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: 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.