edwige fenech

all the colors of the dark poster

A while back I started a little feature I called Bring Out the Perverts: Giallo on the Criterion Channel. That streaming service featured 13 Italian genre films and that seemed like a fun thing to review. I like the idea of having a pre-selected set of films to watch and review. I thought I’d do a bunch of them.

When I say “a while back” I mean I started this feature last September. Four months have gone by and I still haven’t finished watching 13 films. I did well through October, but the Noirvember happened and I completely forgot about this idea.

This is the second to last one and hopefully, I’ll finish it out soon after that. I still like the idea, and I’ve got some things brewing in a similar vein for this coming year. So consider this a Friday Night Horror Movie and a Bring Out the Perverts.

All the Colors of the Dark is a mixture of classic Giallo with some early 1970s psychedelia with a touch of satanism thrown in for good measure.

Edwige Fenech stars as Jane Harrison a woman whose recent car accident caused her to miscarry and lose her baby. This has sent her spiraling into mental breakdown. She begins losing her grip on reality, unable to tell her dream world full of nightmarish images and a man with a knife out to kill her, and real life.

She’s seeing a psychiatrist, but her boyfriend Richard (George Hilton) is against it. But he’s mostly annoyed that every time they start to have sex she starts envisioning that dude with the knife and has a panic attack. We’ll skip the analysis about knives and sex, stabbings, and penetration for now.

She meets a friend who suggests attending a Black Mass. There she is, well I don’t want to say raped because that feels slightly too strong a word so let’s just say strongly persuaded to drink the blood of a sacrificed dog and then engage in a lot of sex. Afterward, she’s totally into sexing up her boyfriend again. I wouldn’t touch that analysis with a ten-foot pole.

That dude with the knife keeps showing up in odd places stalking her. Sometimes she envisions him attacking her but every time that seems to just be a hallucination. At another Black Mass, she might have been forced to kill her friend who introduced her to it. Or maybe that was just a dream too. The lines between reality and hallucination become quite blurred.

It all wraps up a little too neatly for my tastes with all the solutions coming fast and clean.

Fenech is quite good. She’s the Scream Queen of Gialli and while I’m a fan, I’d never call it a fantastic actress. But she does well as this damaged woman in distress.

Director Sergio Martino leans heavily into the psychedelia of the era. He does that thing that was common at this time where the images turn into a kaleidoscope. He uses a lot of quick cuts, and he’ll repeat images over and over. I find it all very dated and rather annoying.

When he’s not giving you a visual trip he does create some rather striking images.

I’ve never been a fan of this type of psychedelic cinema and I find it especially obnoxious in horror. Looking at my Letterboxd friend list most of them seem to really like this one. So your mileage may vary.

strip nude for your killer poster

Horror films have always been at least a little transgressive and salacious. They are trying to evoke strong emotions after all. Starting in the 1960s and moving strongly in the 1970s and 1980s they began to rely heavily on sex and violence. Horror tends to be watched by younger people and younger people buy tickets when that’s what you’re selling.

Giallo always trodded on those tropes. This makes sense since Giallo is at heart a genre about violence against women. The best films in the genre examine those tropes, they ponder the male gaze (while often at the same time offering up examples of it) and probe the links between sex and violence. The worst ones simply give the audience plenty of naked flesh and blood-letting without much thought behind it beyond making a few dollars.

Strip Nude For Your Killer is one of the sleaziest horror films I’ve ever seen. Hardly a scene goes by without someone (usually any number of beautiful women) taking off their clothes. Actually, it is always the women. This is a film that has no problem showing full-frontal nudity from a woman but always pans up just as the men are taking off their pants.

It begins with a woman lying naked on her back, her feet in stirrups. She’s getting a back-alley abortion. The doctor’s head is strategically placed so that we can see pubic hair, but not her actual genitals. That’s about as sophisticated as the film gets.

I won’t get too far into the plot, as you can read more about that in my review of the Blu-ray over at Cinema Sentries. There isn’t much plot to be found if I’m being honest. It is basically someone killing a bunch of people connected to a modeling agency.

The kills aren’t particularly interesting, and the filmmaking is rather plain. There is a groovy soundtrack and the killer does wear a pretty rad-looking leather biker suit (someday I’m gonna make a list of all the films that have a killer wearing a similar suit – there are a lot of them, and they always seem to keep their helmets on!)

It also stars Edwige Fenech and I’ll never complain about that. However, she’s not given much to do (other than strip off her clothes at every opportunity) even as she is the main character and the one who is investigating the murders.

It isn’t a terrible film, it just isn’t particularly exciting which is quite a thing to say considering how much nudity and murder it has in it.