by Wallace, Amy
2. Four FliesonGreyVelvet (1972)
Director: Dario Argento
Stars: Michael Brandon, Mimsy Farmer, Bud Spencer
The giallo is one of Bava’s innovations, a species of “whodunit” on which a great many of his disciples were to distinguish themselves, among them future “maestro of the macabre” Dario Argento. Known as gialli in the old country because of the yellow covers of the original pulps, the tradition has more in common with Edgar Wallace and Alfred Hitchcock than Agatha Christie, radically re-inventing the mousetrap while paying lip-service to its archetypes—faceless gloved assassins, scantily clad victims, baffled cops, and inspired amateur sleuths who sift through the red herrings before unmasking a killer in the last reel, invariably as a result of a misperceived, seemingly insignificant clue trailed in the title or first act. An engaging generic quirk dictates that the plot nearly always turns on a titular animal that fails to appear in the film itself and whose non-existence or non-appearance holds the key to the mystery (TheBirdwiththe CrystalPlumage [1970], TheBlack Bellyofthe Tarantula [1971], The Scorpion with Two Tails [1988], etc.).
While neither the first nor the most accomplished of its kind, Four Flies finds a place on this list thanks to its byzantine plotting, warped sexual politics, swaggering set pieces, and—of course—that title. Michael Brandon plays a permanently stoned drummer who spends the film believing he’s a killer in a series of bizarre, paranoid events. He’s teamed with a gay private eye, who’s hired on the strength of his claim to having “never solved a case,” and Bud Spencer is a mysterious dropout named God whose appearances are signaled by an appropriately messianic Ennio Morricone choral motif. Add to this a recurring dream involving an execution in a sun-drenched Middle Eastern marketplace, a laser process for retrieving images from the eyes of the dead, and the most elegantly eroticized auto accident ever committed to film, and you have one of my favorite flicks of all time, nationality and taxonomy aside.
3. Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)
Director: Lucio Fulci
Stars: Florinda Bolkan, Tomas Milian, Irene Papas
Fulci’s finest hour and a half, and a further sampling of the transgressive possibilities of the giallo. The victims this time are pubescent schoolboys rather than the usual fashionably underdressed women; the string of murders tears apart the social fabric of a sleepy southern Italian village. The bewildered parents turn on the local witch, beating her to death before a tabloid journalist and the town slut succeed in unmasking the real culprit. To give away more would do the film’s all-too-plausible “twist” a disservice. Suffice to say, this distinctly personal work is one of the earliest films to tackle pedophilia head-on and levels the finger of accusation squarely at the hypocritical town elders who shelter the killer, the local censor, and the Catholic Church itself. A brace of strong performances, striking location photography, and a powerfully understated score by Riz Ortolani all combine to make the central set piece of Florinda Bolkan’s Christlike scourging and martyrdom one of the strongest sequences of its kind in Italian cinema. Cinema Paradiso’s stolen kisses will never seem so innocent again . . .
4. Lisa and the Devil (1972)
Director: Mario Bava
Stars: Telly Savalas, Elke Sommer, Alida Valli
Some movies, like wars, can only be understood when inebriated or under the influence of powerful mind-altering substances. This one caught me unawares one Halloween under the influence of a particularly good crop of magic mushrooms, and it simply knocked me for six. To say it tickled my funny bone would be putting it mildly; I couldn’t get up off the floor. . . . Every time I tried, another off-kilter moment or non sequitur would knock me straight back on my ass again. This is quite simply one of the strangest films ever made. Dazed blonde Elke Sommer strays from a tour group viewing a fresco, which shows the devil carrying away the dead, to meander through a string of encounters with a ghostly aristocratic family and their demonic servant, Leandro, played with impish relish by Telly Savalas, complete with lollipop, kid gloves, and a fetching range of quasi-Masonic accessories. The entire film seems unstuck in time and place, with names, identities, and relationships fluctuating alarmingly. (A special mention to Alida Valli, whose deranged matriarch is played as blind in some scenes, while plainly sighted in others.) But as all are apparently dead to begin with, this seems quite in keeping with the nightmare logic conjured from the multicolored chaos by Bava’s swooning lens. At times it appears the cast are simply making it up as they go along, and one can only imagine the director’s imperfect grasp of English allowed some of the weirdest dialogue in cinema history, including mangled chunks of Jim Morrison lyrics and even the Rice Crispies jingle, to find its way into the script. Apparently, Bava’s dad made mannequins for shop windows, and here, the director’s tendency to portray human beings as living dolls reaches its lunatic apogee in one of the most overblown acts of sustained necrophilia ever inflicted on the viewing public. Bracing stuff—too bracing for the producers, who cut the film by nearly half its length and shot additional scenes involving a bewildered exorcist played by Robert Alda, who strives to make sense of the diabolic shambles. It was released in some territories as House of Exorcism and credited to fictional director Mickey Lion (had to get an animal in there somehow!). The original, while admittedly an acquired taste, remains unsurpassed in all its baffling glory.
5. Deep Red (1975)
Director: Dario Argento
Stars: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia
The giallo comes of age with a cinematic tour de force that turned the genre on its head. David Hemmings gives arguably the most nuanced performance of his career as a concert pianist who witnesses the brutal murder of a German clairvoyant by persons unknown. Convinced he holds the key to the killers’ identity, Hemmings finds himself compelled to return to the scene of the crime as his curiosity tilts into an obsessive monomania fanned by the attentions of ambitious reporter Daria Niccolodi, who senses a scoop in the making. Like a demented hall of mirrors, the film’s surfaces conceal countless games of gender, perception, and identity. Among its highlights is the exposure of the assassin’s face in the opening reel (hidden in plain sight, so to speak); the hugely influential score by Argento’s “in-house” band Goblin, which deploys rock ’n’ roll percussion and keyboard rhythms with an intelligence and confidence hitherto unknown in cinema; and the unforgettable “house of the screaming child,” whose labyrinthine corridors look like Gaudi after a hit of Black Pentagram LSD. A bleeding masterpiece.
6. Suspiria (1977)
Director: Dario Argento
Stars: Jessica Harper, Alida Valli, Joan Bennett, Udo Kier
Argento’s breakthrough success burst like a thunderbolt over the heads of international audiences, who simply hadn’t seen it coming and had no prior knowledge of the dark tradition from whence it was spawned. From its opening frames, the viewer is propelled into an utterly different world, where normal rules no longer apply. Conventional narrative logic and even the reassuring tropes of the giallo gleefully abandoned, the story, characters, and dialogue are subservient to a full-throttle assault on the senses; sound and constantly shifting multicolored lighting are amped to the max. Written with Argento’s former spouse, actress Daria Niccolodi, Suspiria and its sequel concern witchcraft, sharing a weird, private cosmology only partly accessible to the casual viewer, and drawing on real-life figures such as Helena Blavatsky, G. I. Gurdjieff, Rudolf Steiner, and decadent romantic poet Thomas De Quincey to weave the grimmest of grim fairytales. The gossamer-thin script details Jessica Harper’s attempts to flee the clutches of a witch cult secretly thriving in an eldritch dance school in the Black Forest. While the young American’s plight is engaging enough, the school is the real star of the show: the academy’s baroque velvet-lined corridors winding ever inwards, the spaces between their walls charged with a malignant intensity, an atmosphere where, in Argento’s words, “the air is thick and hard to breathe. . . .” Initial suspicions that the
wallpaper has overwhelmed not only the cast but the plot itself are weirdly borne out when, in true giallo tradition, the wallpaper is found to contain the vital clue to the lair of Mater Suspiriorum, hidden in plain sight all along! As il maestro succinctly puts it, “Magic is everywhere!”
7. Zombie Flesh-Eaters (1979)
Director: Lucio Fulci
Stars: Tisa Farrow, Ian McCulloch, Richard Johnson
Rushed into production to capitalize on the success of George Romero’s Dawnofthe Dead, this dime-store imitation is to some extent an improvement on the original. Attempting to reconnect the series to its Caribbean roots, Fulci’s unofficial sequel opens with the arrival of a plague-ridden ghost ship in New York Harbor before the action shifts to the godforsaken atoll from whence it came. Trapped on the island, the dim leads throw in their lot with flaky Dr. Menard and his sidekick as they come under siege from a growing legion of the ugliest, skankiest deadfolk the world has ever seen. These shuffling, messed-up zombies are of the old-fashioned, slow-moving variety, which forces the director to keep the plot moving instead—and move it does! It may well be the greatest exploitation movie of all time, a title richly deserved on the basis of one sequence alone: To capitalize on the recent success of Jaws, an otherwise extraneous episode is grafted onto the plot, in which a hot chick goes swimming only to be menaced by a shark. As this is Fulci, not Spielberg, the young lady is topless and the shark is completely real, albeit presumably of a harmless variety. Then, in a twist designed to showcase the undoubted box-office superiority of the zombie, a man in convincing makeup emerges from the sea bed and attacks the shark. He’s not wearing a respirator and probably can’t see a damn without goggles, but he grabs that big, scary-looking fish and sinks his teeth in like a pro, while the naked nymphet flaps her limbs in distress and the weird disco score (courtesy of Fabio Frizzi) throbs on the soundtrack! Things like this usually happen only on posters! Then there’s that bit of business with Olga Karlatos’s eyeball. Words fail me . . .
8. Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
Director: Ruggero Deodato
Stars: Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Gabriel Yorke
No overview of the genre would be complete without mention of what many consider the most infamous horror movie ever made. Deodato began his career as an assistant to Roberto Rossellini, though few could have guessed to what ends his grounding in neorealism would lead. This masterwork concerns four Americans who set out for a remote corner of the rainforest known as the “green inferno” to document the last tribes to practice cannibalism. Months later, a second expedition follows and succeeds in retrieving the film shot by the missing explorers, the cans left unopened by the superstitious natives who believe they contain “evil spirits.” In a plot device “borrowed” to lesser effect by The Blair Witch Project, what follows purports to be the unedited rushes charting the explorers’ demise. The “twist” in the tale comes with the revelation that the atrocities have been committed not by stone-age “savages” but by the filmmakers themselves in their rapacious quest for sensational footage. By the time the locals turn on the documentary crew in the last reel, their fate is richly deserved. While the self-reflexive structure serves as an apt metaphor for Western exploitation of the Third World, the apparent critique of the brutal methods employed by the fictional crew offers a copper-bottomed excuse for Deodato to duplicate their actions, committing to camera a series of scenes utterly beyond the pale of acceptable civilized human conduct in what amounts to—if not an actual “cinema crime”—then at the very least one of the most morally reprehensible motion pictures ever made and an enduring monument to mankind’s capacity for evil. The convincing performances from a largely unfamiliar cast, the weirdly romantic score by Riz Ortolani, and sheer virtuosity of Deodato’s camerawork only add to the outrage. After all, these are acts committed by sophisticated artists fully aware of their implications. Fortunately, the director has not made good on his repeated threats to helm a sequel, despite the slew of cheesy imitations that followed in its wake. As Robert Kerman’s anthropologist puts it: “I wonder who the real cannibals are?”
9. Inferno (1980)
Director: Dario Argento
Stars: Leigh McCloskey, Irene Miracle, Daria Nicolodi, Alida Valli
Argento’s follow-up to Suspiria provoked controversy, and doubtless its inclusion here will be as hotly disputed. Developing an idea from Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis—the conceit of an infernal trinity akin to the three Norns or sorrows—Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears; Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs; and Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness—the maestro turns in his most undisciplined and essentially dreamlike work, a lunatic farrago of murderous events that take place around a Gothic apartment building in New York which conceals the lair of the “Mother of Darkness.” Within minutes, the plot collapses under the weight of the sumptuous, primary-colored imagery and the crazed Keith Emerson score, fragmenting into a series of virtuoso sequences that simply refuse to adhere into anything resembling a conventional narrative. Mumbling, dazed cast members are shuffled on and off or summarily dispatched in mid-flow as if the film can’t even decide on a lead character, let alone a story, and when subtitles start to appear, such as “Later that same night in Rome,” you know you’re in trouble. Consequently, the film was savaged by critics and bombed at the box office, all but bringing the curtain down on Argento’s American career. And yet . . . and yet . . .
In dispensing with the ramshackle plot (seemingly borrowed from Michael Winner’s The Sentinel [1977] and H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Dreams in the Witch House” [1937]), Argento liberates himself to create his finest set pieces, working at full throttle, completely off his trolley and at the top of his form. The opening scene, in which Irene Miracle plunges into the Stygian depths of a submerged basement to retrieve a key lost in the water, has an oneiric power unrivalled in cinema, reminiscent of Jean Cocteau at his very best and early masters of surrealism such as René Magritte. The collapse of the conventional aesthetic superstructure (reminiscent of the collapse of the house itself) forces us to deal with the essentially Jungian subtext, an approach that defeats critical approaches to the work along more traditional Freudian lines. The key lays in the text itself, in the stolen grimoire that floats in and out of this hazy fable, a fictive take on The Mystery of the Cathedrals by real-life alchemist Fulcanelli, whose narrative counterpart is literally discovered skulking beneath the floorboards in the preposterous (albeit strangely appropriate) finale. According to Fulcanelli, Gothic art and architecture are a secret symbolic language, and accordingly Argento’s work acts as an encapsulation and a key to the genre as a whole, the dark art revealed as the art of light. While not a good movie by any conventional standard, Inferno is nonetheless a great movie and an authentic classic of Gothic cinema. Disregard it at your peril.
Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle) emerges from “the Stygian depths of a submerged basement” in Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980). (Inferno © 1981 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.)
10. The Beyond (1981)
Director: Lucio Fulci
Stars: Catriona McColl, David Warbeck
Fulci’s gumbo-flavored phantasmagoria takes off from familiar material (Winner’s The Sentinel, Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” with a dash of The Shining and Clark Ashton Smith’s BookofEibon thrown in for good measure) to craft an incoherent fever-dream of a movie. A demonic surrealist painter in turn-of-the-century Louisiana opens the gates of Hell, only to be beaten to death for his efforts by disgruntled locals, who inter his crucified remains beneath a crumbling gingerbread-Gothic hotel. The action picks up in the present when the efforts of a young New Yorker to reopen the cursed hotel leads to a series of gruesome events that climaxes in the onset of a zombie-induced Armageddon and the descent of the leads into Hell itself. As with other examples of what Fulci and Argento term “total cinema” (a phrase “borrowed” from Truffaut), attempts to analyze or deconstruct events
along traditional generic lines are hopeless. While throwing off countless literary allusions, the film itself (as evidenced by the do not entry sign prominently displayed on the mortuary door) remains stubbornly subliterate, with much of the attempted “dialogue” so gloriously cloth-eared that entire sequences pass without offering the slightest clue as to the character or motivation of the participants. All you can do is sit back and experience this mad dog of a movie until you either vow to put it behind you or submit to its weird rhythms. Of course, a six-pack of beers or liberal recourse to other intoxicants goes a long way towards disengaging the conscious mind so that this visionary epic can be enjoyed on its own freakish terms. Fulci’s excremental opus is lurid and elusive by turns, a stumbling block to conventional notions of art, criticism, and rational thought. Quite simply: Wonderful beyond words!
“And you will face the Sea of Darkness and all therein that may be explored . . .”
—EIBON
Three Borderline Cases . . .
11. Danger: Diabolik (1967)
Director: Mario Bava
Stars: John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Terry Thomas
While fantastical, this Bava masterpiece is by no means a horror film (which precludes its appearance in this roundup); still, it’s far too much fun to go unmentioned. Based on a popular character from the Italian fumetti (comic books), this lil’ firecracker details the deviant exploits of masked super-criminal Diabolik, who is hunted by both Mafiosi and corrupt polizei after repeatedly humiliating a futuristic right-wing government. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis as a follow up to Barbarella, the director turned in the project at a mere fraction of his given budget and simply handed back the balance, cheekily claiming that he “didn’t need it,” thus deliberately forfeiting a career in American cinema—an antiestablishment gesture reminiscent of the film’s antihero himself! Admittedly, the action does slow down a tad in the second act, but the opening heist and resulting chase, involving helicopters and a string of gorgeous high-performance period sports cars in breathtaking Italian Riviera locations, not only rivals but outstrips anything to be seen in the early Bond movies. The Morricone score remains the essence of cool. And what schoolboy wouldn’t dream of Diabolik’s devoted blond assistant Marisa Mell, or the scene in which their love is consummated on a pile of stolen loot in the master criminal’s high-tech underground lair? In fact I’m still dreaming of it now . . .
