Census Bloodbath: Cyrano De Maniac

Note: This movie was only available to me in unsubtitled Italian, so take my review with a huge grain of salt.

Year:
1981
Director:
Bruno Corbucci
Cast:
Pippo Franco, Edwidge Fenech, Sergio Leonardi
Run Time:
1 hour 39 minutes

Plot: Luciano Persichetti (Pippo Franco) is a hapless, big-nosed clothing delivery guy who thinks that he has psychic powers, given his uncanny ability to predict which of the people in his life are about to be targeted by a killer known as The Guardian Angel. He mainly uses this to try to get into bed with the gorgeous parapsychology enthusiast Susanna Luisetti (giallo queen Edwige Fenech of Phantom of Death, Strip Nude for Your Killer, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Bloody Iris, Your Vice is a Locked Room, and Only I Have the Key, and more).

Analysis: I've heard enough about vintage Italian comedy movies to assume that the giallo riff The Nosy One (originally Il Ficcanaso) wasn't going to be any good. However, given its vintage, I held out hope that it might be a Student Bodies-style parody of giallo movies. Alas, this was simply a pure comedy movie with just enough giallo elements for me to not boot it off the Census Bloodbath roster (and reader, I really tried to).

Let's talk about those giallo elements first. It won't take long. This is a movie so desperately disinterested in interrogating the gialli that there isn't a single shot of the killer stalking a victim. The only moment where a gloved killer brandishes a weapon turns out to be a prank. And the only victim who we actually see being attacked is 1) shot by an unseen assailant and 2) survives.

This is basically the slasher version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where a giallo movie is happening just offscreen while the main characters bumble around doing nothing. In fact, I have no idea if my body count is correct, because we barely even see the aftermath of the offscreen kills. I had to deduce that a kill had just happened from the actors' performances and the instrumental score by Franco Micalizzi (which thankfully adds an exaggerated funeral dirge to those moments). I'm sure the dialogue discussed the kills in more detail, but as a visual experience, The Nosy One was even less of a giallo movie than, say, E.T.

At least the comedy is kind of OK. While I can't speak to any dialogue-based humor, the physical comedy is juvenile and broad, but not unappealing. Pippo Franco's performance recalls both Buster Bluth and Mr. Bean, so it wasn't terrible to spend time with him. I wish the comedy had more to do with skewering giallo tropes than farting, but for what it is, it's fine.

The movie also looks pretty good. It has been crisply preserved, and it is for the most part both well lit and legible (save a sequence in a dark warehouse that is dismayingly murky). It generally lacks the abundance of style that the gialli were known for (there is no giallo trope that The Nosy One doesn't fail to evoke), but at least there are plenty of shots where bright reds and greens flood the frame.

Killer: Old Guy

Final Girl: Luciano (Pippo Franco), Susanna (Edwidge Fenech), and basically every other major character

Best Kill: I guess it has to be the death of the dark-haired lady who is vying for Luciano's attention, because at least we see her body being discovered. In true The Nosy One fashion, I have no idea how she died, but I think it was by electrocution.

Sign of the Times: The fact that Italians were so done with giallo movies that they were willing to do whatever this is to it.

Scariest Moment: The moment I realized that we were never actually going to see the killer murdering anybody.

Weirdest Moment: During a conversation with Luciano, Susanna sits there and butters the most enormous pile of toast I've ever seen.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 4; give or take - and not including a dream sequence where both Luciano and Susanna are shot.

1. Man is killed offscreen.
2. Somebody is killed offscreen.
3. Dark-Haired Lady is killed offscreen, potentially by electrocution.
4. Security Guard is killed offscreen.

TL;DR: The Nosy One is unremarkable more than it is truly bad, but it is despicably misguided as a giallo riff.

Rating: 4/10

Census Bloodbath: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dread

 Note: This movie was only available to me in unsubtitled Italian, so take my review with a grain of salt.

Year:
1980
Director:
Aldo Lado
Cast:
Auretta Gay, Pietro Brambilla, Aldo Sassi
Run Time:
1 hour 3 minutes

Plot: A black-gloved killer stalks the cast and crew of the real-life Italian variety TV show Variety. After Ely (Margherita Sestito) discovers the corpse of the dancer Diamante (Mariarita Viaggi), she enlists the help of PA Sandro (Pietro Brambilla of The House with Laughing Windows) and blind switchboard operator Lia (Auretta Gay of Zombie) in getting to the bottom of the mystery.

Analysis: I don't have a lot experience with the giallo genre on the small screen, but there was evidently a pretty big push to get it on the Italian airwaves throughout the 1980s, which more or less culminated in the short-lived 1987 variety show Giallo (something I now desperately want to get my hands on). Because Census Bloodbath is exclusively limited to features rather than series, this is something I have had very little reason to encounter outside of the aborted-miniseries-turned-theatrical-feature The Scorpion with Two Tails, which is uniquely terrible.

Suffice it to say, in the wake of seeing Scorpion, I approached Crime in Via Teulada with some trepidation. You see, the movie (originally titled Delitto in Via Teulada) had previously aired on Variety as a series of five-minute shorts in 1979 before being assembled into a (sort of) feature-length production and debuting in theaters in early 1980.

While the great Sergio Martino delivered us Scorpion, so I know that a filmmaker's legacy doesn't necessarily mean much with TV giallo, I was immediately intrigued by two of the names in the credits: director Aldo Lado (Short Night of Glass Dolls, Who Saw Her Die?) and composer Fabio Frizzi (The Scorpion with Two Tails, The Beyond, Zombie). 

As it turns out, I was right to allow a ray of hope into my heart. While Frizzi is merely competent, delivering a solid Pino-Donaggio-lite orchestration, Lado is firing on as many cylinders as it's possible to fire. While he is still limited by the standards of television storytelling (given the evidence, Italian standards and practices at the time curtailed violence, but not gratuitous boob shots), he puts on a hell of a show.

He stages quite a few exquisite moments of tension and terror, most notably in a sustained chase sequence that sees the character Annie (Barbara D'Urso) being chased from a cherry red stage all the way upstairs to an editing bay via the narrow stairwells surrounding an elevator shaft. He is also extraordinarily skilled at emphasizing Lia's headspace, highlighting how the chaotic sounds and incessantly moving objects in her environment blot out her ability to keep tabs on where she is.

Simply put, Crime in Via Teulada looks fabulous. Moody scenes are drenched in striking pools of light, and sets abound with rotating mirrors, flowing curtains, and everything else you might want out of a stylish giallo production.

Scratch that. Everything you might want, with the exception of outrageous kills. However, the kills that we do get actually aren't half bad. While there are a few more gun deaths than I'd prefer in any given slasher movie, Crime in Via Teulada generally finds ways to stage kills in ways that emphasize the brutality of murder without actually showing much blood or gore.

I don't want to waste my time by trying to convince you that this hourlong movie that Frankensteins together a few shorts from a variety show is some kind of hidden masterpiece, but it is quite lovely for what it is. 

Killer: Lia (Auretta Gay)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: Annie's strangulation by scarf is probably the best, because it accomplishes the "non-gory but still brutal TV kill" vibe with a bit of classic giallo stylization.

Sign of the Times: After Annie is strangled with her scarf, Lia jams it into a spinning tape reel in an editing bay to pretend that it got tangled up in the mechanism. 

Scariest Moment: Annie's extended chase sequence is a real thrill!

Weirdest Moment: In one scene, a costume department worker appears to be ironing her own hand.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 6

1. Diamante is shot in the head.
2. Annie is strangled with a scarf.
3. Ely is blasted in the face with steam.
4. Stagehand is run through with a sword offscreen.
5. Enrico is shot in the back.
6. Lia dies of a gunshot wound.

TL;DR: Crime in Via Teulada is a well-shot and totally pleasant little TV giallo lark.

Rating: 6/10

Census Bloodbath: Screams In The Witch House

Year:
1989
Director:
Fabrizio Laurenti
Cast:
Linda Blair, David Hasselhoff, Leslie Cumming
Run Time:
1 hour 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Witchery is set in a sprawling hotel on an island off the coast of Massachusetts that the locals say used to be the home of a witch. They say this because it's true! Said witch (Hildegard Knef) is still haunting the place, and she begins to enact a murderous Satanic ritual upon a group of people who find themselves stranded there.

It's been a while since we've gotten to do this properly, so let's Meet the Meat: Leslie (Leslie Cumming of Zombie 5: Killing Birds), who is studying the legend of the witch; Leslie's boyfriend Gary (David Hasselhoff, who you'll remember best from Terror at London Bridge), a photographer who is pissed that Leslie wants to remain a virgin; horny architect Linda (Catherine Hickland); nepo baby realtor Jerry (Rick Farnsworth); and a rich family that is looking to buy the property, namely cruel matriarch Rose (Annie Ross), lecherous father Freddie (Robert Champagne of Ghosthouse), pregnant stepdaughter Jane (Linda Blair, who you'll remember best from Hell Night), and young son Tommy (Michael Manchester).

Analysis: The thing that is by far the most interesting aspect of the English-language Italian horror movie Witchery is the fact that it is part of the La Casa franchise, so let's spend some time drilling into that. The series is maybe the most "Italian horror" thing to have ever happened, after all.

So, remember 1981's The Evil Dead? I bet you do. It takes place in an isolated cabin in the woods, so the Italian title for it was La Casa (The House). Six years later, Evil Dead II comes out. What do we call that in Italy? Easy. La Casa 2. That movie's a hit. But Sam Raimi isn't making more Evil Dead movies just yet. What's a film industry with rather lax titling rules to do? If you know even a little bit about Italian horror, you can probably guess what happened next. That's right, they found a series of random, unrelated movies that took place in houses and pretended they were sequels to the Evil Dead movies.

Witchery is La Casa 4, whereas La Casa 3 is 1988's Ghosthouse and La Casa 5 is 1990's Beyond Darkness. La Casa 6 and La Casa 7 are, respectively, 1987's House II: The Second Story and 1989's House III: The Horror Show. Weirdly, the original 1986 House was completely ignored by the faux franchise.

This is the perfect franchise for Witchery to have become a part of, because I'm sure the movie felt right at home in that chaotic, unsupervised free-for-all. Because let me tell you, Witchery is all over the damn place.

Honestly, I wasn't sure going in if it was going to end up being slashery enough for me to include in Census Bloodbath. It's a supernatural horror film about a witch, after all. 45 minutes in, I was still completely unsure about how to categorize it. 

The cast is killed off one by one, yes, but they're mostly pulled into a nether realm (by one of the worst visual effects I've ever seen - a sort of cherry red spiral tunnel that looks like someone flushing a tie dye kit down the toilet and which is given a lavish amount of screen time across multiple scenes) to be tortured and sometimes killed, only to be returned to the real world to either have their deaths continue or happen again in a new way. It doesn't make all that much sense, and it doesn't lend itself to the clean simplicity that I prefer from a slasher body count.

That said, the reason you're reading this review at all is that Witchery assembles just enough of the right slasher tropes in the right order (most notably the cast of Meat being stranded in an isolated location).

The fantasy elements really only work when they lean in on being as Italian as possible. I'm talking witchcraft being visually represented by a flashing brooch that appears in jarring close-ups that interrupt the tempo of the scene, the campy German diva witch showing up periodically just to chat with Tommy when nobody else is looking, and so on. There are also a few moments of demented Italian horror visuals that genuinely work quite well.

Additionally, for fans of bad-good movies, the stilted English dialogue hits that mark more often that not ("I'll never understand which you love more: work or sex"), as do the tremendously inconsistent Boston accents sported by half the cast (neither Hasselhoff nor Blair were paid enough to even attempt accents).

However, none of this prevents Witchery from being a complete waste of time. There are too many characters milling about in this hotel, and not enough happens to them for the first hour and 10 minutes of the movie. Plus, Leslie Cumming is giving a shockingly bad, vacant, bleary performance. This was her last credited acting role, which proves that there is indeed a moral arc to the universe. 

To be fair to Cumming, nobody is directed well enough to deliver a convincing performance (least of all Michael Manchester). Though maybe her direction was "imagine what Daphne Zuniga would do if she had no rizz and was doped up on horse tranquilizers," in which case she executed it perfectly.

Killer: The Woman in Black (Hildegard Knef)

Final Girl: Leslie (Leslie Cumming)

Best Kill: When Freddie is killed via voodoo doll, he begins asphyxiating while the veins on his hands and then his neck bulge and burst. Gross!

Sign of the Times: A licensed Sesame Street tape recorder toy is instrumental to the plot.

Scariest Moment: The group lights a fire, not realizing that Rose is strung up in the fireplace, unable to scream because her mouth is sewn shut.

Weirdest Moment: There is a little girl in a wheelchair who shows up in exactly two scenes that accomplish nothing. One is where she introduces herself to Tommy. The other is where she spots the island's emergency flare and tells her dad, who promptly ignores her. (This scene was my alternate pick for Sign of the Times, because his nighttime routine is apparently to smoke a cigarette in bed while reading The Godfather - what a mensch!)

Champion Dialogue: “They've got a lot of legends about this island. Witches and rainbows and shit."

Body Count: 8

1. Pregnant Lady jumps out of the window in a scene that is either a flashback, a movie, a nightmare, or all three.
2. Sailor is killed offscreen.
3. Rose has her lips sewn shut and is burned alive.
4. Linda is tied up to death (don't ask) and is later found with her neck impaled by a swordfish.
5. Jerry is crucified on an upside-down cross and burned.
6. Freddie asphyxiates and bleeds to death via voodoo.
7. Gary is impaled through the back with like a candelabra or something.
8. Jane jumps out of the window.

TL;DR: Witchery is an aimless supernatural slasher that is only worth watching in infrequent spurts.

Rating: 5/10

Census Bloodbath: Arabella, Where Have You Been, Loca?

Note: The copy of this movie that I had access to was in unsubtitled Italian, so take my review with a grain of salt.

Year:
1989
Director:
Stelvio Massi
Cast:
Tinì Cansino, Francesco Casale, Valentina Visconti

Run Time:
1 hour 29 minutes

Plot: Arabella: Black Angel (originally Arabella l'angelo nero) follows the nymphomaniac Arabella (Tinì Cansino), who gets caught up in a web of intrigue when her writer husband Francesco (Francesco Casale) - who has been confined to a wheelchair since getting into a road head-related accident on the day of their wedding - witnesses her murdering a policeman (Carlo Mucari of Obsession: A Taste for Fear) who was blackmailing her into sex.

Francesco encourages Arabella - against her strong protestations to the contrary - to become a sex worker so he can use her life as inspiration for his next book. However, the twisted drama between them grows even darker when it becomes clear that a black-gloved killer is targeting the men that Arabella sleeps with. Lesbian police commissioner Gina Fowler (Valentina Visconti) is on the case, but the sexual mutilation of the killer's victims triggers memories of her own dark past.

Analysis: At about the 45-second mark of Arabella: Black Angel, I realized that I was dealing with a very particular sub-subgenre of the 1980s slasher: the softcore giallo movie. I figured at that point that I already knew exactly what I was in for. A shitshow. I've seen Killing of the Flesh after all. I know how these things go.

Blissfully, I was proven completely wrong. For one thing, Arabella is a well put-together movie. In addition to a pretty solid score that evokes the late 1980s without leaning too heavily on synths, this movie is extraordinarily well shot (by its director, Stelvio Massi, who also shot The Case of the Bloody Iris and was the camera operator for A Fistful of Dollars).

We're talking striking lighting that makes the (almost) unilaterally sexy cast's faces glow with ethereal beauty! We're talking deep focus shots where things are happening both in the foreground and background. In other words, this is a movie! Speaking as someone who just watched The Strangler of Syggrou and Terror en los Barrios, that's really not something that you can take for granted with a 1980s slasher.

It's maybe not an overly terrific slasher, however. Its startlingly small roster of five kills are doled out with a parsimonious amount of blood, though there is a brutal post-murder moment where you're forced to sit and consider exactly what it might look like for someone's penis to have been snipped off with scissors.

However, it makes up for its not-particularly enthralling kills with one of the best whodunit plots of the giallo genre, which is not only full of twists and turns, but ones that actually make sense for the most part! I wasn't even watching the English-translated version (which exists, but is currently only available via exorbitantly expensive listings on the resale market), and I still had my jaw hit the floor multiple times.

Additionally, it might just be an out-and-out masterpiece of softcore horror cinema. Not only does the sexual content in Arabella: Black Angel feel genuinely transgressive, erotic, and dangerous, it is impeccably blended with the storyline and the characters. The sex doesn't exist solely to titillate the audience (though it does do that, and there ain't nothing wrong with it). Sex informs the backstories of every major character and is the throbbing spoke around which the entire wheel of the plot spins.

Overall, it isn't a masterpiece of cinema in general, but I had a hell of a time watching Arabella: Black Angel. If this sounds like the type of thing you might be into in the first place, I can promise you it's worth taking the plunge.

Killer: Martha Veronesi (Ida Galli of The Sweet Body of Deborah, The Bloodstained Butterfly, and The Case of the Scorpion's Tail)

Final Girl: Arabella (Tinì Cansino)

Best Kill: Gina's journalist girlfriend Agnese (Rena Niehaus) gets those scissors right in the neck in one of cinema's most brutal uppercuts.

Sign of the Times: If you'll allow me to get meta for a moment, I think the only reason that this movie doesn't enjoy a more robust reputation is the fact that it came out in 1989, a decade removed from the heyday of the gialli.

Scariest Moment: The fantasy sequence where Gina sees blood pouring out of a tap isn't scary per se, but it's the scene that feels the most like it belongs in a horror movie.

Weirdest Moment: This sex worker that Arabella picks up is hot, but if I picked him up, I'd spend the first 30 minutes of my hour just having him explain the theme of his outfit.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 5; not including a dream sequence where Gina is stabbed in the crotch with scissors, which probably wouldn't have killed her anyway, even though it certainly would have ruined her day.

1. Alfonso de Rosa is bopped on the head with a mallet.
2. Nick is stabbed in the dick with scissors (and later has his penis cut off).
3. Cowboy is stabbed in the dick with scissors (and later has his penis cut off).
4. Agnese is stabbed in the neck with scissors.
5. Francesco is stabbed in the back.

TL;DR: Arabella: Black Angel is a gleefully transgressive softcore giallo movie that manages to make exploitation the point of the story it's telling while also reveling in it.

Rating: 7/10

Census Bloodbath: Dance Dance Dance Till You're Dead

Year: 1984

Director: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Olga Karlatos, Ray Lovelock, Claudio Cassinelli

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Murder-Rock: Dancing Death follows a dance company training at the *checks notes* Arts for Living Center in New York City run by Candice (Olga Karlatos). The best dancers are being murdered one by one with a massive hatpin shoved straight into their hearts, so Lt. Borges (Cosimo Cinieri of Fulci's previous slasher effort The New York Ripper) is on the case.

Analysis: Among the well-known Italian horror directors of the '70s and '80s, Fulci is perhaps the most inconsistent. Sometimes he could deliver a gorgeous, disgusting fever dream like The Beyond. And other times he would rest on his laurels and deliver a sleepy, autopilot picture like The Black Cat. Usually he would stab out an eye or two while he was at it, but he was constantly crossing the line between art and trash rather than gradually backsliding from one to the other like certain Dario Argentos I won't mention.

I will give Fulci this. He seems to be really trying to make Murder-Rock artful, to the point that certain moments are mimicking the best scenes and aesthetic impulses of Suspiria. One particularly effective moment is achieved just in the sound mix, when the panting of a strung-out dancer gets mixed way higher than the music she's dancing to. There is also some excellent set design (the white tiled hallway of the locker room is something to behold), a gorgeous opening shot of the New York skyline in front of a deep purple sky, and a few shot setups that really made me perk up and pay attention. One in particular, with the camera tracking along as a body bag is being wheeled down a hallway past the watching faces of the dancers, is stunning and unlike anything I've ever seen in a slasher.

Unfortunately, his aesthetic ambition seems to be hampered by his ability. Or at least, he didn't have the appropriate equipment to make his vision happen. Even some of the best sequences are lit too harshly, with lens flares that would make J.J. Abrams' eyes roll back into his head. Most of the time the characters are lit from behind or above in a manner that completely obliterates their faces, and the motif of flashing lights is both preposterous (for some reason, the police carry around a panel of flashing lights to shine onto the body) and profoundly ugly.

Really, Fulci has ended up somewhere far closer to Stripped to Kill than Suspiria, only without the female gaze making the dance scenes tolerable at all. Now, I'm always partial to any film where I see a choreographer listed in the credits, but this dancing is terrible. It has all the intensity of Showgirls with all the precision of The Apple. The music that accompanies the frequent, extended dance sequences ranges from amusingly shitty (the uptempo disco track "Are the Streets to Blame" is an excellent slice of cheese) to ear-scrapingly abysmal (the opening theme "Tonight is The Night" sounds like "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes went to Hell and got laryngitis).

And while the killer's M.O. is appropriately sleazy and horrifying for a Fulci flick, it also leads to an extreme lack of variety, to the point that some of the kills in the second half of the film take place onscreen because Fulci probably figured you got the picture by that point. The kill to dance sequence ratio was already off, but this severe drop-off makes the second and third acts a real slog. When the best thing about your movie about dancing and stabbing is the title font, you know something has gone horribly wrong. Murder-Rock is certainly less stultifying than The Black Cat and more artful than The New York Ripper, but it's just not enough of everything that it clearly wants to be.

Killer: Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: The opening heart-piercing kill is the one that luxuriates the most in how goddamn disturbing that particular M.O. really is.

Sign of the Times: If you listen to even a single second of the wall-to-wall music used in this film, you'd be able to carbon date the exact month of 1984 this came out.

Scariest Moment: When Janice comes home to a supposedly empty apartment, she spots a still-smoking cigarette in her ashtray.

Weirdest Moment: The film randomly cuts to the dancer Jill babysitting a kid in a wheelchair who shows her a slideshow of dead bugs

Champion Dialogue: "You're gonna grit your teeth and dance, even when your friend dies."

Body Count: 6

Susan has her heart pierced with a hatpin.

DeeDee the Bird has her heart pierced with a hatpin.

Janice is killed offscreen.

Jill is killed offscreen.

Gloria has her heart pierced with a hatpin.

Candice has her heart pierced with a hatpin.

TL;DR: Murder-Rock: Dancing Death is a bland slasher that attempts to doll itself up as an aesthetically interesting giallo.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 851

Census Bloodbath: Cats Take Orders From No One (Capsule Review)

Year: 1981

Director: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Patrick Magee, Mimsy Farmer, David Warbeck

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Freely adapted from the Edgar Allen Poe short story of the same name, The Black Cat follows the medium Robert Miles (Patrick Magee), whose murderous instincts are channeled through a hypnotic black cat who is simultaneously his tool and his nemesis. As people around town begin to die one by one, Scotland Yard Inspector Gorley (David Warbeck of Formula for a Murder) enlists the help of visiting American photographer Jill Trevers (Mimsy Farmer of Body Count) to help him get to the bottom of this strange web of mystical intrigue. 

Analysis: When you're approaching a Lucio Fulci movie that came out in the same era as The Beyond and The New York Ripper, you make sure you're strapped in. Unfortunately for you, if you have chosen The Black Cat, you're more in danger of choking yourself on your seatbelt than garnering any excitement from the film itself. It's definitely an "off" moment for Fulci, whose directorial style is sleepy and dreamlike in his best films, but becomes tedious as hell in his worst.

I will say that his methodical pacing really hammers home the death sequences in this film, which are usually accidents that happen around or because of the titular feline. Watching someone, say, asphyxiate on gas while their mouth begins to foam or have the flesh melt off their body in a house fire is one thing. Watching it happen in languorous stretches of film that make you feel trapped in the frame and forced to reckon with their prolonged suffering is another thing. Unfortunately, the deaths are few and far between. They also aren't redeemed by the presence of a satisfying villain, because there is no real "slasher" figure causing all the mayhem we see here.

That slow pace fails to elevate any other part of the movie, unfortunately. That's not to say it's not all very well-mounted and pretty. The lighting and cinematography are perfectly bucolic and dreamlike. And in one case, a piece of set design is even breathtaking, when a potential villain escapes into an attic with a wall decorated in a swirling curlicue pattern. And Fulci continues to prove he has an obsession with eyes even when he's not jamming huge pieces of wood into them, with evocative closeups of humans and cats staring into the camera. 

However, the overbooked nonsense of the plot and the vacant acting of British people dubbing Italian actors require a lot more energy than they're given. It's a deathly dull slog through anything that isn't a kill, and because of the "was it an accident?" nature of the kills themselves, they don't offer enough variety to spice up their rare appearances in the first place. There isn't a lot in this film to justify its existence, less so because Italian horror has already received the most perfect adaptation of "The Black Cat" it was ever going to get, in Sergio Martine's 1972 film Your Vice is a Locked Room, and Only I Have the Key. If you're considering a double bill of that and The Black Cat, you'd frankly be much better served by just watching Your Vice twice.

Killer: Prof. Robert Miles (Patrick Magee)

Final Girl: Jill Trevers (Mimsy Farmer)

Best Kill: None of these kills really deliver in the way that only Fulci knows how to, so I'll nominate a non-kill gore moment when the cat attacks Miles and slashes stigmata onto the palms of his hands.

Sign of the Times: Jill's bleached blonde Junie B. Jones haircut.

Scariest Moment: Miles starts babbling in panic as he uses one of Maureen's possessions to channel her last moments.

Weirdest Moment: The film briefly goes full Exorcist when Miles tries to kill the cat, and Jill's bed starts shaking around and floating.

Champion Dialogue: "Could've been worse. Could've been a case of chicken wrestling."

Body Count: 5

1. Ferguson dies in a car crash.
2. Maureen and 
3. Stan asphyxiate from a gas leak in an airtight room.
4. Drunk falls from a great height and is impaled on a spike.
5. Mrs. Grayson falls out of a window while burning to death.

TL;DR: The Black Cat is gorgeous, but the story doesn't have enough oomph to wake up Fulci's sleepy direction.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 726

Census Bloodbath: No, This Is Patrick

Year: 1980

Director: Mario Landi

Cast: Sacha Pitoëff, Sacha Pitoëff, Mariangela Giordano

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

Oh, Italian horror rip-offs. The fun never ends with you. Remember back in the day when Bay of Blood was advertised as a sequel to The Last House on the Left, a movie that didn't exist when Bay originally came out? Or how Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 is a "sequel" to Dawn of the Dead that doesn't even spare a thought to the fact that a sequel to that film couldn't possibly depict the beginning of a zombie apocalypse?  Among such storied company, Patrick Still Lives is actually a venerable pillar of honesty in advertising.

Allegedly a sequel to the 1978 Ozploitation classic Patrick, this film is more of a remake, but at least it has the decency to be about a telekinetic boy named Patrick. 

By the standards of Italian horror "sequel" continuity, Patrick Still Lives might as well be The Avengers.

So let's get ourselves acquainted with Patrick (Gianni Dei, who we'll meet again in 1987's Delitti). The film's abrupt beginning shows Patrick on a roadside with a man who is presumably his father, Dr. Herschel (Sacha Pitoëff). A bottle gets thrown from a car and smacks him on the head, sending him into a coma. Cut to years later, and Dr. Herschel has assembled a ragtag group of people at a health spa in a remote Italian villa. We don't find this out till later, but the plot is obvious from the beginning so I'll spoil it: everyone has been brought here under threat of blackmail, and they are all suspected of being the bottle-thrower. Patrick may be in a coma still, but he's hooked up to the brains of three other coma patients and his telekinetic wrath causes the guests to perish one by one in spooky supernatural ways.

The guests in question are Davis (Paolo Giusti), a Tig Notaro lookalike and the son of an important banker who was involved in an accident that killed several people; Peter Suniak (John Benedy), who is a drug addict; minister Lyndon Cough (Franco Silva), who is a corrupt parliamentary minister; and Peter and Lyndon's partners Stella Randolph (Mariangela Giordano) and Sheril Cough (Carmen Russo), whose crimes would seem to be that they like to have sex.

Women, am I right?

I don't know what circle of hell I've stumbled into where all the slashers I encounter are basically just softcore pornos now, but Patrick Still Lives at least lies much more staunchly on the "slasher" side of the line than either Killing of the Flesh or Momentos de Prazer e Agonia. And curiously, though the film is obsessed with showing naked flesh (this is the type of movie where people might casually just pop a boob out at dinner, and all the women sleep naked, putting on robes when they get up - robes that do nothing to cover their nipples or vaginas), there isn't actually any sex, unless you count Patrick's bizarre telekinetic tryst with sexy blonde staff member Lidya Grant (Andrea Belfiore).

The first half of Patrick Still Lives - where the characters wander around either being naked, engaging in sub-giallo nonsense drama with lots of slapping, or both - is beyond repair. If you really want to see boobs that bad in 2021, there are much easier ways to do that than bootlegging a stupid Italian slasher from 40 years ago. It's only once the killings begin in earnest that things get interesting. 

"Interesting" unfortunately isn't synonymous with "good." The murder setpieces in Patrick Still Lives are a challenging lot to grapple with. I will lead with the fact that the special effects bringing them to life are uniformly superb for the time, and the movie's endless variations on gruesome kills are shockingly ahead of their time for a pre-Friday the 13th motion picture (technically it debuted in Italy a week after Friday, but they were produced contemporaneously is what I'm saying).

I know you actually don't care about the specifics, but I do. You don't watch slashers almost exclusively for eight years and not get a little in your head about it.

Every kill in Patrick Still Lives is brutal, but there are only two that perfectly ride the line between intense and entertaining: a man who gets a wicked metal hook jammed through his lower jaw, and a woman who is slowly, methodically, decapitated by a car window. Then there's the medium level: the first and final body count kills (where a man dies in a pool of boiling water and a woman is mauled by dogs) aren't particularly visually dynamic, even if the effects for both are above par for similar scenes in other movies of the time. The absolute lowest tier is the pair of kills that just involve poison, which don't require interesting special effects.

OK, enough beating around the bush. There's one kill here that is... challenging. Typically what I look for in a slasher movie kill is a unique premise and convincing, over-the-top special effects. This kill certainly has that, but it takes the sexual violence that simmers beneath the entire motion picture and pitches it right the hell up to 11. For the un-squeamish, here's what happens: A woman is skewered with a spit, which enters through her vagina and comes out through her mouth. It's certainly well-realized, probably the most impressive effect in the entire film. But coming at the end of a dozen scenes of cavalier exploitation and objectification, it's impossible to not feel icky about it. I'm not one for the censorship of art, especially exploitation and pornography (assuming they were created with properly consenting performers), but a conscientious viewer must come to this scene with a very particular mindset that I don't find myself capable of.

Even setting aside that particular scene, the impressive effects don't quite make up for the hour and change spent wandering around the villa with its desperately uninteresting characters while listening to a score that sounds like a Goblin tribute band covering the Exorcist theme. It's not an altogether unwatchable slice of giallo sexploitation, and it has some amusing campy moments (ie. Dr. Herschel tries to write off Lyndon's clearly boiled skin as a side effect of alcoholism), but at the end of the day I'd just rather watch Patrick, you know?

Killer: Patrick (Sacha Pitoëff)

Final Girl: Lidya Grant (Andrea Belfiore)

Best Kill: I'd have to say the car window to the neck, which is brutal in its ceaseless repetitive slamming and convincing geysers of blood.

Sign of the Times: Well, there really was only a tiny window of time in which anyone could have made a sequel to Patrick.

Scariest Moment: A hypnotically hornified Lidya licks the metal post of Patrick's bed. Think of the germs!

Weirdest Moment: Stella discovers Davis' mutilated body and to calm herself down, she wets her breasts at a nearby fountain.

Champion Dialogue: "I usually bang women, not whisky bottles."

Body Count: 8; not including the 3 unnamed host bodies fueling Patrick's telekinesis, who presumably die during the third act when he drains their energy.

1. Lyndon Cough is boiled in a swimming pool.
2. Davis is hung from a hook by the bottom of his chin.
3. Stella Cough is skewered on a spit via the vagina.
4. Sheril Randolph is decapitated by a car window.
5. Peter Suniak is poisoned with carbon monoxide.
6. Brad is electrocuted.
7. Meg is mauled by German shepherds.
8. Dr. Herschel is stabbed in the heart with a hypodermic needle.

TL;DR: Patrick Still Lives is a rather rote erotic giallo until it briefly becomes a very good gore picture.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1278

Census Bloodbath: Hotel Hell

Year: 1983

Director: Cesare Canevari

Cast: Marc Porel, Sonia Otero, Fulvio Ricciardi

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

The Italian giallo genre was waning by the time the 80's rolled around, but it certainly still had its fair share of entries. A lot of them tried to adapt the tropes and look of the American slasher, like Madhouse or StageFright Aquarius, and some kept their Italian flair, like Dario Argento's Tenebrae. I suppose today's topic, Cesare Canevari's Killing of the Flesh, is in the latter category. 

It certainly doesn't fit any slasher formula I've dealt with, and I've seen it all baby.

Killing of the Flesh is clearly trying to go for an And Then There Were None vibe. A group of family members and their sex partners (I'd say "romantic partners" but that might count as libel) have gathered in an old hotel after the death of their Uncle Domenici (for the record, not every character is credited on IMDb, so some people won't have listings unfortunately). They are prepping for the funeral and arguing about who will get the money, though there's no indication that the will reading will be happening this weekend.

There are around 10 different people holed up together, but the only ones who matter in any way are Jimmy, a frustrated artist who was promised funding by Domenici; Max (Marc Porel), who has the most screentime but about whom I can tell you nothing; Elena (Sonia Otero) a ravenous bisexual with a curtain of unruly ginger curls; and Martine (Moana Pozzi, the porn star whose name famously forced Disney to change the title of Moana to Oceania in Italian markets), a former prostitute who Elena has chosen to be her special companion for the evening. Once everyone is gathered, they all fuck each other. Then one person is murdered, the cops force them to stay in the hotel while they investigate, and they all fuck each other again, but in different combinations. Maybe there's another couple murders on the way, too.

That's a big maybe.

Killing of the Flesh might be masquerading as a giallo whodunit, but it's transparently only interested in being a softcore porno. An orgy at a family reunion sounds like it might at least be fodder for something scintillating and taboo-demolishing, but I assure you it's boring as sin. Literally, I suppose. I'm sure aficionados of vintage pornography will have some measure of interest in random people's asses bobbing up and down in front of the camera, or the 20-second shot of two sets of breasts having whiskey slowly dribbled on them, but I do not count myself among that number.

Sure, as a gay man, this is not the type of stuff I'm in the market for, but I can appreciate the aesthetics of sex I'm not invested in. Bound is one of the hottest movies ever made, and I have no vested interest in any of those sexual proceedings. It also has an extremely questionable approach to consent and violence against women, but honestly that's par for the course for Italian horror (in one of the film's most bizarre scenes, a man walks by a man performing oral sex on a woman - he drags the man's head backward, makes the woman stand, slaps her, and then walks off and allows them to resume). On top of that, Killing of the Flesh has a workmanlike approach to sex, assuming that pointing the camera at any cross-section of writhing flesh will cause a viewer to sweat. And sex is all it has to offer.

The film is a resounding, catastrophic failure as a giallo film. There are only two scenes that might be considered genuine body count kills, and one is a bog-standard "woman notices something spooky offscreen and then it cuts to black." The other is a moment that literally cuts from an unrelated scene to a woman already being strangled, in medias death. And that's it! Forget And Then There Were None. Try And Then There Was 80% of the Cast and They Were Too Busy Fucking to Notice.

So between the bad sex and no death, Killing of the Flesh is brain-twistingly boring. There's a scene where a man is just sitting there playing solitaire and I was so jealous of all the fun he was having.

Pictured: Me about halfway through the film.

Oh, and just as a kicker, the infrequent dialogue scenes are incoherent (characters are introduced far too late for them to impact the plot in any way) and mostly comprise glowering stares anyway. But I suppose I should say something nice about the film, so here goes. There are a couple non-sex shots that are quite nice. There's a very James Bond-y moment where Elena is framed by Martine's open legs which is nice, and there's a moment where one of the women is making out with her beau and sees a vision of the late Uncle Domenici appear in the corner of the room. Oh wait, those shots were both just in the preamble to sex scenes. You see what I'm saying?

Killing of the Flesh is a tragic waste of time. At least it's not a waste of potential, because it didn't promise any potential to begin with. 

Killer: Billy 

Final Girl: Everyone and No One

Best Kill: In the final minute of the film, when we learn of the existence and then death of the hotel staff member Ms. Margerita, we are also treated to a flashback of her tea being poisoned, which is only unique because it was foreshadowed by a damp teabag on the table in an earlier scene, the only moment to actually feel like a clue to a murder mystery.

Sign of the Times: The music playing at their disco party sounds like a bunch of white people listened to disco and asked "what if it was quieter?"

Scariest Moment: The moment I saw there were five minutes left in the movie and only two people had died so far.

Weirdest Moment: Elena walks through a stable talking to the horses. She flirts with one of them, reminding him how she used to ride him commando.

Champion Dialogue: "Drink it, sweet sponge."

Body Count: 4

1. Leia is garroted, but we don't find out about that until later.
2. Elena is garroted.
3. Ms. Margerita is poisoned in flashback.
4. Uncle Domenici has his head slammed into a steering wheel in flashback.

TL;DR: Killing of the Flesh is a languorous sex "romp" that is utterly disinterested in being a giallo, effective or otherwise.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1097

Census Bloodbath: Duck And Cover

Year: 1982

Director: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Jack Hedley, Almanta Suska, Howard Ross 

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

The giallo genre that dominated the Italian horror landscape in the 70's may have given way to the slashers in America when the 80's rolled around, but were those exploitation filmmakers just supposed to go away after that? I don't think so, honey. The Italian genre directors knew how to adapt and survive into any new wave of cinema, and gore maestro Lucio Fulci was preeminent among them. After the slasher dam burst with the flood of films following Friday the 13th, Fulci built himself a raft called The New York Ripper, and... well, it sure is a Lucio Fulci joint.

Hope you're not a fan of women making it safely through movies!

The New York Ripper tells the sordid tale of a killer using his trusty switchblade to carve his way through the women of New York's night life. Lieutenant Fred Williams (Jack Hedley of For Your Eyes Only) is on the case, teaming up with professor of psychology Dr. Paul Davis (Paolo Malco of that same year's The Scorpion with Two Tails - coming soon!) to profile the killer and track him down. 

That's really about it for plot. Otherwise we follow random victims of the Ripper through their daily lives until they do or don't get ripped. The most important of these are Fay Majors (Almanta Keller), who narrowly escapes an attack on the subway, causing her to interrupt her training for the Olympics - if you know what event she's training for, you have better ears than I do; her physicist boyfriend Peter Bunch (Andrew Painter), who always seems to have somewhere to be whenever the Ripper is around; and Jane Forrester Lodge (Alexandra Delli Colli), a kinky woman who has an open relationship with her husband and gets her rocks off at live sex shows in a cream-colored fedora. 

In other words, she's awesome.

Oh, did I mention the killer quacks like a duck while he's murdering his victims? That seems like it's probably important. Yes, in every scene he's doing a half-decent Donald Duck impression. And yes, this is extremely terrifying. I had heard about this element going in and fully expected it to be laughable, but I was dead wrong. The manic quacking combined with brutal, bloody violence is uncanny as all hell, and my spine wanted to curl right out of my body every time it happened.

Fulci's films are famous for their use of nightmare logic, an argument that I usually assume people adopt to defend his frequently inept editing, stilted dialogue, and sound design. But whether or not it's intentional, the way his scenes lose control and start to degrade (sometimes outright eschewing continuity and/or the laws of physics) right as the horror and - yes - the quacking kick it up to 11 packs a powerful, disorienting punch.

I'm actually much more inclined to believe that his twisted logic is intentional, because there are a great many scenes explicitly designed to knock you off kilter, even in little moments. Take the sequence where the killer makes a late night phone call to Lt. Williams, who is in bed with a woman we assume to be his wife. It's not until minutes later that it's revealed she's a prostitute who he frequently meets. Does it make sense that these people would be in a full deep slumber together*? Of course not! But it all serves the fact that every single one of these characters has a stake in the city's nightlife, twisting our expectations along the way.

*Come to think of it, every couple that has sex in this movie falls into an immediate deep sleep like they pricked their finger on a magic spinning wheel.

In addition to being surprisingly chilling, The New York Ripper provides buckets and buckets of the expected Lucio Fulci grue. Normally when I'm taking notes on a slasher film, the description of a kill will looking something like this "*Nancy is impaled on antlers." Well, for each and every murder scene here I had to keep adding note after note until it practically became a full fledged paragraph.

This movie is brutal to the women who populate it, putting them through the ringer, smashing that ringer with a sledgehammer, and building a new ringer out of shards of their own bones before putting them through that. The slasher genre (especially the Italian flavor) has a lot to answer for RE: the way it treats beautiful women, but I've gone into that a million times before. So all I will say is that the kills are grotesque, scuzzy, fabulously rendered, and hold off on the trademark Lucio Fulci eye trauma just enough that you think he might not even do it this time.

Don't worry, he does.

Ripper is one of those slashers that takes the grimy, run down streets of early 80's New York City and turns that aesthetic into a meat grinder of horror that makes you want to take a shower afterward. As in, it would make a great double feature with Maniac. These kills aren't fun. They're horrible, which is I guess a good thing, because they're supposed to be. It's just a rough watch sometimes. I suppose it all has to do with tone. There is a queasily realistic shot involving a razor blade and a nipple that is genuinely upsetting, the polar opposite of the transparently, almost charmingly exploitative scene in the daffy Bloody Moon where a knife goes straight through a woman's back and sticks out of her breast. I suppose there's room for both of these in the horror landscape, but Ripper takes the sleazy grindhouse approach rather than the... whatever the hell Jess Franco was doing in Bloody Moon.

At any rate, it accomplishes what it sets out to do: horrify. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie doesn't work quite so well, even on its own terms. For one thing, it is an absolute failure as a police procedural whodunit. 

I've already expressed my distaste for police-centric slashers, because they don't allow us to spend enough time with the potential victims that we really get a sense of their character or begin to care about them. But The New York Ripper is an absolute mess on top of that, forgetting to introduce major suspects or red herrings until the halfway mark, in scenes that act like we've already met these people half a dozen times before. It also fabulously mishandles its own tone, choosing to end on a maudlin bit of sentiment that had only been set up ten minutes before in one of the film's most narratively confusing, sloppily edited sequences. 

It's the Winchester Mystery House of movie scripts. Characters show up, are given names and personality traits, then never appear again. Crucial details (including the major decision to reveal that Dr. Davis is gay) arise and are immediately forgotten. And certain beautiful images (my favorite being a woman's reflection in a turning doorknob) are surrounded by a dreadful mire of repetitive, gloomy guerrilla photography.

I would only recommend The New York Ripper to people who know exactly what they're getting themselves into and are willing to subject themselves to it. Taken on its own terms, I'd say it's a pretty darn good exploitation offering, but it's not the type of movie I rush to rewatch or recommend. I'd say if you've seen Maniac and The Beyond and had the stomach for both of them, then this might just be the movie for you. That's a very small sliver of a Venn Diagram, but there's plenty of people who fit it, so if that's you, have a ball!

I guess I'd like to end this review with a small discussion of Dr. Davis' homosexuality, which is revealed in a purposeless scene of him buying a male nudie magazine. I'm almost entirely certain that this was included in the film to show that he is a "pervert" and position him as a murder suspect because he's a wild and crazy guy who would eschew the delights of female flesh. But it never gets brought up, and he's allowed to be a smart, capable person and survive the film. So that's still pretty damn good representation for 1982, just saying.

Killer: [Peter Bunch (Andrew Painter)]

Final Girl: Fay Majors (Almanta Keller), once she finally shows up

Best Kill: This is one of those sleazy movies where it doesn't feel right to reward the murders, but in terms of special effects, Kitty's death by razor (including it slicing through her nipple and eye) holds up stomach-churningly well.

Sign of the Times: A victim's landlady recalls the exact time she last saw her alive because Dallas had just come on.

Scariest Moment: Fay is sitting in an empty movie theater and a man starts violently grabbing at her crotch from beneath the seat.

Weirdest Moment: Jane visits a restaurant and one of the patrons pleasures her under the table with his bare foot for a loooooong time.

Champion Dialogue: "Well well well, if it isn't the big chief person himself."

Body Count: 6

1. Rosie is slashed.
2. Live Sex Show Lady is stabbed in the gut with a broken bottle.
3. Jane is sliced up the abdomen.
4. Kitty is mutilated with a razor.
5. Mickey is suffocated with a plastic bag offscreen.
6. Peter is shot in the face.

TL;DR: The New York Ripper is disgusting and sleazy, but that's exactly what it aims to be.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1592

Census Bloodbath: Slayboy

For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.

Year: 1987

Director: Lamberto Bava

Cast: Serena Grandi, Daria Nicolodi, Vanni Corbellini
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: UR

Italian horror in the late 1980’s was in a very strange place. The thrilling, erotic giallo genre had long since died down, but international markets were still demanding more and more slasher content. The two big Italian horror exports that year, despite sharing four crew members and almost a whole title, explored two polar opposite approaches. Those films were Deliria AKA StageFright: Aquarius and Delirium AKA Photos of Gloria. They shared a costume designer, composer Simon Boswell, star David Brandon, and writer/actor George Eastman, but they couldn’t be more different.

Michele Soavi’s StageFright resurrects the idiosyncratic visual style of Dario Argento and applies it to a delightfully gory romp through slasher excess, whereas Delirium: Photos of Gloria (our topic for today) takes a more self-reflective approach, wearing the faded patches of the giallo genre on its sleeve yet failing to find the energy to rise above being mildly intelligent softcore trash.

Nobody got out of the 80’s with their dignity intact.

Delirium assembled a robust team of the giallo old guard to bring its story to life. Legacy director Lamberto Bava (son of cinema legend Mario Bava) helmed a crew that included Don’t Torture a Duckling screenwriter Gianfranco Clerici, Five Women for the Killer editor Mauro Bonanni, and The Scorpion with Two Tails production designer Massimo Antonello Geleng. And that cast is a nonstop barrage of familiar faces, both old and new.

The story is simple enough. Gloria (Serena Grandi of Anthropophagus) is an ex-nudie model who now runs a men’s magazine. Unfortunately the women who pose for the cover start turning up dead, photographed in front of a massive blow-up of Gloria which was shot during an unpublished modeling session that very few people have access to. She and the useless Inspector Corsi (Lino Salemme of Lamberto Bava’s earlier Demons) must find out who the killer is before they turn their sights on her.

The suspect pool is rather large, as Gloria is surrounded with intimate friends and coworkers who have all been acting rather peculiar lately…. First there’s Flora (Capucine of the Pink Panther series), a matronly lesbian who wants to buy Gloria’s magazine out of revenge for her resisting the woman’s advances. The list goes on and on from there: Mark (Karl Zinny, also of Demons), her wheelchair-bound Peeping Tom neighbor; Gloria’s actor ex-lover Alex (George Eastman, the impossibly tall cannibal from Anthropophagus), who always seems to be conveniently out of town whenever the murders occur; the stand-offish photographer Roberto (the aforementioned David Brandon); her brother and partner in crime Tony (Vanni Corbellini of The Belly of an Architect); and her dutiful – almost too dutiful – assistant Evelyn (Argento collaborator/ex-wife Daria Nicolodi of Tenebrae, Deep Red, Suspiria, and so forth).

Shockingly, she actually survives this movie.

Even though the cast isn’t particularly small, it’s intimate. There are practically no other characters involved, and the interpersonal relationships between almost every combination of personalities are explored with some depth. This is a giallo with an exceptionally focused murder mystery plot (that’s a low bar, but still) because the people populating it are at least mildly interesting all across the board.

That’s just about the last unequivocally good thing I’ll be saying about Delirium, but let’s keep this positive train a–chuggin’ for another minute. Seeing how the film is such a blend of old and new, it really is an interesting reflection on the genre it more or less put out to pasture. Much like Dario Argento’s Tenebrae five years earlier, it’s as much a meditation on misogyny in the genre as it is a pristine example of it.

With the most phallic, penetrative imagery this side of Slumber Party Massacre’s giant power drill, Delirium is a 90-minute exercise in foregrounding the never-quite-subtle sexual symbolism evident in the slasher and giallo genres. If you don’t want spoilers (like anybody cares), skip until after the next image.

The killer here targets women as an outlet for his rage at his impotence, a theme that has never been explored more explicitly (except maybe in the chainsaw seduction scene of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2). When the killer finally confronts Gloria, he undresses her with his blade, sticking it in her mouth and rubbing it across her body until he’s literally shot in the dick and “ejaculates” blood all over her face. And every other death is so symbolically penetrative it’s almost obscene, especially the sequence where a nude young woman is stung to death by hundreds of bees.

Truly delightful.

The overtly misogynistic violence clashes against the film’s depiction of women who have sexual autonomy and hold high-powered jobs, manipulating the voyeuristic eye of the camera and the men holding it.

But mostly of course, this is all just an excuse to shove as many bare breasts into the frame as physically possible. It’s a shame such an intelligent, knowing visual theme has to be supported by a weak softcore plot and actors who perform like this is the very first rehearsal of a high school play. It also features a completely unnecessary and inexcusable rape scene, which tilts the balance too far over the edge into genuinely nasty exploitation.

Delirium: Photos of Gloria tries its best, but it’s a thin wisp of a film; a sad straggler from a genre that had more or less already been interred. If you’re going for a taste of 1987 Italy, StageFright bridges the gap between Italian giallo and American slasher with aplomb, whereas Delirium merely plummets to its demise.

Killer: [Tony (Vanni Corbellini)]
Final Girl: Gloria (Serena Grandi)
Best Kill: My fingernails never can survive a good bee sting death.
Sign of the Times: Oh, Simon Boswell. You really had a time and a place.

Scariest Moment: Gloria visits her husband’s grave and finds her photo attached to the next casket.
Weirdest Moment: From the killer’s perspective, one of his victims has a giant eyeball for a head.
Champion Dialogue: “I warn you, the hate of a woman can be very bad!”
Body Count: 4; shockingly low for this type of movie.

1. Kim is pitchforked in the gut.
2. Sabrina is stung to death by bees.
3. Susan is killed offscreen.
4. Roberto is hit by a car.

TL;DR: Delirium: Photos of Gloria tries very very hard to be artful and worthwhile, but flails behind abysmal acting and softcore plotting.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1076