Free Hand For A Tough Cop (Umberto Lenzi 1976) Review

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“Who would've believed it, me playing a hero? I would have been a lot happier if you'd left me in jail.” Umberto Lenzi was a skilled journeyman director, but he was perhaps at his happiest when toiling in the criminal underbelly during Italy's tumultuous 'Years of Lead' in the 1970s, with films such as The Tough Ones and The Cynic The Rat and The Fist. Brandishing a keen eye for sudden flashes of violence as well as a darkly dry sense of humour, Lenzi's Free Hand For A Tough Cop acts as a proto-buddy-cop flick, featuring a mismatched pair on opposing sides of the law as they attempt to track down a remorseless criminal in order to save the life of an innocent child...

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Stage Fright (Michele Soavi, 1987) Blu-Ray Review

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“What a disaster, and just a week from opening night.” By 1987 the slasher movie was in rapid decline, having dominated the popular cinema of the 1980s with masked murderers slaying their way through camp grounds and holidays alike with gore-drenched abandon. However, if there's still some juice left in the squeeze, you could be sure the Italians will find it, and in this case Michele Soavi (Dellamorte Dellamore) made a name for himself by injecting a fairly standard slasher flick with an invigorating sense of energy and a love for the horror genre...

 

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Dial Help (Ruggero Deodato, 1988) Review

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“I'm expecting an important call – a call that never comes.” Directed by Ruggero Deodato, the rogue journeyman filmmaker behind the notorious video nasty Cannibal Holocaust, this is, put simply, a movie about killer telephones jealously menacing a fashion model – why would you need a longer introduction than that?...

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The Pyjama Girl Case (Flavio Mogherini, 1978) Blu-Ray Review

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“Just because it's written down it's true, huh?” By 1978 the heyday of the Italian murder mystery – or 'giallo' – had been and gone, but that didn't mean there was nothing of interest still to rinse out of the well-strained genre. Writer/Director Flavio Mogherini's murder mystery casts aside much of the classic tropes and visual styling of the typical giallo film (black gloved killers, gleaming knives, an escalating series of grisly deaths, European glamour) in favour of – egads! - just one murder in, of all places, Australia's Sydney with its sun, sea, and sand. Do not go into this movie expecting killer thrills by any means and, whatever you do, don't read the spoilerific blurb on the back of the box!...

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Formula For A Murder (Alberto De Martino 1985) DVD Review

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“I must kill a man.” The 1980s were a bit of a lean time for gialli (the heyday of which was the early 1970s) what with splatterific American slasher movies dominating the horror genre at that time, but there was still room for Italian murder mysteries amidst the Jasons and Freddys and Michaels. Alberto De Martino's slow-burn killer thriller combines the priesthood, repressed memories, and that old motivator money in a story about a wealthy paraplegic sportswoman who spirals into a whirlwind of love and murder...

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Syndicate Sadists (Umberto Lenzi, 1975) DVD Review

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“I'm not scared now that you're here.” All the boys admire Rambo (Thomas Milian, The Cynic, The Rat, and The Fist), the rogue with a scuffed heart of gold, as director Umberto Lenzi (Nightmare Beach) mashes Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy with The Godfather for this well-crafted poliziotteschi where a drifter rides in on a (steel) horse and gets entangled with two criminal gangs. Italy in the 1970s was a hotbed of headline-grabbing violence from high profile kidnappings to home-grown terrorism, and it was against this backdrop that 'Eurocrime' films dashed onto silver screens in a cacophony of squealing tires and blazing guns...

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Delirium (Lamberto Bava, 1987) Blu-Ray Review

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“Sounds like you enjoy playing the victim.” The 1970s saw an explosion of 'giallo' films produced by Italian filmmakers after the success of Dario Argento's début film The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, a murder mystery that twisted sex and violence together in a bravura package of style and warped psychology. As the decade wore on the flood turned into a trickle, but the American slasher movie craze that came in the wake of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13^th (1980) saw somewhat of a revival of blood-soaked mysteries in Italy with the likes of Tenebrae (1982) and A Blade In The Dark (1983). However, once again, the craze waned, but spurts of brilliance still emerged with Argento's Terror at the Opera (1987) – in which a bullet penetrates a peep hole to brain-splattering effect – or, in this case, Lamberto Bava's psycho-sexual mystery slasher Delirium (aka La Foto Di Gioia) – in which a woman with a big, veiny eyeball for a face gets skewered with a pitchfork … now that got you intrigued, didn't it?

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Blastfighter (Lamberto Bava, 1984) DVD Review

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“You only get peace when you can impose it.” Lamberto Bava, son of the iconic Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, never quite achieved the creative heights of his father's catalogue of cinematic treats (Mario kick started the entire giallo movement with The Girl Who Knew Too Much in 1963), but he has nonetheless carved out a recognised and beloved niche in Italian genre cinema. Macabre, Body Puzzle, A Blade in the Dark, Delirium, and particularly Demons, will all be familiar to aficionados of European exploitation movies, but whereas Demons dispensed with characterisation and any shred of plot logic in favour of scatter gun gore, Lamberto's 1984 action thriller Blastfighter crafts a character-rich story which dispenses frequent action while still keeping the viewer emotionally invested...

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Man From Deep River (Umberto Lenzi, 1972) DVD Review

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“He dared the forbidden river where adventure ends and hell begins!” This former 'video nasty' is regarded as the first film in the cycle of Italian cannibal movies that reared their bloody heads throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Yet Umberto Lenzi's Man From Deep River – otherwise known as Deep River Savages, Sacrifice!, or Mondo Cannibale – ironically features very little flesh eating. Instead, the film focuses more on the culture clash that comes about when a photojournalist from the western world is captured by a remote tribe somewhere in the wilds between Thailand and Burma - as 88 Films' DVD presentation inspires heated debate...

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Massacre In Dinosaur Valley (Michele Massimo Tarantini, 1985) DVD Review

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“It's the land of the Aquata, they're also head hunters, still practising. What's more, some of them are cannibals besides, but I hear the God they venerate is some kind of animal.” The Italian cannibal movie cycle seemingly died a spectacular death in 1981 with Umberto Lenzi's savage Cannibal Ferox, which was otherwise known in American under the particularly memorable title 'Make Them Die Slowly' when it was released stateside in 1983 to thunderous success (1980's Cannibal Holocaust didn't hit America until 1985). The noise of the box office kerchings rang all the way back to Italy and so, further bolstered by the warm reception afforded to jungle adventure romp Romancing The Stone, the Italians returned to the green inferno to deliver Massacre In Dinosaur Valley to the masses...

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Milano Calibro 9 (Fernando Di Leo, 1972) Blu-Ray Review

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“Society makes its criminals suffer and after that it ignores them.” Fernando Di Leo's crime flick gets off to an explosive start as, to the energetic sounds of prog rock, a package containing a large quantity of cash is transferred from one person to another amidst the autumnal streets and neon-lit subways of Milan, only for the real package to get switched with a fake somewhere along the line. The carriers are braced one-by-one in increasingly violent fashion – heads smashed into vases, faces slashed with straight razors – but to no avail; the money has vanished. So now, according to the rules of this vicious gang, they must be taken care of – by blowing them all up with dynamite! Now that's how you start a movie...

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Flavours of the Month: December 2017...

Joe D'Amato goes Beyond The Darkness, room for improvement for The Walking Dead, and second chances are just some of what's been setting the tone of my December 2017...

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Live Like A Cop Die Like A Man (Ruggero Deodato 1976) DVD Review

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“What are we coming to when they let common criminals join the police?” Ruggero Deodato will perhaps forever be inextricably linked to his notorious grand guignol video nasty Cannibal Holocaust, but the famous Italian director tried his hands at numerous genres. He dabbled in gialli with the likes of The Washing Machine, for instance, albeit in the 1990s long after the movement's heyday in the 1970s. Indeed, three genres ruled supreme at the Italian box office – the aforementioned gialli (bloody murder mysteries), sex comedies, and crime films (generally referred to as poliziotteschi), and it is in this latter category that Deodato produced one of his finest films. Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man (what a fantastic title!) is an ultra-charged poliziottescho that knows no bounds of shame, as tough-as-nails coppers take on the dangerous world of crime...

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The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave (Emilio P Miraglia, 1971) Blu-Ray Review

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“It's not uncommon for a man to do strange things to get his kicks.” The opening companion piece to Miraglia's 1972 gothic-tinged giallo The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave treads similar ground to its successor. Miraglia juxtaposes the old and new worlds whereby the cutting edge design of the 1970s sits amidst a crumbling ancestral home built from stone and sordid family secrets. Riddled with nihilism, this forever-twisting tale of a sadomasochistic fetishist and his not-quite-so-dead wife is soaked-through with moral decay...

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The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (Emilio P Miraglia, 1972) Blu-Ray Review

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“The Corpse That Didn't Want To Die!” Following on from The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave (1971), writer/director Emilio P. Miraglia once again dived into the glamorous pool of the lurid European murder mystery with The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (otherwise known as The Lady In Red Kills Seven Times), a violent clash of morals set against a fractured backdrop where two worlds collide: that of a Gothic castle and that of a modernist fashion house. This is a film consumed with ideas of wealth and the inevitability of hereditary sin...

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Emanuelle and The Last Cannibals (Joe D'Amato, 1977) DVD Review

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“The tribe we are to locate are indeed cannibals – tie up their victims, rip open their bellies, tear out their insides, and eat it.” Joe D'Amato – otherwise known as Aristide Massaccesi – the director of such grotesque delights as Anthropophagous (1980), is unlikely to go down in the annals of cinema history as a master filmmaker with a deeply considered artistic vision. His work may skew towards slap dash schlock, but he got the job done and knew to never play coy: if his audiences wanted devoured innards and boobies flopping about everywhere then that's exactly what he was going to give them – and this is undoubtedly the case with Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals...

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Four Flies On Grey Velvet (Dario Argento, 1971) DVD Review

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“Seeing all these worms make a living out of death, kind of knocks the fear out of you, right?” Dario Argento's third giallo film and, at the time, intended to be his last, Four Flies On Grey Velvet is a curious mix of murder mystery and offbeat comedy in which a drummer in a prog rock band finds himself framed for murder – but his blackmailer has no intention of calling the cops on him, so what is it they're after?

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Death Walks At Midnight (Luciano Ercoli, 1972) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

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“I'm telling you the truth – believe it or not!” Utilising much of the same cast and crew as he had done with his previous two forays into the giallo genre, Director Luciano Ercoli's third – and final – giallo film is less interested in murder and mayhem at the hands of a black-clad killer and much more taken with its leading lady. Having been portrayed in The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970) as a free-love nympho, Nieves Navarro (who would go on to spend the rest of her life with Ercoli as husband and wife) advanced up the ladder of gialli's roster of ladies in peril. In Death Walks On High Heels (1971), Navarro is portrayed with love as a far more rounded, yet still sexual being, whose forthright attitude enthrals or confounds the men in her life. However, in what was to become one of her strongest roles, Navarro (aka Susan Scott) kept her clothes on and her fists at the ready for Death Walks At Midnight, which could arguably be considered the 'girl power beacon' of the entire genre...

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Death Walks On High Heels (Luciano Ercoli, 1971) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

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“With this razor you won't feel the pain right away, but it will leave your body covered with horrible scars.” Luciano Ercoli teamed up again with his Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970) stars Nieves Navarro (aka Susan Scott) and Simon Andreu, and giallo screenwriter extraordinaire Ernesto Gastaldi, for Death Walks On High Heels – a deeply fetishistic thriller. A strip tease artist flees Paris with a Doctor, but soon finds the quaint English countryside is nowhere near as safe as she had hoped...

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The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Mario Bava, 1963) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

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“Don't you see it over there? Blood. Blood everywhere!” Originally intended to be a frothy romcom about tourists on an adventure in Rome, when horror maestro Mario Bava (Black Sunday) entered the project, it changed into something altogether darker. Not only did Bava transform the film, but he altered the face of murder mystery cinema. Tracing its roots through Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, the German 'Krimi' films, and Hitchcock, the giallo film – named after the yellow colour of pulp novels detailing lurid murders and twisted crimes – was birthed by Bava.

The genre, which he would finesse the following year with the technicolour terror of Blood and Black Lace, was turned – by Dario Argento (The Bird With The Crystal Plumage), Sergio Martino (All The Colours of the Dark), et al – into a hugely popular cinematic movement. So successful were the gialli, in-part through their sexuality and blood-splashing violence, that the American slasher film came to pass (Bava's own A Bay of Blood gave particular inspiration to Friday the 13^th Part 2). The importance of giallo films in the history of genre cinema cannot be overstated. The transition, from paperback to celluloid, happened here: The Girl Who Knew Too Much...

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