Excellent reason why A Quiet Place in the Country is a gothic giallo

From Paracinema: written during their giallo marathon, a wonderful bit of writing on why A Quiet Place in the Country could be considered a giallo...

Goblin!!!

Not a day goes by that I don't listen to some Goblin. Before I became well versed in Eurocult beyond Fulci, Leone and Cannibals, I had no idea who they were. I remember loving Romero's Dawn of the Dead's really awesome score and not having a clue who was behind it.

One track stuck in my head, as Peter, Fran, Scott and Flyboy land their helicopter on the Monroeville Mall roof, this crazy, discordant synth cue was forever stuck in my gray matter.  When I realized Goblin were behind the soundtrack, I became a fan.

To me a great piece of a film music instantly flashes whatever scene it played behind. When I hear that cue, I see the quartet of survivors stunned and scared at the scene below and then I get their madness as they decide to hole up in the mall.

For years and years, this was my favorite Goblin track. A decade ago, thanks to dvd I got into Eurocult seriously and bought myself a multi-region player. High on my Castellari kick, I bought dvds from Europe and Japan including King Records La Via Della Droga. 

It was there  I discovered my all time favorite Goblin track, sequence 2 (starting at 2:12 here), the Hong Kong credits music from La Via Della Droga. I kid you not, I must have repeated that sequence at least 10x before I let the film continue (and hey, Fabio Testi topless is an equally nice incentive :D). The music evoked Oriental thoughts so clearly and conflicted with Testi's Narc so perfectly...

It was years before I could just watch La Via Della Droga without repeating that scene before moving forward.  It kills me that the otherwise awesome Blue Underground release of La Via, has a serious sync lapse/skip in the soundtrack as the previously unseen earlier moments in Amsterdam flow into the Hong Kong moments.

More recently, I've begun to appreciate the short version of Deep Red and with it, a good deal of Goblin's score. While Suspiria seems to be a lot of people's favorite Goblin soundtrack (it is one of the best things about that film), it's not mine. Yep, La Via Della Droga is my favorite Goblin score. You get all kinds of neat things (the weird synthy stuff, a sense of place (like my beloved sequence 2), some great bass work, awesome rockin' tunes etc.

So grazie Goblin for making some of the most memorable, fun and insane soundtracks.

Superbitch Review

Superbitch (a.k.a. Si può essere più bastardi dell'ispettore Cliff?) is a lot of fun.

                             


 NNN = Stephanie Beacham is nude a lot

G = Typical Italian crime gore - lots of people getting shot

FFF3/4s = the most fun I've had with an Italian Crime film since Castellari 


Massimo Dallamano will always be pretty ace in my book for the amazing giallo, What Have You Done to Solange? He's racked up another notch for his very entertaining corrupt cop film Superbitch. 

Here Dallamano plays up the Dirty Harry/undercover narcotics cop Yojimbo storyline to the max. I never realized how much Ivan Rassimov made me think of Clint Eastwood until watching this film. Sure, the voice actor who gave his Inspector Cliff a proper American accent sounds almost identical to Eastwood, but the addition of the attractive Rassimov as a no-holes barred go-it-alone undercover Narc gives Dallamano's entertaining drug bust flick a playful tone. 

Cliff inserts himself into Morell's London escort service as a "specialist" (read hired killer.) Morell has his team film wealthy clients doing some pretty wonky things in order to have them smuggle drugs out of Europe. Morell's top gal is Stephanie Beachum's almost constantly naked Joanne. Joanne and Cliff become something of an item as Cliff wrenches himself inside  Morell, Marco and Mama The Turk's drug rings. 

A bit about Mama the Turk - ridiculous mustache twirling is just the tip of the iceberg with this old drug smugglin' marm who keeps a band of counterculteresque rogues as her inner circle. These younger folks can be quite amusing if not as laughably bad as Mama The Turk. Only Cliff's counterpart, Gambol, can be taken seriously in the dubbing/acting and menacing departments. 

At any rate, the pace is fast, fun and there's a lot of humor and charm to break up an otherwise serious film about undercover cops pitting one drug family against another.  Everyone calls Cliff a Bastard (hence the original title: Who's a Bigger Bastard than Inspector Cliff?) The ending has a neat twist too. 

Besides Rassimov's spot on performance, Riz Ortolani's catchy jazz score hits all the right notes. And Morrell's office complete with the wonky curved chair and quasi-psychedelic slides on the projection screen are pretty damn cool too. If I ever go back to a multi-region player, the Arrow version has a lot of juicy extras I wouldn't mind seeing (particularly the interview about the late, great Rassimov.)

If you can take your Yojimbo storylines with tongue-hanging-out-cheek baddies and a lot of early 70s style and humor, Superbitch deserves a look. It is one of the more entertaining and all around fun eurocult films I've seen in the last two years. 


I definitely smell a double feature with Castellari's The Heroin Busters.

Sergio Martino fest: The Blade of the Ripper

The Blade of the Ripper a.k.a. The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh/Next! 1971 (Mya release 2010


If Lucio Fulci directed the perfect look for psychedelic nightmares, then Sergio Martino directed the perfect kinky sex in  The Blade of the Ripper.  Rough sex puts it very mildly, as Julie Wardh (Edwige Fenech) flashbacks to her very s & m relationship with Jean (Ivan Rassimov, who is harrowingly perfect here).

She marries a business man  Neil Wardh, hoping to escape her twisted relationship with Jean, but somehow becomes embroiled with George Hilton's boring lead...named George.

One of these three men has it for Mrs. Wardh (or it is more than one?)  The topsy-turvy proceedings of Jean,  Neil Wardh and Hilton's lackluster lead George against Mrs. Wardh grow delightfully more whacked as the film goes on. Even Julie's flight to Spain  cannot stop the fact that one of these three gents might be the same serial killer bumping off other young women lately.

So is one of our trio the serial killer?

I am not saying.

Nor am I saying, outside of the extremely lame moment for Jean and George, how Martino's first giallo ends. The pay off is brilliant and only yesterday, after several viewings over the past decade,  did I finally latch onto the reveal.

The film does not end in the way you think it would.

Edwige makes for a very smart, perfect heroine. And, boy, does she have chemistry with Ivan Rassimov.

My reason for not giving this excellent little film a higher rating is George Hilton. If he slept walked through any more of his roles (Hilton admitted that his heart wasn't in it)  Even after ten years of watching gialli, I just cannot buy George Hilton as a love interest for Edwige. Yet, Martino insisted upon casting them as a couple. There must have been a kick back somewhere because five years on, I'm still annoyed with George Hilton in these films.

Some folks might find the pacing of the giallo a little slow, but that's fine with me. The labyrinth like plots needs time to unwind and to set up all the red herrings and such.

Mya's release of Blade... is not quite the show stopper that No Shame's original release was (no extras), but for U.S. fans this is readily available.

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A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin 1971 (remastered edition, 2007 Shriek Show)

Revisiting one of my favorite Fulci gialli, the psychedelicly-inclined A Lizard in a Woman's Skin.  Absence does make me remember what drew me to this movie in the first place (the dreamlike quality of Carol's "trips"), although the eviscerated dog sequence still is unnecessary. Yeah, typical too-much Fulci sadism (the dogs are fake but they are a very convincing fake)...that moment is the one flaw in this otherwise awesome whodunit.

And Florinda Bolkan and Jean Sorel as wife and husband? Hell yes.  Bolkan's Carol has "dreams" about her hippie neighbor Julia Duer...and remembers details about Duer and her flat a bit too clearly after Julia is found murdered. So are these details Carol spills to her psychiatrist her wishful envy -she's a repressed daughter of a politican and married to a lawyer- or are the details relaying something much worse?

Lizard... is perhaps Fulci's most inventive and off-the-wall murder mystery. I love all the wonky shit with the hippie characters.  I've said this before, Lizard... would be even better if Fulci had the typecast Ray Lovelock as the male hippie.

Still, I'm appreciating the inventive storyline and the whole psychedelic flavor of the film. For awhile there, I was burnt out on ALIWS, but now I see it's Lucio's most linear and clear storyline (as happily convoluted as it gets.) It's one of the best  gialli not made by Dario Argento.






For the record, my favorite non-Argento gialli are:

What Have you Done to Solange? 

All the Colors of the Dark

and

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin.

I would admire Lucio a lot more had he stuck with giallos and westerns, I know both genres were all but dead when the ultra violent zombie craze hit Italy and the world in the late '70s.


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City of the Living Dead

City of the Living Dead (a.k.a. the Gates of Hell) - 1980, special edition released by Blue Underground, 2010.



As Lucio Fulci moved into the zombie horror arena, his films made less sense as time went on. Unlike his brilliant early giallo turns from the Hitchcock-like Perversion Story, and the awesomely dark A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Fulci's zombie horrors tossed aside logic for supernatural apocalypse. 


The first time I saw City of the Living Dead was in 1988 on home video. At that point, I was a newly christened gorehound (awakened by Tom Savini's gruework in Romero's Day of the Dead), and looking for the most disgusting, over-the-top stomach churning gore I could handle. 


Fulci and Umberto Lenzi (with his awful cannibal horrors) fit that bill perfectly. Strange, I avoided Dario Argento until 2006, but I digress. 


Fulci's zombie horrors Zombie and City were in top rotation back in the late 80s,  I was still ignorant of the grand Italian police films, westerns (beyond Leone) or gialli. 


City of the Living Dead is the tale of the pending armageddon wrought by a priest (Father Thomas) who hangs himself in the cemetery of the New England town Dunwich.  Dunwich sits upon one of the Gates of Hell and the cleric's suicide was key to opening the Gates. Dunwich prided itself on being a town of witch-hunters (Salem is often referenced), making the locals think that Father Thomas' suicide might very well be the revenge of evil upon the current inhabitants.


Meanwhile in New  York, a young psychic, Mary witnesses the priest's suicide during a seance. Mary "dies" of fright setting up one of the scariest set pieces Fulci ever lensed. A nosy reporter played by Christopher George winds up saving Mary from being buried alive. The scene of Mary desparately trying to claw her way out of the coffin is claustrophobic and harrowing. Still awful some 30 years after it was shot. 


The reporter teams up with Mary to find Dunwich to stop the impending apocalypse.   Mary's mentor claims that stopping armageddon on All Saint's Day (in which no dead body will ever rest and the dead will overrun the earth) will require the closing of the Gates of Hell. 


What follows are a series of utterly disgusting kills, the smothering by worms freaks me out more than other more gruesome deaths,  as time slips closer to All Saint's Day.  


The film ends abruptly. This remained the frustrating element  of City, but I seem to finally think it means that our 'heroes' were unable to close the gates of hell. Just a word of caution, only two characters, Mary and the psychiatrist Jerry, are vaguely worth rooting for. Fulci always populated his movies with unlikable characters, but City... like Zombie before it, is filled with scum. 


For me, the concept for City... is the strongest of Lucio's zombie films.  I also think that Fulci and his cowriter got the idea for this film from one pivotal line in George Romero's awesome Dawn of the Dead: "When there's no more room in Hell, the Dead will walk the earth." 


City... was the first in Fulci's supernatural zombie trilogy and set the stage for the unnerving sequel, The Beyond.



Back to this dvd release, Blue Underground's special edition, like so many of their releases is top shelf. Several interviews, a documentary and other such extras make this an essential purchase for gorehounds who want more gore with their zombies. And not just the gut-munching kind.


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The Sergio Martino Fest continues: 2019: After the Fall of New York

2019: After the Fall of New York (1983), released by Shriek Show 2002.


Key:


SF
G
T
FF (If you love Escape from New York give this a whirl, and be prepared to have fun.)


With the successful release of John Carpenter's seminal Escape From New York, the Italians rushed to create knock-offs. The most successful was Sergio Martinos' cheap quickie penned by awesome giallo scripter Ernesto Gastaldi.  I adore some of Enzo Castellari's crime and western output, but his E.F.N.Y. knock offs are beyond awful.


Former model Michael Sopkiw is 2019's de facto Snake Plissken, the snarky Percival.


 2019... is a fun, o.t.t. trash exercise in flattery.  Ignore, if you will, the $1.99 models and sets and roll with it. After the third world war renders all women sterile, mankind is close to extinction.


Enter Percival who is forced by the head of the Euracs to rescue the last fertile woman on Earth.


 Guess where she is? Yep, New York.


Sopkiw handles the Plisskenisms with a charm and edge that make getting through the silly moments a blast. If you're a fan of Eurocult and Italian films/horror in particular, you'll note Italian thesp "George Eastman" in a classic cameo as Big Ape.


To Gastaldi's credit, 2019 retains a lot of the New York dark humor that makes the original Escape such a blast. Imprisoned, Percival's quip to a Eurac babe coming onto him is "You're my last cigarette, huh?"


And when Big Ape meets Percival and co., he says: "They've been combing the city for you guys like bunches of bananas." Big Ape is NOT the Duke of New York. 


If you don't like rats, old buses, or mootants...you might want to skip this. The film still has a lot of low budget charm. I often like to watch this and then follow with Escape From New York.  Unlike Escape From L.A. which is pretty darn bad, 2019 feels more like a happily crude answer to E.F.N.Y. 


Martino's flair for action and character set pieces remains alive and well after his glorious early days swirling in the giallo gore-pool. Unlike some of his contempories, Sergio Martino could direct more than crime and gialli. It's too bad Michael Sopkiw faded into obscurity after the four films he shot in Italy (I still haven't seen Blast Fighter with Eastman), the guy had a lot of charisma, but was also aware of how loopy filmmaking can be.


Shriek Show's dvd is quite good: featuring interviews with Eastman & Martino. You can still find it alone, and as part of the company's post apocalyptic bundle featuring more George Eastman in two of Enzo Castellari's worst films.


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