un paperino)I’m still bemused by his reputation. Don't Torture a Duckling, released in 1972, is a routine giallo. It has the standard giallo elements - the series of murders that appear to have some sexual motivation (although in this case the motivation is initially rathe obscure), the hard-bitten reporter who is a better crime-solver than the police, the beautiful mysterious woman whose sole function is to provide the movie’s token nudity, and a plot with far too many twists and turns. What Fulci adds to the mix is some very crude and totally unnecessary gore, which actually weakens the film. Most giallos rely on having at least one star who is a competent actor, and at least one actress with some real sexual charisma. This movie does have one very competent actress, Florinda Bolkan, but she’s largely wasted. Most giallos also rely very heavily on visual style, but Don't Torture a Duckling is fairly weak in that area as well. A number of young boys have been murdered. A local madwoman (Florinda Bolkan) finds herself under suspicion, but there are the usual plentiful red herrings. A beautiful blonde woman also becomes a suspect, apparently because she’s beautiful and blonde so she must be up to no good. The boys had disturbed the grave of the dead child of the madwoman, and in fact they’re as thoroughly unlikeable and obnoxious a group of boys as you’ll ever find in one movie. They’re obsessed with slaughtering the local wildlife, perving on the local prostitutes, persecuting anyone they can, and in at least one case they’re also obsessed with sexual fantasies about the mysterious beautiful blonde woman. She tends to encourage this by flaunting her naked body at the boy. There’s also a dedicated young priest who believes soccer is the answer to everything, there’s a retarded girl and there’s a disturbed mother. While it’s very much a by-the-numbers giallo, it’s at least competently done. If you really love the genre you may enjoy it. I personally mostly enjoy giallos that play around with the conventions of genre and spring some genuine surprises rather than just convoluted plot twists. The typical giallo is a type of film that doesn’t hold all that much interest for me, so those with more enthusiasm for the genre will undoubtedly respond to it more positively than I did. Blue Underground’s DVD release is more impressive than the film itself, despite a lack of extras.