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.

High Crime (1974)

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Franco Nero was one of the biggest Italian movie stars of the 1970s. Though he made a number of international and American movies I’m not sure if he was ever all that well known over here. Maybe he was. I really don’t know. These days he’s well loved by genre fans. His breakthrough role was Django a terrific Spaghetti Western that beget untold sequels. He made lots of other Westerns, Gialli, Poliziotteschi, and every other Italian genre film you can think of. He’s still working, too, having recently been in films like John Wick 2, and The Pope’s Exorcist.

Not all of his films were masterpieces (dude has starred in over 200 films so you gotta give him some slack) but I always enjoy seeing his face appear in anything.

High Crimes is a pretty good little crime thriller from the 1970s. Nero plays a no-nonsense cop who feels all the rules and regulations are keeping him from nailing the bad guys. The plot gets a little convoluted but the action sequences are pretty great. You can read my full review here.

Demons (1985) & Demons 2 (1986)

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It occurs to me that having moved all my music posts to the other site, I’m going to need to figure out ways to post to this site on a regular basis. I was posting music every day and then occasionally talking about movies and such like. But without the music, this place is gonna look a little barren.

I’m hoping to step up my game a little. An easy way to do that is to keep going through my Cinema Sentries posts and linking to them here.

First up are a couple of “classic” Lamberto Bava horror flicks. I recently upgraded my Blu-ray player to a 4K UHD one and these were the first films I watched on it.

The films are ridiculous, and bonkers, and so, so much fun.

You can read my review here.

Bandits of Orgosolo (1961)

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Radiance Films is a relatively new company competing in the Boutique Blu-ray market. This was my first venture into what they are doing and I gotta say I liked it. The film is quite good – it is an Italian Neorealistic look at how someone might become a bandit. And the disk is beautiful with some nice extras. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Knife of Ice (1972)

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I knew that I was going to watch a Giallo some Friday this month when I dedicated it to murder mysteries. The name Giallo comes from the yellow coloring of the cheap paperback mysteries that were for sale in Rome at the time. Filmmakers started adapting them in lurid, violent ways, which turned them into horror films, but at their heart, they are murder mysteries.

I had not meant this Giallo to have been directed by Umberto Lenzi, the Italian genre director who now leads the director field in my stats for the year with me having now seen four of his films in 2024. I never would have guessed he’d be leading the pack in the middle of May. But life, and my film watching, is just full of surprises.

This one stars Carroll Baker (who made three other films with Lenzi) as Martha a woman who witnessed her parents die in a horrible accident when she was but a child, rendering her mute.

Now in her twenties, she lives with her uncle in a beautiful estate in the Spanish countryside. One day her cousin Jenny (Evelyn Stewart), who is a famous singer shows up. Then she gets herself murdered by a knife-wielding maniac.

The police note that another woman was found dead in a ditch not far away. It must be the work of a sex maniac. Later they’ll find remnants of a black mass and decide the murders aren’t that of a sex maniac, but of a satan worshipper.

More murders pile up and it appears as if Martha may be the next victim. The police inspector put three officers around her house for protection. It is the worst protection I’ve ever seen in a film. One guy takes shelter in an underground crypt (her house is next to a cemetery). Another one tells her that his replacement is running late so he just takes off without waiting. The last guy gets a call stating there is an accident nearby so he takes off, leaving her alone.

There are lots of twists and turns and the killer’s reveal is a big (and rather dumb) twist that will likely surprise everyone. Lenzi is a good enough director to keep you from getting bored, but just. There are some cool images (one involving some fog-covered streets is particularly nice) and some well-directed kills, but the story is mostly dull. There’s nothing particularly special about it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Spasmo (1974)

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I’ve come to realize the line between the horror genre and the crime genre is often a thin one. Sometimes horror films involve monsters or space aliens or the supernatural, but sometimes the villains are more pedestrian. Many horror films involve human killers – often of the psychopathic and serial variety – but human all the same. Many of these films follow a police detective private detective or some other normal citizen as they investigate the murders. This is, of course, what countless crime dramas do.

In these cases, it isn’t entirely clear as to what differentiates a horror movie from a crime one. Sometimes it might be a matter of the violence and gore, but I’ve seen plenty of detective movies/series that revel in the gruesome details. Maybe horror movies have more jump scares. Or maybe sometimes the genres rather blend together and you get to decide which one you are watching.

The Italian Giallo was pretty much always crime stories with a (usually leather-gloved, knife-wielding) killer on the loose and someone out to discover who he (or she) is. But they did so with a particular brand of style and a pension for graphic, sexualized violence.

Spasmo is a Giallo that works more like a standard crime mystery with a bit of (not very graphic at all) sexual psychology thrown in for good measure.

Christian (Robert Hoffman) and his girl go frolicking on some beach. They come across a woman face down in the sand. At first, they think she’s dead, but upon further inspection, they find she has just passed out. When she awakens she says her name is Barbara (Suzy Kendall) but she gets pretty cagey when asked any other questions. As soon as Christian’s back is turned she runs for her car and jets away.

But she leaves behind a bottle with the name “Tucania” written on it. Somehow they figure out the name is also the name of a boat and they jump aboard and attend a party going on there. As it happens Barbara is also aboard and before you know it Christian has dumped his girlfriend and run off with Barbara.

Strangely, Barbara is all about a little hanky panky but she forces Christian to shave his beard first. While he’s in the bathroom getting a face trim some dude busts in the window brandishing a gun and threatening to kill him. A Tussel ensues and Christian accidentally shoots the man dead (or is he?).

Barbara is weirdly chill about this fact, doesn’t even bother to look at the guy but does suggest that the two of them (her and this man she’s just met) go on the run together. But before they can leave Barbara’s boyfriend shows up and forces her to go with him. Christian takes off separately, then realizes he left a necklace at the house and returns to the scene. There he finds the dead man has vanished.

He regroups with Barbara at a chateau on the sea where they meet a couple of oddballs who tell them a story about a weird crime they just came across. Turns out someone is planting very lifelike dummies, dressed in lingerie and with knives sticking out of them all around the countryside. The film is littered with people discovering these strange creations.

Someone else attacks Christian and nearly kills him. His brother is somehow involved. Barbara seems to come and go. Christian begins to think he’s going crazy. At its heart this is a murder mystery, but also a psychological horror. We’re never quite sure what is real and what is being imagined by Christian.

The ending ties it all together with a twist that I won’t spoil, but it’s one of those things where once you see the conclusion the rest of the film makes more sense. I found myself thinking about the beginning and what was confusing got tied together. But that didn’t really make watching it the first time all that satisfying, and I’m not sure this film really merits a second viewing.

ScreeningNotes over at Letterboxd has a really interesting essay on the film. He ties it into the larger Italian cinema from the time frame. I’m not sure I buy into everything he’s spouting, but it is an interesting read anyway.

For my money, if you are a fan of the genre then this is worth watching, but you’ve really got to be a fan.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Paganini Horror (1988)

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Horror, as a genre, can take some of the dumbest plot points and turn them into something fun, and interesting, and when you’re lucky, even scary. Killer clowns are living in the sewer, hatchet-wielding dudes slice up coeds in isolated campgrounds, killer tomatoes lurk at the grocery store, and just today I watched a short film called Hair Wolf.

Sometimes the movies are in on the gag (that killer tomato movie is full of winks towards the camera), sometimes they find ways to elevate the material, and sometimes they are just dumb.

Paganini Horror has a fairly interesting (if rather silly) idea but doesn’t find a way to do anything interesting with it.

An all-girl rock band is struggling to come up with their next big hit. Their producer Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) complains that all their new songs sound like their old ones. They need something new, something bold, something that will wow their fans.

Naturally, they buy an unpublished score by the famous Italian violinist and composer Paganini from an unscrupulous dealer (Donald Pleasence who doesn’t get to do much but has one scene in which he throws piles of cash off a tall building while muttering “fly away little demons.” Naturally, they decide to shoot a video of them performing their rock-n-roll version of the Paganini song inside the murder house where he lived. Naturally, this unleashes a gateway to Hell.

See what I mean? That’s not a bad setup. I mean, it’s pretty silly, but a good writer and director could do something with that. Instead, we get some half-thought-out ideas, a couple of decent bouts of gore and violence, and two (count them) two full-on music videos.

Daria Nicolodi who starred in a bunch of great Dario Argento films (and cowrote Suspiria with him) costars as the owner of the creepy mansion. She also co-wrote it with director Luigi Cozzi and Raimondo Del Balzo (who hasn’t done anything else I’ve seen). You can kind of see what they were going for, but without a true master like Argento to help out it all comes out as a big mess.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Nightmare City (1980)

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George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead didn’t exactly invent the zombie movie, but it perfected it and popularized most of the genre’s tropes. Ten years later he made a sequel, Dawn of the Dead. That film was a huge success in Italy, so successful that in 1979 Lucio Fulci made an unofficial sequel entitled Zombi 2 (Dawn of the Dead was renamed Zombi in Italy). It was a big hit and the Italian zombie crazy had begun.

Lots and lots of Italian zombie films were made over the next several years. Some of them are great, some of them are terrible, but they are almost all worth watching. The Italians tended to go big – bigger violence and gore, more nudity and sex. What they miss in nuance and social commentary they more than make up for in over-the-top craziness.

They also allowed themselves to get a little weird, to play with the genre in interesting ways. In Nightmare City the zombies are not the slow-walking, brainless ghouls from Romero’s films, but rather somewhat intelligent, fast-moving monsters capable of using weapons and systematically invading places like hospitals and power stations.

It begins with an airplane flying towards some unnamed European airport. The tower gets no response when it asks the plane to identify itself. When it lands the police surround it, demanding whoever is inside come out with their hands up. When the door does open what comes out is a mass of knife-wielding maniacs whose faces are covered in scabs and scars (more like oatmeal and latex if you ask me). Guns seem to do nothing to these monsters; in an instant, they have killed everyone on sight.

Well, nearly everyone. Our hero, a news reporter named Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) was there to interview a nuclear scientist, manages to escape.

What follows, plot-wise is your fairly typical city under siege storyline. The government orders everyone to stay in their homes and lock their doors. The military comes out in force to kill the zombies. Scientists scramble to figure out just exactly what’s going on (it was radiation, stupid).

Our hero rushes to the hospital to rescue his doctor’s wife and then they try to escape the city.

The script is a mess. There is a lot of speechifying about how mankind is a doomed species and how we’ve used technology to play god, etc. and so forth. It is nothing you haven’t heard in a million other science fiction films, and none of it is delivered confidently. The military and other law enforcement presence seems very small. You’d think they’d bring in tanks and jet planes to secure the area, but we see almost none of that. Presumably, the budget wasn’t big enough to bring in actual military vehicles (the best we get is a helicopter).

The violence is a funny mix of really bad to surprisingly gruesome. There are a lot of zombies with knives and hatches but their stabbing and slicing is often completely bloodless. Sometimes they don’t even break the skin though it seems to drop their victims stone dead. But in other scenes, we’ll see a guy get his eyeball ripped out with a stick, or a woman has her breast completely cut off.

There are a lot of naked breasts in this film. The men tend to get stabbed in the neck, but the women seem to almost always have their shirts ripped off and their boobs stabbed.

It is nothing new to have low-budget horror films throw a lot of gratuitous nudity at their viewers, but it happens so often here that it is both hilarious and tedious (and of course wildly sexist).

Despite all of this, I really rather enjoyed myself. You can’t go into a film like this expecting greatness. But director Umberto Lenzi keeps things moving at a steady pace and he has enough skill to not make the ridiculousness too inept. It all comes off as seriously ridiculous fun.