Bring Out the Perverts: Death Walks at Midnight (1972)

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By 1972 the Giallo was already well established and quite popular. Mario Bava had created its template and Dario Argento had perfected it, but by this stage, many others had begun to play in that particular sandbox.

Quite a few of the directors now making Giallo weren’t necessarily interested in the genre, but they made whatever types of films they could get financed. These workman-like filmmakers went where the money was. As such the films aren’t always the best, sometimes they are pretty awful, to be honest, but a good filmmaker can make something interesting out of genres he’s not necessarily interested in.

There were quite a few directors during this period who would make a couple of westerns, a couple of Gialli, and then maybe a couple of action-packed crime thrillers.

Luciano Ercoli was that kind of director. He made some comedies, a couple of drams, some gritty crime thrillers, and three pretty good Gialli.

Death Walks at Midnight was his last foray into the genre, and arguably it is his best. It still has that workman-like sensibility to it, but it has style. And one of the best weapons in all of Giallo.

Fashion model Valentina (Susan Scott) agrees to drop a bit of LSD while her boyfriend and journalist Gio Baldi (Simón Andreu) photographs her and documents her experience. The agreement is he will not use her name and she’ll wear a mask so her identity will not be known. But as soon as the drug takes effect all bets are off, Gio removes the mask and ultimately uses her name to sell more newspapers.

While in the midst of her trip, she witnesses a gruesome murder in the flat across the street. A man dressed in black and donning a metal spiked gauntlet on his hand, smashes in the face of a beautiful, young woman.

Nobody else sees the murder and because she’s high as a kite on hallucinogens no one believes her. Later she learns a woman was murdered by a similar weapon in that very flat several months prior. But they caught the killer for that incident. He was found next to the body and confessed to the crime.

Perhaps Valentina witnessed that crime at the time, but it was so brutal, so awful, she repressed the memory. And then the drug resurfaced it. Or maybe the drugs unlocked some psychic ability and she was able to see into the past.

But then why does the killer from her vision look nothing like the man who confessed? And why does a man who looks just like the killer in her vision keep following her around town? And who is that other guy who keeps showing up to tell her she’s in danger?

Naturally, she begins her own investigation which leads her down all sorts of twists and turns. For the most part, Ercoli is pretty straightforward in his direction. The mystery is front and center. Except, it isn’t really a mystery as the film shows us who the killer is from the start. There is no mask in this one. He’s not hidden in shadows, and we don’t see things from his point of view. We know what he looks like, but we don’t know who he is. Or why he killed in such an awful way.

It is a fine story, told well. Periodically Ercoli infuses it with real style. The murder is especially well-shot. We see part of it reflected in his sunglasses. In another moment the screen splashes red with blood. But mostly, and I’m sorry to keep using this word, the direction is workmanlike. It is good. It is well done. But it isn’t all that memorable.

Except for that crazy gauntlet. That thing is cool.

I previously reviewed this movie and another Ercoli Giallo, Death Walks on High Heels for Cinema Sentries.

Bring Out the Perverts: Blood and Black Lace (1964)

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Mario Bava’s 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much is generally considered the first Giallo ever made. While it does contain many of the hallmarks of that genre, it is missing one important ingredient: color. It was filmed totally in black and white.

As if correcting his own mistake Bava’s next turn into the genre would be absolutely exploding with color. Blood and Black Lace is one of the most colorful films I’ve ever seen. The genre forevermore would make great use of bold color schemes.

Bava was an artist and cinematographer before he became a director and it certainly shows with this film. Every scene is a painting. Every shot is beautiful. Even the violent ones.

He constantly uses different colored spotlights (red, blue, green, etc.) and will shine them on a specific object in his scene so that in any given shot, multiple things will shine bright in specific colors. One set is filled with mannequins, all of which have their own colored lights, and billowing curtains, again with different colored lights shining on them. It gives the entire thing this beautiful, yet eerie look.

His use of shadow and light is entrancing. Everything truly is astonishing-looking.

It is the story that lets me down. A black-gloved, masked killer is murdering beautiful women at a modeling agency. A police detective tries to solve the case. Everyone is a suspect. Everyone has an opinion on who the real killer is. A secret diary, red herrings galore, and all sorts of backstabbings and skeletons are in the closet. That sounds good, but something about its execution just doesn’t do it for me.

I think the lack of a real protagonist, or at least someone to root for causes my interest to lag. We wander from character to character, learning their dark secrets and thus their potential to be the murderer without ever really caring for them.

But Giallo has never been a genre that was all that concerned with telling a good story. It is about style, and Blood and Black Lace has that in spades.

What’s amazing is how this film, the second-ever Giallo, has pretty much every hallmark of the genre. This is the gold standard by which every other Gialli came into existence.

The killer has a black trenchcoat, a black hat, and black gloves. Here he wears a faceless mask that obscures everything about him, even his gender. He prefers blades over guns. The motives are psychosexual (presumably), and the victims are beautiful women. The camera is all gaze, objectifying the women as they become victims. Implicating us as it thrills us. And as I say it has style for days.

If you are interested in Giallo this is where you begin.

I previously wrote a review of Blood and Black Lace for Cinema Sentries, you can read it here.

Bring Out the Perverts: The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970)

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Dario Argento’s debut film was not the first Giallo ever made (Mario Bava’s 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much usually gets that honor, followed by another Bava film Blood and Black Lace from 1964 – both of which I’ll be writing about later). Nor did it create any of the hallmarks usually associated with the genre (black-gloved killers, bold use of color and camera angles, psycho-sexual motives, etc). I wouldn’t even say he perfected it (at least not with this film). Still, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage was exceedingly successful, helping to popularize the genre and influencing a decade’s worth of Italian horror films.

It is a bit like how John Carpenter’s Halloween didn’t invent the slasher (a genre greatly influenced by the Giallo) but it popularized it to the degree that without it 1980s horror would look extraordinarily different.

The thing to remember about Giallo is that they are all essentially murder mysteries. Someone is killed (usually female, usually graphically), and someone else (usually not a cop) tries to solve the crime. They fall into the horror category because the violence is often stylized, brutal, and blood-soaked, and the killer often pops out of nowhere leading to jump scares. But at their heart, they are no different from other crime stories.

The genre in general, and Argento in specific never seem to care that much about the details of the crime or its solution. If, upon examination, some part of the story doesn’t make logical sense, that’s okay. What matters is the style and the execution (of the story, not the victims, although the kills are an important part of the genre.)

So it is with The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Some of the plot points are a little goofy and the final solution is a bit ham-fisted, but I never care no matter how many times I watch it.

Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) is an American writer vacationing in Rome. While walking home one evening he sees what appears to be a woman attacked by a man wearing a black trench coat, black gloves, and a black fedora. The woman is stabbed and the man runs away through a back door.

Sam tries to help but finds himself stuck between two sliding doors. He stands there helpless, watching this woman bleed out. Eventually, he manages to flag down a passerby who calls the police. The woman lives.

The police think the assailant has also killed three other women in the city within the last few weeks. Sam is haunted by what he saw. He thinks about that scene over and over again. He can’t even make love to his girlfriend without thinking about it. He’s convinced he missed some vital detail. Perhaps he saw the man’s face and can’t remember it. Or maybe there is some other clue he’s not seeing.

The film keeps flashing back to that moment as well. We see the attack from slightly different angles. In slow motion. It zooms in. As an audience, we examine the scene, looking for some vital clue. All cinema is voyeurism, but Argento makes it explicit. We are a part of this movie.

In another scene, the killer will look at his potential victim. He’ll snap photographs of her. The movie camera will look through the photographer’s lens. Voyeurism upon voyeurism.

The film opens with the killer in his black coat, donning his black gloves typing at a typewriter. Anecdotally I know that it was Dario Argento himself wearing those gloves, being seen creating words on a typewriter. In this moment the creator of the film portrays the killer creating something. Creation is art and art is violence.

Sam begins his own investigation into the crime. He visits an antique shop where one of the victims worked. The last thing she sold was a strange painting of a girl getting stabbed in the snow. More art. More violence. He visits the artist and finds that his painting is based on a real incident that happened several years before.

Meanwhile, the killer makes a few attempts on Sam’s life. In one stunning scene, he’ll attack his girlfriend in her apartment. The killer makes threatening phone calls. All the while Sam and the police get closer to him.

The ending is a bit of a letdown. It reminded me a little of Pscyho which is also a fantastic film right up until the end.

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage isn’t my favorite Giallo, it isn’t even my favorite Argento film but it is a stunning debut and helped crystalize what the genre was about, and certainly influenced nearly every Giallo that came after.

I previously reviewed this film for Cinema Sentries.

Bring Out The Perverts: Giallo On The Criterion Channel

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Criterion was one of the first boutique physical media companies. They started making Laserdiscs as far back as 1984 and then eventually moved to DVDs, Blu-rays, and most recently 4K UHD. They specialize in arthouse, foreign, and independent movies. Basically, they are the film snobs’ religion.

But that isn’t really fair. While they do release films by non-American, art-house directors like Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Federico Fellini and independent film darlings like Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson, they also have boxed sets starring Bruce Lee and Godzilla.

The Criterion Channel does an even better job at this. Sure, you can watch the entire filmography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but they also regularly add in all sorts of obscure, goofy, and cult films like The Atomic Submarine, Atragon (about a giant sea snake that decides humans have become technologically advanced and attacks), Baba Yaga (based on a series of S&M friendly comics), and The Canyons (starring Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen).

Right now they are featuring thirteen Giallos. Fans of this site know I’m a huge fan of that stylish Italian horror genre so this is like catnip to me.

Even though I’ve previously watched all of the films, own most of them on DVD, and have even reviewed quite a few of them before, I thought it would be fun to watch them on the Criterion Channel and do a little write-up on each one.

Now that the music has moved to a separate site, I keep wanting to find ways to add value to this site. Something like this seems exactly perfect.

The name of this series, by the way, comes from Dario Argento’s debut film The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. A cop in that film has put together a lineup of crooks who might be the murderers of several beautiful women. He yells this when bringing them out. I thought it was a fun title for this series.

The films are as follows:

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Death Walks at Midnight (1972)
Deep Red (1975)
Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)
Tenebrae (1982)
In the Folds of the Flesh (1970)
Who Saw Her Die? (1972)
Torso (1973)
What Have They Done To Your Daughters (1974)
Strip Nude For Your Killer (1975)
All the Colors of the Dark (1972)
The Evil Eye (1963)

Usually, Criterion presents their collections in chronological order, but lately, they’ve used some other criteria. I presume someone has ordered them in a way that makes for interesting viewing. I’ve decided to follow their order.