italian ciema

I’ve been trying real hard to review every murder mystery I watch this month. It is a struggle (but fun) because I have a…well, I started to say I have a life, but anyone who has an actual life doesn’t watch 7-10 movies a week. But I do have a job and a family, and other things that need my attention besides writing about movies (I mean I have to watch them too!). But also it’s a struggle because sometimes the movies are bad. Sometimes it is fun to write about a bad movie, sometimes it is a struggle.

But here we go again…

Arabella: Black Angel stars Tinin Cansino as Deborah Veronesi a woman with an insatiable sexual appetite who has the misfortune of being married to a man paralyzed from the waist down. Every night she slips away and finds some stranger to get sexy with.

One night she attends a wild warehouse sex party. It gets raided by the cops and one officer mistakes her for a prostitute and forces her to have sex with him. A paparazzi-esque blackmailer takes photographs of this.

Before he can do much blackmailing he’s stabbed with some scissors. Before you know it everyone Tinin sleeps with gets themselves scissored.

Meanwhile, the husband learns of her sexual escapades and is turned on by it. He wants to know more and he turns that more into his next book.

All of this could be a pretty good movie. But the film is more interested in gratuitous sex and nudity than it is in telling a good story.

It has a few decent Giallo visuals, and the killings are staged fairly well, but that’s about it. You all know I’m no prude when it comes to gratuitous sex but god golly I need more than that. For Giallo completist only

blanceville monster poster

This is film #2 of Arrow Videos Italian Gothic Horror boxed set. I’ll be reviewing the entire thing soon so I won’t say much about it here. The Italians were great at taking successful American genres and making them their own. When Roger Corman found success with several Edgar Alan Poe adaptations the Italians started adapting his stories. The Blancheville Monster (also known simply as Horror as seen from the poster) basically rips Corman’s adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher. The story, about a woman who returns home to her family castle, discovers that everything has changed and that someone (possibly a ghost) is trying to kill her before her 21st birthday, is pretty standard gothic horror story stuff.

But it looks great and contains everything you want – a spooky old castle, creepy shadows, flowing white gowns, and a monster in the attic – from this sort of thing. It isn’t a great film, its own director essentially disowned it calling it “a little film of no importance” but I found it quite enjoyable.