Census Bloodbath: Marriage Can Be Murder

Year:
1985
Director:
Alberto De Martino
Cast:
Christina Nagy, David Warbeck, Carroll Blumenberg
Run Time:
1 hour 36 minutes

Plot: Formula for a Murder (AKA 7, Hyden Park - La casa maledetta) is set in New York state and follows Joanna (Christina Nagy), a rich woman who has had paraplegia since she was sexually assaulted by a man dressed as a priest and thrown down a flight of stairs (there's your clue that this is an Italian movie, if the title didn't already tip you off). After marrying her athletic trainer Craig (David Warbeck of The Beyond and The Black Cat), she finds herself in the middle of a tangled web of deceit, as (mid-plot spoiler alert) he is working with her friend Ruth (Carroll Blumenberg) to murder her and inherit her fortune, killing anybody who gets in the way of this plan.

Analysis: I would have straight-up removed Formula for a Murder from my Census Bloodbath list if not for two things. 1) There is a dream sequence that adds an additional onscreen kill, proving that the movie was at least slightly interested in being a slasher and not just a Hitchcockian thriller with occasional plot-necessary murders. 2) This is unmistakably a giallo movie.

It's a late-period giallo, certainly, but director and co-writer Alberto De Martino (who also made 1982's vividly unmemorable Blood Link) put in a black-gloved killer and some overheated murder melodrama, and you simply can't ignore that, even though the movie mostly revolves around a single, constantly-foiled murder plot than a constant string of body count murders.

Anyway, one major reason I was highly motivated to try and remove the movie from the list, beyond its failures as a slasher, is that it is a deathly dull experience. A movie with this little happening requires a strong character study to prop it up, and nobody onscreen has the barest wisp of a personality. And while Ruth and Craig are at least brought to life by competent actors, the actual lead delivers her poorly translated dialogue with all the fervor of a stoned teenager offering you pretzel samples at a mall. Formula for a Murder is Christina Nagy's only credited film role, and if you ask me, her resume coulda done with one less.

That said, it's not an entirely terrible slasher. There is a profoundly creepy recurring motif of a priest slowly approaching Joanna while holding a doll that both has these unsettling, swollen eyes and tinkles out a high-pitched nursery rhyme. Every time that comes back, it'll send a shiver down the spine. And the kills, while infrequent, aren't half-bad. They're not particularly gory by any stretch of the imagination, but they're more brutal and affective than they have to be, particularly a throat slashing via straight razor that shows how much effort it might actually take to carve through all that irritating gristle contained in the human neck.

There is also a scene where Joanna has a literal screaming orgasm that feels like it belongs in a proper 1970s giallo, so that's something. However, the fact that we are forced to spend so much time with her outside of that scene has a profoundly deleterious effect on the movie. She's tedious even at the best of times, but she can't even get survival right, because her Final Girl sequence one-ups Laurie Strode's "hit 'em once, take a nap" strategy by having her mostly just assume that because Craig has briefly passed out, this means that he has simply expired of his own accord. Maybe she figured that she had bored him to death.

Killer: Craig (David Warbeck)

Final Girl: Joanna (Christina Nagy)

Best Kill: This is probably my pick because it's the only one that feels different from the others, but one of the priests is slammed ruthlessly about the face with a shovel in a protracted and quite intense sequence. 

Sign of the Times: There's a whole lot of business about trying to reach a cordless phone handset that has been tossed down the stairs.

Scariest Moment: In Joanna's nightmare, she is wheeled away helplessly by an increasingly menacing priest.

Weirdest Moment: Dr. Sernich (Rossano Brazzi of Fear City) patiently explains that, even though Joanna's condition is fragile, hardcore sex won't kill her as long as it is an act of love.

Champion Dialogue: “You won't have time to feel sorry for yourself when we're married."

Body Count: 5

1. Father Peter has his throat slit with a straight razor.
2. Father Davis is bludgeoned repeatedly in the face with a shovel.
3. Dream Priest is stabbed to death by Joanna.
4. Ruth has her throat slashed with a straight razor.
5. Craig succumbs to his stab/falling-out-a-window wounds.

TL;DR: Formula for a Murder is boring as all hell, but it has a few exquisitely creepy moments to its name.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 803

Census Bloodbath: Twin-sanity

Year: 1982

Director: Alberto De Martino

Cast: Michael Moriarty, Penelope Milford, Geraldine Fitzgerald 

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Blood Link is an early 80's slasher made by Italians, which a stone cold horror scholar could have sniffed out just from the poster, which borrows heavily from the poster for the same year's The New York Ripper, and by borrows heavily I mean wholesale steals the entire image except for Michael Moriarty's face shoved in there at the bottom. That kind of brazen thievery bears the distinct markings of the Italian horror producers of the late 20th century (the same group of people who, you might remember, advertised Twitch of the Death Nerve as The Last House on the Left Part 2 even though it came out several years before Last House).

You can also tell from the fact that every female character takes her top off at some point in the movie.

In Blood Link, Dr. Craig Mannings (Michael Moriarty) is living his best life, building an experimental therapy practice with his girlfriend who he refuses to marry, Dr. Julie Warren (Penelope Milford). Unfortunately this revolutionary new therapy (which involves electrocuting people through acupuncture needles - neat!) has unlocked a part of his brain and he can now occasionally see through the eyes of his long-lost conjoined twin brother Keith (Michael Moriarty). Wouldn't you know it, but this twin is a bit evil, and has been wandering around Germany murdering women for who knows how long.

He heads off to Europe to see if he can't drag his twin back to the states to get help, but becomes mixed up in his twin's evil schemes, because having the same face as somebody who has been murdering people in broad daylight is a little bit of a liability. He arrives just as a case of mistaken identity has thrown Keith into the path of Craig's former patient, prizefighter Bud Waldo (Cameron Mitchell of Memorial Valley Massacre, Terror Night, Without Warning, Blood and Black Lace, Silent Scream, and The Demon, phew) and his daughter Christine (Sarah Langenfeld).

Plus we get a whole bunch of shots straight out of The Parent Trap.

Blood Link very clearly wants to be an elegant early-70's style giallo like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, but it's missing one key element: Dario Argento. His early work was just as nasty-minded and misogynistic as this movie is, but he at least presented it with style and panache. Alberto De Martino wouldn't know panache if it sprayed blood all over his fish tank. 

Sure, he gets a few cracks in at some pretty shots (it's very nice whenever the camera peers up into the mirrored ceiling of a prostitute's room, and there's one solid shot of the aforementioned fish tank lighting up an artfully arranged corpse), and Ennio Morricone's lush score makes a solid effort to class up the proceedings (minus the moments when the titular blood link is activated, which just sounds like a telegram coming in). But Blood Link is just plain nasty - cruel and gross in all the wrong ways.

I'm not saying that the slasher genre isn't built on the backbone of objectifying then murdering women, but rarely has that approach been so cut and dry, converting the already unsubtle subtext of phallic knife slayings into out-and-out text with clunky dialogue about Keith's impotence that it tries to gussy up with lots and lots of pointless philosophizing about twins. It has nothing to say, it just knows it needs to fill up the scenes between uncomfortable rapey menacing of women with something.

It's not scary other than when you're contemplating who out in the world would actually find this entertaining (the climax of the movie is a rape scene in a park, which should show you how little interest this has in really being a psychological horror film), and it's certainly not fun. It's just... unpleasant.

Meanwhile, Michael Moriarty continues to fuck his way across Europe like a regular Robert Langdon.

It doesn't even have the decency to at least spruce up the murder scenes with fun special effects. No, just a lot of grunting and stabbing in the back, and moving right along. And Michael Moriarty does not provide a fun presence to spend 100 minutes with. He might be playing two characters, but he's giving about half a performance between them. Every line spoken by Craig is spoken in a miserable monotone like Ross saying "hi..." in the pilot episode of Friends, and Keith is mostly performed the same except for the random moments where he becomes Jim Carrey as the Grinch.

This is exploitation filmmaking at its most bare bones. It's not quite pornography, not quite horror, not worth your time. It definitely makes sense why they didn't even bother making Blood Link its own poster. I don't want you to mistake me as saying this is one of the worst slasher films I've ever seen - it's not even in the bottom 100 - but it certainly gave me no pleasure to watch. It's largely competent at putting images on the screen and presents its tawdry narrative with clarity, so it's at least above par for an entry this deep into any Census Bloodbath year.

Killer: Keith Mannings (Michael Moriarty)

Final Girl: Julie Warren (Penelope Milford), but only as an afterthought

Best Kill: The reveal of how the twins' parents died, which shows them having sex in a garage for some reason and being hilariously crushed by a speeding truck.

Sign of the Times: We just can't stop calling people with creepy messages on those courtesy telephones at the airport, can we?

Scariest Moment: When training with Bud, Keith starts to get more and more violent and intense.

Weirdest Moment: One other thing the twins have in common is that they like to stir jam into their coffee.

Champion Dialogue: "Breakfast in bed is a disgusting luxury. I love it."

Body Count: 9

Cougar is stabbed in the back.

Prostitute #1 has her head smashed through a window.

Bud Waldo has a heart attack while being beaten to death.

Christine is stabbed to death.

Prostitute #2 is stabbed in the back.

Smuggler is stabbed in the chest.

Keith (or was it Craig? cue dramatic music) is stabbed in the back.

Mom and

Dad are crushed with a truck in flashback.

TL;DR: Blood Link is trying to be something better than it is, and it is failing.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1080