Shepperton Screams (Part IX): What Became of Jack & Jill? (1972) dir. Bill Bain

For sixteen weeks, Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's WHAT BECAME OF JACK & JILL? (1972). Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.

NT: And now for something (almost) completely different. In the same year that they spent some time convalescing in the ASYLUM (1972), the producers at Amicus Productions decided to knock out another one of their varied standalone horror films. In doing so, they opted for a fresh take by allotting the principal roles in the cast and crew largely to Amicus newcomers, who were unencumbered by the company’s established history, expectations, and in-house style. The resulting picture, WHAT BECAME OF JACK & JILL? (1972), speeds us from the period-specific Victorian cityscapes of Amicus’s prior standalone, I, MONSTER (1971), to a very contemporary urban English setting. So contemporary, in fact, that with the arrival of JACK & JILL we bear witness to an Amicus first: a film about young people. Though Amicus’s films had been skewed towards a younger audience from the beginning, this film marks the company’s first blatant foray into capturing the pocket change of the youth market. They accomplish this grab for a younger audience’s piggy banks by casting the titular leads as two of that younger generation’s ilk. But there’s a problem here. See, Jack (Paul Nicholas) and Jill (Vanessa Howard) are two vile, shallow, and annoyingly childish cretins.

WHAT BECAME OF JACK & JILL? is a wolf of a conservative social critique in a youth picture’s sheep clothing. The film’s title (a riff on the “Whatever Happened to…?” trend launched by similarly named horror-melodramas by the likes of Robert Aldrich and Curtis Harrington) signals its intent to demonstrate to us what might have become of those archetypal, innocent, hill-climbing water-fetchers if they had grown up to be groovy, countercultural young adults in the tumultuous early 1970s. Yet, director Bill Bain and screenwriter Roger Marshall, both in their middle-age at the time of production, tap into the countercultural youth movement in their film only to attempt to expose how selfish, misguided, and without firm conviction the so-called “social revolution” is. With its emphasis on the argument that the younger generation’s rebellion against the status quo will result only in needless death and ironic retribution, JACK & JILL becomes essentially a morality tale, trumpeting the message “wait your turn, kids.” Our titular youths are lazy and unmotivated sociopaths who simply want to inherit all of Jack’s granny's money rather than work for their own, and their use of countercultural rhetoric to justify their covetousness is intended as a critique of the rabble-rousing younger generation as a whole. The film acts as a reaffirmation of the order of a social hierarchy based upon seniority: the youth are simply too stupid and jealous and selfish to run things, and, moreover, they don’t even want to run things, they just want the keys to the car without asking permission first. 

Contrast the message of this English production to that of roughly contemporaneous U.S. films like WILD IN THE STREETS (1968) or EASY RIDER (1969), and it's pretty obvious that JACK & JILL is the product of a reactionary studio system. Those in power in England-- always a group to cower in a puffed-up moral panic over the threat of any drastic social change-- were obviously unnerved by the youth movement on the rise in the U.S. and on their own shores. Thus, a popular cultural production like JACK & JILL served as a sort of psychological sedative, telling its true audience of worried middle-class parents and their right-wing children that all would be okay in the end, that those frighteningly boarish hippies would do away with themselves eventually, so true citizens needn’t fret for much longer. Bizarrely, JACK & JILL was co-produced and funded by the U.S. production company Palomar Pictures International and first released by 20th Century Fox in New York City in 1972, which signals that those involved thought the film might strike a chord with hippie-fatigued American audiences as well. The film’s financial failure, subsequent wide unavailability on home video, and the resultant near total obscurity it now possesses should give one a clue as to how it was received by both countries’ moviegoing audiences.

However, perhaps some of JACK & JILL’s failure can be chalked up to issues of genre rather than issues of being culturally out-of-step. The trailer for the film paints it as a rollicking thriller in which a pair of sexy young radicals conspire to scare their square old granny to death. This is more or less the plot of the film, but the trailer’s joyous, rock-music punctuated presentation of these basic facts was certain to alienate a large contingent of the film’s intended audience of cultural squares. Furthermore, those genuinely sexy young radicals who might have been tricked into the theater by such advertising were sure to be miffed by their philosophy and lifestyle being lambasted by the filmmakers. What results from this confusion of intention and presentation is a quaint quasi-horror film that appeals intrinsically to no one (perhaps excepting genre nerds like us, of course). JACK & JILL is a succulent gaslight thriller, with those harebrained social and political undertones stuffed inside like dried-up imitation crabmeat. My adoration for gaslight flicks has yet to meet its bounds, and this gaslight scenario is particularly wicked and inventive, playing on the precise unease of the older generations while making an ironic joke out of it. Progressive in its beliefs? Certainly not. Fun to watch regardless? Certainly for a little while.

I’d like to dig a little deeper into all of the above topics and the particulars of the film itself, but first we’ll flip this radical rock-n-roll LP to hear your recorded rendition.

GR: Nothing is quite as surreal as taking in the all the spooky and kooky fare that we’ve been watching so far and then coming to WHAT BECAME OF JACK & JILL?, which features the credits “An Amicus Production” set to the blare of a wailing guitar and angsty vocals as a hip teenager combs his long hair in his grungy bedroom. I think we were listening too intently to Dr. Schreck’s predictions and missed our stop. Clearly we’re outside the boundaries of the charming horrors from Shepperton Studios and have arrived in a land full of loud music and car posters. I want to go home! What we have here is certainly the stuff of eyebrow-raising. Adolescents cavorting about in jeans and getting high on Granny’s pills in the cemetery. Footage of police riots and social unrest playing in the periphery like a Romero flick. Sexual promiscuousness in dark attics. And the narrative glue that holds all this together and that’s sniffed by the two leads is perhaps one of the hoariest generators of thrills and suspense, the gaslight tale. 

But what strange clothes it wears! As you said, this was clearly Amicus’ more conscious way of tapping the vibrant vein of youth (and their wallets) by making an entertainment that, while lacking some of the “kiddie stuff” like vampires and werewolves that we’ve seen before, concerned them and their pimply little lives more directly. Or at least on the surface. If we have learned anything from our venture, it’s that Amicus was a studio that produced stories that more often than not strove for a balanced morality, one that put all the agitators and general sinners in their place, whether it was the callous-hearted guests of Dr. Diablo’s torture garden or the greedy antiquarians who sought to possess the Marquis de Sade’s skull. 

The films have made it clear that anyone who seeks to harm others in their pursuit for personal glory or riches is certain to fail and be punished by supernatural and/or human agents. In this sense I wonder if director Bill Bain and scripter Roger Marshall (adapting from the novel by Laurence Moody) consciously set out to apply a stern slap on the universal keester of the rebellious youth with their depiction of Jack and Jill’s tumble down the moral hill or if they were solely adhering to the hallmarks of the gaslight tale in seeing that the villains received their just desserts in full by the final reel’s end. Did the creative team really mean to examine the meaninglessness and emptiness of the youth revolt by showing us the plight of these two avaricious, doomed fools or was it simply a case of the bad guys paying for their crimes just like in any other melodrama? Of course one can view the proceedings through either (or countless other) of these lenses; I tend to be of the mind that it’s more of the latter than the former, but the implications of this being a dramatic statement on the futility and vacuity of the movement are undeniably strong.

No matter the interpretation, it’s easy to see how WHAT BECAME OF JACK & JILL? ultimately flopped in its attempt to hitch itself to the closest and most successful bandwagons that it could find in the cinematic prairie. Amicus tries to appeal to the young adult market by giving us a thriller that paints its two representative characters as selfish and petty children devoid of any sense of reality who die in the end? The couples’ constant cries of “Youth power!” can’t help but taste a little more bitter each time they’re stated, almost becoming a mimicking playground taunt from the filmmakers to all of the young people in the audience because, as we are soon to find out, the youth have no power at all. The film slyly shows us how Jack and Jill are two babes utterly lost in the wilderness; even a seemingly mundane exchange between the two after Gran’s funeral  (Jill: Did you tip the vicar? Jack: No. Was I supposed to? Jill: I don’t know.) is given emphasis to show us that the couple is much too caught up in their dream-world to even know how to function on a day-to-day basis, their idle hours spent with visions of sleek automobiles and silky nightwear dancing in their heads like visions from a music video. The graffiti that Jill sees with her last, dying glance, “Out with the Oldies,” might as well be Gran returning from the grave to stick her worm-chewed tongue out at the conniving little wench. Had this been a different Amicus movie that probably would have been the case. JACK & JILL ultimately tells us that all of the fighting and plotting and outraging that the kids in the street can muster will only land their silly dreams right where Jill’s blood pools all around her at the film’s climax: in the gutter.

For all of its subtext and ill-fitting political clothes, there is an effective story of suspense and sweaty tension lying at the heart of the film, and it’s this I’d like to turn the discussion over to to find out just what Bain was able to do with the material that succeeded now that we’ve covered JACK & JILL’s broken crowns fairly well. It’s your turn to take the bucket.  

NT: It’s true that most Amicus horrors place karmic retribution against sinners at the center of their narratives. These films strive to demonstrate a restoration of morality, in which wrongdoing and injustice is set right by supernatural means. This presence of a moral supernatural force in the bulk of the Amicus universe evacuates any specific real world politics from the tales’ teachings, rendering them into general platitudes rather than pointed barbs of critique. Don’t be a heel, we learn, or the spookier elements of existence will get you. But, as you note, there are no ghosts, vampires, or possessed pianos in WHAT BECAME OF JACK AND JILL? The comeuppance our loathsome heroes receive is wrought solely from their own loathsome doings. The film sees Jack and Jill’s thinking as so diseased, so puerile, and so reckless in its dumb and blind destructiveness that the supernatural universe need not intervene in their fates by sending Gran back as a flesh-chewing fiend; it knows they’ll take care of themselves. Because of this supernatural absence and the fact that the particular politics of the decade fuel the action on screen, it feels wrong to ignore the wider implications of the film’s message. JACK & JILL refuses to present us with a positive example of a young radical (the protesters seen on television look as barbaric as our heroes), and so we’re stuck with the eponymous hill-tumblers as our emissaries for the whole of the youth movement. This deliberately limited perspective alone ensures that we’ll read the film as condemning the entire generation. If that’s not convincing enough, recall the uproarious scene that visualizes Jack’s fantasy of leading a Nazi youth firing squad against a group of assembled octogenarians. The filmmakers aren’t exactly being subtle here.

Of course, the film’s chiding of the young is incredibly reductive. As you note, it views our protagonists (and so by extension, all young adults) as no more than helpless children with the unfortunate addition of raging sex drives. As clever as they might be in their efforts to obtain power, once they possess it they immediately squander it and can do little but stand around and wait for adults to wipe up the mess. Jack’s whimpering, childish cries for his deceased Gran’s assistance in the film’s final moments is a little on the nose in this regard. The film also presents an entirely shallow reading of the youth movement’s aims, summarized succinctly by Jack in his conversation with Gran about the elder generations in power being like those who have sat at a table in a restaurant too long and are unwilling to give up their seats for the starving youth out in the cold. The film assumes the youth movement exists as a premature grab for power from those who are underserving. It believes the youth aim to replace the current power structure with an identical (albeit younger and hipper) version of their own, rather than eliminate that oppressive power structure altogether. It’s as if the filmmakers based their interpretation of the youth movement solely off newspaper headlines.

Ironically, the use of phony newspaper headline hysteria is precisely how Jack & Jill go about their gaslighting business, and this is where lies most of the film’s joys. Gran (Mona Washbourne) is an elderly shut-in, so her understanding of the world outside her front door is colored exclusively by distorted media images on television and her grandchild’s even more distorted (and often untrue) yarns about a violent, militant youth movement. She’s told by Jack, and believes without question or tangible evidence, that the youth have mobilized and begun stripping the elderly of their homes. Her gaslighting progresses slowly over the film’s first half (sometimes bizarrely: this may be the first and only time an overheated electric blanket and blown bubbles have been used to gaslight someone), but it climaxes with Jack’s assertion that the youth are now coming for Gran, too. Jack and Jill stage a wonderfully thrilling ruse, banging on the walls of Gran’s house to the pre-recorded sounds of a riot until she dies of a heart attack. It’s both the film’s most suspenseful scene and the lynchpin of its critique: the youth movement is nothing but smoke and mirrors. And a lot of noise.

There isn’t much in JACK & JILL for the standard issue horror fan to glom onto, but those with more eccentric sensibilities will find moments of it irresistible. For instance, the Nazi firing squad fantasy, which transitions, incredibly, to another fake-out dream fantasy in which Jack machine-gun’s Gran in her bed. There’s also cemetery lipstick defacement, Juicy Fruit kisses, demented piggybacking, and the aforementioned snorting of Gran’s heart pills to keep us weirdoes entertained. The film, like its nursery rhyme source material, tumbles down in the last third, post Gran’s coronary, but this is an undeniably fascinating curio that we’ve dredged up from the bottom of the Amicus well.

GR: I share the same amount of enthusiasm as you for JACK AND JILL’s spirited attempts at Grand Guignolery and suspense and your view that the filmmakers offered an incredibly unfair depiction of the youth movement. Whether it was their goal to bitingly critique the opinions of contemporaneous young people or simply ignore the greater implications of the so-called “revolt” through sheer negligence, the end product carries a social message that is completely one-sided and that seems ignorant in its sheer earnestness. 

But enough of all that political yammering. How does WHAT BECAME OF JACK & JILL? stand up as an entertainment? You’ve already detailed some of the juiciest moments, the pinnacle of course being the final offing of Gran through the use of the staged riot. It’s an ingeniously new and clever variation on the typical gaslighting process that we’ve seen before. The gaslighting of an unfortunate soul is usually a more intimate matter between two parties, and the bits of stage magic that the perpetrator uses are of a more quiet variety, at least at first, like dribbles of blood, disappearing/reappearing objects, or maybe even some makeup and a fright wig if they’re feeling adventurous (refer back to “Method for Murder”). JACK & JILL is the first time to my recollection that the perpetrator(s) have used a kind of global scare to torment their victim into cardiac arrest. Gran can only clutch at her heart and beat upon the walls as the sound of the fabricated extermination squad’s marching boots advance ever closer, terrified that they have come to snatch her away and put a bullet through her wrinkled head. Jack and Jill go all out in their charade, and the constant uproar of shouting and clattering builds to a wonderful crescendo where Gran, finally overwhelmed with utter terror, collapses to the floor. It’s the movie’s best, grandest set piece and, had I been in Gran’s slippers, I would’ve been just as overcome. 

Those visions of the slaughter by Nazis are rather surprising and colorful given the film’s overall gritty and glum aesthetic, like a fantasy sequence from an entirely different movie. Interestingly enough, I was immediately put in mind of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981) after seeing the maniacal S.S. troops and their blasting machine guns. In that film, David Naughton has a dream where he sees his entire family slaughtered by a fleet of demonic soldiers. He “awakens” from this vision in his hospital room only to discover he’s in another dream when one of the troops jumps out and knifes a nurse to death. The similarities between these scenes are amazing and one can’t help but wonder if Landis caught a showing of JACK & JILL and this particular sequence sat stewing in his brain during the production of his own film. 

There’s also a small but effective dose of droll humor fueling some of the picture’s other moments, such as the duo’s scoping of a seedy rock and roll club for a potential lady meant for Jack to woo and wed in order to sidestep a stipulation in Gran’s will; Jack’s general enthusiasm for picking a girl is met with deadpan disapprovals from Jill who merely shakes her head at her partner’s selections. She also gets to speak some of the film’s most colorful dialogue when she flashes with anger and jealousy at Jack’s willingness to go through with this particular phase of their plan: “Smoke pouring out of your pants. Horn on you like a rhino!” She gets another chance to show her flippant attitude when, in an outburst fitting of Mr. Torrance, Jack lays siege to the dining room with a fireplace poker, smashing wood and china with reckless abandon to which his lady offers: “Feeling better?” Not only that, but Jill proves that she can give as good as she gets when she returns a slap to Jack that is just as vigorous as the one he delivered to her pretty little face. 

Along with this humor is a stinging cruelty that’s doled out by our two naughty kiddies. It ranges from the heartless (Jack stops to pop a zit in the bathroom while Gran suffers an attack and begs for medication) to the heartbreaking (Jack constantly interrogates Gran about a phone call she received from Jill posing as a type of census taker until the woman finally breaks down and cries “You would think it’s a crime being old!”). There’s no doubt that out of the cast of ne’er-do-wells that we’ve seen thus far in the Amicus films, Jack and Jill fully deserve the fate that finally comes to claim them for so brutally hounding the gentle grandmother right into her grave. But, as you say, it’s no otherly, monstrous force that does the duo in but rather their own devilish natures. Like the scheming couple from many a film noir, Jack and Jill find out the hard way that when push comes to shove they’ll eagerly send one another crashing down the hill. They don’t deserve any better. 

Next week: TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972)

Shepperton Screams (Part VI): The House That Dripped Blood (1971) dir. Peter Duffell

For sixteen weeks, Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's third anthology, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1971). Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.

GR: Taking a short hiatus from horror, Amicus Productions returned after filming two sci-fi schlockers (THEY CAME FROM BEYOND SPACE and THE TERRORNAUTS, both 1967) and a trio of "prestige" dramatic works adapted from literature and the stage (THE BIRTHDAY PARTY [1968] and A TOUCH OF LOVE and THE MIND OF MR. SOAMES from 1969) to the haunted grounds that had won them clout amongst fantasy fans. THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1971) is yet another step up on the shadowy staircase of the company's success and skill, the dawning of the new decade bringing more innovation and verve to the terror portmanteau that they had pioneered with their first two efforts, DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1964) and TORTURE GARDEN (1967). HOUSE is a film that could have only come from a company that had had experience with horror (as its final segment would so cheekily attest), and I feel that this film is yet a further honing on the blueprint that TORTURE GARDEN (1967) formulated and is, indeed, the very architectural structure that viewers can look to as perhaps the quintessential Amicus picture, bronze finishings and all. 

What particularly surprised me in re-viewing this film was the inventiveness of the wraparound segment. The patented approach to creating a movie with multiple episodes (ones bother to have a uniting frame in the first place) is to stage a sit-down of some kind, a meeting place where the various vignettes are told as a stand-in character for the audience listens to them with varying mixtures of awe and disbelief. This had been the standard since DEAD OF NIGHT (1945), that British chiller that had established so many hallmarks of the anthology, one that continued to be used in such contemporary fare as TALES FROM THE HOOD (1995)--criminals listen to a demented undertaker's grim warnings--to V/H/S (2012)--more criminals break into a home to find strange footage on videotapes. 

Everything is normally so stationary in this regard that it's genuinely unexpected to see the progressive investigation of our intrepid Detective Inspector Holloway (John Bennett) as he tries to solve the mystery of the old Gothic house and its disappearing residents. It's a brilliant twist, clever partly in just how simple a change it is; the stories come gradually, each thread unraveling as Holloway turns over every stone: looking through old files, listening to corroboration from his sergeant, questioning the real estate agent. Instead of just waiting for the inevitable bogey to descend upon him, Holloway actively plunges deeper and deeper into the house's heart of darkness as its goried past plays before him like newsreel footage. The "framing story" here is not just a convenient holder for the other, meatier tales but an involved narrative in of itself.

Another element of the film that is surprising is the absence of heretofore go-to man Freddie Francis at the director's helm, replaced with Peter Duffel, who had dealt mainly in television fare before and after today's film (this was in fact his first theatrical effort). With that in mind, it's impressive how easily Duffell fits within the Amicus mold, shooting the proceedings with all the leering angles, garish lighting, and grand horrific embellishments that Francis had brought to the studio's first five genre efforts. It's a wonder why Subotsky and Rosenberg didn't go on to request his services for future productions, especially given how HOUSE appears to be a favorite amongst fans of Amicus' output.

The actual sanguinary real estate on display here seems to be a fun invention of Bloch's, like a haven for mordant-minded fiends like himself to live out the rest of their shuttered, musty days. The film's opening offers up a loving introduction, a virtual tour of the house set to the bone-clacking musical score. The gloomy hallways, the softly ticking ornate clock, the prominence of such wonderful tomes as Eisner's THE HAUNTED SCREEN and Summers' THE VAMPIRE: HIS KITH AND KIN. It's no wonder that the eerie locale calls to characters who fancy murder and the macabre. In a way I can't blame them, so count me as one more entry on the "Missing Persons" list.

What did your overnight stay in the bloody house yield for you?

NT: Here's a controversial opinion for you: if ASYLUM (1972) didn't exist, I'd find THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD to be the least charming domicile on Amicus's post-DR. TERROR block. It's certainly no atrocious ranch-style affront to cinematic architectural decency, but its brick walls crumble about as easily as the one felled on set by Jon Pertwee's pompous actor in the film's final segment. Last week, we both dropped words of praise over the thematic and tonal unity of Amicus's immediately prior anthology, TORTURE GARDEN, and I can't help but feel that THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD looks like polyvinyl siding in comparison to that sturdy stone structure. Amicus's fourth anthology has severe foundational issues: a through-line connecting the stories that is so vague that a character must turn toward the camera right before the closing credits roll in order to spell it out for us; thankless roles bestowed upon veteran actors; an over-serious tone that three-fourths of the way through sharply devolves into outright farce; and the unforgivable presence of rubber bats hoisted into the air on strings. Hadn't we moved past this?

Above, you note the novelty and influence of the film's investigatory framing structure, and it's on this point that I will eagerly agree, though with reservations. Using the Scotland Yard inspector's investigation of that old leaky house as the method through which these assorted tales are conveyed to the viewing audience is a refreshingly organic frame for the anthology conceit, serving to eliminate the more glaring logistical issues found in the frame stories of Amicus's previous anthologies. Yet, on this viewing of the film, I was astonished to note how much less of the actual running time is devoted to this frame narrative than I remembered. Most episodes are bridged with only a few short lines of dialogue between the inspector and whoever he's interviewing, which makes the investigation feel far too easy and far less engrossing. Perhaps scenes of our inspector digging through the stacks of the local library or the police archives like an antiquarian would be more than is necessary, but the fact remains that even DR. TERROR spent more time developing its frame narrative than this one does. And that's unfortunate, considering its potential.

But I don't mean to dwell entirely on the unsightly cracks in the plaster of this house: there are several things to recommend here. We had to move on from our beloved Freddie eventually (though we do have one last hurrah with Amicus's frequent director in the near future), and I agree that Peter Duffell is a fine temporary replacement. For example, a video interview with Duffell that I watched reveals that Cushing's character's dream sequence in the second segment-- a nightmarish sequence that ranks among the film's best-- sprung fully formed from the director's mind, as it was absent from Bloch's original script. (This video interview also hints that future collaborations between Duffell and Amicus may have been soured by the director's distaste for Subotsky and Rosenberg's meddling in the production, He notes, for one, that he wished for the film to be titled DEATH & THE MAIDEN. The idea was brusquely shot down.) Similarly, the cinematography by Ray Parslow feels consistent with the Amicus house-style as established thus far, with the opening credits' eerie tour of the house's many Gothic features being an especial highlight. Most worthy of our regard, I feel, is Michael Dress's evocative score, which attains an almost avant garde timbre when it resembles the furious knocking of demented woodblocks.

Now let's turn our attentions to the four walls of this structure. In the interest of fairness, you can use your words to hang up some pretty pictures on them before my complaints aim to peel off the wallpaper and reveal the lack of adequate drywall underneath.

GR: Well. Remind me to never go house-shopping with you!

“Method for Murder” might be the most unremarkable tale of the lot to the layman, but I found it to be a softly eerie and pointed look at the creative and artistic mind giving in to its fancies… and its nightmares. Denholm Elliot is an interesting choice for the imaginatively-challenged author who hopes that the stately house will bear dark literary fruit for his next paperback shocker, but Elliot does seems to fit the bill of a popular inkslinger trying to type up his latest, lurid potboiler. The central demon of his novel that he does conjure up—Dominic the Strangler—is an unnerving fiend who, with his scraggly hair, sunken eyes, and ever-grinning overbite, serves as a reminder that the most disturbing of visages are always the ones that are noticeably human. All the CGI ghosts in the world can’t hit the same nerve or as hard as Dominic does even as he peeks at us from a sun-dappled lake.

There’s a playfulness at work here that isn’t quite as overt as the unabashed parody in “The Cloak,” but it underscores the menacing scenes quite nicely, such as how Elliot typically sees Dominic leering at him when near reflective surfaces (windows, mirrors, water), cluing the audience in to the wouldn’t-be-too-surprising notion that our intrepid scribe may be taking his evil character too seriously… and acting out on Dominic’s homicidal tendencies. Especially fun is the scene where Elliot is in the psychiatrist’s office, trying to explain his delusional dilemma. A pair of large, brass hands is prominently displayed, an allusion no doubt to Dominic’s murderous, vice-strong grip. And then, just as Elliot is describing how his personal boogeyman seems to surface from his subconscious at random, there’s the strangler himself, emerging from the shadows and Elliot’s repressed Id to creep up on the doctor and give him a little neck massage. This reading is kind of hampered by the addition of an admittedly unnecessary twist ending; it turns out Elliot’s wife (Joanna Dunham) and her secret, actor lover (Tom Adams) have pulled the old double-cross in order to drive Elliot to madness. But the plan turns out to be too good for its own… good, because Adams has become too involved with his role as Dominic, as evidenced when he gleefully wrings conniving Dunham’s throat. There had been links made earlier in the story as to how actors and writers alike could fall victim to their respective fabrications, but this climax seems a little too rushed, like Bloch was eager to throw a final curveball in the tale simply because that’s “his thing.” It injures an otherwise moody piece that scores extra points for serving up a healthy heaping of Creepy Face.

We class things up a bit (but just a little) with our second story, “Waxworks.” Peter Cushing is back in the saddle here as Philip Grayson, a milquetoast bachelor who occupies his solitary hours by playing records of classical music and going to the theater. His loneliness is best illustrated in the single shot of him observing the gentle streaming of a river, looking like Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,” a solitary Gothic soul attempting to find a sense of companionship in nature. Where Cushing does formulate a bond is with the molded figure of a deadly maiden in a dusty wax museum, one who symbolically holds the decapitated head of a man on a silver platter (I haven’t read Bloch’s original story, but I can’t help but think that he whipped out a “He lost his head over her” type line). And that’s exactly what happens to Cushing, and soon his visiting chum Rogers (Joss Ackland) is under the figure’s spell as well. 

The dream sequence you brought up is indeed fantastic. Cushing gets so many of those! This one is comic book-surreal at its best, all drifting mists and lime-green vistas of cheaply-crafted wax figurines. “Waxworks” is similar in theme and tone to the, in my view, markedly better Bloch tale “Everybody Needs a Little Love” that was produced as an episode of TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE. That one presented us with two male pals who became triangulated with the introduction of a store mannequin, but it took a supernatural turn as the mannequin began to show disturbingly humanistic traits. “Waxworks” doesn’t quite have the same doom-laden, uncanny valley touch as “Everybody…” but it’s serviceable in its own right and has just the right pinch of flair. It suffers from a similar fate as “Method for Murder,” as the concluding minutes feel a little too packed than they need to be, namely in the moment when Wolfe Morris as the proprietor lays some expositional hee-haw on Cushing like so many layers of molding wax that amounts to “That figure is really the dead body of my wife who I framed for the murder of my best friend because I loved her too much to let her go.” Bloch could have simply let things lie, although it is of interest that on the film’s IMDb page Russ Jones, editor and writer of Warren magazines like CREEPY and EERIE, is said to have been an uncredited contributor to this very segment. Is this merely an Internet goof, or, if true, does it point to the fact that “Waxworks” went through some last minute doctoring that made it a touch too detailed? Who can say. But nothing does quite say “cool” like a grinning skull with long, flowing locks.

“Sweets to the Sweet” feels like it’s just as long (or short, if you will) as it needs to be, and is actually quite sinister in the dark implications that it makes concerning child abuse. Christopher Lee is pitch-perfect as Mr. Reid, his tall frame and menacing bass making him seem like the great, looming shadow of a villain from a children’s fairy tale. What’s most frightening is that he never does any grand scenery chewing to make him larger than life, but rather seems like a vicious bully caught in the act when his daughter’s nanny Mrs. Norton (Nyree Dawn Porter, who has a great matronly schoolteacher vibe going and who looks stunning in a smart pair of reading glasses) questions him on his parenting, his eyes shifting to the side as he thinks of the physical and emotional scars furrowed deep between him and little Jane (Chloe Franks). Franks is cute as a button as the traumatized tot, her sugary British nature shining through even as she explains to Mrs. Norton how yew trees were used for the practice of evil magic… right before taking off on a cheery skip!

As simple a conceit as it may seem (Bloch’s tale was actually freely adapted into “Daddy Lost His Head” for an issue of E.C.’s THE VAULT OF HORROR), this one is delicately told and has a biting finish as bitter as black apples. Amicus shows their fondness for dolls yet again as little Jane constructs a voodoo replica of her mean old father from candles to inflict a little much-deserved payback on him, even reviving the “insinuated death” motif from THE PSYCHOPATH (1966) when the figure gets a little toss in the roaring fireplace as Lee screams to the heavens off-camera. It’s quite subversive in its own way; these days we’ve become accustomed to the Avenging Child in works of fiction, but here it retains a disturbing potency, the image of an oppressed waifish girl gleefully stabbing an effigy of her dear ol’ daddy chilling in its depiction of perfect innocence sent irretrievably over the edge (though Lee’s final words hint that Jane might have been more than meets the eye). It’s certainly something that Dickens would never have imagined! 

Ahh, and “The Cloak.” This is the tale that may be the most divisive amongst viewers, as its foray into outright lampoonery may be an unwelcome taste on the palate of some. I sense that this may be the case with you (at least in regards to the tonal shift), but I admit freely that I love every minute of it. Strange perhaps considering my previous thoughts on the segments from TORTURE GARDEN (1967) when I assessed that the stories therein were far better off having not been given the dark comedy twist. To specify, what I had meant by that was that it was surprising and welcoming given the content of those stories (namely Balthazar the head-eating cat and Euterpe the living piano) that the creative forces didn’t exploit them for laughs, whereas here the subject is vampires and, more specifically, the making of a vampire film, a topic that Bloch and Duffell use to poke some good-natured fun at their rival Hammer Studios as well as their own aesthetic. Take when the prissy Paul Henderson (Jon Pertwee) comments on the greatness of the Dracula character before off-handedly clarifying “Bela Lugosi, of course. Not this new fella.” I also really like his dead-pan delivery of “Dear God” upon seeing the actor playing the hunchbacked manservant, in a get-up that looks awfully similar to Dominick’s features!

“The Cloak” may be too high on the camp level when stacked against the other serious-minded suspense yarns, but it’s welcome in my book nonetheless. It’s all silliness and rot in its depiction of a “serious” horror actor balking at the low-budget tripe he’s forced to play in and, in an effort to bring some legitimacy to the production, purchases an antique cloak from an out-of-the-way costume shop that he mysteriously received a business card for. He’s bequeathed a royal number by the spidery Von Hartmann (Geoffrey Bayldon) and, upon trying it on, discovers that it bestows the power of the undead upon him, including two doofy fangs and the ability to float in the air at the stroke of the midnight. “The Cloak” is the most self-consciously silly entry to come through the gates of Shepperton Studios thus far, but I don’t think that it’s an affront to the stories that have come from THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD. It doesn’t resort to prat falls and painful puns (surprising, given this is Bloch), and when it makes fun it’s doing it at the expense of Amicus and their contemporaries more than anything else with its candid look at the colorful acting personalities and economical production values behind the scenes. When Ingrid Pitt gives us that toothy smile and salutes Paul with “Welcome to the club!” I just want to join her even as she takes to her rubbery bat flight. Primitive? Perhaps. A lesser effort than what the company was capable of? Certainly. Did it make me feel good? Absolutely.

Alright. Now I turn it back to you so that you may wheel the bulldozer in and raze my opinions to the ground.

NT: My bulldozer shall tread lightly. Truthfully, I agree with virtually everything you've written above about the individual segments. While I do think this is overall a weaker crop of installments when compared to last week's charmingly zany ones, none is without some small value or interest. My problems with the film stem from the totality, which-- for me-- never coheres into a satisfying, unified anthology. "The Cloak" is a fine short film on its own; it's a perplexing segment in THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD. I find it bizarre that, as you've noted, this film is often held up as the quintessential Amicus anthology when it seems to me more transitional, as if Amicus has grown unsure whether it should embrace comedy or retreat into serious horror. It upsets the fine balance that Francis and Bloch brought to TORTURE GARDEN, and which won't return until Francis does with TALES FROM THE CRYPT.

"Method for Murder" is my favorite of the four. In part, this is because I cannot restrain my adoration for the gaslight tale, in any of its sundry forms. And the gaslighting of Denholm Elliot's horror author here is quite the accomplishment, as the villains actually appear to drive him insane. Typically, a gaslighting victim's sanity may fluctuate while he's being tortured, but he'll emerge with his wits intact by the closing of the curtain. Our author is not so fortunate: until his final moment he appears to believe in the reality of Dom the Strangler and the seemingly supernatural power of his creative mind. Pleasantly, this also creates doubts in our minds. Looking back at the events, can we say definitively that all of the appearances of Dominic are actually of the actor Richard and not of some other, sinister force? The ending you found hackneyed I found to be both a moment of delicious ironic justice and a revelation that throws the prior revelations into question. Could it be that Hillyer's creative mind did, in fact, conjure Dominic into some sort of ethereal reality? Perhaps Dr. Andrews (Robert Land) was partially correct, and because this bushy-eyebrowed, Hyde-esque personality of Hillyer's no longer had him to attempt to possess, it simply jumped into the next warm male body it could find. Perhaps. This reading aside, I also appreciate "Method for Murder" because the bits of subtle humor you note work to align it more closely with those segments I adored from TORTURE GARDEN. This is the sort of tale I find Amicus tells best.

In a video interview with producer Max Rosenberg, he admits that all he wanted from the "Waxworks" episode was to see Peter Cushing's head on a plate as the final stinger. For better or worse, that's the pulpy, four-color horror comic image that drives this tale, and it's a shame those involved couldn't come up with more interesting ideas to lead us there. Imagine how dull "Waxworks" would be without the splendid dream sequence, and-- as I mentioned-- that scene was a last minute addition! This tale also suffers as part of the anthology for being the most loosely connected. The horror in this segment (and almost all of the action) does not emanate from the titular house, but a waxworks museum in town. Are we meant to believe that the house's influence spreads so far? Again the frame story seems inadequately defined, and in this case ill-fitting to the story presented. Lastly, this tale also has the unfortunate coincidence of casting Cushing as a lonely widow pining after the memory and image of his deceased wife: Cushing's actual wife died a month before the film was released in 1971, sending his own personal life spiraling into a melancholy shared with his on-screen role. Knowing this information makes the segment painful to watch at times. Poor, dear Peter.

"Sweets to the Sweet" is the clunker. After the audience's expectations are upset by the film's revelation of the presumed abuser as the true victim, the remainder of the plot is a rote, uninspired reiteration of similar tales of the Witchy and Evil Child varieties. Lee's curt gruffness of demeanor may be appropriate for the role, but I can't help but feel it wastes his many talents. I mean, he's constantly upstaged by the adorable Little Jane (Chloe Franks), whose air of playful innocence when committing evil deeds-- even when roasting her father alive-- is a more sophisticated performance than most other child actors could muster. As for other positives, I will also say that the part during which Jane collects her father's electric shaver trimmings in her hand is the grossest image Amicus has yet captured on film stock. So kudos for that.

And, finally, "The Cloak": it is what it is. I love the early meta-humor of the piece and its willingness to give Amicus and itself a gentle ribbing (and Pertwee as the proto-Peter Vincent is aces), but as the segment progresses it loses most of its (um) bite. Tellingly, when this tale and the frame story catch up to one another in the film's final moments not a lick of comedy or satire remains and the fang-bearing is played with nary a toothy smirk. Again, Amicus appears unwilling to decide what it wants to be as a producer of horror films. Ultimately, that's my issue with the film: it's unsure of itself, and so likewise I'm unsure of it.

At times like this the only thing I can be sure of is that Ingrid Pitt was quite the lady. Of that, the film and I are in agreement.

GR: At the end of the day and after our friend A.J. Stoker closes the iron gates to await the next residents, it seems like the one thing that can be agreed upon (barring Ingrid Pitt’s classiness) is that THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD is an alchemical mixture that alternatively pleases the tongue while very occasionally upsetting the stomach with its clashing ingredients. Through it all, it’s a film that I’ll probably always eye as it sits on the cobweb-strewn self, tempting myself to indulge in its varying levels of gaudiness and dread like a cursed bottle of spirits. Its tone may be schizophrenic, but one thing it isn’t is boring.

And speaking of split personalities and bubbling concoctions, that puts me in mind of our next feature, one that also has Sir Christopher Lee exercising (and exorcising) the evilness of his personality. Perhaps there we shall find unity even amongst the chaos during his dark night of the soul…

Next week: I, Monster (1971)

Deadly Dreams (1988) dir. Kristine Peterson

Logline: Years after witnessing his parents murdered by his father's disgruntled business partner, Alex (Mitchell Anderson) is plagued by dreams of the sadistic killer, donned in a wolf mask, aiming a rifle squarely at him and his loved ones. But are these really dreams? Alex gradually becomes convinced that the deadly hunter-- long deceased-- is tailing him in his waking life as well. Are these random phantasmagoria the work of some sick prank or nefarious scheme? Worse yet, is his parents' murderer still alive? And the most pertinent question of all: can a dream slit your throat with a hunting knife? Inquiring minds would like to stop sweating through their sheets.

Crime in the Past: On Christmas Eve, Norman Perkins (Duane Whitaker) is given the very bad news that his business partner, John Torme (Geoffrey Forward), has screwed him over in their latest ambiguous business dealing and has now cut him out entirely. Perkins, desiring to place some coal in the Tormes' stockings, heads over to their house with a hunting rifle. Waiting for the arrival of his older brother from college, Alex thinks nothing of opening the door when he hears a knock. Perkins barges in, pulls down his super creepy wolf mask, and makes short work of Mr. and Mrs. Torme with his hunting rifle, all of which poor Alex is forced to view as he stands helpless, a mere child. Perkins then tells young Alex that they're going to play a fun game of hide and seek in the woods. Alex will hide, Perkins will seek. Though we don't see Alex escaping Perkins, presumably he does and (as we gather from information provided later in the film) Perkins responds to the whole mess he's created by blowing his own brains out a few days later. (OR DOES HE???)

Bodycount: a paltry 5 trophies to add to the wall, but there are plenty of graphic dream deaths to keep you satiated, you bloodslurping freaks.

Themes/Moral Code: Director Kristine Peterson, a female horror director best known for helming Critters 3 (1991) (a.k.a. The One with Leo) and working second unit on films like Chopping Mall (1986) and Tremors (1990), doesn't fall into the trap of misogynistic capitulation that Roberta Findlay does in her slasher, Blood Sisters (1987). While on the one hand being altogether uninterested in providing conservative comeuppance for its characters' assumed sexual transgressions, Deadly Dreams also craftily toys with the audience's perception of female agency. The films subverts our initial impressions of its female lead (Juliette Cummins) as, by turns, a nurturing lover and a duplicitous, conspiring gold-digger with another boyfriend (both images of women held in sway to the desires of controlling men) by revealing her to be, in actuality, a morally dubious but unquestionably independent avenger. The point being: don't think you've got a woman pegged under your Madonna/Whore dichotomy, 'cause she could always be a Lilith. The film's portrayal of this principle female character is far from totally flattering (she is, after all, at least in part responsible for the murder of two essentially innocent young men and one scheming chump), but she's nonetheless imbued with a certain self-driven power and skewed moral certitude that places her in opposition to the rather petty and aimless male characters.

Killer's Motivation: The motivation driving our ominous and omnipresent Hunter (Gary Ainsworth) is obvious by the film's conclusion: he's being paid. The Hunter, decked out in the same sick garb as the deceased Norman Perkins, is no more than a faceless and nameless man who has been hired by Alex's weasel of an older brother, Jack (the ever-weaselly Xander Berkeley), to drive the already fragile Alex insane and, eventually, to his own "accidental" death. Jack plots against his beloved younger brother because, well, money, duh. Having invested all of his own livelihood into continuing their dead parents' failing company, Jack believes that Alex is going to squander his share of the inheritance by refusing to partner up in the family business and instead running off to "be a writer" with his fancy liberal arts degree. Yes, this film is more cynical than most, presenting an image of the wealthy capitalist who will-- in elaborate fashion-- turn violently against his own blood in order to remain part of the upper echelon and afford to be dressed up in "ugly yellow power ties." Wryly cynical to the end, the film isn't content to let events stand at that and so proceeds to undercut Jack's momentary "victory" by showing him as both haunted by his fratricidal actions and ultimately victim to another sort of predator: one seeking selfless revenge for a family member who has been wronged. If the bloodshed Jack causes devalues or makes a twisted mockery of the notion of family bonds, his own blood being shed in the name of family serves to reaffirm the inexorable influence of that most sacred of human social institutions, even from beyond the grave.

It's also worth noting that the image and concept presented by the character of The Hunter, that of a home-invading, arsenal-toting for-hire hunter/mercenary wearing a unfathomably creepy animal mask who is tied up in a cynical inheritance scheme between bitter family members, bears an awful resemblance to the image and concept of some baddies that crops up in a more recent flick. Coincidence? Unacknowledged inspiration? Outright thievery? Eh, I'll bet they just dreamed it up.

Final Girl: Our protagonist, Alex, fulfills the role of the neurotic gaslight victim. This is a stock figure most often presented in this type of film as a woman, and so naturally Alex displays more typically "feminine" qualities than the average perpetually shirtless slasher movie hunk. Alex is sensitive and needy; he's quick to fall in love and ridden with guilt over his inaction during a past event. His visceral, physical experience of his own traumatic nightmares makes him a touch hysterical on occasion. He's a ball of nerves with aspirations to forsake the family tradition of ruthless capitalism and reinvent himself as a writer. And yet, his status as a "feminine male" does little to save him in the end: he's killed quite brutally by the film's villains at the climax, making him into an innocent if gullible victim. His death is a shocking choice that is solely in service of the film's cynical tone: it is a very, very giallo maneuver.

Evaluation: Though gaslight plots were prevalent (to say the least) in the era of the giallo, the giallo's American slasher descendants were always a little too blunt and, well, obvious to employ the same necessarily semi-complicated gaslighting shenanigans during their headlong sprint into a pile of butchered bodies. Though not the most intellectually taxing of cinematic scenarios, the gaslight plot nonetheless requires both a certain amount of finesse from its filmmakers (in order to prevent the true goings-on from being screamingly obvious from the start) and an equal amount of attention from its audience (in order to piece together the maddening puzzle of possible psychosis and hallucinations). Slasher audiences in the 1980s skewed significantly younger than those flocking to the gialli of the 1970s, and-- to judge by the example of those films that raked in the thick stacks of scattered cash during the latter decade-- these teenage creeps preferred their body count flicks as brutal and simplistic as possible. Under that criteria, devoting screen time to convoluted schemes and questionings of the protagonist's sanity would be a risky proposition when some swift stabbings would suffice.

And yet, some slasher films gave the gaslight an honest go: No Place to Hide (1981) is a fine if sedate made-for-television attempt, and Happy Birthday to Me (1981)-- though by no means featuring a conventional gaslighting-- reveals by its climax that it has digested the lessons of a few of the formula's key tricks. Arriving late in the slasher cycle, Kristine Peterson's Deadly Dreams may be the most ambitious slasher gaslighting of them all, presenting a hardcore inheritance scheme that results in a poor sap being driven mad by a hulking masked killer in varied scenarios stuck somewhere between the empirical world and Freddy Kreuger-lite rubber reality. Its careful balancing act of providing the slasher's shallow visceral thrills alongside a sizable-enough heaping of quasi-complex thriller intrigue is admirable and by and large successful. Intense, surprising, and ever-so-slightly surreal, the film is the sort of clever and enthralling stuff that inspires one to eBay an original video store one-sheet immediately after viewing.

Meltdown 09: Yellow Days of Summer (Part I)

Summertime: the best time of year to don black gloves and chase fashion models and their boyfriends through the back alleys of Rome. Throughout August I'll be spending my weekends in a whiskey-soaked haze of murder, inheritance scams, psychosexual pleasure, and sex-concealing trench coats as I stalk my way through twenty one fiendish gialli that I've yet to make acquaintance with. These dog days will be decidedly yellow.

French Sex Murders 

(Casa d'appuntamento) 

(1972) 

dir. Ferdinando Merighi

Of the ten gialli covered for this entry, Ferdinando Merighi's French Sex Murders is easily the most typical of the subgenre, but that doesn't mean it isn't oozing a weirdness all its own. In addition to its familiar spat of black-gloved sex murders we're also witness to its more eccentric bits, like the facts that the killer carries a pair of accusatory eyeballs around in his pocket and that the lead investigator of the crimes is a Humphrey Bogart impersonator. Right from the start we know we're in for something special when we witness a man's unexplained falling from the top of the Eiffel tower, twice. (Editing is credited to the illustrious Bruno Mattei, naturally.) From there things play out in much the same fractured, loopy manner. A hoodlum beats up his prostitute girlfriend for being a "whore" and when she's found dead the police chase after him as the obvious suspect. When he's caught, tried, and sentenced to die by guillotine (!), he curses the assembled onlookers and declares that he'll have his revenge from beyond the grave. (Fun and sort-of-insane fact: France was still guillotining folks all the way up until 1977.) Of course the condemned hoodlum then escapes and dies in a decapitating motorcycle wreck (ironic cosmic justice!), but we have to figure his curse still applies. When assorted prostitutes are murdered in elaborate fashion, Inspector Bogey and his associates must ponder whether the fiend really is a ghost or something more corporeal. Amusingly, Mattei edits all of the film's death scenes to repeat multiple times in quick succession with Bay of Blood (1971) trailer solarization layered over top, making every death look as if it were caused by a Christmas strobe light malfunction. Pretend incest, decapitation by antique sword, and stretch-marked lovemaking round out the events. French Sex Murders is a silly but delectable slab of yellow cheese with an enviable cast of Eurohorror regulars (Rosalba Neri, Anita Ekberg, Barbara Bouchet, Howard Vernon) from a director who sadly put his name to little else.

The Bloodstained Butterfly 

(Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate) 

(1971) 

dir. Duccio Tessari

Duccio Tessari's The Bloodstained Butterfly sure does look like a giallo (on paper and poster, at least). With its string of suspicious murders and shot of a bottle of J&B within the first few minutes, it feels safe to say that it is a giallo, of course, but it never feels like one. The story is appropriately absurd, but Tessari refrains from presenting it in the giallo's sensational fashion. The cinematography of Carlo Carlini (who had worked with Fellini on I Vitelloni (1953) and Rossellini on Il generale della Rovere (1959) previous to this film) is flat and procedural, observing the action from low angles in close-up, deflating any sense of spectacle that the subject could create (placing the film in contrast to Tessari's later giallo Puzzle (1974), which is all chainsaw-wielding spectacle). The murders occur almost entirely off-screen, preventing the inclusion of any gory set pieces. This means that many of the subgenre's admirers are going to find The Bloodstained Butterfly quite dull, but the lack of bloodshed doesn't significantly detract from the film's sneaky Wrong Man plot and brief flirtation with social critique. (The wealthy and affluent killer-- I won't say who-- must kill so that he can take suspicion off someone else, and the victims he chooses are prostitutes, because the poor and unfortunate aren't people. Right?) But there's no denying that this isn't primarily a police procedural with elements of courtroom drama and sprinkles of melodramatic romance, adultery, and the attempted rape of a minor. It's not totally without sleaze, after all. The film also contains a choice piece of dialogue: one character refers to "the limited amount of blood" she has in the whiskey pumping through her heart.

Mystere 

(Murder Near Perfect) 

(1983) 

dir. Carlo Vanzina

I'll tell you what's not a mystery: why Mystere isn't well known, even among those stricken with giallo fever. That's not to say that Carlo Vanzina's latter day giallo is either forgettable or a celluloid abomination, but it is rather confused about what exactly it's trying to be. The bulk of Vanzina's work before and after writing and directing Mystere (excepting his other major mid-'80s giallo, Nothing Underneath (1985)) falls under the umbrella of Italian comedy, and there's certainly an element of "humor" here, if your idea of humor is a meat-head detective who is adamant that white women are boring and catty, innuendo-rife repartee between prostitutes and pimps. Even more than a comedy, Mystere resembles a scrappy spy thriller when its giallo killings give way to car chases, explosive money drops, and double crosses. Those early giallo moments are enticing (a killer with a razor sharp cane is stalking and dispatching anyone on his path to recovering a golden cigarette lighter full of incriminating negatives), but they don't endure. The medium-to-low octane action that overtakes the rest of the film isn't on par with that of any of the finer poliziotteschi of the period, and even then we see that its modest fumbling of thrilling set pieces can be chalked up to Vanzina's preference for comedy. (An amusing corpse decoy gag is used twice within five minutes near the film's back end, which just goes to show that there's no respect for the dead in Italian cinema.) 

The film's most obvious appeal is wisely the sole feature printed on its theatrical poster and highlighted by its title: Mystere, played by former Bond girl Carole Bouquet, who had also starred in the films of Luis Bunuel and Ulli Lommel, is a bewitching screen presence. Bouquet is a beautiful woman, obviously, but its her character's striking self-reliance and autonomy that is nearly the film's saving grace. In contrast to far too many female characters in Italian genre cinema, Mystere (at least initially) is an independent woman who, as a prostitute who pimps herself out, utilizes and controls her own sexuality to take monetary advantage of the weaselly males around her. True, this hardly allows her to stand as a progressive feminist icon, but when compared to her contemporaries (who are almost exclusively crazed villainesses or hopeless victims) she stands out. And yet, in a surprising bit of bleak reality, the film also demonstrates that despite her personal strength Mystere is still the victim of blunt, as well as ingrained, patriarchal forces: to maintain her relative independence as a prostitute, she must trade her sexual favors to a local pimp on a monthly basis. The unfortunate message the film slowly reveals is that even a woman with Mystere's self-possession and intelligence can't operate with total autonomy in the film's world. This is reinforced explicitly by the film as it progresses. When Mystere meets the repugnant and aptly named Detective Colt (Phil Coccioletti), she crumbles as both a character and an outlying figure in giallo cinema. Colt beats her, and she crawls into bed with him. He grossly betrays her, and she tracks him down and forgives him with a kiss. The film's humbling and debasement of Mystere over its concluding acts is embarrassing and vaguely infuriating. Why go to the trouble of teasing us with a strong female character like Mystere only to then destroy her? Is her destruction the film's entire misogynistic point, making the absurd claim that even the toughest women give up when courted by a juvenile but manly stallion? What exactly Vanzia and his crew were thinking with this evacuation of any sort of complexity from the film's portrayal of gender relations can be responded to with the same quip Mystere (when she's still herself) snarls at Colt after he asks her the meaning behind her name: "It's a mystery."

The Bloodstained Lawn 

(Il prato macchiato di rosso) 

(1973) 

dir. Riccardo Ghione

Long before the mad scientist's refrigerator-sized robot begins to suck all nine pints of blood from the body of a prostrate nude woman through use of its unfurled hose claws, we realize that something is off about Riccardo Ghione's The Bloodstained Lawn. This tale of a wealthy couple (Marina Malfatti and Enzo Tarascio) who employ the woman's brother (Claudio Biava) to pick up hitchhikers, gypsies, drunkards, and other undesirables for pampered imprisonment on the grounds of their moddish property in order to further their shadowy and nefarious scheme is certainly not a typical horror tale, though that basic premise is recognizable enough to anyone steeped in too many of these films. See, The Bloodstained Lawn, with its oversize bow-ties, screeching mechanical mannequin heads, and vagina-shaped doors that lead into mirrored rooms perfect for psychedelic orgies, resists being just another giallo. Technically it's not a giallo in any traditional sense, but, then, what the hell else could it be? Is it a... comedy? It's certainly often humorous, but it's difficult to tell if the film itself is aware of this fact. Throughout, the film plays its barefaced satire straight, despite the progressive introduction of increasingly bonkers plot points and situations. It lampoons its pleasure-seeking youths and flamboyant, eccentric wealthy class to an equal extent, with the former being shamed for their shocking dimness and inner vacuity and the latter for their egomania and wanton devaluing of human life for profit. 

Our lead couple of hitchhikers (Daniela Caroli and George Willing) are a pair of barely functioning, free-spirited druggies blissfully unaware of the danger that they're in as long as chemicals are provided to them at regular intervals. Humorously, they discover numerous blatant clues as to their hosts' evil intentions-- including a furnace brimming with human bones and a freezer full of exsanguinated corpses-- yet never display any definite signs of being eager to escape their imprisonment and the fate that awaits them. They sit meekly, groovily by, like lambs to the blood-letting. Their murderous hosts, Dr. Antonio Genovese and his wife Nina, justify their actions with flimsy claims of selfless endgames: Dr. Genovese dreams of creating a race of immortal cyborgs through his experiments while Nina imagines she's helping the poor, needy people of the Orient dealing with war and famine. Both ignore the fact that they're profiting-- exorbitantly and lustfully-- from their black market blood bank. Though they bear no striking resemblance to one another, The Bloodstained Lawn is reminiscent of Sergio Bergonzelli's nearly as strange In the Folds of the Flesh (1970), another sorta-giallo that contains some out-of-nowhere social and political content.

What Have They Done to Your Daughters? 

(Coed Murders; La polizia chiede aiuto) 

(1974) 

dir. Massimo Dallamano

What Have They Done To Your Daughters?, Massimo Dallamano's follow-up to his ultra-sleazy, schoolgirl-defiling, Fabio Testi-starring giallo What Have You Done to Solange? (1972), is perhaps not as memorable as that earlier piece of outrageously questionable content, but it is a tighter and more thematically rich effort. A 15-year-old pregnant girl is discovered hanging from the ceiling on the top floor of an abandoned building, and the investigation of her ostensible suicide by a police inspector (Claudio Cassinelli) and an assistant district attorney (Giovanna Ralli) uncovers something far more sinister than one troubled teen's lamentable death: the dead girl had been drugged, raped, and coerced into participating in a secret but far-reaching teenage prostitution ring servicing powerful local interests. To protect the secrecy of the ring, a butcher knife wielding chap decked out in a full-body leather motorcycle outfit and helmet begins to wave his weapon at the fleshy limbs of anyone getting too close to the truth. Dallamano's film has some fantastic chase sequences, well-crafted moments of suspense, and clever cinematography throughout, but I was most endeared with its progressive attitude towards women in the workplace doing "men's work" (Ralli's district attorney is a strong and confident female character, and her strictly professional relationship with Cassinelli's inspector is based on mutual respect and admiration) and its cynical yet ultimately defiant attitude towards corruption in the world (though our heroes solve the case and present damning evidence of the prostitution ring's bigwig clientele to their bosses, they're told that no one will be indicted as the criminals have too much political pull. Disgusted, Cassinelli's Inspector Silvestri speaks for himself and his associates when he tells their superior to "go fuck [himself]"). There are some disappointments to be had within the film (the casting of Mario Adorf and Farley Granger in what amount to pointless cameos is a serious annoyance) but one would have a difficult time denying that this is a satisfyingly yellow mystery.

Slaughter Hotel 

(Cold Blooded Beast; La bestia uccide a sangue freddo) 

(1971) 

dir. Fernando Di Leo

One measly year after completing Slaughter Hotel, director Fernando Di Leo began to carve his name into the stump that is Italian cinema through his numerous and always excellent entries into the crime genre, including the likes of such breathtakingly crafted films as Caliber 9 (1972), The Italian Connection (1972), and Shoot First, Die Later (1974). But before all that was Slaughter Hotel, Di Leo's sole horror effort and-- as many would likely claim-- an enormous, pus-filled blemish on the director's otherwise largely impeccable filmography. True, there's little if any of Di Leo's unmistakable talent on display here: Slaughter Hotel is crude, artless, brashly exploitative, and about as deep as one of the oily nude massages it displays on screen. The film is rather lacking in most narrative and cinematic aspects and-- worse yet-- it's more often than not quite dull, and yet Di Leo's slapdash effort is still a fascinating and marginally unique example of the giallo. It's the first ever softcore giallo, and that is quite the distinction. After all, the giallo subgenre was founded on the titillating tension that exists between sex and violence, and its films' innumerable instances of beautiful nude women being slashed to pieces before and after copulation deliberately toss viewers back and forth between states of excitement and revulsion. (Despite how it sounds, the juxtaposition of sex and death in the giallo film is often vastly more complicated in its portrayal than that of its blatantly moral North American slasher descendants. In the giallo film-- and in the bulk of European horror generally-- sex is rarely if ever frowned upon as a corrupting force; it is, rather, the denial or perversion of sexual impulses that creates monsters.)

But Slaughter Hotel, with its unabashed crotch closeup a scant five minutes in and many more spread labia to follow, cranks up the giallo's erotic component to a new level of explicitness. One can read the film's plethora of eroticism as an argument that the subgenre should aim to celebrate sexuality in a society and cinematic landscape that often violently suppress it. The film's primary conceit of a prison-like "rest home" for suicidal and sexually active women (whom their husbands and male doctors have deemed to be abnormally sexually active) is the perfect vehicle through which to deliver such an argument. To make a blatant point a little less subtle, Di Leo has the titular rest home-- ostensibly a place of healing-- casually outfitted with a full array of medieval weaponry and torture devices, including an iron maiden. This grim setting, which ensures the loss of personal and sexual liberty, helps to explain the derangement of the female patients within. Eventually, the setting also allows for the creation of a sexually supportive environment between the patients and female nurses that excludes the repressive specter of male dominance (read as: tender lesbian action galore). Di Leo's camera focuses and lingers far more lovingly on the film's many scenes of same-sex and solo softcore (at times nearly hardcore) heavy petting than it does on its infrequent attacks of violence. Di Leo may favor the former as a filmmaker, but the repressive society he has established (and perhaps the regional film industry he's working in) demands that the latter accompany it. Though not adverse to including scenes of murder, the film is also clearly doubtful that the relationship between sex and violence in gialli should be slanted in the direction of murder. Its most significant moment critiquing that relationship comes along with the demise of Rosalbi Neri's nymphomaniac character: cornered by the axe-wielding killer, her death inevitable, she purrs at her assassin and pleads with him to at least have sex with her first. Di Leo is aware that violence is the unavoidable culmination of the giallo plot, but he also knows that violence isn't necessarily where its pleasures lie. To savor only the murder and discard the sleaze would be a bit boring, would it not?

The House of the Yellow Carpet 

(La casa del tappeto giallo) 

(1983) 

dir. Carlo Lizzani

I'm not certain, but it may be the case that The House of the Yellow Carpet is the only giallo coming to us from an Academy Award Nominee, for whatever that's worth. At the 1951 ceremony, director Carlo Lizzani was nominated for the now-retired Best Story award for his work on Giuseppe De Santis's Bitter Rice (1949). Nearly 35 years later, his work on The House of the Yellow Carpet is less worthy of a Best Story statuette than it is one for Best Old Story Repurposed to Darkly Comical Ends. Adapted from a play by Aldo Selleri, the film is a Gaslight-inspired chamber drama concerning a trio's convoluted and wrongheaded attempt at curing a young married woman of the psychological trauma of being sexually abused by her stepfather as a child. Honestly, this is one of the more bizarre premises I've come across in my exploration of the giallo: annoyed that his wife Franca (Beatrice Romand) keeps moaning the name of her abusive stepfather during her late night dream fantasies instead of his own, Antonio (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) hires a married pair of experimental psychiatrists (Erland Josephson and Milena Vokotic) to cure her through their unconventional method. That astonishing method is to eradicate Franca's past trauma by creating a new, safer trauma for her to fret about. This unscrupulous couple of head shrinkers hope to accomplish this by staging a twisted, elaborate play for Franca, in which Josephson's character poses as a demented doctor who gains entry to Franca's apartment under false carpet-buying pretenses and then proceeds to lock them both in, admit to murdering his wife, and terrorize Franca with a knife to the extent that she will then attempt to turn the tables on her domestic abductor. After Franca believes she's dispatched of her antagonist, Antonio arrives home and begins to plant doubts in her mind about the reality of the day's events-- see, her symbolic murder of a crazed stepfather-like figure and disposal of his body wrapped up in a carpet given to her by that stepfather is certain to stop her from calling out his name during her fits of dream passion, especially if she thinks it all happened only in her own crazy, mixed-up head. Of course. 

That's one bizarre plot outlined above, but the film doesn't play it without a certain amount of snickering contempt. The film seems to be amused by Antonio's pathetic, insecure reasons for "helping" his wife, and the psychiatrists are painted unambiguously as criminals, perhaps suggesting the film's view of psychiatry in general. Freudian psychology and interpretations of motivation are a staple of the giallo, but usually they're put forth in earnest. That's not the case here. Lizanni's sympathies seem to rest firmly with Franca: she's not portrayed as pea-brained or helpless, and she's pretty quick to point out the likely possibility that her husband and his accomplices are probably just gaslighting her. At one point I jotted down in my notes "Everyone is acting like they're from outer space," and that seems accurate upon reflection: characters and performances are ever-so-slightly askew, like, for example, Josephson's mad doctor, whose hand is deformed and intermittently paralyzed. The hand, he tells Franca, is "in mourning" for the late wife whom he claims to have murdered. Dialogue and pacing are sharp, the plot becomes ever-more ludicrous as it barrels along, and the ironic closing twist is about as devilishly satisfying as they come. Devoid of giallo stalwarts, the film is populated instead with some strong and well-respected European arthouse actors: Josephson is a legendary actor who worked extensively with Bergman and Tarkovsky, Romand was an Eric Rhomer regular, and Milena Vukotic had roles in many of Luis Bunuel's great films. But don't let the film's pedigree fool you: this is a knowingly silly and outrageous ode to clunky meddling of the damaged psyche.