euro fever

Elizabeth Turner, actress and... FASHION MODEL!

2011-12-11T19:56:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Turner is without a doubt one of the most obscure and mysterious actresses to have appeared in Italian films. The above screenshot of Elizabeth is taken from Ruggero Deodato's erotic thriller Waves of Lust (1975), where she plays a very prominent role and has lots of steamy scenes together with the film's other three stars Silvia Dionisio, Al Cliver and John Steiner. Elizabeth played her only real leading role in Jean-Marie Pallardy's sexually explicit Truck Stop (1978), but she is probably best known for her substantial role as John Saxon's wife in Antonio Margheriti's gory horror hit Cannibal Apocalypse (1989), which also appears to be Elizabeth's final film.

Additionally, Elizabeth played supporting roles in a couple of other notable films, including the popular Exorcist rip-off Beyond the Door (1974), where she plays Juliet Mills' good friend, and Lucio Fulci's compelling giallo The Psychic (1977), where she has a small but memorable part at the start of the film - as Jennifer O'Neill's mother, who commits suicide by throwing herself off a cliff.

However, nothing is known about Elizabeth herself. Absolutely nothing! Based on her name and her looks, I'm assuming she's either British or American but that's it. I have never found any information about her background and nobody seems to know what became of her either.

The only thing I have been able to find out about Elizabeth is that she worked as a fashion model in the early 1970s. Indeed, I've been fortunate enough to lay me hands on some Italian magazines that feature some pretty cool fashion shoots with her. I'd bet modelling is what brought her to Italy in the first place, and then she was presumably discovered and put in movies.

Anyway, I've scanned a bunch of fashion photos of Elizabeth and thought I'd share them here. They are all quite cool but also slightly bizarre due to the inclusion of some rather absurd props.

First up is a shoot from 1971 where Elizabeth is posing in trench coats for photographer Franco Grillo. I have no idea what the deal with the steering wheels is, though!

Up next is another 1971 shoot, and once again photographed by Franco Grillo. Again, I don't get what the deal with the Christmas stars (at least I think that's what they are) is but I guess Grillo just likes to use weird props in his shoots.

Finally, we have a fashion shoot from 1972 where Elizabeth is posing in outfits that are labelled as "men's style with femininity" in the article text. Once again the photographer is Franco Grillo, which explains the appearance of lots of animal statues.

On a final note it is worth mentioning that in all of these fashion spreads, the model is credited simply as "Joan" - not as Elizabeth. Which raises the question of whether or not Elizabeth Turner actually is her real name. The mystery deepens...

Is there anyone out there who knows anything about Elizabeth Turner? If so then do come forward!

Grand Hotel gallery #6: Carroll Baker

2011-11-30T16:06:00.000-08:00

This autographed photo of Carroll Baker was originally published Grand Hotel issue No. 1078 from February 18, 1967.

Hollywood actress and later giallo staple Carroll Baker should be quite a familiar face to fans of Italian genre cinema. She was born on May 28, 1931 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in the United States, and started her acting career in Hollywood in the early 1950s. Baker's breakthrough role was as the lead in Elia Kazan's controversial Baby Doll (1956), which earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. Subsequently she appeared in a series of well-regarded Hollywood films including The Big Country (1958), How the West Was Won (1962), The Carpetbaggers (1964) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

In 1965, Baker starred in the film Harlow (1965), a biographical film about the life of 1930s movie star Jean Harlow which ended up being a critical and commercial failure. After this, Baker had a falling out with her studio, Paramount Pictures, who apparently had her blacklisted. Unable to get work in Hollywood, Baker relocated to Europe - more precisely to Italy, where she enjoyed great success as a leading lady for more than 10 years.

Her first big Italian hit was Romolo Guerrieri's classic giallo The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968), in which she starred alongside French hearttrob Jean Sorel. This highly successful film spawned several imitations and was considered somewhat of a succès de scandale due to several explicit (for its time) sex scenes between Baker and Sorel.

Carroll Baker and Jean Sorel as a very affectionate, newly wed couple in The Sweet Body of Deborah

The shower scene between Baker and Sorel in The Sweet Body of Deborah was considered very risqué at the time and Playboy magazine ran a pictorial with stills from the scene

After the great success with Deborah, Carroll Baker found herself being cast in a string a similarly twistful and sexy gialli - most notably four gialli directed by the great Umberto Lenzi: Paranoia (1969), So Sweet, So Perverse (1969), A Quiet Place to Kill (1970) and Knife of Ice (1972). But she also appeared in other gialli, including Osvaldo Civirani's The Devil With Seven Faces (1971), Eugenio Martin's The Fourth Victim (1971) and Gianfranco Piccioli's The Flower with the Deadly Sting (1973). Baker also dabbled in other genres - appearing the western Captain Apache (1971), the artsy horror film Baba Yaga (1973), and sex dramas such as The Body (1974), Private Lessons (1975) and My Father's Wife (1976).

Umberto Lenzi's excellent giallo A Quiet Place to Kill reunited Baker with Jean Sorel, her co-star from The Sweet Body of Deborah

Carroll Baker together with giallo favorite George Hilton in The Devil with Seven Faces

Carroll Baker in peril in Umberto Lenzi's classy giallo Knife of Ice

Carroll Baker eventually returned to America in the late 1970s and resumed her Hollywood career. Most of Baker's so-called "serious" fans tend to harshly dismiss her European films as "euro trash" but that just goes to show how clueless they are. Personally, I love the wonderful films Carroll Baker made in Italy - specially the gialli. They are a lot better than they are given credit for and will always have a special place in my heart.

Orgasmo esotico

2011-06-09T18:12:00.000-07:00

Italy, 1982

Directed by Mario Siciliano

Cast:
Sonia Bennett, Marina Lotar [Marina Frajese], Mimì Losy [Fernando Arcangeli], Guia Lauri Filzi, Joe Mignano [Paolo Gramignano], Sabrina Mastrolorenzi, Michel Curiè [Giuseppe Curia], Luigi Tripodi, Sandy Samuel, Peter Brown [Bruno Romagnoli], Alfonso Gaita

We all have a lot to be thankful to Lucio Fulci’s landmark horror movie Zombie (1979) for. It was such a huge international hit that it immediately led to a real boom for gory Italian horror movies. Many of these were zombie movies of course but even the ones that weren’t still owe a lot to Zombie because it was the huge success of Fulci’s film that made Italian producers cough up the cash that made it possible for all these great films to be made. But if there’s ever an undeniable sign of a film’s big commercial success then it is no doubt the appearance of a porn movie that references the film’s title. You know, titles like Edward Penishands, Good Will Humping, Saving Ryan’s Privates etc. Mario Siciliano’s Orgasmo esotico obviously isn’t a pun on the title of Zombie, nor is it really any sort of parody of Fulci’s film. But I am nevertheless confident that without the enormous success of Zombie, this bizarre zombie-porn oddity would never have been made.

Through the years I have seen a lot of strange films but I must say that I don’t think I have ever seen anything as crazy as Orgasmo esotico. This film is demented to the point where I don’t even know how to properly review it, so rather than writing a regular review, this will be more of a long plot summary accompanied by some reactions and comments along the way. I think that is the best way to do it as a summation of the deranged plotline is going to say a lot more than what any sort of traditional critique can ever hope to.

It's a dark, stormy night. A horny housewife named Marina (Marina Frajese) is at home in her big villa and getting it on with her husband (Paolo Gramignano) by the fireplace. They go about doing their naughty business to the strains of some C.A.M. library music but they’ve barely finished up before Marina discovers that a sinister-looking black woman (Sonia Bennett) is standing outside the window looking in.

Love by the fireplace

Scary lady in the window

Now, a voyeur usually isn’t seen as something bad in a porn movie but the filmmakers make sure we know this is dangerous stuff by firing up the frenetic main theme from Joe D’Amato’s gory horror film Absurd (1981) – as well as having Marina act all hysterical. Paolo hurries out to investigate but just as he opens the door, Sonia plunges at him and stabs him to death with a knife. She quickly enters the villa and attacks a hysterical Marina, who tries to escape but faints from the horror of it all when she discovers Paolo's corpse in the doorway.

Sonia goes after Marina

Sonia drags the unconscious Marina into the bedroom and puts her on the bed. Out of the blue, Sonia's very feminine and obviously homosexual assistant (Fernando Arcangeli) appears and they inject Marina with a syringe to wake her up again. Apparently, the injection has also removed Marina's fright and made her horny, and she quickly gets into some lesbian action with Sonia, as the recycled suspense score from Absurd finally disappears to give way to some dreadful porn muzak.

Marina gets a syringe...

...and suddenly she's very... hmm... playful

For whatever strange reason, Fernando wants in on the fun so he strips and tries to jerk off but seriously struggles to get an erection from watching the two women. Well, duh! He finally succeeds (more or less anyway) and joins in – getting a blowjob from Marina while Sonia fingers his ass. Yikes! This scene was seriously awkward and nasty. No doubt Fernando’s erection problem will have rubbed off on anyone unfortunate enough to be watching.

Fernando decides to join in. Just be grateful I didn't include any more graphic screenshots

Cut to the next day, when Sonia and Marina dispose of Paolo's body by dumping it into an old well on the estate. Both women cackle and laugh when the body plunges to the bottom.

Sonia and Marina dispose of Paolo's body and cackle like a pair of crazy hens

Sonia then takes Marina with her to the home of a doctor-friend (Alfonso Gaita), and the two women engage in some threesome action with him. As soon as the women’s needs have been satisfied, though, they murder the doc by shooting him. They then wrap his corpse in a hideous-looking blanket, drag it outside and cover it (very half-heartedly) with some hey.

Some fun at the doc's place

Your services are no longer needed, doctor

Later back at the villa, Marina has fun watching Fernando dance around to awful disco music but then all of a sudden her dead husband Paolo reappears as a zombie! The so-called zombie make-up on Paolo is beyond amateurish and basically consists of some green and purple face paint but Marina nevertheless flips out with fright.

The night Paolo came out of the grave (or, actually, the well)

Apparently, Marina’s reaction angers Sonia and Fernando, who decide to punish her. They tie up Marina on the kitchen table and Sonia tortures her by burning her with a lit cigarette. Fernando then whips out a dildo and rams into Marina’s nether regions, while Sonia forces another dildo down Marina's throat. Okay, what the hell kinda movie is this!? It just keeps getting more and more psycho!

Dildo torture!

Anyway, the insane and totally unpredictable plot continues as we suddenly jump ahead to the evening. A couple (Bruno Romagnoli and Guia Lauri Filzi) who are friends of Marina arrive to visit her and are surprised to find that no one is at home. However, they are not about to let the opportunity of having some naughty fun in an empty house pass them by, so they quickly rip off their clothes and treat us to yet another coarsely executed sex scene. When Bruno and Guia have finally finished, they are scared shitless by the sight of a ghoulish Marina in freaky punk make-up standing outside the window.

Marina in punk... erm, sorry... zombie make-up

Guia freaks out

I guess this means that Marina too is a zombie now, although we never actually got to see what Sonia and Fernando did to her. In any case, Sonia suddenly appears and apparently uses magic powers to gain control over Guia and Bruno’s minds. At least I think that’s what she does – it’s not as if anything is actually explained in this flick.

Anyway, the plot makes a big jump to the next day, where we see that Guia and Bruno are now completely mind-controlled by Sonia. They willingly participate in a threesome with her, which Fernando takes delight in spying on.

Sonia gets a new pair of best friends

Afterwards, Sonia and Guia play around cheerfully in the garden while Bruno sits on top of the well and watches them. Suddenly, Guia lunges at him and pushes him down into the well while Sonia grins in approval.

Up next, a woman named Sabrina (Sabrina Mastrolorenzi) shows up at Marina's villa for some sort of errand, along with her boyfriend Pino (Giuseppe "Pino" Curia). Pino waits at the outside gate while Sabrina enters the villa, where she is overpowered by Guia and Fernando. They hold Sabrina down and Sonia injects her with another one of her mysterious syringes to make her more cooperative. Soon, Sabrina willingly engages in a rather icky lesbian session with Sonia in the bedroom while some tedious music stolen from D’Amato’s Porno Holocaust (1981) plays. Sonia even dons a strap-on at one point. Meanwhile, Pino senses that something is wrong and comes looking for Sabrina but he is met by Guia, who brings him into the living room and distracts him by giving him a blowjob.

Sabrina and Sonia have fun...

...while the trusty Guia distracts Pino

Having finished with their lesbian lovemaking, Sonia and Sabrina then enter the living room, and Sabrina gets furious when she sees Pino getting blown by Guia. She furiously chases after him but after a few seconds of bickering, they have made up and cheerfully stroll away together. You gotta love how all problems have such simple solutions in porn movies!

Back at the villa, however, Guia isn’t feeling well. It looks as if Sonia's magical spell over her is wearing off and she begins to cry and bitch. As we’ve already seen, Sonia doesn’t take too kindly to this kind of behavior, so it’s a pretty safe bet that Guia isn’t going to stick around for much longer. And true enough – in another one of those big jumps between scenes we cut to Guia lying dead on the ground while Sonia is firing up the oven. A little later, what used to be Guia is served to Fernando as a big roast for him to eat!! Again I have to ask: what the hell kinda movie is this? Were they seriously attempting to turn people on with this stuff!?

A touch of cannibalism!

Later, at a different place, a sleeping blonde woman named Sandy (Sandy Samuel) is woken up by a phone call telling her to come to Marina's villa. Sandy does as instructed but upon her arrival she is shocked to discover Marina's corpse. She doesn't take it too hard, though, because a little later she and Fernando are seen dancing cheerfully to some cheesy disco music. I have absolutely no idea of why that happens but at this point I’ve long given up on trying to make any sort of sense from this mess.

Sandy discovers Marina's corpse...

...but you can't allow such trivialities stop you from enjoying some bad disco music!

I should perhaps mention that Sandy Samuel was no stranger to disco at this point. In between doing porn she actually found the time to release a really bizarre S&M/disco vinyl called “I Like Sado-Music” in 1980! And thanks to the wonders of YouTube you can all enjoy this wonderful track here:

But back to the plot! The next thing to happen is that we are introduced to Sandy’s boyfriend (Luigi Tripodi). He’s clearly older than Sandy and not very fit-looking either but he does, however, have a really cool and massive moustache, so that earns him some points in my book.

Luigi's awesome porn moustache

Anyway, Luigi shows up at the villa to look for Sandy but instead he is met by a zombiefied Marina and by Sonia, who uses her magic powers to get Luigi to undress and let Zombie-Marina give him a blowjob. Sandy is watching the action from the sofa and gets excited so she whips out a dildo and starts pleasuring herself. Zombie-Marina continues to blow Luigi until he shoots his load all over her breasts, which greatly disappointed me. I mean, come on! What on earth is the point of throwing in a zombie blow job if it’s not going to end with the guy’s dick being gorily chomped off and eaten? Seriously lame!

Zombie blow job!!

Apparently, this is what women do when they become witnesses to zombie-sex

Sandy, Sonia and Luigi then retreat to the bedroom and participate in a threesome. After they've finished, Sandy leaves and Sonia takes out an axe and attempts to kill Luigi. However, Luigi is able to overpower her and pins her to the bed. Then we hear a knock on the door and suddenly Luigi has vanished. It turns out that the one knocking on the door is the no longer zombiefied Marina. Yup, that’s right! Just when you thought that the film couldn’t possibly get any lamer than it already is, a bewildered Sonia sits up and tells Marina that she’s just had the most terrible nightmare. Everything has just been a bad dream!! Uuughhh!

It was all just a dream!

The film still isn’t over, though. We now learn that in real life, Sonia is actually Marina and Paolo's maid. After getting into her maid's uniform, Sonia serves a drink to Paolo but he is very mean to her and calls her names. Oooh... Poor Sonia! No wonder she has to resort to dreaming about turning her employers into zombies. She runs sobbing into the kitchen, where she comforted by Fernando, who is also a servant to Marina and Paolo in real life it seems.

In the evening, Marina and Paolo are getting it on again in the living room next to the fireplace. You can probably guess where this is going, can’t you? And sure enough, after the lovemaking is done, Marina discovers a sinister-looking Sonia outside their window and freaks out. The End! The only thing missing here is an onscreen text reading “The nightmare becomes reality...?” à la Umberto Lenzi’s amazing Nightmare City (1980).

The nightmare becomes reality

Although Orgasmo esotico is frequently said to be a Joe D’Amato film, it was in fact directed by Mario Siciliano under his frequent porno pseudonym Lee Castle. One might be forgiven for mistaking this for a D'Amato film, though, since mixing zombie/horror elements together with hardcore porn is a practice more closely identified with D'Amato and his Caribbean-lensed pornos than with Mario Siciliano, whose previous pornos (such as My Swedish Aunt, 1980) fall into the category of more traditional smut. The D'Amato connection is further strengthened by the constant recycling of Carlo Maria Cordio’s frenetic score from D'Amato's gory horror hit Absurd as well as the brief inclusion of a track from Porno Holocaust - itself somewhat of a horror/porn hybrid.

Regardless of director, though, Orgasmo esotico is a terrible mess, and it’s hard to believe it was actually released in theaters. I can’t stop wondering what kind of audience Siciliano had in mind when he made this. Surely, the weird zombie stuff will put off most of the raincoat crowd, while the ugly bumping and grinding on display is unlikely to find much appreciation among horror movie fans. That only leaves fans of genuinely bizarre WTF-movies, and in this regard I suppose the film can be considered a success. Aside from the unforgivably lame cop-out ending, the film’s plotline is completely unpredictable and full of crazy ideas, so I will give it some due credit for its warped creativeness. I also got somewhat of a kick out of watching such hardcore favorites as Marina Frajese, Guia Lauri Filzi and Ferdinando Arcangeli acting completely crazy. Nevertheless, the film is still fairly repetitious, poorly put together and full of tedious and ugly hardcore activity.

All in all, Orgasmo esotico is an absolutely insane and woefully trashy film. It’s thoroughly incompetent and laughable but I must admit that it is truly one of the weirdest films I have ever seen, and that sort of makes it worth seeing. It’s definitely not easy on the eyes, though, so seek out this demented piece of celluloid at your own risk!

© 2011 Johan Melle

The cast:

Sonia Bennett as Sonia

Marina Frajese as Marina

Fernando Arcangeli as Sonia's assistant

Guia Lauri Filzi as Marina's friend

Paolo Gramignano as Marina's husband

Sabrina Mastrolorenzi as Sabrina

Giuseppe Curia as Pino

Sandy Samuel as Sandy

Luigi Tripodi as Sandy's boyfriend

Bruno Romagnoli as Marina's friend

Alfonso Gaita as The doctor

Death Steps in the Dark/Passi di morte perduti nel buio

2011-05-31T13:07:00.000-07:00

Italy/Greece, 1976

Directed by Maurizio Pradeaux

Cast:
Leonard Mann, Robert Webber, Vera Krouska, Marie Elise Eugene, Nikos Verlekis, Antonio Maimone, Anestis Vlahos, Barbara Seidel, Nikos Vandoros, Lefteris Giftopoulos, Andreas Ioannou, Evagelia Samiotaki, Anthi Andreopoulou

Maurizio Pradeaux is a fairly obscure Italian director who only made a handful of films. He took two stabs at the popular giallo genre. The first one was Death Carries a Cane (1973), which was released just at the tail-end of the giallo craze of the early 1970s. This could very well have ended up as Pradeaux’s first and only foray into giallo territory, but the tremendous success of Dario Argento’s giallo masterpiece Deep Red (1975) led to Pradeaux trying his hand at the genre one more time with Death Steps in the Dark.

Italian photographer Luciano Morelli (Leonard Mann) and his airheaded Swedish fashion model girlfriend Ingrid (Vera Krouska) are travelling with the Istanbul-Athens express. They share a compartment with four fellow passengers – one of whom is a distracted-looking young woman (Anthi Andreopoulou) who keeps fumbling nervously with her pearl necklace.

Strangers on a train

The nervous woman

After a lot of fiddling with the necklace, the cord finally breaks and the pearls fall all over the floor. While the other passengers are helping the girl pick up the pearls, the train goes into a tunnel and the lights go out. When the train emerges from the tunnel shortly afterwards, they are all shocked to discover that the nervous young woman has been stabbed to death with a letter-opener.

Murder!

A local Greek police inspector (Robert Webber) questions Luciano, Ingrid and the other three passengers, which consist of Omar Effendi (Antonio Maimone), a shady-looking Orthodox priest; Ben Amuchin, a suspiciously-acting man of few words; and Ida Tuclidis (Barbara Seidel - the film’s assistant director), a somewhat arrogant divorcee. But unfortunately for Luciano, the letter opener used to commit the murder belongs to him so he quickly becomes the prime suspect in the case. Fearing arrest, Luciano goes into hiding with the help of his buddy Salvatore (Anestis Vlahos), a petty criminal, and shacks up in an old fishing hut. Eager to prove his innocence, Luciano – with help from Ingrid – begins his own investigation to catch the killer.

Dangerous sleuthing

In the meantime, Raul Komakis (Nikos Verlekis), a handsome playboy who was also aboard the Istanbul-Athens express, reads about the murder and sees pictures of the five suspects in a newspaper. Upon reading that the killer cut the electric circuits in the wash room to make the train go dark when it entered the tunnel, Raul realizes that he has actually seen the killer entering and exiting the wash room. Together with his lover Ulla (Marie Elise Eugene), a saucy black nightclub singer, Raul starts blackmailing the killer – leading to a chain of brutal and gory murders...

Even blackmailers like J&B

Death Steps in the Dark opens very promisingly with an excellent train sequence that plays like something straight out of Agatha Christie and establishes the intriguing central puzzle right away. Unfortunately, the film fails to fully deliver on its initial promise as it eventually gets bogged down by some seriously misguided attempts at humor. While a running gag involving the inspector’s digestion problems is fairly amusing (largely because it is underplayed and doesn’t interfere with the flow of the film), the more broad attempts at comedy fall terribly flat and seriously test the viewer’s patience. Luciano dressing up like a woman to hide from the police is one of the most awkward moments but the absolute worst offence is the grossly exaggerated stupidity of the Swedish girlfriend, Ingrid, whose imbecile behavior begins to seriously grate on the nerves after a while. In fact, a potentially suspenseful sequence involving a break-in at an old villa is completely ruined by a series of insufferable gags involving Ingrid’s lack of intelligence (a bit with an umbrella is particularly cringe-worthy). Also not helping matters any is the fact that this sequence seemingly goes on forever.

A lame attempt at comedy

The piecing together of the murder mystery is not fully satisfactory either. It is blatantly obvious that the killer has to be one of the five people who were present in the train compartment, and since Luciano and Ingrid are clearly established as innocent, that leaves us with only three possible suspects. This number is way too low and it is not made any better by the fact that all of the three suspects are given rather limited screen time. Instead, the plots puts a lot of focus on the blackmailing playboy Raul and his racy black girlfriend Ulla, and various characters connected to them, such as Ulla’s unnamed lesbian lover, and a rather mysterious gallery owner, who also happens to be Ulla’s lover. With that said, the Ulla character is actually one of the film’s most entertaining figures and her nightclub act – in which she performs the catchy song “Making Love to You” (by the film’s composer, Riz Ortolani) and then switches to a blonde wig for a scantly-dressed dance routine – is a definite highlight.

Ulla’s nightclub act

I have to say that in spite of the misguided attempts at humor and a bit too much focus on irrelevant characters, Death Steps in the Dark is still curiously difficult to dislike. For the most part it plays out quite enjoyably and it has plenty of points to recommend it by. For starters it is a very slick-looking and well-shot film. Aldo Ricci’s cinematography makes great use of the picturesque and sunny Greek locations during the daytime, while the night exteriors are brilliantly lit and atmospherically framed. Ricci also employs some extreme close-ups in several scenes – most notably a lesbian lovemaking scene where tongues, nipples and genitalia are shown in ultra-close-up. Really sleazy stuff but it is rather original too. I, at least, cannot remember having seen anything like this before.

A good example of the film’s lovely compositions and lightning

Lesbian love in ultra-close-up

Ricci’s cinematography is also an instrumental part of the impressive staging of the film’s stalk-and-slash sequences, which are captured from stylish camera angles and tightly edited together. The helps to create an effective tension, and we are given a satisfactory pay-off, too, as Pradeaux does not skimp on the red stuff. Most of the killings are indeed very graphic and brutal, and – just like the lesbian lovemaking – the merciless razor slashings are captured in loving close-ups.

Stylish slashings

It should be mentioned that the Scooby Doo style method used for unmasking the killer is one of the least credible I can remember seeing in a giallo (and that says a lot), and the explanation for the killer's motive is delivered rather clumsily in a great hurry during the last minute of the film! But, ultimately, I don’t think this detracts too much from the film, which on the whole is agreeable and pretty nicely paced.

The cast is quite good here even if none of them are allowed to stretch their acting muscles to any great degree. Leonard Mann is a likeable leading man, while Robert Webber is charming as the police inspector who struggles with indigestion. Since this was a co-production with Greek company D. Dimitriadis Film and filmed almost solely in Greece, the majority of the supporting cast are Greek actors but, strangely, the only one of these to receive any on-screen credit is leading lady Vera Krouska. All the other Greek actors are uncredited even though several of them play substantial roles, and instead fake credits are given to various Italian actors who do not actually appear in the film. It’s almost as if the makers didn’t wish to acknowledge that this was a Greek co-production. In any case, Vera Krouska does as well as can be expected in the role of the annoying Ingrid, while Nikos Verlekis (known from The Devil’s Men, 1976) is convincing as the blackmailing playboy. Enigmatic black actress Marie Elise Eugene, who can also be seen in Nico Mastorakis’ thriller Death Has Blue Eyes (1976), really digs into the role of the sassy bisexual nightclub singer, and has no qualms about appearing nude at the tip of a hat.

The English-dubbed version of the film is very good, and benefits a lot from having both Mann and Webber dubbing their own voices, while versatile dubbing actress Silvia Faver does a commendable job of voicing Vera Krouska in a suitably clueless and ditzy-sounding fashion. Other notable dubbing favorites who can be heard include Frank von Kuegelgen (as the voice of Nikos Verlekis) and Nick Alexander (doing the voice of the inspector’s assistant played by Lefteris Gifropoulos), while Edward Mannix, Susan Spafford and Ted Rusoff dub various smaller roles.

In summation, Death Steps in the Dark is a pretty nice little giallo. While I didn’t appreciate the broad attempts at humor, the film thankfully stays on track for most of its running time and is ultimately very likeable in spite of its flaws.

© 2011 Johan Melle

Leonard Mann as Luciano Morelli

Robert Webber as The Inspector

Vera Krouska as Ingrid Stelmosson

Marie Elise Eugene as Ulla

Nikos Verlekis as Raul Komakis

Antonio Maimone as Omar Effendi

Anestis Vlahos as Salvatore

Barbara Seidel as Ida Tuclidis

Nikos Vandoros as Theodoro Theodopolis

??? as Little Baffo

Lefteris Giftopoulos as The Inspector's assistant

??? as Ben Amuchin

??? as Omar's mistress

??? as Ulla's lesbian lover

Andreas Ioannou as Ida's husband

Evagelia Samiotaki as Baffo

Anthi Andreopoulou as The first victim

??? as The ticket collector

Reflections in Black/Il vizio ha le calze nere

2011-05-29T10:03:00.000-07:00

Italy, 1975

Directed by Tano Cimarosa

Cast:
John Richardson, Dagmar Lassander, Tano Cimarosa, Magda Konopka, Ninetto Davoli, Ursula Davis, Gianni Williams, Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Livio Galassi, Dada Gallotti, Giovanni Brusatori, Giovanna D’Albore

Reflections in Black is a giallo I’ve been aware of for quite some time but because the only known English-friendly release is a fullscreen Greek VHS with large chunks of footage missing due to print damage, I’ve kept holding off on seeing it. But once a fan version using a widescreen Spanish VHS as the image source and the English dub from the Greek release as the audio source became available I just had to jump on it. And while this version still looks rather grotty, it is at least in widescreen and around 10 minutes longer than the Greek tape. Plus it’s always nice to sit down with a “new” giallo.

The plot kicks off in classical giallo fashion – showing a mysterious killer with a dark coat and the ubiquitous black gloves roaming the dark streets. An unfortunate nightgown-clad girl named Nelly (Daniela Giordano) is savagely attacked with a razor when she opens the door for this mysterious person in black. In a desperate bid for escape, the bleeding girl flees screaming into the night. She manages to reach a phone booth but her attacker catches up with her and slashes her to death before she can call for help.

Not long afterwards, a ditzy blonde named Emma is having an amorous nighttime encounter with a lover in a park when she is attacked by the same black-gloved killer and gets her throat slashed open.

The killer’s handiwork

Inspector Lavena (John Richardson) is put on the case, and together with his assistant Sgt. Panto (played by the film’s director, Tano Cimarosa) he starts looking into the various people connected to the two victims. It turns out that Emma was the trusted secretary of a powerful and influential notary named Anselmi (Giacomo Rossi Stuart), and apparently she was also very chummy with Anselmi’s sexy wife Leonora (Dagmar Lassander). All the gory details of Leonora and Emma’s relationship are revealed to us by having Leonora gaze at an old photo of Emma, which triggers a long, gratuitous flashback scene of them engaged in some soft-focus lesbian lovemaking to the strains of Carlo Savina’s typically gialloesque score full of lulling female vocals.

The obligatory lesbian action

Anyway, it soon transpires that the two murder victims knew each other as a photograph of them together is discovered. Also present in this photo is a third woman and two men, and while Inspector Lavena and Sgt. Panto work on trying to figure out who these people are, the audience learns that the third girl is a somewhat bitchy blonde named Marilyn (Dada Gallotti). Marilyn knows the identity of the killer and indulges in a dangerous game of blackmail – with predictable results.

A classic photographic clue

Those blackmailers just never learn, do they?

As the body count continues to rise, so does the list of potential suspects. In addition the Anselmis there is also their nosy and horny lesbian maid; the mysterious Contessa Orsello (Magda Konopka), a predatory lesbian with ties to all of the victims; the Contessa’s pathetic, drug-addicted son Marco (Livio Galassi), who likes to threaten his mother’s mistresses with a razor; Marilyn’s lover Sandro (Pasolini favorite Ninetto Davoli), who shows a questionable interest in underage girls; and Mario (Giovanni Brusatori), a camp gay hairdresser whose salon the victims used to frequent.

By the time the movie is over, most of these characters will be dead and anyone but the most naïve and inexperienced giallo viewers will have guessed the killer’s identity long before the “shocking” reveal. First-time director Tano Cimarosa was a good, reliable tough guy actor and already had some experience with the giallo genre thanks to his memorable supporting part in Renato Polselli’s appropriately named Delirium (1972), but it’s obvious from the get-go that Cimarosa’s talent for directing is far less impressive. This is a strictly by-the-numbers affair that throws in all the usual giallo clichés and tries to spice up the brew by upping the sleaze factor. And if taken merely as a sleazy romp, Reflections in Black can actually be a lot of fun.

One of the most amusing things about the film is how Cimarosa uses it as a showcase for himself. Although British actor John Richardson – fresh from his giallo turns in Torso (1973) and Eyeball (1975) – is given prominent top-billing, Richardson’s police inspector is continuously overshadowed by Cimarosa’s sergeant, who proves himself to be much smarter than his superior time and time again. In fact, Cimarosa continues to upstage Richardson to the point where one wonders why he didn’t just cast himself in the lead, but I suppose he needed Richardson’s name to sell movie tickets.

What little thunder Richardson has left gets stolen by another cop on the case, the young and promising Manlio (played by Gianni Williams) and his girlfriend Anna (played by 1960s starlet Ursula Davis under her actual name Pier Anna Quaia), whose relationship is given an absurd amount of screen time. Anna is shown to be an awfully sassy girl who likes to wear see-through blouses that show off her nipples. “It’s a sexual revolution! Didn’t you know the girls burn their bras these days?” she chirps to Manlio when he protests. At one point she even endangers herself by deciding to play amateur detective – after which Manlio finally sets her straight by telling her to limit her crazy impulses to the bedroom or the supermarket from now on! Oh, the 1970s!

Cimarosa sets Richardson straight

Manlio and Anna occupy a fair amount of the film’s running time

Visually, Reflections in Black isn’t one of the better-looking gialli. It may be a tad unfair to judge its visuals on the basis of the generally crummy-looking versions that are currently available but aside from a few nice uses of reflective images there just aren’t that many stylish traits to be found here. Some of the sleazier moments actually look downright drab – especially a coarsely shot sex scene between Ninetto Davoli and Dada Gallotti that gives us a closer look at Davoli’s bouncing nut sack than what anybody really needs to see. This scene is made all the more hilarious because it is accompanied by an inappropriate Carlo Savina score that sounds much too classy to suit the images on the screen. But while none of the general sleaziness on display is all that well-made it does add to the fun.

Say what you want but you cannot accuse Ninetto Davoli of shyness

One of the many sleazy highlights

Apart from the fun that comes from watching Cimarosa muscling in on poor John Richardson, the film also benefits from having both Dagmar Lassander and Magda Konopka on hand as predatory lesbians. Obviously, the careers of both women had seen better days but they deliver what is expected of them and are definitely easy on the eyes.

Dagmar Lassander sporting an outfit almost exactly like the one she wore in The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire (1971)

Magda Konopka in action

Everyone else is somewhat wasted, though, from old pro Giacomo Rossi Stuart, who hardly registers as a screen presence in the role of Lassander’s cuckolded husband, to poor Daniela Giordano, who gets nothing more to do than show up and get killed (she doesn’t even have any dialogue).

Also worthy of mention is the presence of the usual crew of English dubbers – most notably the unmistakable tough guy voice of Edward Mannix dubbing Tano Cimarosa. It’s a great match as the voice fits Cimarosa’s look and the character’s hardball attitude perfectly. You’ll no doubt also recognize the other voice actors, including Carolynn De Fonseca (dubbing Dada Gallotti), Silvia Faver (dubbing Ursula Davis) and Frank von Kuegelgen (dubbing Gianni Williams).

While far from a great movie, Reflections in Black is nevertheless just about silly and sleazy enough to warrant a recommendation for giallo hounds. You might also want to check out Cimarosa’s second film as a director, the gritty crime flick Death Hunt (1977), which is even more sleazy and enjoyable.

© 2011 Johan Melle

The cast:

John Richardson as Inspector Lavena

Dagmar Lassander as Leonora Anselmi

Tano Cimarosa as Sgt. Panto

Magda Konopka as Contessa Orsello

Ninetto Davoli as Sandro

Ursula Davis as Anna

Gianni Williams as Manlio

Giacomo Rossi Stuart as Mr. Anselmi

Livio Galassi as Marco

Dada Gallotti as Marilyn

Giovanni Brusatori as Mario

??? as Leonora's maid

??? as The Contessa's lover

??? as Emma

Daniela Giordano as Nelly

Crazy Desires of a Murderer/I vizi morbosi di una governante

2011-03-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

Italy, 1973

Directed by Filippo Walter Ratti

Cast:
Corrado Gaipa, Isabelle Marchall, Roberto Zattin, Gaetano Russo, Annie Karole Edel, Adler Gray, Beppe Colombo, Patrizia Gori, Rino Bellini, Ambrogio Molteni, Sergio Orsi, Claudio Peticchio

Time for me to sit down with another obscure little giallo – more specifically an obscure little low-budget effort named Crazy Desires of a Murderer from director Filippo Walter Ratti, who is probably best remembered for his horror movie The Night of the Damned (1971).

The plot plays out in a crumbling old castle and we are introduced to a beautiful young upper class girl named Ileana De Chablais (Isabelle Marchall) as she returns to her massive family estate after a trip to China. With her she has brought her old friends Frank (Beppe Colombo), Gretel (Adler Gray) and Elsa (Patrizia Gori), as well as two more recent acquaintances, Bobby (Gaetano Russo) and Pier Luigi (Roberto Zattin). Ileana’s father, an old, wheelchair-bound baron, is an antiques lover, so Ileana has brought some collectible Chinese vases for him. But unbeknownst to Ileana, Bobby and Pier Luigi have hidden a stash of opium in the vases, which went through the customs with no problems thanks to Ileana’s wealth and connections. It just so happens that Pier Luigi owes a lot of money to a couple of nasty drug dealers who threaten to kill him unless he pays up.

Ileana and her friends arrive at the castle

The precious Chinese vases

It doesn’t take long before the young friends start to engage in an evening of wild partying and a bit of kinky bed-hopping. But in the middle of the night, a mysterious killer sneaks into Elsa’s bedroom and stabs her to death. He then proceeds to carve out her eyeballs.

Elsa’s gruesome demise

Soon afterwards, a peculiar police inspector (Corrado Gaipa) arrives to investigate the murder and he decides to take residence at the estate until he is able to unmask the killer. There is certainly no shortage of prospective killers but the number one suspect is Ileana’s younger brother Leandro, a disturbed young man who is mute due to a childhood trauma and who prefers to stay hidden in the basement where he can practice his taxidermist hobby. The rest of the suspects are made up of Ileana and her friends, as well as Hans, the sinister butler; Dr. Olsen, the equally sinister family physician, and Bertha (Annie Karole Edel), the faithful but horny housekeeper who seems to be getting it on with everyone.

The creepy taxidermist brother gives Gretel a good scare

Made at the height of the giallo craze in the early 1970s, Crazy Desires of a Murderer was plagued by a long and complicated release history and it continues to languish in obscurity to this day. It was filmed circa late 1972 or early 1973 but for whatever reason it was put on the shelf for several years. However, a photo-novel version was published in the magazine Cinesex Mese in June 1973 under the title Gli occhi verdi della morte (translation: The green eyes of death). Presumably, this was the film’s original title and it is most likely in reference to the half-witted taxidermist brother whose sinister green eyes are given enough close-ups to make Lucio Fulci proud.

The cover for the rare photo novel version of the film

A sample scan from the photo-novel showcasing Elsa’s gory fate

The green eyes alluded to in the photo-novel title

The film remained on the shelf for three years until it was submitted to the Italian censorship board and obtained a censorship visa in May 1976. It was now cleared for theatrical release but somehow it still took nearly one more year before the film finally premiered in April 1977. By now, the whole giallo craze had died down and this is probably why it was released under the title I vizi morbosi di una governante (translation: The morbid vices of a housekeeper), which sounds more like a sexploitation flick than a giallo. The film’s housekeeper does admittedly get it on with several of the male characters but this title nevertheless fails to really convey what type of film this is. In any case, it did poorly at the Italian box office. An English-dubbed version was never prepared and the film received very little release outside of Italy.

The titular housekeeper with morbid vices

In 1996, the film was rescued from obscurity by British video company Redemption Film, which issued it on VHS under the title Crazy Desires of a Murderer - in Italian with English subtitles. Redemption’s release featured a good-looking widescreen print but, unfortunately, 5 seconds of an eyeball carving was removed at the insistence of the Britsh Board of Film Classification. And once again the film fared poorly as Redemption apparently only sold around 150 copies.

The reasons for the film’s lack of success may initially seem puzzling as the plot sounds quite promising. It has most of the ingredients needed to make an enjoyable giallo but, unfortunately, it falls rather flat in its execution. Ambrogio Molteni's meandering script is probably the biggest problem. Molteni’s storytelling is annoyingly unfocused as he spends far too much time on the boring subplot about Pier Luigi’s troubles with the drug dealers he owes money to. In fact, the plot is full of irrelevant details that are brought up only to be dropped a few minutes later. Characterization is kept at a strictly rudimentary level (if that) and the characters display a surprising lack of interest in the fact that someone among them is a killer, although it’s possible that the many disinterested faces are simply a reflection of the actors’ personal attitudes towards the project. Not helping matters any is the sluggish pacing as well as Filippo Walter Ratti’s often lifeless direction.

But in spite of these faults, Crazy Desires possesses a quirky atmosphere that is strangely compelling in its own weird way, and it does feature a couple of notable plus points. The strongest card is probably Corrado Gaipa as the wry, old police inspector who walks with a limp. Gaipa, who appeared in everything from The Godfather (1972) to nazisploitation trash like The Red Nights of the Gestapo (1977), is a fine character actor and he puts in a good performance as the peculiar Columbo-style inspector. Piero Piccioni's moody score is another great asset, and the camerawork is not bad either - capturing some pretty stylish images along the way.

The excellent Corrado Gaipa as the peculiar police inspector

Stylish camerawork in the creepy basement

Another stylish shot - of the killer with the murder weapon in hand. Notice how the gloves are actually white for a change!

With the exception of Corrado Gaipa’s inspector, the actors are not really given much opportunity to shine but petite, catty-eyed French starlet Isabelle Marchall, who also appeared in the much better giallo The Crimes of the Black Cat (1972) and in the original Black Emanuelle (1975), is very cute and appealing as Ileana, and the lovely Patrizia Gori is always a pleasure to watch even though she is under-used in the role of the ill-fated Elsa. Marchall and Gori feature prominently in one of the film's most enjoyable scenes, which occurs during a salacious party game where some of the characters are mimicking movie scenes while the others try to guess the name of the movie. Marchall and Gori get down on the floor and start kissing and caressing each other, while the others are having a hard time guessing the right movie. “All movies have scenes like that now!”, one of them complains before another is finally able to guess that the movie in question is Alberto Cavallone's Le salamandre (1969), the first Italian lesbo-erotic film. A very funny in-joke that gives the film extra points in my book.

Your typical Italian party game

The graphic eyeball removals are pretty well-done and provide some much-needed visceral thrills. It's just too bad that the film doesn't have more scenes of bloodletting or graphic sex because it could have livened up the proceedings and made up for the slow pacing. As it turns out, Ratti did actually shoot some very graphic and kinky sex scenes for the film but, unfortunately, they were deemed too extreme by the censors and thereby removed. Fortunately, these “naughty” sequences are present in photo-novel version printed in Cinesex Mese, so let’s have a look at what we are missing out on.

Firstly, the sex scene between Isabelle Marchall and Gaetano Russo is considerably more detailed than the brief sequence seen in the film. As seen in these scans, the session originally included cunnilingus:

...and some doggie style action:

Even more regrettable, however, are the cuts made to the sex scene between Patrizia Gori and Roberto Zattin. In the film, Zattin gets a kinky idea when he notices a big candle next to the bed and he proceeds to light it and start shaping it into a dildo while Gori grins and licks her lips in anticipation.

Suggestive kinkiness

But just as Gori turns over on her stomach and things are about to get more interesting, the scene cuts away. In the photo-novel, however, the scene goes much further as Zattin proceeds to fuck Gori with the burning candle while calling her a whore:

Love Italian style

The reason why these “forbidden” scenes are left intact in the photo-novel is because it was customary for the photo-novel publishers to receive copies of the films before they were sent to the censor board and any cuts were imposed. Hence, a lot of the photo-novels printed in the likes of Cinesex, Cinestop, Bigfilm and Topfilm feature racy scenes that are not present in the release version of the films. This is the case with The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire (1971), Frankenstein 80 (1972) and Sex of the Witch (1973) just to mention a few. But because there is so much else going on in those films, the removal of a few naughty bits doesn’t hurt them as badly as it does Crazy Desires. If there was ever a film that could truly benefit from the restoration of censored scenes then it is surely this one!

In the end I must say that Crazy Desires of a Murderer is not a very good film but nevertheless I find myself being fascinated by it. Maybe its troubled release history is why it appeals to me as I do find things like that very interesting. To be honest I’m not entirely sure of the reason as this is one of those films whose appeal is extremely hard to pinpoint. I cannot in good conscience recommend this film but I do think that true giallo fans should give it a shot.

© 2011 Johan Melle

The cast:

Corrado Gaipa as The Police Inspector

Isabelle Marchall as Ileana De Chablais

Roberto Zattin as Pier Luigi La Rocca

Gaetano Russo as Bobby Heston

Annie Karole Edel as Bertha, the housekeeper

Adler Gray as Gretel Schanz

Beppe Colombo as Frank Hoffmann

Patrizia Gori as Elsa Leiter

??? as Hans, the butler

??? as Leandro

??? as Baron De Chablais

??? as Dr. Olsen

??? as Moretti, the inspector's assistant

Lost film #4: Paura

2011-03-20T17:06:00.000-07:00

Italy, 1972

Directed by Luigi Russo

Cast:
Rosario Borelli, Kai Fischer, Rosalba Grottesi, Patrizia Gori

Unfinished, unreleased or lost films have always intrigued me, and it is really interesting to try and piece together information about such projects. One lost film that is particularly fascinating is the thriller Paura (or Fear as it translates to in English), which was written and directed by little-known filmmaker Luigi Russo, who spent most of his career making various skin flicks such as the Blue Lagoon rip-off Blue Island (1982) with Sabrina Siani. Paura was Russo's directorial debut and it has never been released. Apparently, shooting was completed but it ran into post-production difficulties and was never edited or dubbed.

Due to its unavailability there is little information available on Paura but, fortunately, great Italian magazine Cinesex ran a piece on the film in early 1972. The article includes both pictures and a plot summary that helps give you an idea about what the film is like.

According to the plot summary in the Cinesex article, Paura opens in brutal fashion: a beautiful girl named Orsola is violently raped by three masked men. Orsola becomes pregnant after the rape and eventually gives birth to a deformed and grotesque son - a "monster". But in spite of his physical appearance and the circumstances under which he was conceived, Orsola loves her son and she wants to protect him from the gazing eyes of people who do not accept anything that is different. Hence, she takes her baby son and hides with him in the abandoned underground level of an old theater.

Cut to 20 years later. The "monster" is now grown up - having spent his entire life in the theater's abandoned underground level and never having seen other people than his mother. One day, however, an acting troupe consisting of four men and four women arrive at the theater to rehearse a play. Apparently, several of the actors are quite horny, and in between rehearsals they sneak off to look for isolated spots to have sex. Naturally, they end up in the theater's underground area and start to go at it without knowing that they are being watched by the "monster". Having never been exposed to sex before, the "monster" snaps after witnessing all the copulating, and starts killing the unsuspecting theater actors one by one.

From the plot description, Paura appears to be more of a horror movie than a giallo, and it sounds fairly bizarre. According to the Cinesex article, the killer only murders the men, whom he considers as sexual rivals (although he does kill one unfortunate woman too because her short hair made him think that she was a man!) and this is a rather unusual touch. The women figure prominently in the many sex scenes, though, and the Cinesex article includes several stills from a lesbian scene between the sexy platinum blonde Patrizia Gori and another unidentified actress. Below are some scans of this lesbian love scene:

The Cinesex article briefly mentions that Paura stars Richard Melvill, Kai Fischer, Rosalba Grottesi and Patrizia Gori, but it doesn't say anything about the roles they play. Let's take a little closer look at these four actors, though.

First off, Richard Melvill is actually a pseudonym that was used by Italian actor Rosario Borelli in a couple of early 1970s films.

Rosario Borelli as he looked in The Cynic, the Rat & the Fist (1977)

Borelli had been a popular leading man in the 1950s but when he got older he switched to directing and acting in violent photo-novels such as "Antar" and "Killing", and playing supporting roles in Euro-crime movies. At the time Paura was filmed, Borelli was in his mid 40s, so clearly it cannot be him who plays the monster (who is supposed to be 20). Presumably, he plays one of the actors - or maybe the director. No director is specifically mentioned in the plot summary but it seems likely that such a character could be present and it would fit Borelli age-wise.

Then we have Kai Fischer, a popular German actress known for numerous krimis such as Room 13 and The Monster of London City (both 1964), and Mel Welles' cult horror movie Man Eater of Hydra (1967).

Kai Fischer in a still from Room 13

Fischer was pushing 40 when Paura was made, so it seems like a fair guess that she plays the role of Orsola, the mother of the "monster".

Beautiful and likeable blonde starlet Patrizia Gori plays one of the horny young theater actresses, and she figures prominently in the pictures of the lesbian scene printed in Cinesex.

Patrizia Gori photographed by the famous Angelo Frontoni in 1973

Gori was just getting her career started when she appeared in Paura, and she seemed to be suffering from bad luck. Not only was Paura never released but her next film, the obscure giallo Crazy Desires of a Murderer (1973), was also shelved for several years. She soon found success, though, in sleaze classics such as Emanuelle and Françoise (1975), Cries and Shadows (1975) and Elsa Fräulein SS (1977), and was married for several years to porno director Franco Lo Cascio (a.k.a. Luca Damiano).

Also listed as a cast member is the gorgeous, raven-haired Rosalba Grottesi. Although she only appeared in a handful of films, Grottesi had enormous success as both leading ladies and femme fatales in photo-novels during the 1960s and 70s, and she would continue to play supporting parts in photo-novels up until her retirement in 2001.

Rosalba Grottesi in a photo-novel from 1973

Again, there is no mention about what kind of character she plays in the film but I think it is reasonable to assume that she plays one of the theater actresses.

This is pretty much all the information I've been able to dig up about Paura. As I've already mentioned, Luigi Russo apparently finished shooting the film and the footage is supposed to still exist. It has never been edited or dubbed, though, and quite frankly, I find it highly unlikely that it ever will be after so many years. And that's a great shame because Paura sounds just like the kind of film I'd like to watch. It has some really cool actors, the plot sound delightfully bizarre, and I imagine that the theater setting could be used to very atmospheric effect as it was in later films like The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (1974) and Stagefright (1987).

More print ads with Euro actresses unearthed

2011-03-12T17:39:00.000-08:00

Finally! It's time for another batch of vintage prints ads featuring beautiful Euro-actresses. Enjoy the show!

First woman out is the gorgeous Virna Lisi. I've already posted an ad she did for Chlorodont toothpaste in 1964 here, but below we have a much earlier Chlorodont ad that Virna did in 1960, when she was looking very young and innocent:

Virna endorsed Chlorodont throughout most of the 1960s so there's certainly no shortage of different ads to be found. Here is one from 1964:

But as usual, Lux soap is the big favorite, and the next scan is a Lux ad featuring the beautiful Danish actress Annette Stroyberg. Annette is best known for her marriage to the famous French director Roger Vadim, who directed her in Les liaisons dangereuses (1959) and in the vampire film Blood and Roses (1960). After their divorce in 1960, Annette moved to Italy, where she appeared in notable films like Roberto Rosselini's Anima nera (1962), as well as less prestigious stuff like the comedies Beach Casanova (1962) and The Eye of the Needle (1963). Annette had become a popular actress in Italy by the time she did this ad in 1964 but she retired from acting shortly afterwards.

Lovely Italian actress Rossana Podestà started her acting career in 1950 and was given a chance at worldwide fame when she landed the title role in the Hollywood epic Helen of Troy (1956) directed by Robert Wise. Unfortunately, the film wasn't all that successful but Rossana nevertheless had a long and successful career in Italy, where she appeared in memorable films such as the adventure flick The Golden Arrow (1962) where she starred alongside Tab Hunter, the spectacle Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), the gothic horror film The Virgin of Nuremberg (1963), the caper classic Seven Golden Men (1965) and its sequel Seven Golden Men Strike Again (1966). Her popularity and good looks made her a natural choice to be featured in this advertisement for Lux soap in 1967:

Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of the legendary comedian Charlie Chaplin, should need no introduction. She has enjoyed a long and succesful career in Hollywood but has also done occasional work in Europe. Geraldine had just starred in the obscure Italian film Andremo in città (1966) and in Robert Hossein's French/Italian production I Killed Rasputin (1967) when she did this ad for Lux soap in 1967:

Finally, we have yet another ad for Lux soap, featuring the sexy German Elke Sommer - famous for her roles in such films as A Shot in the Dark (1964), Deadlier Than the Male (1967), Baron Blood (1972), Lisa and the Devil (1973) and numerous others. I have previously posted a Lux ad that Elke did in 1965 here, but below is a later one that she did in 1967:

That's all for now but I promise that some more goodies will follow later on.

Ligeia forever

2011-03-05T18:07:00.000-08:00

Italy, 1979

Directed by Daniele D’Anza

Cast:
Umberto Orsini, Silvia Dionisio, Dagmar Lassander, Philippe Leroy, Victoria Zinny, Giuseppe Pertile

While Italian cinema from the 1960s, 70s and 80s continues to grow in popularity among movie lovers, far fewer seem eager to rediscover Italian television productions from the same period. Which is probably because a lot of the stuff made for television is of a much lower standard but here and there you can find a couple of gems hidden. One such gem is the four-part mini series Racconti fantastici, which freely adapts a series of Edgar Allan Poe stories into a contemporary setting. Each of the four episodes is self-contained but they are linked together by the character of Roderick Usher, who is present in all four episodes. While the series as a whole is highly interesting, the best of episode is arguably the second one, Ligeia forever, an intriguing amalgamation of the Poe stories "Ligeia" and "Morella".

The story begins in the house of Usher in the present time of 1979, where a dusty old photo and a gramophone record causes the ageing Roderick Usher (Philippe Leroy) to recount the story of one of his ancestors – thereby allowing the narrative to flash back to the late 1920s. Here we meet the handsome Robert Usher (Umberto Orsini), who is married to the stunning Ligeia (Dagmar Lassander), a renowned silent movie actress who has just starred in her first talkie.

Robert and Ligeia

While they await word from Hollywood about the audience response to the talkie, Robert and Ligeia throw a party to celebrate what will no doubt be another huge success for Ligeia. Unfortunately, their celebration turns out to be more than a bit premature. Once the phone call from Hollywood arrives it is actually bad news: the audience has reacted with laughter and derision to hearing Ligeia speak. Utterly humiliated and fraught with despair, Ligeia is unable to deal with this crushing defeat, and the disastrous party ends with her committing suicide in front of the shocked guests.

Cut to five years later. Robert has not set foot in the house of Usher since the devastating death of his beloved wife. In an attempt to forget and move on he has taken a new wife, the sweet and loving Morella (Silvia Dionisio), and decides that the time has come to return to the family estate. Together with his young bride, Robert moves back into the house he had shared with Ligeia but the section of the house where Ligeia’s rooms are located is kept securely locked and off limits.

The newlyweds arrive at the house of Usher

Morella has a hard time getting adjusted to her new home as Ligeia’s personal maid, Miss Crown (Victoria Zinny), is hostile towards her, and Robert starts being haunted by memories of the past. He finds himself compelled to enter the section of the house where all of Ligeia’s rooms are located. All the rooms are completely untouched since Ligeia’s death and the walls adorned with pictures and movie posters of her.

The forbidden house...

...and the memories it holds

Robert starts to get overcome by memories of Ligeia and he senses her presence as if she was still alive. Poor Morella knows nothing about Robert’s first marriage but she feels him gradually slipping away from her and starts snooping around. Upon entering the forbidden parts of the house, Morella uncovers the truth about her husband’s past but soon afterwards she falls victim to a strange accident. Robert is convinced that Ligeia’s ghost is trying to kill his new wife...

Morella angers her husband by desecrating his shrine for Ligeia

Morella in fear of her life

Writers Daniele D’Anza and Biagio Proietti have done a good job of piecing together story elements from the two thematically similar Poe stories "Ligeia" and "Morella" while adding new touches and retaining an appropriate bit of ambiguity. The late 1920s/early 1930s setting and the prominent use of brightness and sunshine is highly atypical of a Poe adaptation but it gives a fresh and inspired spin on the material. Furthermore, the period setting imbues the piece with an atmosphere of nostalgia that poignantly mirrors the emotions experienced by Robert upon his return to the home he had shared with his dead wife. D’Anza and Proietti (who penned numerous television scripts together) are both good writers but Proietti, in particular, has a real talent for coming up with interesting ideas. He had previously written the underrated giallo The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (1974), and would later go on to explore Poe material again when he wrote Lucio Fulci’s The Black Cat (1981).

In spite of the subject matter, Ligeia forever is not really a horror story. If anything, it is a melancholy tale – one in which love, death and being haunted by the past just happen to be the main ingredients. Instead of striving for suspense or chills, Proietti and D’Anza favor mood and atmosphere, and they are aided in their quest by an eerie and dreamily evocative musical score by the popular pop/rock band Pooh. The atmosphere is further enriched by Blasco Giurato’s beautiful cinematography, which together with high production values, lush period costumes and effective locations, gives Ligeia forever a polished and classy look that greatly surpasses other Italian television products from this era.

Bright and sunny...

...but also dark and gloomy where appropriate

The small but well-chosen cast is uniformly good. The renowned Umberto Orsini delivers a strong and dedicated portrayal of the tormented protagonist, but the best performance comes from the beautiful Silvia Dionisio, who is extremely sweet and sympathetic as the tragic Morella. It is hard not to feel sad for the character when witnessing Dionisio skillfully portray her gradual transformation from happy and carefree to despaired and tormented. Also of note is the part of Ligeia’s maid Miss Crown, a sinister figure that seems to be modelled after the Mrs. Danvers character from Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), and played with an appropriate sense of mystique by the gifted Argentinean actress Victoria Zinny. Finally, there is of course Dagmar Lassander, who looks absolutely gorgeous as Ligeia but she is not really given much to do here. She appears relatively briefly but Ligeia’s presence is still felt throughout the entire running time – making a strong impression on the viewer. Not so much because of Lassander’s acting but actually more because of her deep blue eyes and enchanting beauty, which makes her ideal to embody the part of a haunting figure whose presence never fades. Lassander’s photogenic looks are also put to excellent use in the numerous photographs that adorn the walls of Ligeia’s old rooms - lovingly capturing her intense beauty as well as strengthening the character’s presence in the house.

Clever and effective use of Dagmar Lassander’s beauty

Elegant and atmospheric, moody and compelling – Ligeia forever is an inspired Poe adaptation that is worthy of a larger audience. Highly recommended!

© 2011 Johan Melle

The cast:

Umberto Orsini as Robert Usher

Silvia Dionisio as Morella

Dagmar Lassander as Ligeia

Philippe Leroy as Roderick Usher

Victoria Zinny as Miss Crown

Giuseppe Pertile as Dr. Brooks

Play Motel

2011-02-28T12:31:00.000-08:00

Italy, 1979

Directed by Mario Gariazzo

Cast:
Anna Maria Rizzoli, Ray Lovelock, Enzo Fisichella, Marino Masé, Mario Cutini, Antonella Antinori, Anthony Steffen, Patrizia Webley, Patrizia Behn, Marina Frajese, Mario Novelli, Bob Balisteri, Vittorio Ripamonti

Welcome to Play Motel, a nice little motel just outside of town, where rich and respectable men come to secretly live out their perverted sexual fantasies with busty call-girls. In the film’s opening sequence we are introduced to Rinaldo Cortesi (Enzo Fisichella), a respectable upper-class citizen who discreetly picks up a sexy blonde woman named Loredana (played by the notorious Swedish porno diva Marina Frajese) in the lobby of Play Motel, and brings her to a room upstairs. Here, Mr. Cortesi reveals his depraved nature as he dresses up in a devil’s costume while Loredana dons a nun’s habit. Her half-naked body is soon caressed with a pitchfork before they get down to the nitty gritty.

The nun and the devil

But unbeknownst to Mr. Cortesi, his raunchy bed-hopping is secretly photographed from the room next-door through a two-way mirror, and it doesn’t take long before he receives an envelope with compromising photos and a letter with instructions to pay up unless he wants the pictures handed over to the media. And Cortesi is far from the only one to suffer this fate. It turns out that an organized blackmailing ring is operating from Play Motel, and there is no shortage of rich and kinky clients for them to prey on.

Forbidden photos

When Cortesi’s estranged young wife, Luisa (Patrizia Behn), who is having an affair with her husband’s lawyer, finds out about the blackmail plot, she immediately delivers the photos to police inspector De Sanctis (Anthony Steffen). Thanks to the police’s “archive of pornographic publications” (!!), De Sanctis is able to determine that the girl with Cortesi in the blackmail photos is pornographic photo model Loredana Salvi. Wow! Who knew the Italian police kept an archive of porn magazines!? It sure came in handy, though!

Anyway, inspector De Sanctis is quick to seek out Loredana but this is observed by the other employees at the porn publisher she works for. One of Loredana’s co-workers is clearly afraid that she will expose the profitable blackmail operation because later that day she is strangled by a mysterious black-gloved killer hiding in the backseat of her car.

After hearing of the murder, Luisa Cortesi decides to play amateur detective and rents a room at Play Motel. While snooping around, she enters the linen room and discovers the two-way mirror used to get the blackmail photos but before Luisa can do anything more, the black-gloved killer sneaks up behind her and strangles her.

The killer claims another victim

At this point we are finally introduced to the film’s main characters: handsome theater actor Roberto Vinci (Ray Lovelock) and his hot, blonde girlfriend Patrizia (Anna Maria Rizzoli), who have just rented a room at Play Motel so they can enjoy a little quickie. After checking out, they start driving home but get a flat tire. Upon opening the trunk of the car they are shocked to discover that Luisa’s corpse has been dumped there. They immediately call the police, and inspector De Sanctis figures that Roberto and his acting skills might be an asset to the investigation. He asks the couple to do some amateur sleuthing at Play Motel and they agree – thereby putting themselves in inevitable danger...

"Honey, there's a corpse in the trunk!"

Wow! A giallo taking place in the world of porn and prostitution! Play Motel must surely be a real giallo classic, right? Well, no, not really. It is actually a rather poor giallo in the sense that it is unable to mount any discernible suspense or tension. This is no doubt because writer-director Mario Gariazzo is far more interested in bombarding the audience with one sleazy, explicit sex scene after the other. However, I must hasten to add that this isn’t really a bad thing because it makes the whole film amazingly fun to watch. I mean, how can you not get a kick out of watching a guy in a devil costume doing a hooker dressed as a nun, or a nutty old guy who likes to put champagne bottles where his dick ought to go? It’s not classy, no, but one has to admire the incredible level of sordidness on display here.

Kinks aplenty!

While the numerous kinky softcore scenes really push the envelope in terms of sexual explicitness, that is clearly not enough for Gariazzo, who seems hell-bent on pushing the sleaze factor to its absolute maximum – a goal he achieves by throwing in a couple of scenes featuring full-on hardcore pornography.

Porn!

It must be said that the amount of hardcore footage is pretty sparse (it is mostly relegated to the opening sequence with Marina Frajese, as well as some brief bits here and there) but it nevertheless adds that extra layer of sleaziness that you only find in the seediest of Italian thrillers from this period, such as Mario Landi’s infamous Giallo a Venezia (1979). It is quite interesting to compare Play Motel to Giallo a Venezia because they are obviously similar in that they are both ultra-trashy gialli with a strong emphasis on the sexual content. But at the same time they are very different – the main difference being that Giallo a Venezia has an extremely grim, joyless and nihilistic tone that enhances its sordidness even further, whereas Play Motel has more the kind of jolly tone that you’d expect to find in a sex comedy. This prevents it from having any serious impact as a thriller but as a trash film it’s all great fun.

Obviously, one of the main appeals of a film of this type is the attractive female cast. Taking center stage is the blonde and shapely leading lady Anna Maria Rizzoli, who looks absolutely stunning and whom the camera appears to be in love with. She is ably supported by an impressive assembly of voluptuous trash movie regulars who have no qualms of any kind about shedding their clothes at regular intervals. Busty blonde starlet Patrizia Webley, who appeared exclusively in grade Z trash such as The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance (1975) and Malabimba (1979), is delightfully uninhibited as a kinky blackmail victim; raven-haired Antonella Antinori from the endearingly silly zombie flick The Nights of Terror (1980) gets the dubious pleasure of being fucked by a champagne bottle; while porno queen Marina Frajese (not yet a star at this point) ups the sleaze value by dressing up as a nun for the film’s most prominent porn sequence.

There's certainly no shortage of sexy ladies on display

In addition to doing numerous sex scenes, the film’s sexy actresses also get plenty of opportunities to strut their stuff in several nude photo-shoots accompanied by a soundtrack of very cheesy but deliriously catchy disco songs. These trashy songs fit the film’s atmosphere perfectly and are a lot of fun. The title song ("Stop on by at Play Motel and have a lot of fun" etc) is a particular hoot and it’s very catchy so don’t be surprised if it gets stuck on your brain for days and weeks after watching the film. The musical score is good too – with top honor going to its addictive and oft-repeated bass-driven suspense track.

Naturally, this isn’t the sort of film you look to for great acting but Ray Lovelock and Anna Maria Rizzoli – who also starred together in Umberto Lenzi’s enjoyable comedy Excuse Me, Are You Normal? (1979) around the same time – are quite nice together as the attractive leading couple. The most fun is provided by the male supporting cast, though, with Marino Masé, Enzo Fisichella and Vittorio Ripamonti pulling out all the stops and no doubt having a ball playing the various perverts that go about conducting their "business" at Play Motel.

As you can probably tell, I quite enjoyed Play Motel but I’m not really sure if it is something I’d recommend to serious giallo fans, who might be disappointed by the lack of genuine thrills and gory set pieces. Furthermore, the film never really pays proper attention to its mystery plot, which is little more than a hook to draw us in, while the real raison d’être are the non-stop scenes of kinky and graphic sex scenes. So, yes, Play Motel is no great shakes as a thriller but it is, however, an absolute must-see for anyone who prides themselves on being trash movie lovers.

© 2011 Johan Melle

The cast:

Anna Maria Rizzoli as Patrizia

Ray Lovelock as Roberto Vinci

Enzo Fisichella as Rinaldo Cortesi

Marino Masé as Max Liguori

Mario Cutini as Willy

Antonella Antinori as Anna De Marchis

Anthony Steffen as Inspector De Sanctis

Patrizia Webley as Valeria Marzotti

Patrizia Behn as Luisa Cortesi

Marina Frajese as Loredana Salvi

Mario Novelli as Play Motel receptionist

Bob Balister (???) as Attorney Alfieri

Vittorio Ripamonti as Guido Toselli

Grand Hotel gallery #5: Susy Andersen

2011-02-28T10:13:00.001-08:00

This autographed photo of 1960s starlet Susy Andersen was originally printed in Grand Hotel issue No. 921 from February 15, 1964. Honestly, this photo does her no justice at all as Susy was far more attractive than this picture would have you thinking.

In spite of her blonde hair and Nordic-sounding name, Susy Andersen is actually an Italian actress, and she was born on April 20, 1940 in the Italian town Pola (which is now a part of Croatia) as Maria Antonietta Golgic. She started her career as a fashion model, and under the name Susy Valgoi she made her film debut with a supporting role in Pietro Francisci's peplum adventure The Warrior Empress (1960), which starred American actress Tina Louise. When interviewed by Grand Hotel, Susy revealed that she and Tina Louise didn't get along at all during shooting. Apparantly, Tina felt intimidated by Susy and was particularly bothered by the fact that Susy had better-looking legs, so she ran to director Pietro Francisci and demanded him to not film them below the knees. Francisci, however, doesn't seem to have paid much attention to Tina as both her and Susy's legs are prominently displayed throughout the film. Of course, it's hard to say whether or not this story is actually true - especially since just about every European actress I've read interviews with have made similar claims about driving famous Hollywood divas mad with jealousy - but it's a fun little story nonetheless.

Susy in her first film, The Warrior Empress

Anyway, Susy soon changed her her last name from Valgoi to the more internationally sellable Andersen and quickly started to get leading roles. She appeared in two more peplum adventures: Antonio Leonviola's silly but enjoyable Thor and the Amazon Women (1963) and Giuseppe Vari's interesting War of the Zombies (1964). However, most people remember Susy best for her performance as the beautiful Sdenka in the famous "The Wurdalak" segment from Mario Bava's anthology horror film Black Sabbath (1963). And it's no wonder people tend to remember this role with such affection, as Susy really looks enchantingly beautiful here.

Susy as the gorgeous Sdenka

Susy spent the rest of the 1960s appearing in a wide variety of different films, such as Antonio Pietrangeli's comedy The Magnificent Cuckold (1964), Antonio Margheriti's Eurospy adventure The Killers Are Challenged (1966), Nunzio Malasomma's spaghetti western Fifteen Scaffolds for the Killer (1968), Alfonso Brescia's exploitative mondo-style sex flick The Labyrinth of Sex (1969) and Siro Marcellini's crime movie Gangster's Law (1969).

Unfortunately, Susy seems to have vanished off the face of the earth after 1969 and I have no idea what became of her. She is fondly remembered by a lot of movie fans, though, which is impressive for someone who only appeared in 13 movies - most of which were done over a 7-year period.

Black and white photo of Susy from 1964

Susy in Thor and the Amazon Women

One of Susy's final roles was as a nymphomaniac in the trashy The Labyrinth of Sex

Grand Hotel gallery #4: Ingrid Schoeller

2010-11-14T15:18:00.001-08:00

Finally! The Grand Hotel gallery returns - this time with an autographed photo of sexy German starlet Ingrid Schoeller. It was originally printed in Grand Hotel issue No. 1046 (published July 9, 1966).

A considerable star in her time, Ingrid Schoeller is one of all too many 1960s starlets who have since faded into obscurity. I haven't been able to find out too much about Ingrid's background, other than the fact that she was born in Munich in 1942. At some point she went to Italy to persue a career in acting, and she started appearing in films in the early 1960s. She made her debut with a supporting role in Duccio Tessari's adventure film The Titans (1962), and went on to appear in several comedies, including Lucio Fulci's spy spoof 002 - Those Most Secret Agents (1964), in which she appears alongside the legendary Italian comedic duo of Franco and Ciccio.

Ingrid's big breakthrough came in late 1964 - thanks to a stint on the TV show Napoli contro tutti (translation: Naples Against Everybody), a hugely successful music show in which a group of Neapolitan singers challenge famous singers from various world capitals. Originally, Elke Sommer was set to appear in an episode as both emcee and musical competitor but she fell ill at the last minute and had to be replaced. Her replacement was none other than Ingrid Schoeller, who stepped in on very short notice and really won over Italian television audiences with her charming personality and impressive singing. After this performance, everybody wanted a piece of Ingrid. She was quickly signed with Italian record company Durium and would go on to release several singles, such as "Ieri, domani", "Se passerai di qui" and "Se cerchi amore". Ingrid was also photographed for the "Girls of Germany" spread in the November 1964 issue of Playboy, and the following month she was chosen to guest star in an episode of the highly popular British spy series The Saint, starring Roger Moore.

With this newfound stardom, Ingrid's cinematic career blossomed and she was given the starring role in Umberto Lenzi's excellent Euro Spy adventure 008: Operation Exterminate (1965), in which Ingrid plays Agent 008, a sort of female James Bond. The film is notable for being the first to portray a female variant of James Bond and is a real starring vehicle for Ingrid, who not only plays the lead but also gets to perform the song "Good Bye to Cairo", which she co-wrote with the film's composer, Angelo Francesco Lavagnino.

Ingrid's popularity continued throughout the rest of the 1960s and her face graced the covers of countless magazines as she kept herself busy with singing, appearing in films and on television. She proved herself a versatile actress and managed to avoided being typecast as she swithced between playing sympathetic and unsympathetic characters - in both leading and supporting capacity. It's also impressive that she nearly always appeared in different kinds of genres: the comedy Ischia Love Operation (1966), the spaghetti western Son of Django (1967), the caper movie Mission Phantom (1967), the costume adventure The Son of the Black Eagle (1968), the gangster movie They Paid with Bullets (1969) etc.

Unfortunately, Ingrid's film career came to a very sudden end in 1969, and I have not been able to come up with any information about what became of her. According to reports in Variety magazine, she was supposed to appear in Demofilo Fidani's crime flick The Electric Chair (1969) but she dropped out of the project for reasons unknown. While Ingrid's cinematic career ended in 1969, it is very possible that her singing career continued into the 1970s. If anyone has any more concrete information about what happened to Ingrid, I'd love to hear it.

And, finally, here are some pictures to remember the beautiful and talented Ingrid by:

A funny picture of Ingrid and legendary comedian Franco Franchi

Ingrid as a female James Bond in 008: Operation Exterminate

Another gorgeous shot from 008: Operation Exterminate

Ingrid together with a very young Edwige Fenech in the enjoyable adventure movie The Son of the Black Eagle

School of Fear/Il gioko

2010-10-24T16:01:00.001-07:00

Italy, 1989

Directed by Lamberto Bava

Cast:
Alessandra Acciai, Jean Hebert, Daria Nicolodi, Viola Simoncioni, Stefano De Sando, Fabio Iellini, Morena Turchi, Giuseppe Pianviti

In 1987, when the Italian horror movie industry was dying a slow death, director Lamberto Bava struck a deal with production company Reteitalia to produce a quartet of horror movies for Italian television. The four movies were: Graveyard Disturbance (1987), Until Death (1987), Dinner With a Vampire (1988) and The Ogre (1988), and the package went under the series title Brivido Giallo. Although most of these films are fairly toothless "kiddie horror" efforts aimed at younger audiences, they nevertheless did very well in Italy and were also successfully distributed in English-speaking territories. In fact, the whole project was so successful for Reteitalia that in 1989, Bava was assigned the task of directing another quartet of TV horror movies – this time under the series title Alta Tensione (or High Tension in English). The four movies in this package are: The Prince of Terror, The Man Who Didn’t Want to Die, Eyewitness and School of Fear. Interestingly, this second quartet of tele-thrillers is quite different from the first. One of the more noticeable characteristics of the High Tension films is that unlike their predecessors they seem to have been aimed at a more mature audience – and this is particularly true of School of Fear.

The plot takes place at the renowned Giacomo Stuz private school, and begins with a creepy scene set during a stormy night with heavy rain and lightning. A terrified young girl is lurking through the dark basement areas of the school – looking for a way out. She tries climbing her way out through a shaft but her escape is blocked by a solid iron grid and her desperate cries for help are drowned by the pouring rain and crashing lightning.

Effective opening sequence

Cut to sometime later when the beautiful, young schoolteacher Diana Berti (Alessandra Acciai) arrives at the Giacomo Stuz school for her first day of teaching. Unfortunately, Diana gets a rougher time than expected at the school, with the headmistress (Daria Nicolodi) disapproving of her mini-skirt and advising her to dress more conservatively, and the hostile caretaker’s deformed son is lurking around and spying from shadowy corners.

Diana arrives at the school of fear...

...and meets the schoolchildren

It also turns out that the schoolchildren are playing a mysterious “game” that they keep hidden from the adults. Diana soon starts to get concerned about this secretive game – especially when she reads an essay in which one of the schoolgirls, Roberta (Viola Simoncioni), writes about being afraid of the game. The essay was written to the children’s previous teacher, a certain Mrs. Curiel, and Diana decides to have a little chat with her. But when she asks about how to reach her predecessor, the headmistress reluctantly tells Diana that Mrs. Curiel is dead. In fact, she died rather mysteriously one night at the school when she apparently fell out the classroom window and was impaled on the spiked iron gate below. What she was doing at the school in the middle of the night and how she managed to fall remains a mystery. And this isn’t the only dark cloud from the school’s past – there’s also the matter of one of the schoolgirls who was kidnapped and never recovered. “Naturally, it had nothing to do with our school”, the headmistress is awfully quick to point out.

A strange essay upsets Diana

The headmistress tries to put Diana's worries to rest

Things become even more sinister when Diana turns on the TV and sees herself on the screen getting killed – impaled on the school’s iron gate just like poor Mrs. Curiel! The next day at school, a student named Anna (Morena Turchi) is inexplicably missing. Everyone seems to assume she gone on holiday with her parents, and no one except Diana finds it strange that the school hasn’t been notified about this. Diana is convinced that the children and their mysterious “game” are responsible for the death of Mrs. Curiel and the disappearance of Anna, and she fears that she might be next on their list. But neither the headmistress nor Diana’s new love interest, Mark Anselmi (Jean Hebert) – who is conveniently a police inspector – seem to believe in her suspicions...

Diana starts to get paranoid

With School of Fear, Lamberto Bava has come up with an odd little chiller that goes for a different approach than expected. The opening sequence with the frightened young girl who tries to escape from the school effectively establishes a chilling horror movie atmosphere, and the subsequent introduction of Daria Nicolodi as the headmistress who vehemently denies that the mysterious deaths and kidnappings have anything to do with the school immediately alerts the viewer’s attention and raises expectations of a Suspiria-style plot with villainous teachers bumping off unfortunate students. But in a very welcome twist, famed horror movie screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti and co-writers Roberto Gandus and Giorgio Stegani skew our expectations and head in a completely different direction – making the young schoolchildren the villains of the piece. Fortunately, the writers avoid drawing upon the bland Children of the Corn (1984) for inspiration, and instead approach the subject matter as a psychological thriller in the spirit of Polanski’s excellent The Tenant (1976). The viewers are never completely sure about whether or not Diana’s suspicions towards the children are actually justified, and this is one of the film’s greatest strengths.

Luckily, Lamberto Bava compliments the script’s maturity and directs with surprising restraint – dropping the expected bloodshed and instead focusing his efforts on the psychological thrills and chills. That’s not to say that School of Fear doesn’t have its share of more classic horror moments, though, because it certainly does. The opening sequence with the young girl who tries to climb to safety during a stormy night is particularly creepy and very atmospherically shot, and various scenes of Diana exploring the large and seemingly empty school building are quite well-handled too. Not to mention the freaky flashbacks to Diana’s childhood trauma, which are definitely memorable. Gianfranco Transunto (who shot most of Bava’s TV movies) delivers some very stylish cinematography and he photographs the large, old and sinister-looking school to eerie effect. Aiding the visuals is a solid musical score by Simon Boswell, which is quite chilling and very fitting for the atmosphere of the film.

The sinister school building

Gianfranco Trasunto's stylish cinematography is a great asset to the film

The only really familiar face in the cast is horror legend Daria Nicolodi in the role of the conservative headmistress whose only concern is to maintain the good name and reputation of the school. While I wish that her role had been a tad more substantial, Nicolodi is an accomplished actress who is capable of delivering the goods in both big and small roles and she does not disappoint this time either. She’s very believable in the part and brings a touch of class and elegance to the proceedings. Leading lady Alessandra Acciai (who played a supporting role in Luigi Cozzi’s god-awful The Black Cat the same year) may not be the world’s most brilliant actress but she acquits herself well and is both sweet and likable. None of the other actors are given too much to do but they all deliver adequate work – including the child actors.

School of Fear is not without its flaws, however, as there are a couple of disruptive elements that don’t serve much purpose in the film, such as the deformed child of the school’s caretaker. The film is also quite generously paced – perhaps a tad too much at times. Normally I don’t have any problems with films that are deliberately slow-paced as long as the denouement it carefully builds up to pays off. Unfortunately, School of Fear fails to deliver a fully satisfactory pay-off, and this is without doubt its most serious flaw. It’s not that the ending is downright terrible, mind you; but it does fall somewhat short of delivering the necessary punch that the film has slowly been building towards for 90 minutes – especially on the first viewing.

The deformed child

In short, School of Fear isn’t entirely successful but it’s an interesting little psychological thriller with some inspired ideas. It’s not a film for everyone’s taste and if you’re looking for another A Blade in the Dark (1983) or Demons (1985), you might be disappointed. But if, on the other hand, you are among those who consider Macabre (1980) to be one of Bava’s better films, you might want to give this one a chance as you may very well come to like it.

A note about the availability of the High Tension films

Unfortunately, School of Fear (as well as the other three films in the High Tension series) is fairly tricky to get hold of. Whereas Bava’s first quartet of TV horror movies were very successful and sold well abroad, the High Tension movies did not fare as well. None of them were given TV screenings in Italy until in 1999 – ten years after they were first made. All four of them were dubbed into English but failed to attract buyers and have not received any sort of English-friendly release on either VHS or DVD. English-dubbed screener tapes with a non-removable ‘Not for commercial use’ text at the bottom of the screen were sent to potential buyers, though, and poor-quality bootlegs of these tapes are doing the rounds among collectors. This is not a very ideal way to watch the films, though.

As you can see from this random screenshot, the screener version ain't too hot-looking

Recordings from Italian television broadcasts are also out there and they look a lot nicer but, alas, they’re in Italian only. Let’s hope someone decides to put out an English-friendly High Tension box-set someday. In the meantime, I have made due with watching a rip of an Italian TV broadcast with the soundtrack from the English screener tape. It worked well enough for my needs.

© 2010 Johan Melle

The cast:

Alessandra Acciai as Diana Berti

Jean Hebert as Inspector Mark Anselmi

Daria Nicolodi as The Headmistress

Viola Simoncioni as Roberta Sassi

Stefano De Sando as Mauro Lamberti, the Headmistress's assistant

??? as Giorgio Musy

Morena Turchi as Anna Giusti

??? as Claudia Testi

??? as Alberto, the caretaker

Thans to my friend Emiliano for helping to identify Viola Simoncioni and Morena Turchi.

Grand Hotel gallery #3: Leonora Ruffo

2010-09-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

The above autographed photo of actress Leonora Ruffo was originally printed in Grand Hotel issue No. 1101 (published July 29, 1967).

The strikingly beautiful Leonora Ruffo was born in Rome on January 13, 1935 as Bruna Bovi, and would go on to enjoy a very successful film career in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Leonora was only 16 years old when she began her acting career in 1951. She first started out appearing in fotoromanzi (photo-novels) under the Swedish-sounding pseudonym Ingrid Swenson, and experienced notable success with her leading role in the photo-novel Il giardino di Allah (published in the magazine Cine Illustrato), which was a photo-novel-remake of the Hollywood film The Garden of Allah (1936) with Marlene Dietrich. Soon afterwards, Leonora was discovered by peplum and adventure movie specialist Pietro Francisci (best known as the director of the original Hercules), who cast her in the female lead in his adventure film Wonderful Adventures of Guerrin Mescino (1951). Impressed by her performance, Francisci awarded Leonora the title role his the next film, the Biblical costume spectacle The Queen of Sheba (1952).

Throughout the rest of the 1950s, Leonora Ruffo's career blossomed and she worked with some of Italy's most important directors - appearing for Federico Fellini in I vitelloni (1953), and for Dino Risi in The Widower (1959). But she also appeared in genre cinema, and during the early 1960s, Leonora was the leading lady in three excellent sword and sandal adventures: Vittorio Cottafavi's Goliath and the Dragon (1960), Sergio Corbucci's Goliath and the Vampires (1961) and Mario Bava's Hercules at the Center of the Earth (1961).

But after 1961, Leonora Ruffo abruptly stopped making movies. She did not retire completely, however, as she continued to play occasional leading roles in photo-novels published in Grand Hotel. This part of her career appears to be completely forgotten today, even though several of the photo-novels she starred in are quite interesting. Most notably, she played historical figures such as Catherine the Great in La grande Caterina (published in Grand Hotel during 1964) and Queen Christina of Sweden in La regina Cristina (published from 1965 to 1966 in Grand Hotel).

After a five year break from cinema, Leonora's old friend Pietro Francisci helped her make a comeback by casting her in his cheesy science fiction film Star Pilot (1966). Leonora plays the starring role of a wicked alien woman and she does a superb job - managing to really make this weird space opera enjoyable to watch. But, sadly, her comeback was to be short-lived. Her next film, the spaghetti western Tequila Joe (1968), would offer Leonora the last substantial role of her career. After that she made one final film appearance - an uncredited cameo in Fernando Di Leo's erotic drama Burn, Boy, Burn! (1969). Leonora then abandoned the limelight for good, and was not written about in media again until her death on May 28, 2007 - at the age of 72.

I've always thought it was a great shame that Leonora chose to retire so prematurely, because she was a very good actress and a radiant beauty whose eyes were absolutely mesmerizing. One wonders what direction her career had taken had she stuck around during the 1970s...

Anyway, here are a few pictures to remember the lovely Leonora Ruffo by:

Leonora together with Broderick Crawford in the highly enjoyable Goliath and the Dragon

Leonora in the role of Catherine the Great in the photo-novel La grande Caterina

Leonora in top form as an alien villainess in Star Pilot

Leonora - still at the hight of her beauty - in Tequila Joe

Grand Hotel gallery #2: Robert Hundar

2010-09-19T16:14:00.000-07:00

The above autographed photo of actor Robert Hundar was originally printed in Grand Hotel issue No. 1030 (published March 19, 1966).

Italian actor Robert Hundar was born in Sicily on January 12, 1935 as Claudio Undari, and is fondly remembered as one of Italian cinema's most memorable bad guy actors of the 1960s and 70s.

Claudio Undari made his film debut with a supporting role as an evil centaur in the peplum adventure Goliath and the Dragon (1960) starring American muscleman Mark Forest as Goliath. Soon afterwards, Undari changed his name to the more American-sounding Robert Hundar, and stuck to this pseudonym for most of his long-running career.

The genre with which Hundar is most closely identified is no doubt the western. He got his first leading role in Antonio Del Amo's fairly obscure western Son of Jesse James (1965), and would go on to star in three further westerns: Maurizio Pradeaux's Ramon the Mexican (1966), Joaquin Romero Marchent's 100.000 Dollars for Lassiter (1966) and Tulio Demicheli's Dakota Joe (1967) - playing the title characters in each of them.

But it was first and foremost as a villain that the tall and menacing-looking Hundar would make lasting impact in the spaghetti western genre - appearing in such memorable efforts as Gianfranco Parolini's Sabata (1969), Mario Caiano's The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe (1972), Joaquin Romero Marchent's Cut Throats Nine (1972), Joe D'Amato's Cormack of the Mounties (1975) and Michele Lupo's California (1977). As the western fad gradually died out, Hundar switched to playing bad guys in other genres - popping up in crime/police thrillers such as Free Hand for a Tough Cop (1976) and The Cynic, the Rat & and the Fist (1977), both directed by Umberto Lenzi, and in two of Alfonso Brescia's wacky but enjoyable space operas: Star Odyssey and The Beast in Space (both 1978).

After 1980, Robert Hundar's career slowed down and he only made sporadic film appearances - his final role being a supporting part in the drama Ponte Milvio (2000). He died in Rome on May 12th, 2008, at age 73.

To round off, here are a few screenshots to demonstrate the many different roles played by this excellent actor:

Hundar in the ultra-violent western Cut Throats Nine

Another bad guy role in Umberto Lenzi's awesome The Cynic, the Rat & the Fist

Hundar in alien make-up in the hilarious low-budget space opera Star Odyssey

Naturally, a new installment in the Grand Hotel gallery will follow next week!

Evil Eye/Malocchio

2010-09-19T13:29:00.000-07:00

Italy/Spain/Mexico, 1974

Directed by Mario Siciliano

Cast:
Jorge Rivero, Pilar Velazquez, Anthony Steffen, Richard Conte, Maria Pia Giancaro, Eduardo Fajardo, Luis La Torre, Lone Fleming, Daniela Giordano, Luciano Pigozzi, Terele Pavez, Eva Vanicek, Flora Marrone

I’ve previously covered the fluffy porno comedy My Swedish Aunt (1980), directed by former western and war movie specialist Mario Siciliano (1925-1987). Siciliano is not typically associated with horror movies but he did take two stabs at the genre. One was the genuinely bizarre porno-horror flick Orgasmo esotico (1982) but his first attempt was the stylish and supernaturally themed Evil Eye.

Evil Eye is about Peter Crane (Jorge Rivero), a hunky American millionaire playboy living in Rome. Peter is suffering from bizarre and unsettling nightmares, in which creepy, naked Satanists are compelling him to do bad things. Thing take a stranger turn when Peter’s girlfriend Tanya (Maria Pia Giancaro) drags him along to a fashion show, where he meets an attractive French widow named Yvonne (Lone Fleming). On hearing the name Peter Crane, Yvonne is visibly startled, and she reveals to Peter that she has had a strange dream in which her late husband appeared before her and told her she would be murdered by a man named – you guessed it – Peter Crane. At first, Peter suspects the whole thing of being a practical joke orchestrated by his party-loving pal Robert (Luis La Torre) but it quickly transpires that Yvonne is being completely serious. Fascinated and attracted, Peter eventually ends up bringing Yvonne back to his big villa for some hanky panky.

Peter encounters the mysterious Yvonne

However, they don’t get very far before Peter is suddenly struck with an intense headache. A powerful storm sets in and blows the windows open, a sculpture starts to inexplicably move, a painting falls down and shatters a floral vase, and Peter’s eyes turn dark and sinister as he appears to go into some kind of trance. He menacingly approaches Yvonne and starts to strangle her...
Cut to a confused Peter waking up the next morning. Yvonne is gone and everything is back in order. The painting that fell down is back up on the wall, and the no-longer-shattered flower vase is back in its place. It’s as if none of the events from last night ever took place. Was it all just a bad dream?

Peter murders Yvonne. Or does he...?

Unable to distinguish nightmares from reality, a concerned Peter contacts psychiatrist Dr. Stone (Richard Conte), an old friend of his father, and confides his concerns to Stone and his sexy colleague Dr. Sarah Turner (Pilar Velazquez). But while Peter is talking to the shrinks, Yvonne’s bloody corpse is fished out of the water. A seasoned police inspector (Anthony Steffen) is assigned the case and starts snooping around.

Peter's shrinks

Yvonne is discovered dead

In the meantime, Peter is being subjected to all kinds of strange tests at Dr. Stone’s clinic, and it doesn’t take long for the sexy Dr. Sarah to lose sight off all professionalism and jump into bed with Peter. Which might not be such a great idea, because Peter continues to have disturbing nightmares. He also continues to get headaches, attack people and then black out – with the people he attacked being discovered dead by the police shortly afterwards. Is Peter a deranged killer? Or is someone or something taking control over his mind and using him as a killing machine? Or is someone else doing all the killing?

This strange potpourri of giallo and supernatural horror is a real head-scratcher. It’s not the first giallo to employ supernatural elements, of course, as this had already been tried and tested by Emilio G. Miraglia in both The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972), as well as in Armando Crispino’s The Etruscan Kills Again (1972), but in all these examples a naturalistic force is revealed to be at work. As such, Evil Eye is – along with Giuseppe Bennato’s underrated The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (1974) – one of the very few gialli to uphold its supernatural angle throughout the entire running time. And that’s a fresh spin that actually works – at least for a while.

In one of the film’s most intriguing plot twists, it’s implied that all of the victims may at one time have gotten away with murder, and that the people they murdered are now channeling Peter from beyond the grave – taking control of his mind and using him as a vessel to exact vengeance on their murderers. Unfortunately, this plot point is rather clumsily handled and is never fully elaborated on, which is a great shame.

The revenge of the dead?

Sadly, the squandering of the above plot point is just one out of many serious flaws the script is saddled with. Several plot elements are never explained and the narrative is often fairly confusing – resulting in a viewing experience that is at times incoherent and frustrating. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of ambiguity if that is the intention but I have a lingering suspicion that the indecipherable nature of the plot is a result of sloppy and careless screenwriting rather than artistic ambitions. To be fair, neither writer-director Mario Siciliano nor Spanish co-writers Julio Buchs and Federico De Urrutia had any prior experience working within the horror or thriller format, so one should perhaps not judge them too harshly. That’s easier said than done, however, since they foolishly chose to cap the whole thing off with a truly pathetic ending that completely undermines the rest of the film.

But in spite of these serious flaws, Evil Eye also offers a load of redeeming qualities. The film is very well-shot by Vicente Minaya, who in great 1970s tradition employs a lot of stylish shots and odd camera angles, as well as frequent use of Lucio Fulci-style close-ups of the actors’ eyes. Even better is the marvelous Stelvio Cipriani score, which is both catchy and eerie – channeling just the right mood for a supernatural chiller and lending a lot of atmosphere to the proceedings. And Mario Siciliano proves that he has a certain eye for memorable horror movie imagery, with some of the stand-out moments including an opening black mass with a sinister red monk, Peter’s creepy nightmares featuring pale, naked Satanists, and a freakish scene where Eduardo Fajardo vomits up a toad. Plus the kitschy décor, Peter’s funky disco-style wardrobe, the obligatory product placement of J&B bottles, and the impressive roundup of sultry Euro-beauties certainly don’t hurt the proceedings either.

The red monk

Peter's freaky nightmares

Toad-vomiting!!!

Being a co-production between Italy, Spain and Mexico, the film boasts a highly interesting assembly of actors. Mexican muscle hunk Jorge Rivero – whose interesting career includes everything from the Hollywood western Rio Lobo (1970) with John Wayne, to Lucio Fulci’s brainless sword and sorcery flick Conquest (1983) – is a slightly odd choice for the leading role of Peter but he makes a pretty convincing playboy and is quite quick to take his shirt off. Rivero looks really good here and he also does a good job of portraying the character’s bewildered confusion, although it’s hard to say whether or not this is due to great acting skills or because Rivero himself was downright confused by the screenplay.

Jorge Rivero freaking out - and looking like he's about to transform into the incredible Hulk

Richard Conte – best known from The Godfather (1972) – acts completely on autopilot as Peter’s psychiatrist. He no doubt signed on only to earn a quick paycheck but at least he doesn’t look as embarrassed here as he did in Cries and Shadows (1975). In the role of the police inspector, stone-faced Anthony Steffen is fairly dull and inexpressive – just like he was in most of the spaghetti westerns he starred in. The great Eduardo Fajardo, however, puts in some real effort and is quite fun as Peter’s polite majordomo.

But the real stars of the show are the delectable female cast members, of which there are many. Spanish spitfire Pilar Velazquez looks absolutely ravishing as Peter’s seductive psychiatrist (she is perhaps too hot be convicing as a shrink but never mind), Maria Pia Giancaro drops her clothes at frequent intervals, and the elegant Lone Fleming (best known as the heroine in the Spanish horror classic Tombs of the Blind Dead) really makes the most of her limited part as the mysterious Yvonne. Only Daniela Giordano (who is almost unrecognizable in an unflattering, short wig) seems wasted in a small role as a woman who insists she has met Peter before. Another interesting actress in the cast is Spanish actress Terele Pavez, who plays the wife of Eduardo Fajardo’s character. Two decades later, Pavez would became a favorite of Spanish cult director Alex de la Iglesia, who cast her in several of his films – including the much celebrated horror film The Day of the Beast (1995).

There's certainly no shortage of babes trying to use their charm on Mr. Rivero

Dubbing fans may want to take note of the fact that dubbing hero Ted Rusoff (whose voice will be familiar to most fans of Italian genre cinema) was in charge of translating and dubbing the film’s dialogue into English, and he also receives an onscreen credit for “additional dialogue”. Rusoff also performs the task of dubbing Jorge Rivero, and, as expected, his real-life wife Carolynn De Fonseca is also onboard – lending her breathy, feminine voice to the sexy Pilar Velazquez (a perfect match). You’ll probably also recognize most of the other dubbing voices (which include Edmund Purdom, Edward Mannix and Silvia Faver), and that may be a good or a bad thing – depending on your point of view. Personally, I've grown very fond of the familiar English dubbing voices that recurr in all these great films, and their amazing voice acting is an integral part of this whole 'Euro cult' experience.

Bottom line: There’s some really good stuff and great actors in Evil Eye but, unfortunately, the film isn’t as good as it could have been. Had the script been stronger and more emphasis been put on the plot point about Peter being used as a vessel for revenge by the dead, then it could have been a real winner. As it is, Evil Eye only gets a partial recommendation but it can still be a lot of fun if you're in the right frame of mind.

© 2010 Johan Melle

The cast:

Jorge Rivero as Peter Crane

Pilar Velazquez as Dr. Sarah Turner

Anthony Steffen as The Police Inspector

Richard Conte as Dr. Stone

Maria Pia Giancaro as Tanya

Eduardo Fajardo as Walter, the majordomo

Luis La Torre as Robert Gifford

Lone Fleming as Yvonne Chevrel

Daniela Giordano as Elizabeth Stevens

Luciano Pigozzi as Derek Stevens

Terele Pavez as Walter's wife

??? as Martha, the inspector's wife

Eva Vanicek as Robert's girlfriend

Grand Hotel gallery #1: Erika Blanc

2010-09-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

Famed Italian weekly magazine Grand Hotel (published since 1946 and still going strong) is most famous for containing photo-novels starring famous movie stars and articles on various celebrities, but back in the day, each issue also used to feature the so-called 'Grand Hotel gallery' - full-page, autographed color pictures of popular stars (both famous and not quite so famous ones). They're really cool, and I've decided they'd make a nice weekly feature on this blog.

So to kick it off, here's a lovely autographed photo of Erika Blanc - scanned from Grand Hotel issue No. 1123 (published December 30, 1967):

Erika Blanc doesn't really need much of an introduction. She was born on July 23, 1942 in Brescia, Lombardy. Since making her film debut in 1965 she's been a very important and prolific actress in Italian genre movies, and she's still a successfully working actress.

Erika is well-remembered for her many roles in Spaghetti westerns and Eurospy adventures, but she is probably even better known for her many memorable and sexy performances in a long line of gialli and horror films, including Massimo Pupillo's The Vengeance of Lady Morgan (1965), Mario Bava's Kill Baby, Kill! (1966), Mino Guerrini's The Third Eye (1966), Umberto Lenzi's So Sweet... So Pervese (1969), Jean Brimsée's The Devil's Nightmare (1971) and of course her small but unforgettable part as a stripper who performs a kinky coffin-striptease in Emilio G. Miraglia's The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971). Quite an impressive track record, and the versatile, talented and very beautiful Erika is always a great pleasure to see on the screen.

And finally a little look at some of the many different faces of Erika Blanc:

A blonde and innocent-looking Erika in the remarkable The Third Eye

A creepily made-up Erika as a succubus in The Devil's Nightmare

A seductive Erika in top form in The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave

Stay tuned - another Grand Hotel portrait will be posted next Friday!

Tor - Mighty Warrior/Taur, re della forza bruta

2010-09-06T16:05:00.000-07:00

Italy, 1963

Directed by Antonio Leonviola

Cast:
Joe Robinson, Harry Baird, Bella Cortez, Alberto Cevenini, Antonio Leonviola, Carla Foscari, Thea Fleming, Janine Hendy, Claudia Capone, José Torres, Erminio Spalla

Having been positively surprised by the very enjoyable Thor and the Amazon Women, I felt strongly compelled to seek out its companion piece, Tor - Mighty Warrior, which was apparently made by director Antonio Leonviola at the same time with much of the same cast. Now, as it turns out, I've gone about watching the films in the wrong order as Tor - Mighty Warrior was actually the first one to be released (in late June 1963), while Thor and the Amazon Women came out shortly afterwards (in early August 1963). However, I don't think it matters much as the two films aren't directly related other than the fact that they both feature muscleman Thor (though this time the 'h' in his name is omitted from the English title) and his bumbling black sidekick Ubaratutu.

Thor and Ubaratutu are back for more!

The film kicks off with two pretty girls running joyfully through a meadow - picking flowers. They are attacked by a couple of bad guys in what looks like birdman costumes but, luckily, the girls are saved by the heroic intervention of a handsome young lad named Syros (Alberto Cevenini). The two girls, Illa (Thea Fleming) and Tuja (Claudia Capone), are revealed to be the daughters of the king of a village named Surapak. Syros is instantly smitten by the blonde and lovely Illa and because of his bravery, the king allows them to marry.

The brave Syros

The king's daughters

Ubaratutu (Harry Baird), Thor's big, muscular and very goofy black pal from Thor and the Amazon Women apparently lives in this village and he is given the task of fetching Thor (still played by Joe Robinson), so he can come and partake in the celebration of Syros and Illa's wedding. It just so happens that Thor already knows Syros, who was put out in the woods as an infant but was rescued and taken care of by none other than Thor. In any case, Thor and Ubaratutu head back to Surapak to attend the wedding but by the time they arrive, tragedy has struck. The king has been murdered and the others have been taken prisoner by a bloodthirsty, Inca-like enemy tribe named Kixos. Not surprisingly, Thor and Ubaratutu take it upon themselves to retrieve both Syros and the king's daughters.

Ubaratutu finds the king slaughtered

They manage to sneak unseen into Kixos territory and free Syros, who is kept in a huge cave along with hundreds of other captives. While exploring the giant cave, Thor and Syros discover a black woman named Afer, who is chained to the wall. Afer is played by Janine Hendy, who played the very sexy and wicked queen in Thor and the Amazon Women, but anyone hoping to see her play a similar role here is in for a huge disappointment because she looks far less attractive here - with grey hair and old-age make-up! Afer tells the men that 18 years ago, the king of Kixos died in battle and the evil grand priest El Kab (played by the film's director, Antonio Leonviola) had the queen murdered and the baby prince substituted with a baby girl named Akiba. After putting Akiba on the throne, El Kab hypnotized the girl and made her his will-less slave - thus tyrannically ruling the kingdom through her. Afer herself was given the task of murdering the baby prince but was unable to do such a horrible thing and instead left the child in the woods. For this insubordination she has been chained up in the cave ever since! No wonder she's looking old and haggard!

Anyway, Afer is stunned when she discovers a peculiar scar on Syros' chest. It just so happens that she carved a mark just like this into the baby prince's chest in order for him to be identified later on. So Syros is actually the old king's son and hence the rightful heir to the kingdom of Kixos! My my, what a nifty coincidence! Can you believe it? So now it's up to Thor to get Syros on the throne and put an end to the tyrannical rule of El Kab and Akiba.

Poor, old Afer!

Syros' rather peculiar scar

Now, about Akiba... She has now grown into quite a sexy woman - played by the pouty-lipped Cuban peplum star Bella Cortez. She's not a particularly nice girl, though. Just like the evil El Kab, she is very bloodthirsty and forces the female prisoners (including Illa and Tuja) to participate in gladiator training so they can fight each other to the death while the people of Kixos enjoy the spectacle. As you can probably tell, this part of the plot is pretty similar to Thor and the Amazon Women but the gladiator angle is featured less prominently this time around.

El Kab and Akiba

In the meantime, Thor and Syros hide among the other male prisoners while trying to plot a revolt. They are approached by the gorgeous Ararut (Carla Foscari), who is the trusted confidante of El Kab. Ararut is very attracted to Syros and tells him she sympathizes with their cause and wants to help them put an end to El Kab and Akiba's reign. That sounds fine and dandy now, doesn't it? But since the role of Ararut is played by the sexy and alluring Carla Foscari, who played the delightfully cruel Ghebelgor in Thor and the Amazon Women, it goes without saying that this chick isn't as nice as she seems. But, unfortunately, the alarm bells fail to go off for poor Syros, who obviously hasn't seen enough pepla to be able to separate the cunning bad girls from the fair-haired heroines. Hence, he foolishly tells Ararut that his great love Illa is one of the girls being trained for gladiator fighting. Wanting Syros for herself so she can become queen of Kixos, Ararut then schemes to make sure Illa is forced to partake in a fight to the death in the gladiator arena - against her sister Tuja!

Do not trust this babe!

All of this actually sounds pretty enjoyable but somehow Tor - Mighty Warrior never really becomes quite as entertaining as it ought to. In spite of some obvious similarities, the film has a very different feel from Thor and the Amazon Women. One of the most notable differences is that this time Thor has a much more prominent role and he actually gets to play the part of the hero instead of spending his screen-time recuperating in bed like he did in Amazon Women. Now, it's good that he actually serves a purpose, but at the same time it's problematic too. The main reason Amazon Women was so enjoyable was precisely because of its intriguing female gladiator plot and the focus on the strong female characters instead of the boring Thor. Now, Thor is admittedly more likeable this time around but, as played by Joe Robinson, he's still rather stiff and not a terribly engaging hero.

There's also the unfortunate matter of Thor's black sidekick Ubaratutu, who, just like in Amazon Women, is portrayed as unintelligent and clearly inferior to his white friend Thor, whom he repeatedly addresses as "master". But this time Ubaratutu isn't portrayed merely as a dim-witted fool but also as an easily scared coward. This, of course, gives way to a series of strained and unsuccessful attempts at comic relief - the worst instance being a scene where Thor and Ubaratutu are hiding from the evil guards and the sound of the frightened Ubaratutu's chattering teeth almost gives away their hiding place!

Ubaratutu's teeth chatter from fear

However, the real problem with Tor - Mighty Warrior is that it's a fairly generic entry in the peplum genre. Antonio Leonviola's direction feels workmanlike, which is surprising considering that his earlier peplum adventures, Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules and Atlas in the Land of the Cyclops (both 1961), are both engaging efforts. One of the main strengths of those films is that they are very unusual peplum entries with strong individual stamps that help them stand out among the endless crowd of similar flicks being churned out in the 1960s. Mighty Warrior, however, suffers under the lack of the distinctively bizarre details found in Leonviola's other films, and as a result, it remains the least of his peplum adventures. That said, the film still has its moments and it perks up as it goes along. It really gets enjoyable by the last third, when Leonviola throws in lots of cool action, such as a bound Thor fighting to stay alive on a conveyor belt heading towards a nasty rock crushing machine, sisters Illa and Tuja battling each other to the death while gagged and blind-folded so they don't know who their opponent is, a big revolt and a volcanic eruption. It's too bad the rest of the film isn't of the same caliber but the final 30 minutes are well worth sticking around for.

Highlight 1: Thor vs. the rock crusher

Highlight 2: Gagged and blind-folded gladiator battle

Another really nifty part that I thought was terrific is when El Kab and Akiba select a couple of strong men to fight to the death. The losers are obviously killed by their opponents, but the really great twist here is that instead of getting a nice reward, the victors end up suffering a far more horrible fate: they are boiled to death in cauldrons looking like giant beer mugs! Yikes! Didn't see that one coming!

Crappiest reward for winning ever!

Just like Thor and the Amazon Women, many scenes were shot on location in the Postojna caves in Slovenia but this time more money seems to have gone into the making of the film - as evidenced by higher production values, lots and lots of extras and some nifty miniature effects. All of which work to the film's advantage, of course.

Some quite nice-looking production values

As for the actors, not all of them are put to good use. Joe Robinson is too stiff as Thor, while Harry Baird simply embarrasses himself as Ubaratutu - again! Janine Hendy is completely wasted as she spends most of her short screen-time chained up and in old-age make-up, and Alberto Cevenini, though not bad, is given little to do in the role of Syros. I like the fact that director Antonio Leonviola cast himself as the evil El Kab, and while he's somewhat of an over-actor, he seems to have had a lot of fun.

Why pay a professional actor to play the villain when you can have a great time doing it yourself?

The only ones given any real opportunity to shine, however, are the villainesses. The voluptuous Bella Cortez (dubbed into English by Carolynn De Fonseca - in typically bitchy fashion) is stunning to look at and she nails the part of the wicked queen Akiba. However, Akiba isn't technically one of the bad guys. She's not really to blame for any of her wrongdoings since she's been turned into a will-less slave by El Kab's magical powers. But in a rather hilarious twist, the good guys completely fail to take this into account when they enact their revenge upon her! Or maybe they just forgot? Oops! Poor Akiba! Oh well...

In any case, the true standout is - like in Thor and the Amazon Women - the mesmerizing Carla Foscari, who steals every scene she's in as the cunniving and sexy Ararut. She reminds me of Rosalba Neri in many ways and really ought to have enjoyed a longer-running movie career than she did!

Overall, Tor - Mighty Warrior does not compare favorably to Thor and the Amazon Women but if you liked the latter, you'll probably want to check this one out as well. It does have some cool moments - particularly in its last third - and a couple of very appealing actresses, so give it a chance.

© 2010 Johan Melle

The cast:

Joe Robinson as Thor

Harry Baird as Ubaratutu

Bella Cortez as Akiba

Alberto Cevenini as Syros

Antonio Leonviola as El Kab

Carla Foscari as Ararut

Thea Fleming as Illa

Janine Hendy as Afer

Claudia Capone as Tuja

José Torres as Thorak

Erminio Spalla as King of Surapak

Thor and the Amazon Women/Le gladiatrici

2010-09-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

Italy, 1963

Directed by Antonio Leonviola

Cast:
Susy Andersen, Carla Foscari, Joe Robinson, Harry Baird, Janine Hendy, Maria Fiore, Claudia Capone

A while back I bought a DVD set called the Warriors 50 Movie Pack, which consists of a whooping 50 Italian peplum movies from the 1960s. It's currently selling for $26.99 on Amazon, which means you're getting 50 films for roughly $0.5 each. Sounds like a great deal but, unfortunately, most of the films are given horrible presentations – having been culled largely from cropped, battered and washed-out TV prints. In fact, the majority of the prints are practically unwatchable. There are, however, a few exceptions, and one of those is the 1963 film Thor and the Amazon Women, which not only has one of the better transfers in the set - it's also a very enjoyable little flick.

Unlike most of the other films in the DVD set, this one doesn't play out in ancient Rome. Instead it is set in a kingdom ruled by a tribe of bloodthirsty women who have enslaved all the men - keeping them as caged prisoners and forcing them to work in a mine. The evil black queen (Janine Hendy) is a particularly nasty number who takes great pleasure in the pain and suffering of others.

One day, however, a laughable-looking sibyl with green-ish skin and white hair foretells that a brave and powerful man will defeat the queen's all-woman army and overthrow her. This brave man would seem to be kind strongman Thor (Joe Robinson), whose strength and heroic deeds the oppressive women have caught wind of.

The sibyl makes a predicament...

...and it's not to the queen's liking!

Naturally, the queen is none too keen on the prospect of being overthrown, so she sends out her troops to capture Thor and thereby prevent the sibyl's prophecy from being fulfilled. The queen's female army, led by the shapely captain-general Yamad (Maria Fiore), soon succeed in finding Thor and confront him in an unintentionally sidesplitting scene where Yamad matter-of-factly announces: “We have come to capture you, Thor. You must come with us!” Unsurprisingly, Thor refuses, and when the women attempt to seize him he starts backing away while shouting: “Stand back! Don't move! I do not fight against women!” Hilariously, Thor's English-dubbed voice sounds terribly wimpy here - making the supposedly heroic strongman come across like a big coward. Anyway, Thor keeps backing away from the women till he ends up falling off a cliff! Fortunately for him, he is carried to safety by his muscular black sidekick Ubaratutu (Harry Baird), who hides them in a cave.

Thor and Ubaratutu

Thor the wimp

Yamad and her army don't have to leave empty-handed, however, as they come across the beautiful, blonde Tamar (Susy Andersen) and her annoying little kid brother Homolke, and decide to take them prisoners instead. We quickly learn that Homolke and Tamar aren't just simple village folk. No, their father was actually the king of the kingdom that is now ruled by the merciless black queen. She had the entire royal family massacred so she could take over but Tamar and Homolke were able to escape and have been living quietly in exile among a friendly village people ever since. All of this is revealed to us through some terrible expository dialogue in which Tamar actually tells her little brother the whole story about how the two of them escaped when the rest of their family was slaughtered. As if Homolke - who, after all, witnessed all of this together with Tamar - wouldn't already know!

Tamar and Homolke

Luckily for the royal siblings, though, their captors have no idea of their real identity but they are quickly separated. Homolke is put with the rest of the captive males, while Tamar is put in gladiator training. Apparently, all female prisoners must become gladiators and fight to the death in the arena for the enjoyment of the queen and her women. Tamar is given 21 metals bands to wear on one arm - representing the amount of gladiator battles she must fight and survive before she will have earned her freedom. For each battle she wins, one band will be removed. So far, however, not a single one of the gladiator women have managed to win their freedom but there is one who is very, very close: the wicked Ghebelgor (Carla Foscari), who only has two bands left on her arm.

The perils of gladiator training

Evil, sexy Ghebelgor is willing to do whatever it takes to lose those last two bands...

But where is our big hero Thor in the midst of all this? Oh, he actually spends most of the film bed-ridden in the cave, where he recuperates from his fall down the cliff! Some hero, huh? If anything, Thor is more a supporting character than any sort of hero. Eventually, he does get back on his feet and helps the gladiator women to revolt but he takes a definite backseat to the film's strong, sexy ladies. And that's not a bad thing! On the contrary, keeping the focus on the women is one of the main strengths. Gladiator movies were popular at the time, thanks to big Hollywood spectacles like Spartacus (1960) and Barabbas (1962), but this film manages to stand out in the crowd thanks to the gladiators being female. Sure enough, this wasn't the first Italian film to portray domineering women who live in a society free of men - an earlier example includes Colossus and the Amazon Queen (1960) but that was a pretty toothless affair leaning more towards comedy. Furthermore, Thor and the Amazon Women notably pre-dates the somewhat similar but far more well-known Italian female gladiator flick The Arena (1973) - starring Pam Grier and Margaret Markov - by 10 years.

All the gladiator-related stuff in the film is really cool and well-made. The fights are impressively executed and are far more brutal than you'd expect from a 1963 movie. Furthermore, Tamar is a likeable central character who is easy to root for. The growing tension between her and the villainous Ghebelgor is very well-handled, and their inevitable face-off in the gladiator arena is one of the film's highlights.

Some surprising bits of gladiator violence

From a visual point of view, it's obvious that director Antonio Leonviola had a limited budget to work with, which is no doubt because he shot this back-to-back with the similar Tor - Mighty Warrior, which features much of the same cast. Most of the money seems to have gone into this companion film, and hence Leonviola had to perform a couple of cost-cutting maneuvers on Amazon Women. The most obvious example of this is a scene early in the film where a woman tells the queen of one of Thor's heroic feats, and her speech is accompanied by footage of Thor wrestling with a gorilla inside a cage. This footage is actually lifted from Leonviola's earlier peplum adventure, the wonderful Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules (1961) with Mark Forest. So, naturally, it's Forest we see wrestling the silly-looking gorilla, and NOT Joe Robinson - a fact that is painfully obvious!

Recycled gorilla wrestling

Much of the film was shot on location in the famous Postojna caves in Slovenia, and this adds a certain atmosphere and partly makes up for the budgetary restrictions. However, it was obviously very cold in the caves as there are many scenes where we can see frost breath coming from the mouths of the scantly dressed actresses.

The Postojna caves

While the film's original Italian title Le gladiatici - i.e. the gladiatrices - is in keeping with the film's themes, the misleading English title is certainly not. 'Thor and the Amazon Women' makes you think this is going to be a film about Thor - when in fact he's a supporting character at best. Whenever he is on-screen, all he seems to do is recuperate in bed or goof around with his black sidekick, Ubaratutu, who is supposed to provide comic relief by behaving like a clumsy fool. Ubaratutu is portrayed as highly unintelligent and clearly inferior to his white pal Thor, whom he addresses as "master". Black actor Paul Wynter had previously played a similar character in Leonviola’s Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules, so it seems that this type of stereotypical portrayal of blacks is a common trait in Leonviola’s films. One can’t help but feel bad for Harry Baird, who plays Ubaratutu. This handsome-looking, muscular guy should have been given something better to do than to embarrass himself as the bumbling, unintelligent sidekick.

Ubaratutu in all his glory

To me, the only interesting thing about Thor and Ubaratutu is their strange, homoerotically charged relationship. This is said about lots of pepla and most of the time it’s a case of people reading way too much into the Italian way of male bonding. In this film, however, the gay vibes are unusually strong - with Ubaratutu intimately sucking poison out of Thor's leg and gently nursing him back to health. And it doesn't exactly help that Thor shows a surprising disinterest not only in leading lady Tamar but actually in all of the women in the film. Yeah yeah, I know I'm reading way too much into this but I had to try and find something interesting about the Thor character and there really wasn't much else! To me, the fact that the homoerotic vibes are most likely unintentional just makes it funnier.

One of many awkward moments between Thor and Ubaratutu

But, fortunately, it doesn’t matter much that Thor is a bore because the sexy female cast more than make up for this by livening up the screen with their presence. Blonde, statuesque Susy Andersen is best remembered for her starring role in the 'Wurdalak' segment from Mario Bava's anthology horror film Black Sabbath (1963), and she makes Tamar a strong, sexy and likeable heroine who is considerably tougher than your average peplum heroine. Then there are the wicked villainesses, whose delightful bitchiness adds volumes to the film's camp entertainment. The gorgeous Janine Hendy is great as the evil black queen who rules the all-white village with violence, while her black superiority is symbolically demonstrated by her carrying around a little white cat. You gotta love this kind of charming bluntness!

But my absolute favorite of the lot is the diabolical Ghebelgor, who is a really amazing piece of work. Curvy, raven-haired Carla Foscari plays the part with real gusto and clearly relishes the opportunity to play a character that is so wonderfully ruthless. Her huge grin when she is given the task of executing a girl who refused to kill her gladiatorial opponent is priceless.

Tamar and Ghebelgor battle it out

It’s really interesting to see how nearly all the women are depicted as strong and independent. These gals are definitely are far cry from the helpless damsels in distress we see in most pepla. That said, this is not in any way a feminist action flick. Far from it! If anything, writer-director Leonviola seems to want to show us the horror of how society would be if ruled by women. His view on a woman's real place in society is clearly demonstrated through some outrageously non-PC dialogue by the captain-general Yamad, who rebels against the female rulers because, as she herself puts it: "a woman cannot deprive herself of every human sentiment in the name of a superiority that nature never meant to assign to them!" Leonviola clearly shares her views, and while this is a horribly offensive attitude, I couldn't help but find it endearingly amusing. They just don't make films with a message like that anymore!

Some viewers will no doubt be put off by the film's attitude towards blacks and women, and while I do not support such views, I think it's important to remember that this is just an obscure Italian action film from the early 1960s. When looked at through nostalgic glasses, its non-PC attitudes are actually more humorous than offensive. Plus there is so much else to love! The gladiator stuff is amazing and the strong female characters are really cool. The only reason I'm not giving Thor and the Amazon Women a top recommendation is due to the tired and unnecessary scenes involving Thor. Still, the rest of the film is surprisingly well-made and definitely worth checking out!

© 2010 Johan Melle

The cast:

Susy Andersen as Tamar

Carla Foscari as Ghebelgor

Joe Robinson as Thor

Harry Baird as Ubaratutu

Janine Hendy as The Queen

Maria Fiore as Yamad

Claudia Capone as Agarit

??? as Homolke

??? as The sibyl

More Euro actresses doing print ads

2010-04-01T08:52:00.000-07:00

During a busy Easter holiday there isn't as much time for films as I'd like to but I don't want to neglect this blog completely, so I scanned a new batch of prints ads featuring popular Euro actresses of the time.

Once again, Lux soap is a big favorite, and here we have a Lux ad from 1959 with Italy's most famous actress, Sophia Loren:

Interestingly, the next Lux ad (from 1963) features the beautiful Scilla Gabel, who had at one point in her career been a stand-in for Sophia Loren. But Gabel would go on to become a considerable star in her own right - appearing in such memorable projects as the excellent horror film Mill of the Stone Women (1960), the Robert Aldrich-directed all-star cast peplum Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), the screen version of Modesty Blaise (1966) and the esteemed television mini series The Odyssey (1968). Here's the print ad Scilla did for Lux:

French actress Jacqueline Sassard was a popular film actress in both Italy and France the 1950s and 60s - popping up everything from serious films like Valerio Zurlini's acclaimed Violent Summer (1959) to Umberto Lenzi's Sandokan adventure The Pirates of Malaysia (1964), where she starred alongside Steve Reeves. After appearing in Claude Chabrol's Les biches (1968), she cut short her promising career and abruptly retired from acting, which might explain why she is largely forgotten about today. Below is an ad for Lux soap that Jacqueline Sassard did in 1964, when her career was still blossoming:

Flame-haired beauty Liana Orfei was the undisputed queen of Italian muscleman and swashbuckler adventures in the 1960s. In 1963, Liana did a series of print ads for Felce Azzurra make-up kits - two examples of which you can see below:

German actress Elke Sommer has been active since the late 1950s and is still going strong. She has enjoyed a hugely successful international career, so she was a natural candidate to endorse Lux soap in 1965:

Okay, so Jane Fonda isn't really a Euro actress but she did star in Barbarella (1968) and that's good enough for me. Besides, this ad for Lux soap that she did in 1966 is Italian:

Euro actresses doing print ads

2010-03-20T17:33:00.000-07:00

I've always found prints ads featuring Euro-actresses to be a lot of fun and since I've been lucky to come across several of these lately, I figured I'd share some of these goodies.

First up is this black & white ad from 1964, in which renowned Italian actress Virna Lisi attributes her shiny white smile to the use of Chlorodont toothpaste:

However, the product that Euro actresses seemed most eager to promote in the 1960s was soap - more specifically Lux soap. Here's a 1964 ad in which the gorgeous Sylva Koscina promotes Lux soap:

Another actress who endorsed Lux soap was Antonella Lualdi, who has been a popular actress in Italian films for decades. She's been somewhat less prolific in genre cinema but I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Antonella thanks to her amazing performance as the seductive and provocative Serena in Death on the Fourposter (1964). The same year she starred in that film, Antonella did this advertisement for Lux:

But Antonella Lualdi did other ads too. In 1965 she endorsed a product called Stilla. At first sight it looks like some kind of beauty product but from what I can tell it's actually an eye medication sold only in pharmacies:

Gorgeous Japanese actress Yoko Tani had a career in Hollywood - appearing in stuff like The Wind Cannot Read (1958) with Dirk Bogarde, The Savage Innocents (1960) with Anthony Quinn and Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1963) with Dean Martin. I must admit, however, that to me she is of more interest thanks to her appearances in a number of Eurospy films, such as the last entry in the Mabuse series, The Death Ray Mirror of Dr. Mabuse (1964), Ferdinando Baldi's Suicide Mission to Singapore (1966) and Umberto Lenzi's The Spy Who Loved Flowers (1966). Yoko, too, did an advertisement for Lux soap in 1964:

Flame-haired Italian bombshell Luciana Paluzzi became a busy actress both internationally and in Italy after her role as a wicked James Bond girl in Thunderball (1965). So naturally, Lux soap got Luciana to promote their product in 1966:

American actress Carroll Baker earned good money by making films in Italy but I'm pretty sure this ad for Lux soap paid very well too. This one is from 1967 and, as you can see, it's a bit different from the 1964 ones:

The final ad features Minnie Minoprio, a well-known figure in Italy but perhaps more obscure to non-Italians. Minoprio is actually a British singer and she made her debut in 1957 (at age 15) by starring in "Cinderella" by Rogers and Hammerstein at the London Coliseum. She was then a soubrette in an Italian variety show and ended up staying there - becoming a very well-known jazz musician. She also appeared in a few films - most notably the mafia comedy The Funny Face of the Godfather (1973), in which she played the leading role. Minnie's career started to falter in the mid 1980s and this prompted her to do pornographic photoshoots for smut magazine Le ore (although without partaking in the actual hardcore activity) and starring in the softcore flick Una storia ambigua (1986) directed by porno specialict Mario Bianchi. Nowadays, Minnie likes to pretend that she never made this film - at least it isn't listed among her credits on her official website.
But enough on that. The reason I'm mentioning Minnie is because in 1973, she did a couple of sexy prints ads for Playtex corselettes as you can see an example of below:

My Swedish Aunt/La zia svedese

2010-03-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

Italy, 1980

Directed by Mario Siciliano

Cast:
Marina Frajese, Peter Thompson [Giovanni Tamberi], Laura Levi, Giuseppe Curia, Guia Lauri Filzi, Erminio Bianchi, Patrizia Predan, Sandra Cardinale, Giuseppe Cardone, Rossana Canghiari

Though rarely brought up in discussion, Italian hardcore porn from the early 1980s is quite fascinating stuff that can make for some really interesting viewings. Curiously, the hardcore scene in Italy was established relatively late in comparison to other European countries as there basically wasn’t any market for hardcore porn in Italy during the 1970s. Sure enough, some Italian films from this era did contain hardcore scenes, such as Joe D’Amato’s Emanuelle flicks Emanuelle in America (1976) and Emanuelle Around the World (1977), Edoardo Mulargia’s sleazy W.I.P. romp Hotel Paradise (1979) and Mario Gariazzo’s ‘sexy’ giallo Play Motel (1979), but these scenes were added in order to spice the films up for export to foreign markets such as France, who demanded hardcore scenes. Hence these films can hardly be labeled as real porno movies – they’re basically softcore films with a few brief hard scenes thrown in here and there. It wasn't until the early 1980s that full-on hardcore pornos started to boom in Italy. One of the better known Italian pornos from this era is My Swedish Aunt – directed by former straight movie director Mario Siciliano – and this is largely because it was one of the very few of these films to get dubbed into English and given an international release.

As expected, the plot is simple enough: Barbara Musomecci (Marina Frajese) is an attractive and free-spirited Swedish blonde who lives in a huge villa in the Italian countryside together with her grumpy and much older husband (Giuseppe Cardone). The husband is usually preoccupied with his work, and the film starts with him leaving for a two-week business trip to New York. Rather than sulk around, Barbara decides to have fun while she has the house to herself, and invites two of her slutty friends (Patrizia Predan and Sandra Cardinale) over for some partying. They quickly get into some lesbian action and later invite two hunky student boys over for some further hanky panky.

When hubby is away...

Barbara also gets around in between all her partying as she’s carrying on a fling with her virile gardener, Alberto (Giuseppe Curia), and occasionally gets some lesbian love from her nymphomaniac maid, Alice (Laura Levi).

Meanwhile, we are introduced to teenage boy Marco (Giovanni Tamberi), who is the nephew of Barbara’s husband. Marco lives in the city together with his strict, puritanical mother (Guia Lauri Filzi) and he is nearly flowing over with hormones as he has started to develop a craving for the opposite sex. This does not sit well with his sex-hating mother who goes ballistic when she discovers that Marco has brought a dirty magazine into her house: “You’re vice personified. You’re a potential delinquent. You’re nothing but a sexual maniac!” she scolds him!!

Marco...

...and his horrible mother

Unable to cope with his deranged mother any longer, Marco decides to move out and go to stay with his uncle in the country. But since the uncle is away on business, Marco is met only by his sexy aunt Barbara. The two of them get along very well and it doesn’t take long before the hormonal boy starts lusting after his Swedish auntie. Unfortunately for Marco, Barbara isn’t prepared to take up a sexual affair with her husband’s nephew, so he has to make do with the nympho maid instead. However, as Marco gradually falls in love with Barbara, she finally gives in during one of her sexy parties and they have passionate sex in the middle of the living room floor while Barbara’s friends giggle and dance around them. Naturally, several more complications follow…

Seduced by auntie

As you can probably tell from the plot, this is fairly traditional coming of age stuff with lots of jealousy between the characters and ridiculous sex comedy elements thrown in for good measure. None of it is particularly original, or even all that well-made for that matter. No, in order to really understand the success of this film it is crucial to take a closer look at its star, Marina Frajese (alternatively known as Marina Hedman, Marina Lotar and various other aliases). Swedish-born Frajese made her first hardcore scene at age 32 in Joe D’Amato’s Emanuelle in America, and would continue to do hardcore scenes in both Play Motel, and for D’Amato again in Images in a Convent (1979). But since there wasn’t much of a hardcore market in Italy at the time, Marina also appeared in a number of regular, non-pornographic roles. It wasn’t until the advent of fully fledged Italian porno movies in the early 1980s that she reached true stardom.

My Swedish Aunt is one of the key titles among Marina’s early pornos, and it played an important part in establishing her star power. A mature but attractive 36-year old at the time, Marina Frajese was ideally cast as the frivolous Swedish aunt who has her sexually awakening nephew walking funny. The seductive aunt was soon to become one of Frajese’s signature characters as she would go on to play different variations of this role in a number of adult films – quickly establishing herself as Italy’s most (in)famous porno diva of the 80s. Much of Marina’s popularity was no doubt due to her uninhibitedness as she eagerly performed in scenes with anal sex, double penetration and facials – none of which was too common in early 1980s porn. There are no such scenes on display in My Swedish Aunt, though.

The sinful aunt

In addition to introducing Marina as the seductive aunt, this film also foreshadows another notorious Marina trait. In a bizarre sexual dream sequence, Marco dreams about a horse in a field, and a buff naked Marina running towards the horse in slow-motion while a catchy disco beat plays. As she reaches the horse, she starts caressing it. The film then cuts to a smiling Marina on her back in the field getting a big, white load squirted over her breasts while we hear the off-screen stallion neighing ecstatically. Mercifully, this scene is clearly faked, and Mario Siciliano has the good sense to suggest instead of showing - thereby sparing us a repeat performance of the uncomfortable stable sequence from D’Amato’s Emanuelle in America. Marina, however, would later go on to perform explicit scenes of zoophilia in several other films such as Marina e la sua bestia (1984) and La perdizione (Marina’s animals) (1986), although the authenticity of these scenes is rather questionable.

Marco’s very bizarre dream

But really… the scene of Marina and the horse, though surprising, is little more than a mild preview to her later escapades. There are no really nasty or overly graphic scenes in My Swedish Aunt, which is really a relatively innocent affair when compared to the Italian hardcore films that would follow. As mentioned, the film is one of the few Italian pornos from the early 1980s to get dubbed in English and given an international release. In the US it got a VHS release on the Private Screenings label under the title The Other Woman. The English version I’ve seen was a fullscreen softcore cut – shorn of all moments of hardcore couplings. Luckily, I also have an Italian release and although it is in Italian only, it is widescreen and has all the hardcore action intact. Now, you’d think this would be the best way to view the film but truth be told, both versions contain exclusive footage, so neither one is completely satisfactory.

Obviously, the softcore version suffers from having a lot of unfinished sex scenes. There are numerous scenes that contain a lot of build-up and cheesy dialogue full of sexual innuendo but then abruptly cuts away just as the actors start undressing. It’s a build-up to nothing and it’s hard to not feel cheated by this. To compensate, though, there are some soft sex scenes that appear to have been shot exclusively for the non-hard version – most notably a silly scene where Marco and the maid, Alice, have sex in a car.

Fun in the car

Now, the hardcore version delivers all the explicit footage missing from the soft cut but on the other hand it’s missing a lot of additional footage from the soft version, including several dialogue scenes and an even entire sub-plot regarding Marco’s mother. It also leaves out the sex scenes that seem to have been shot soft (like Marco and Alice in the car).

So what does the hard footage consist of? Well, for the most part it’s limited to a lot of long blowjobs. There are also some full-on sex scenes with vaginal penetration but these scenes are briefer and occur with less frequency. Also, the fact that the penetration scenes are mostly shot in close-up indicates that they were performed by body doubles. This is presumably because Giovanni Tamberi, who plays Marco, was a “real” actor and probably didn’t want to appear in such scenes.

Tamberi was at the start of his film career when he starred in My Swedish Aunt and he would later appear in a series of thrillers such as Specters (1987), Phantom of Death (1987) and Too Beautiful to Die (1988). He’s not bad as the horny nephew but does feel dreadfully miscast because he is at least 10 years too old to be playing a sexually awakening teenager. Also of great interest is the fact that while he doesn’t partake in any penetration scenes, he does receive a non-simulated blowjob from Marina. Which explains why he’s hiding behind the pseudonym “Peter Thompson”. No doubt, Tamberi would like to forget all about his short-lived porno adventure.

Some of the naughty bits missing from soft versions

Seeing a legitimate actor like Tamberi doing porn, and having Marina Frajese playing her aunt role for the first time are some of the main selling points of My Swedish Aunt. But it does have some more stuff going for it as well, such as a couple of delightful Euro-disco songs by composer Carlo Maria Cordio. The two songs “No, Baby, Not Tonight” and “Hello” are both extremely catchy and dance-able but, unfortunately, the credits don’t list the singer. Too bad – we could really need a soundtrack release with these great numbers.

As an erotic film, however, My Swedish Aunt doesn’t exactly work because it is for the most time distinctly un-erotic. There’s nothing too sexy about the sex scenes, and with the exception of Marina Frajese, the performers are plain-looking at best. This can be said about pretty much every Italian porno movie from the early 1980s, though. They’re all highly unlikely to get modern viewers turned on but they still remain fascinating and worth checking out because of their often wacky plots and extreme cheesiness. Personally, I’m particularly interested in the ones that feature “real” actors, such as Giovanni Tamberi in this case, but other notable actors like Paola Montenero, Kieran Canter, Karin Well, Enzo Monteduro and Zaira Zoccheddu also popped up in some early 1980s hardcore productions.

But My Swedish Aunt isn’t just a sex film, of course. More precisely it is a sex comedy, which means that we are served a lot of funny business as well. Director Mario Siciliano was a competent craftsman and had made some fairly enjoyable films in the past, such as the WW2 adventure Overrun! (1969) and the strange supernatural giallo Evil Eye (1974), but his films lack a distinctive style and he doesn’t seem to have that good an eye for comedy. Hence the comedic elements tend to fall rather flat as they’re both predictable and stupid (and aided by an appropriately laughable English dubbing job). The sub-plot involving Marco’s sex-hating mother, in particular, is monstrously idiotic – so much so that it actually ends up being kind of amusing. The mother is played by prolific porno diva Guia Lauri Filzi, a hard-faced woman who tried her luck as a legitimate actress in a couple of films like Tano Cimarosa’s trashy crime flick Death Hunt (1977) before turning to hardcore. She’s pretty funny here – wearing her hair in a tight bun and without any make-up on. But since this is a sex film, she naturally gets cured of her fear of sex by a doctor, whose method is taking his clothes off and jumping in bed with the poor woman. So after some long blowjobs and a bit of brief fucking, the mom lets the hair out of her tight bun, puts on make-up, and voila: she’s now a lusty gal with an insatiable sexual appetite. One can’t help but laugh at this!

Ms Filzi’s hilarious transformation from nutty to slutty

The rest of the cast is interesting, too. Beefy, moustached Giuseppe Curia plays the gardener, and he has that super-clichéd 1980s porno actor look that immediately makes him funny to watch. Curia was one of the most important male porno actors in Italian adult cinema of the early 1980s but he too had started out with some brief roles in softer films: he was one of the orgy participants in a soft scene in Bruno Mattei’s The True Story of the Nun of Monza (1980) and played one of the men who rapes Marina Frajese in the woods in D’Amato’s Images in a Convent (a scene that does features some brief hardcore action). Playing the role of the maid is voluptuous brunette Laura Levi, who was also a key figure in Italian XXX cinema. She really gets to display her sexual appetite here. There’s also another important porno regular on board – namely Erminio Bianchi, who plays the doctor that cures Marco’s mother of her sex phobia. Grey-haired Bianchi looks a tad older than the other actors and he also played tiny bit part roles in a number of legitimate films such as The Concorde Affair (1979), The Salamander (1980), Bruce Le Fights Back (1982) and others. Rounding out the cast are blonde ladies Patrizia Predan and Sandra Cardinale as Marina’s friends. Of the two, Predan is the one who gets in on the most explicit stuff but she doesn’t appear to ever have done anything else. Cardinale doesn’t actually perform in any hardcore scenes here but she later went on to appear in a few more pornos for both Joe D’Amato and Angelo Pannacchio.

All in all, My Swedish Aunt is complete rubbish and not very sexy but it has its moments and is a relatively important title in Italian hardcore cinema. Mario Siciliano’s two next adult movies, Happy Sex (1981) and Dangerous Love (1981), were also dubbed into English and released on VHS in the US by Private Screenings. It’s a big wonder why Siciliano’s pornos were chosen for international export because there are numerous other Italian adult films that are far more interesting and enjoyable than these films. For a much better and sexier film where Marina Frajese plays a seductive aunt, I’d recommend Con la zia non è peccato (1980).

© 2010 Johan Melle

The cast:

Marina Frajese as Barbara

Giovanni Tamberi as Marco

Laura Levi as Alice

Giuseppe Curia as Alberto

Guia Lauri Filzi as Marco’s mother

Erminio Bianchi as The doctor

Patrizia Predan as Barbara’s friend

Sandra Cardinale as Barbara’s friend

Giuseppe Cardone as Barbara’s husband

Rossana Canghiari as The doctor’s wife

Cool, old Variety Ads #3

2010-03-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

Time for some more of those cool, old Variety ads. This time I've been scanning stuff from 1984 and 1985, and as usual I've consentrated on the European stuff.

Starting off with 1984:

First off is some cool artwork for Manhunt a.k.a. Cane arrabiato, an Italian action movie directed by prolific movie producer Fabrizio De Angelis under his frequent 'Larry Ludman' pseudonym. This one was shot in Arizona and features a really impressive cast: John Ethan Wayne (the Duke's son), Bo Svenson, Henry Silva, Raimund Harmstorf and Ernest Borgnine.

Treasure of the Amazon is a trashy and violent but very enjoyable jungle adventure directed by reliable Mexican schlock director Rene Cardona Jr. So technically this is a Mexican film and not a European one but I say it's close enough - especially since it stars three Hollywood veterans who all worked extensively in Italian cinema: Stuart Whitman, Donald Pleasence and John Ireland. The interesting cast also includes everyone's favorite Mexican cult actor Hugo Stiglitz (of Nightmare City fame) and Ann Sidney (Miss World 1964).

Lola's Secret is a fairly obscure film that I haven't seen and I don't know much about it either. It's obviously some sort of erotic film, though, and this is more clearly alluded to in the original Italian title, Il peccato di Lola, which translates to 'Lola's sin'. The voluptuous Donatella Damiani, who plays Lola, specialized in these kinds of film, and director Bruno Gaburro (Erika Blanc's ex-husband) made several erotic period pieces with Paola Senatore around the same time.

Here's an ad where Spanish production company Acónito Films showcases their latest releases: Panic Beats a.k.a. Latidos de pánico, The Beast and the Magic Sword a.k.a. La bestia y la espada mágica, The Last Kamikaze a.k.a. El último kamikaze, The Child and the Vagabond a.k.a. Mi amigo el vagabundo and Operation Mantis a.k.a. Operación Mantis - all starring Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy. Naschy's co-star in most of these films is the ravishing Julia Saly, who also served as producer on all of them. If you look at the bottom of the ad, you'll see that Saly was also in charge of world sales for these films under her real name, Julia Salinero.

And now for something really interesting: an action movie named Crossfire that was written by Dardano Sacchetti (otherwise best known for writing many of Lucio Fulci's gory horror movies). Unfortunately, this project was never realized, even though three big stars had been cast: Christopher Connelly, Henry Silva and Bo Svenson. Romolo Guerrieri (who had just made the trashy but fun post-apocalypse flick The Final Executioner) was supposed to direct. I don't know why the project fell apart - especially not with a script that seemed to be ready and three pretty popular leading players.

What's really interesting, though, is that two years later, Filman International was still trying to get the Crossfire project off the ground, as we can see from this 1986 ad:

If you examine the above ad you'll see that Henry Silva was still attached to the project in 1986 but Connelly and Svenson had dropped out. A certain John Stephen (who!?) seems to have taken over the leading role. Also notice how director Romolo Guerrieri had by now been replaced with 'Joseph Warren', which is a pseudonym frequently used by director Giuseppe Vari, who had made such films as the fine WW2 flick A Place in Hell (1969) and the interesting giallo/crime hybrid Who Killed the Prosecutor and Why? (1972).

This ad also reveals a few other interesting things - for example that Giuseppe Vari was also supposed to direct the WW2 adventure Wartime, which ended up being made by Umberto Lenzi instead.

And the horror movie Aenigma, which was directed by Lucio Fulci, is credited to a certain 'Frank Shannon' here. Director Franco Prosperi had occasionally used 'Frank Shannon' as a pseudonym, so it's possible that Prosperi was originally set to direct this one but got replaced by Fulci. It's also interesting that the ad says the screenplay is by Raimondo Del Balzo and Luigi Cozzi. Their script must have undergone a lot of re-working, though, because in the finished film both the story and screenplay is credited to Fulci and Giorgio Mariuzzo.

And here we have yet another unrealized Italian action movie. This one is called Primary Objective but I haven't been able to find out much about it. The production, which was to be shot in Africa, was helmed by Ettore Spagnuolo and his production company Visione Cinematografica, which had just put out Fernando Di Leo's dismal action film The Violent Breed. I'm not sure who director 'Roy Gilbert' is, though. Mario Gariazzo often directed films under the name 'Roy Garrett' so it could perhaps be him...?

At the same time, Spagnuolo was also trying to put together a film named The Hidden Eye, which was to be directed by Enzo G. Castellari. This project didn't get made either and there's no ad for it but there's a small text telling us what it was to be "a yarn of semi-horror violence about a mother and daughter both in love with an insane man." Sounds interesting! Too bad it didn't get made.

Anyway, let's move on to the 1985 ads:

And we get even more Euro-action! Above is an ad for the German/Italian co-production Commando Leopard, one of many mercenary action flicks Antonio Margheriti made in the Philippines during the 1980s. Lewis Collins and Klaus Kinski leads the cast.

Demons doesn't really need any introduction, does it? One of Lamberto Bava's finest films, this fun and super-gory horror film is one of my personal favorites. It's a real gem of a film, and this famous poster art is very nice!

Tex and the Lord of the Deep is a movie version of the extremely popular western comic series Tex Willer that was created by Gian Luigi Bonelli in 1948. Giuliano Gemma plays Tex, while William Berger fills the role of his buddy Kit Carson under the direction of Duccio Tessari, who had already made a bunch of westerns in the 1960s. This is a colorful and cool-looking film but it isn't quite as enjoyable as it ought to have been.

The Trap a.k.a. La gabbia is a somewhat kinky erotic thriller that is seriously underrated. The amazing Laura Antonelli stars alongside Tony Musante, Florinda Bolkan and Blanca Marsillach. The screenplay was co-written by Lucio Fulci, who went on to re-use many of the same ideas in his own thriller The Devil's Honey (1986), which also stars Blanca Marsillach.

If you like cheap, laughable Euro-schlock, you can always depend on the guys at Eurocine to fill your needs. Panther Squad is a classic example of Eurocine rubbish and the ad is appropriately cheesy-looking. Really great cast, though: Sybil Danning, Jack Taylor, Donal O'Brien and Karin Schubert in one of her last roles before crossing over into pornographic films.

And last but not least we've got a color ad! In 1979, Edoardo Mulargia directed Ajita Wilson and Cristina Lai in Escape From Hell and Hotel Paradise, two extremly trashy but immensely enjoyabel Italian W.I.P. movies. In 1985, Empire Pictures edited together scenes from both films, shot about ten minutes of additional footage with Linda Blair, and released this incoherent patchwork to unsuspecting audiences as Savage Island. You'll be much better off watching the two original films (they're both trash masterpieces) but at least the artwork for Empire's bastardized version is totally awesome! You really can't go wrong with a scantly dressed Linda Blair in high heels while clutching a machine gun and showing off a giant cleavage. They just don't make 'em like they used to!

Well, that's all for now but I'll be back with some stuff from 1986/87 later on - including some Bruno Mattei stuff and Spanish horror.

La polizia brancola nel buio

2010-02-25T08:38:00.001-08:00

Italy, 1973

Directed by Helia Colombo

Cast:
Joseph Arkim, Elena Veronese, Halina Zalewska, Gabriella Giorgelli, Francisco Cortéz, Richard Fielding, Danny P. Gerzog, Robert Trewords, Margaret Rose Keil, Sonny Crowell, Daiana Murpy, Erika Fisher

I really love hunting down obscure, forgotten gialli from the 1970s. There’s just so much amazing stuff out there that’s just waiting to be rediscovered. Unearthing these old movies can be a two-sided coin, however, because sometimes you come to realize that there’s actually a pretty good reason why certain films have languished in complete obscurity for decades. This is certainly the case with La polizia brancola nel buio (translation: The police are blundering in the dark), which is arguably the worst giallo to emerge from the early 1970s. Made in 1973 by one-time-only-director Helia Colombo under the laughable shooting-title Il giardino delle iattughe (translation: The lettuce garden), it sat on the shelf for two years before finally getting a limited theatrical release in 1975. After that it completely disappeared and never got a single VHS release. The only known version of the film to have turned up anywhere is a battered-looking Super 8 print, which has since been transferred to video and made available to an unsuspecting Euro cult audience.

It all kicks off in the countryside, where a pretty blonde model is despairing because she’s gotten a flat tire. She asks a passerby (whose face is unseen by the audience) for help but instead he attacks her with a pair of scissors – conveniently ripping her blouse open in the process. With the scissor-wielding maniac in hot pursuit, the poor girl runs off into the woods while her exposed boobs keep bouncing around.

A chase through the woods

After providing the requisite amount of screaming, tripping and bouncing tits, the girl is caught and stabbed to death with the scissors. Her lifeless body then slumps to her knees – resulting in a tasteless shot of the dead girl on her knees with her face pressed up against her killer’s crotch. This is a hilariously tacky opening sequence and it immediately sets the standard of quality for the rest of the film.

An awfully tacky scissor murder

Next, we learn through some newspaper headlines that the unfortunate victim is the fourth model in 18 months to go missing in this area, and that the clueless police are blundering in the dark (hence the title of the film). It turns out that all the missing models had been photographed nude by an eccentric photo artist named Edmondo Parisi, who lives in a secluded country villa. Now, you’d think that this would make Parisi a likely candidate for being investigated by the police but apparently this hasn’t occurred to the cops. You’d also think that Parisi would have a pretty hard time managing to convince any more models to come to his house to get photographed naked, but since nothing in this film seems to make much sense, a sexy blonde model named Enrichetta (Margaret Rose Keil) still shows up to get her picture taken. But unfortunately for Enrichetta, she too gets a flat tire on her way back. To make matters worse, there’s a bad rainstorm going on, so Enrichetta seeks refuge at the local inn, where she calls her journalist boyfriend Giorgio D’Amato (whose car she was using) and asks him to come get her. However, Giorgio is just getting it on in bed with another woman, and tells Enrichetta he hasn’t got time to come get her until the next day. Nice guy, eh?

Gentlemen prefer blondes – philanderers, apparently, do not

Anyway, that leaves Enrichetta with no other option than to rent a room at the inn. Luckily for her (and for the male viewers) there’s a big fireplace in her room, so she quickly gets out of her wet clothes and prances around naked. That is, until she discovers that the scissor killer has been inexplicably hiding behind the curtain (he wasn’t there when Enrichetta was looking out the window a few minutes earlier and there’s nowhere he could have come from in the meantime but, like I’ve already mentioned, things don’t make a great deal of sense in this film). So, naturally, poor Enrichetta ends up being victim number five. This really wasn’t a very good day for her!

Enrichetta’s demise

Cut to the next morning, as Enrichetta’s idiot boyfriend Giorgio finally comes to get her. Of course, she is nowhere to be found, so Giorgio heads to Edmondo Parisi’s villa to check if he knows anything more. Parisi turns out to be a rather weird, wheelchair-bound hippie-ish type who looks a bit like a gay version of Hyde from That ‘70s Show – sans the sunglasses.

Mr. Parisi

Parisi isn’t able to shed any light on what has happened to Enrichetta (and Giorgio doesn’t seem very interested in finding out either – although that may be down to bad acting) but he invites Giorgio to stay for dinner. And thus we get acquainted with the rest of the Parisi household, which consists of Parisi’s miserable wife Eleonora (Halina Zalewska), who hates living in the countryside and who apparently suffers from a hyper-maniacal state called ‘erotomania’; their beloved orphaned niece Sara (Elena Veronese); and Dr. Dalla, the village doctor, who doesn’t actually live with the Parisis but he apparently never has any patients so he spends his entire days moping around in their villa. Then there’s the domestic staff, which consists of the sinister and newly-employed butler, Alberto, who takes an immediate dislike to Giorgio’s presence; and the busty maid, Lucia (Gabriella Giorgelli), who is an insatiable nymphomaniac that will fuck anything or anyone – not even the local village idiot gets turned down by her!

But there’s more going on too. During dinner, we see Parisi secretly pressing a button on some weird devise, which causes the eye of his golden Buddhist statue to flash strangely. It turns out there’s actually a camera hidden in the statue but it’s no regular camera. No, Parisi has actually managed to invent a revolutionary camera that can photograph people’s thoughts!!!

Parisi's bizarre photographic devise

Now, I have to admit that all this sounds like the recipe for a thoroughly enjoyable – if somewhat crazy – giallo but, sadly, it's nowhere near as cool as it sounds. Once Giorgio arrives at the Parisi villa, the plot just grinds to a halt as the characters almost never do anything but dine or indulge in idle chit chat. It seems like the director ran out of ideas and could think of nothing better to pad the running time with than long, boring interior shots of people discussing irrelevant matters. Sure enough, at some point another woman (and you can probably guess who) bares her breasts and gets stabbed to death and then Parisi solves the crime by developing the thought-photographs he took of everyone during dinner. And that’s pretty much everything that happens. Seriously! Oh, and just forget about an explanation for the killer’s motivation because there just isn’t any.

In case you haven’t figured it out already, La polizia brancola nel buio is an extremely trashy affair that is very badly plotted and acted. One could easily overlook these flaws had the film at least provided a bit of suspense, or some stylish murder set-pieces like we’ve come to expect from a giallo, but unfortunately, there’s no such stuff to be found here. Writer-director Helia Colombo seems to have no eye for visual style or flashy imagery, so instead he tries to compensate by making sure that all of the female victims are flashing their tits when they get killed. Not helping matters any is the fact that the film seems to have been made on a virtually non-existent budget. It looks every bit as dirt-cheap as it undoubtedly was – especially in the beat-up Super 8-sourced version that’s currently doing the rounds. The cinematography is stale and boring, and the frenetic musical score by a certain Aldo Saitto (who doesn’t appear to have scored any other films) is annoyingly repetitious.

Tits and gore is all it takes to make a good giallo! Right...?

There are nevertheless a few interesting ideas thrown in – particularly the concept of the machine that can photograph thoughts. In Dario Argento’s excellent Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), a victim’s eyeball is examined by a machine, which is able to extract the image of the last thing the person saw before dying. That in itself was pretty fanciful stuff but here Helia Colombo manages to take the idea one step further, and one has to sort of admire him for employing such a wild, science fiction-like plot element in a film that is otherwise... erm... realistic. Still, Colombo hardly does much justice to the idea, which is handled in a rather arbitrary fashion.

A classic Blow-Up-style sequence (well... sort of) as Parisi develops his thought-photographs

The majority of the actors are ultra-obscure and don’t seem to have appeared in anything else, although it’s hard to say for sure since most of them are hiding behind ridiculous anglicized pseudonyms that betray the filmmakers’ poor grasp of English – Daiana Murpy, anyone!? I don’t even know the identity of the actor who plays the leading role of the womanizing Giorgio D’Amato but whoever he might be, he’s a pretty uncharismatic guy as well as a useless protagonist. One initially expects him to be the amateur sleuth that solves the case but in the end it is Parisi who exposes the killer with his thought-photographing devise, while Giorgio proves to be as ineffective as the conspicuously absent police. In fact, Giorgio does nothing useful throughout the film and he’s a pretty unlikable character, too, due to his attitude towards women (his introductory scene where he refuses to help Enrichetta because he’s getting it on with another woman is just one example).

There are, however, three familiar faces in the film – all of them actresses. The most famous of these is the voluptuous Gabriella Giorgelli, whose long and prolific career includes appearances in westerns (Day of Vengeance, 1967), gialli (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, 1972), sex comedies (The Virgin Wife, 1975), violent crime films (The Cynic, the Rat & the Fist, 1977) and much more. Giorgelli’s performance as the sex-hungry maid is one of the film’s few real highlights as she clearly savors the opportunity to show off her impressive physique in a steamy shower scene as well as in her hilarious sexual encounter with the village idiot.

Gabriella Giorgelli saves the day

Another familiar face is that of blonde German beauty Margaret Rose Keil, who at the time was well-known to Italian audiences for her appearances in a long-running series of TV commercials and prints ads for the vermouth brand Punt e Mes, as well as a bunch of sexy film roles. But unlike Giorgelli, Keil is poorly utilized in the rather thankless role of poor Enrichetta – she basically just gets naked and dies. Finally, there’s Polish-born actress Halina Zalewska (the older half-sister of the more famous Ely Galleani) in the role of Parisi’s frosty and dissatisfied blonde wife. Zalewska had a very successful acting career in the 1960s, when she appeared in such memorable films as the Antonio Margheriti’s gothic chiller The Long Hair of Death (1964) alongside Barbara Steele, the spaghetti western The Bounty Hunter (1967) and the bizarre crime/giallo hybrid Date for a Murder (1967). But, unfortunately, Zalewska’s career took a nose dive in the early 1970s – in fact this was to become her final film as she died tragically in a fire in her Roman apartment in 1976. La polizia brancola nel buio was hardly a good swansong for her as she isn’t given anything interesting to do here.

There isn’t much more to say, really. No one in their right mind would ever mistake La polizia brancola nel buio for anything even resembling a good film. It’s simply an awful piece of celluloid, and yet it is strangely endearing in all its awfulness. I suppose it’s the film’s sheer rarity and tastelessness, coupled with its glaring amateurishness and complete lack of logic sense that somewhat manages to work in its favor if you’re in a rather generous state of mind. Plus we do get a fair amount of tits and gore – and usually at the same time too – so if boobs and bloodshed satisfy your needs (even when it’s executed without any sense of style), or you just feel like exploring the very tackiest depths of the giallo format, then La polizia brancola nel buio is unquestionably a film for you!

© 2010 Johan Melle

The cast:

??? as Giorgio D’Amato

??? as Edmondo Parisi

Elena Veronese as Sara

Halina Zalewska as Eleonora Parisi

Gabriella Giorgelli as Lucia

??? as Dr. Dalla

??? as Alberto

Margaret Rose Keil as Enrichetta

??? as The village idiot

??? as The inn-keeper

??? as The inn-keeper’s wife

Dangerous Women/Le diaboliche

2010-02-23T09:48:00.000-08:00

Italy, 1989

Directed by Luigi Russo

Cast:
Lisbeth Hummel, Pierangelo Pozzato, Beatrice Palme, Giulia Urso

After recently watching and enjoying Formula for a Murder (1985), Alberto De Martino’s nice little thriller about an evil plot to scare a wealthy wheelchair-bound woman to death, I kept feeling an irresistible urge to also check out Luigi Russo’s Dangerous Women since it has a pretty similar plot. But as it turns out, the two films are rather dissimilar in execution.

The plot centers around Elise Manning (Lisbeth Hummel), a wealthy heiress who is confined to a wheelchair. Although good-natured, Elise seems to be a rather lonely woman with few friends, and she lives by herself in a large mansion with only her housekeeper, Vivian (Beatrice Palme), and the chauffeur-cum-gardener, Angelo (Pierangelo Pozzato), to keep her company. The lonely Elise is so appreciative of Vivian’s hard work and companionship that she has decided to make her the sole beneficiary of her will. But poor Elise also suffers from a weak heart. So weak in fact that a friendly nurse named Giulia (Giulia Urso) comes by every day to check up on her. The doctor has said that any strong emotion could be fatal for her, so Elise needs to be quite careful! Hmm... care to take a guess where this is going?
Well, as you might have anticipated, Vivian has no intention of slaving around in a maid’s uniform for decades while she waits for Elise to croak. Instead she and Angelo (who is her lover) hatch a diabolical plot to frighten Elise to death – thus making her death seems natural.

Elise

The hellish housekeeper - one of the dangerous women alluded to in the title

Setting her evil plan in motion, Vivian tells Elise that she has to go away for some days because her sister has been hospitalized. Elise says she’ll manage on her own for a few days but shortly after Vivian’s departure bad things start happening. Elise (who had been sitting in the sofa) discovers that her wheelchair is gone, and with no one else in the villa, she has little choice but to get down on the floor and crawl around the house in search of her missing wheelchair but to no avail. Elise quickly senses that she isn’t alone. Someone seems to be hiding in the mansion – someone who means her harm. But Elise comes to realize that whoever is lurking around in the villa doesn’t seem to be out to kill her but rather to terrorize and torment her. Alone, defenseless and heartsick, Elise is nevertheless determined to get the better of her tormentor but will her weak heart be able to sustain the ordeal?

Elise fights to stay alive

Director Luigi Russo is a fairly obscure figure in the world of Italian B movie cinema. He started off writing the screenplays of a few decamerotic films in the early 1970s, before moving on to write and direct his own films. The majority of Russo’s directorial output consists of little-known erotica efforts such as The Black Maid (1976) with Ines Pellegrini, and Blue Island (1982), a Blue Lagoon rip-off starring Sabrina Siani.

It is worth taking note of the fact that Russo didn’t merely write and direct his own movies – he frequently did editing and cinematography duties on them as well. To be honest, I suspect that his motives for doing so have less to do with him being a true auteur and more to with the fact that it’s cheaper to make a film when you’re doing everything by yourself. Nevertheless, this does mean that Russo was pretty deeply involved in most of the films he made, and this is also the case with Dangerous Women, which he wrote, directed, photographed, edited and even produced through his own company, Luigi Russo Produzione. It was the first film he had directed in almost seven years and it is a clear departure from the sex romps he used to specialize in. Russo’s only prior experiences with the thriller format is limited to co-writing the dismal giallo La morte scende leggera (1972) and directing the unreleased thriller Paura (1972), which starred German actress Kai Fischer and a young Patrizia Gori at the start of her career. But in spite of his somewhat limited experience with the genre, Dangerous Women is proof that Russo is still able to craft a reasonably engaging thriller that manages to hold ones attention.

Though sometimes referred to as a giallo, Dangerous Women can’t really be classified as such, although it admittedly has a few similarities to the twistful inheritance-plot gialli of the 1960s. But more than anything the plot is a reworking of the classic Les Diaboliques (1955) – a fact which is clearly acknowledged in the film’s original Italian title, Le diaboliche – with a couple of new twists and ideas thrown into the mix. The most notable difference is of course the fact that the imperiled leading lady is wheelchair-bound – a plot point that has been snatched from Formula for a Murder, which, of course, is a Les Diaboliques rip-off itself, although a highly enjoyable one.

Just to be clear, though: Dangerous Women is nowhere near as good as Formula but it has more going for it than you might expect from a late 1980s Italian thriller. The pacing is surprisingly snappy as Russo wastes very little time with setting up the plot before jumping right into the terrorization of Elise. Russo uses the large villa setting to good effect and manages to create some nice tension as neither the paralyzed heroine nor the audience is exactly sure about who’s hiding there. And the scenes where the frightened Elise crawls around in the large mansion while clutching to a kitchen knife do a good job of establishing Elise as both vulnerable and highly exposed to her tormentor.

Terror in the dark

Seeing as there are only four characters in the entire film, it goes without saying that there are few kills, and the few deaths that we do get are not gory since Russo is clearly favoring psychological terror over splattery mayhem. There is, however, a surprisingly brutal scene where the mysterious tormentor violently attacks Elise with her own wheelchair. Filmed from the attacker’s POV as he repeatedly smashes the wheelchair into the poor defenseless woman, this relentless and prolonged sequence has a mean-spirited streak to it and is actually very unpleasant to watch.

Nasty wheelchair violence

On the technical side, Russo’s cinematography is fairly slick, and Luigi Ceccarelli provides an excellent synthesizer score that underlines the suspense perfectly. But the one really serious complaint I have about Dangerous Women (outside of a completely asinine surprise twist at the end) is that the concept is stretched out too far. At 90 minutes, the film is overlong. It would probably have worked better as a one-hour installment in an anthology series à la the popular 1970s TV series Thriller but there isn’t quite enough plot to fill an hour and a half, and consequently we get a bit too many long stretches with Hummel crawling around on the floor to the strains of Ceccarelli’s agreeable synthesizer score.

Crawling aplenty

The film is further hampered by a horrendous English dubbing job that is so flat and un-emotive that it seriously undermines the performances of all the actors. Thankfully, there’s only a limited amount of dialogue, which makes it more bearable but it’d still be nice to be able to watch this one in Italian with subtitles as I’m certain it would benefit from it.

Character motivation is at times a little shaky too. Because Elise has little interaction with other characters, we get rather limited access to what goes on inside her head, and this begins to pose somewhat of a problem once Elise starts making improbable choices. It seems highly illogical that when the nurse who checks up on her every day stops by, Elise pretends that everything is like normal because she’s too proud to ask for help. This sort of bizarre character motivation is hard to swallow but as the film progresses, we gradually begin to accept Elise’s determination and stubbornness as she lets her tormentors’ plot unfold while she starts preparing a trap of her own. In this regard, the Elise character is quite similar to the heroine of José Maria Forqué’s underrated giallo In the Eye of the Hurricane (1971), who also seemingly sits passive and lets a plot to murder her play out.

The casting of the film is quite interesting. The wheelchair-bound heroine is played by Danish actress Lisbeth Hummel, who is the real-life wife of Luigi Russo. In the 1970s, she appeared in several film directed by her husband but her most famous part was unquestionably her leading role in Walerian Borowczyk’s notorious arthouse shocker The Beast (1975). Hummel retired from films at the end of the 1970s but after a 10 year break from the limelight her husband convinced her to return before the camera to play the leading role in Dangerous Women. At the time she was pushing 40, and though she was still pretty, Hummel certainly looks far more ordinary and unglamorous here than in her glory days. This works to the film’s advantage, though, as Hummel convincingly looks the part of the lonely and vulnerable wheelchair-bound heiress. Since she spends much of the film in isolation and doesn’t have a great deal of dialogue, she is instead required to rely on her body language and facial expressions to convey the character’s emotions. On top of that, the role is very physically challenging as Hummel has to spend much of her screen time crawling the floors of the massive villa. I must say she manages this task really well, and her performance is what really holds the film together.

Hummel gets ample opportunity to play on fear and terror

It’s difficult to fully assess the performances of the three remaining actors because they are all badly dubbed and not given that much to do. Pierangelo Pozzato and Beatrice Palme act appropriately slimy as the greedy servant couple but neither of them are able to transcend the clichéd nature of their characters. Pozzato has just the right face for this type of unsympathetic role, though, and aficionados of extreme Euro-sleaze will probably remember him fondly for his role as one of the escaped death row prisoners terrorizing a women’s penitentiary in the unforgettable W.I.P. trash masterpiece Blade Violent (1983). Palme, while far less prolific in genre cinema, has enjoyed a long and successful career – appearing in everything from the obscure Fred Williamson action film Foxtrap (1986) to the internationally revered Cinema Paradiso (1988).
My favorite in the supporting cast, though, is the sexy Giulia Urso, who plays the growingly suspicious nurse who comes to check on Elise. Unfortunately, she never managed to make much of a career for herself. Outside of a supporting role in Sergio Martino’s WW2 action flick Casablanca Express (1989), she only appeared in a handful of pretty non-noteworthy films.

Pozzato and Palme as the bad guys

In sum, Dangerous Women is a pretty nice entry in the extremely short-lived fad of Italian wheelchair-terror flicks (actually, outside of this and Formula for a Murder there doesn’t really seem to be any other examples of this sub-genre, although a wheelchair does feature prominently in Leandro Lucchetti’s oh so subtly titled Bloody Psycho (1989), which I’ll probably cover later on). Anyway... as long as you’re able to overlook the incredibly stupid ending, the rest of the film is – in spite of its flaws – a fairly enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half, so I say give it a shot if you liked Formula for a Murder.

© 2010 Johan Melle

The cast:

Lisbeth Hummel as Elise Manning

Beatrice Palme as Vivian

Pierangelo Pozzato as Angelo

Giulia Urso as Giulia