Tag: italian horror

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: Paganini Horror (1988)

paganini horror

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.

31 Days of Horror: Macabre (1980)

macabre poster

There has been a lot of discourse over on Twitter lately about how cinema is more than just plot. This stems from a certain contingency of filmbros who loudly complain about things like perceived plot holes or a lack of narrative or some other problem within the film’s story without paying attention to the atmosphere or direction, acting or other aspects of a film’s artistry. The argument is that what makes movies special is not what actually happens, but how it happens, or how the story is told.

Lamberto Bava’s first film as a director Macabre is a good example of what I’m talking about. The plot is razor-thin. A woman returns to a rambling old mansion where she rents an apartment after being away for several years. The apartment is not her home, but rather a place she used to sneak away to and have an extra-marital affair. This was before her daughter drowned her son and before an automobile accident decapitated her lover (which happened just moments after she learned about the dead son). The reason she was away was due to being in a mental institute, having broken down after those two deaths.

All of this happens within the first five minutes of the film. For the rest of the movie the lady spends most of her time in her apartment having spirited relations with some unknown lover all the while the blind man who owns the building listens attentively downstairs. The woman’s daughter (who was not arrested for her brother’s murder as she made it look like an accident) periodically shows up and asks a lot of questions.

There is a mystery around the woman’s lover as he is never seen. And she has the freezer locked up for some reason. It is pretty easy to figure out what’s going on, especially since the posters and synopsis tend to give away the surprise.

But Bava (who is the son of Mario Bava, one of the grandfathers of Italian horror) knows how to make a movie, even when the plot is slim and rather hokey. The mansion is filled with creaky old stuff and interesting bric-a-brac. He films it from various angles with lots of shadows and light giving it a great gothic feel.

It reminded me a lot of really old films that clearly didn’t have much of a budget and were hemmed in by the censors from creating something really creepy. But were still able to create a mood, a vibe, and then had some ridiculous twist at the end. Bava does his best to create tension about what it is that freezer. He moves his camera slowly towards it, adds in mysterious music, etc. Even though you know what it is, and how ridiculous the idea is, you are still along for the ride. At least I was.

The House by the Cemetery (1981)

house by the cemetery poster

It is almost October which means it is almost Halloween which means I’ll be watching a lot of horror movies. I should be creating a list for my #31DaysofHorror and #Hooptober hashtags (more on that later) but for today I just watched an old Italian horror. Lucio Fulci was an Italian director who made lots of films in lots of genres but is mostly known today for a series of Giallo and Horror films, most of which included high levels of graphic violence (he is sometimes called the “Godfather of Gore”.)

The House by the Cemetery is not his best work, nor his worst, but it is a pretty good example of what he is about. The story is hard to follow and mostly nonsense. The screenwriter, Dardano Sacchetti, says he was inspired by Henry James and Fulci says he wanted to make a Lovercraftian story. I’ve not read anything by any of those authors so I can’t comment on that, but I can say little of what’s on the screen makes much sense.

The story involves an intellectual, Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco) who moves from New York City to a small town in New England. He takes his wife Lucy (Catriona MacColl) and young son Bob (Giovanni Frezza) with him. He’s there to continue the research of his mentor Dr. Peterson, who previously went a little crazy and killed his mistress and then offed himself. All of this was done in the titular house by the cemetery, the house Norman and his family are moving into.

It is a creepy old horror movie house – big and dilapidated, filled with shadowy corners and a scary basement. It is not only located next to a cemetery but also on top of one. Or at least when they pull back a rug they find a tombstone in the middle of one of the rooms. Norman says that lots of homes bury their loved ones inside their houses because it gets cold up there in the winter and the ground is too hard. Sure Norman, whatever you say. There are lots of cold places in this world and I don’t think any of them keep grandma’s corpse in the basement.

People keep telling Norman that they’ve seen him before, that he must have been up in that town a few months prior. Norman keeps denying this. The librarian is a creepy dude who seems to know more than he lets on. A babysitter (Ania Pieroni) shows up and is found trying to get into the locked basement. Then she gets brutally murdered down there. Bob befriends a young girl who no one else can see and who may actually be a ghost.

None of these things are connected very well. It feels like several scenes are missing. Or the screenwriter got drunk and forgot to write a few pages. But it doesn’t really matter. Nobody watches a Fulci film for a great story. They watch it for the gore and this film gives you plenty.

It is the type of film that not only includes a dungeon filled with bodies chopped into pieces but that quick zooms into the viscera and lingers on the gore. In the very first scene a woman gets a knife stabbed through her skull. If you enjoy handcrafted gore effects, and I certainly do, then Lucio Fulci is your man, and The House by the Cemetery is not a bad place to start.

It isn’t just blood and guts though, that make this worth watching. The story is a bit bewildering but Fulcio does a nice job of creating an eerie atmosphere and keeping things just enough off balance that your left feeling on edge for most of the film’s runtime.

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

planet of the vampires bluray

Mario Bava is one of the all-time great horror directors. He basically created the Giallo subgenre and was a master visualist. He also directed lots of other genres, including sword and sandals movies and science fiction. Planet of the Vampires is a bit of a genre blend including both sci-fi and horror. Kino Lorber recently released a nice copy of it on Blu-ray and I wrote a review which you can read here.