Nude Per L’Assassino: Sex And Violence And More Sex

Horror movies, like pretty much any other movie, are products of their time and the culture in which they’re made. And horror movies also tend toward transgression, since they’re largely dealing with the kind of stuff more polite entertainment doesn’t. What this means in practice is that the older the film, the more likely it is that it will have…not aged very well. Values and norms change over time, and some things that used to be acceptable aren’t any more. So I’ll sometimes find myself watching a movie where I’m more grossed out by the way the people in it behave than I am by blood and gore.

In my limited experience, gialli are especially susceptible to this. A type of film made largely in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, gialli have some ideas about sex, sexuality and gender that are by modern standards pretty repugnant. And Nude Per L’Assassino (Strip Nude For Your Killer) is definitely no exception. I mean, with a title like that, it was never going to be subtle. But even though it isn’t as viciously nasty as some I’ve seen, the way it seems to be equal parts murder mystery and softcore sex film ends up being pretty distracting.

It comes in pretty hot, opening with a woman at a doctor’s office getting an abortion. It’s not as lurid as it could have been, thank goodness, but it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. Halfway through, she appears to expire quietly in the chair. It’s an unusually low-key sequence, ending with the doctor calling someone in a panic. They’re going to move her back to her apartment and make it look like she died of natural causes. They dump her in the bath and start the water running, then they leave.

Some days later, a mysterious figure catches up to the doctor as he’s about to walk into his house, and stabs him to death.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, fashion photographer Carlo is busy trying to bed an attractive woman while he’s out in public…taking photographs, I think? He’s very much the kind of dude who doesn’t take “no” for an answer, which is gross enough, but somehow it’s worse that the woman he’s pressuring into sex (in a public place, no less) relents and goes along with it. Apparently, “no” means “yes” in this movie, and it’s pervasive. When Carlo brings her back to the fashion design house, he sort of dumps her on the head of the agency and finds out that one of their models apparently died of natural causes. Hmmm. And then only a couple of days later, another employee dies. It takes a bit for people to start putting it together, but a mysterious killer is targeting everyone who works for this design house. Someone’s out for revenge.

The biggest problem with this film is the same problem as pretty much any other Italian movie in the genre from the mid-70s – pretty much every man in this film is one flavor of pig or another. It’s more chauvinistic than misogynistic or homophobic (I still haven’t gotten the taste of New York Ripper out of my mouth), but there’s plenty of dudes who don’t take no for an answer, who have no sense of boundaries, who’ve never heard the word “consent.” And on top of that, most of the women in this film are sexually available in one way or another. Carlo has a brief, tense exchange with aspiring photographer Magda, who is intent on proving herself as a photographer on her own merits, but this doesn’t stop her from turning around and seducing Carlo in a darkroom for…reasons? It really does underscore the idea that boundaries and consent don’t really mean anything. No matter what she says, she really wants it. Even a scene with two cops interviewing someone can’t resist having one of the cops spend the whole thing leering at a scantily-dressed woman in the office. Why is she scantily-clad? That’s a good question. With the exception of two nurses in a brief hospital scene, pretty much every woman in this film ends up getting naked, whether it makes sense or not. It ranges from the somewhat uncomfortable - there’s a brief scene of a woman getting slapped around toward the end - to the pathetic, as another executive at the design house attempts to pay a woman to sleep with him, and when he’s unable to perform, he cries for his mother. I didn’t feel dirty after watching it (still looking at you, New York Ripper), but I did yell “ew, gross!” more than a few times at the way dudes acted in this film and at the subtext about sexual availability. I’m usually able to calibrate for older films, but in this instance it ends up being distracting.

So it’s very much of its time, to the point that it is kind of a distraction, but there’s also not a whole lot of movie outside of the gratuitous T&A. Apart from that, it’s sort of a mixed bag. The editing comes straight from the school of “meanwhile, in another movie,” the acting is nothing to write home about, and there’s very little mystery to it. It’s not so much that the killer is immediately obvious as it is it just one person after another dropping like flies until the very end, where the killer is revealed mere seconds before process of elimination would make their identity clear to the audience. It doesn’t have the stylishness of Argento’s work or the deranged vision of Fulci at his weirdest, but it’s mostly cohesive (if not especially interesting in how it develops the story) and it does manage a decent amount of suspense with a repeated motif of running water, heavy breathing, and a near-subliminal insert shot from the beginning of the film heralding the killer’s arrival. The deaths are quick and nasty, full of blood that looks like tempera paint, but they aren’t overly sadistic, and both men and women get killed. So it isn’t as icky as I was afraid it was going to be, landing more on inappropriately horny in a way that mostly just made me roll my eyes. It’s grainy, with pops of color and rainy streets at nighttime, and it’s got the requisite cop-show up-tempo score mixed in with some lighter pop music from the period. I’m beginning to see what people mean by “Eurosleaze” after watching this, and though it has its merits as a style of film, the “sleaze” part makes it a little tough to appreciate.

Film - especially horror film - is a place where you can explore difficult or upsetting ideas, grapple with uncomfortable emotions and express things in strong, vivid terms. I don’t like moral panics or pearl-clutching, and I don’t think that any particular creative work’s value should be determined by its adherence to a particular set of norms and values. Judging the films of 40-plus years ago by the values of today doesn’t make much sense to me. But anything that yanks me out of a movie is going to be a problem, and this one’s just juvenile and gross enough to be distracting. 

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Lo Squartatore Di New York: Not A Nice Place To Visit, And I Certainly Don’t Want To Live There

As near as I can tell, there are a couple of different types of Italian horror films that get filed under giallo. You’ve got the stylish (or at least stylized) murder mysteries, where lots of people get stabbed or strangled or otherwise dispatched by mystery figures in black leather, and then you’ve got the zombie/demon movies, where some gate to hell or another gets opened up and all kinds of gooey monstrosities emerge to kill, eat, and both eat and kill people. Where do cannibal movies fit? If/when I ever make a point of watching any, I’ll let you know, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. I know that giallo describes a wider range of movies than this, but this is what I’ve observed so far. And regardless of which of those two types it is, there’s one thing they have in common: They’re bonkers. Not a shred of subtlety to be found. The more I think about it, “outrageous” really fits, in that they’re both wildly unconcerned with plausibility and also likely to evoke outrage.

And in both those regards, Lo Squartatore Di New York (The New York Ripper) fits the bill in spades. It’s the kind of film that gets described as being “very much of its time,” but really that just means it’s sleazy and gross on multiple levels. Worse, as far as I’m concerned, it seems to bring together the two types of giallo I outlined above, but does so without including the strengths of either. The narrative doesn’t hold together, and it’s bloody and violent without being either stylish or over-the-top enough to get over. It’s kind of the worst of both.

That said, I have to applaud the opening. We get a scenic view of what is presumably the East River, and an older gentleman walking his dog along the trash-strewn asphalt adjacent to the riverbank. Ah, city living. He finds a chunk of wood and he throws it. Like the very good girl she is, his dog brings it back. So he throws it again, and she dives into some bushes to retrieve it. But when she comes out, he looks at her in dismay, as the camera cuts to her standing there holding a decomposed human hand in her mouth. It’s not an especially surprising scene, I would have been more surprised if it had gone any other way, but then it freeze-frames on the shot of the dog holding the rotting hand and plays all of the opening credits over it. It makes you look at that hand. The movie is saying “you are in for some shit,” and it’s right.

Cut to world-weary police lieutenant Fred Williams at the precinct house, taking the statement of a dotty old landlady who is reporting one of her tenants missing. Does his cop intuition tell him there’s more to this than a flighty young woman who’s taken off for an impromptu trip? No, not really, but he’s the protagonist, so he’ll have to do. We move from New York’s finest standing around looking bored to a young woman riding her bike to the Staten Island ferry. She accidentally scrapes against a car along the way and the driver makes a point of loudly explaining to her that she’s a menace to society with the brains of a chicken and how “you women” should stay at home where they belong. And yeah, that’s…this movie came out in 1982, and that’s pretty much how the whole film is going to be. As luck has it, he’s parked on the ferry, and as they get underway, this young woman takes the opportunity to slip into his car and write “shit head” on the inside of the windshield in lipstick.

But before she can finish, she is interrupted by someone with a switchblade. Permanently.

So Lieutenant Williams gets assigned to investigate the Mysterious Case Of Why Women Are Turning Up Dead. He is ostensibly assisted by a psychologist named Dr. Paul Davis, who will be helping him develop a profile of the killer. I say “ostensibly” because mostly all Dr. Davis does is play chess, look smug, and belittle the people around him. What follows is a lot of stuff happening, in no particular order. This is a film that doesn’t move from scene to scene so much as it lurches from scene to scene, and though you can make out something of a story, there’s not a whole lot of attention paid to pacing or structure or anything like that. Characters are routinely introduced with little to no context in the way that you expect that connections between them will be revealed, or that they’ll cross paths and things will make more sense, but not so much. In most cases (at least the women), they’re in the movie to get murdered and that’s kind of it.

So this is a film about a police investigation into a series of murders, but I can’t really call it a procedural, because that implies that there’s anything resembling procedure. This film makes leaps in logic that would easily take Olympic gold if it were an event. Apparently, Wiliams is able to determine the killer’s age and that they’ve lived their entire life in New York City from…a blood test. That’s…that’s not a thing. The killer makes a point of calling the police to taunt them, and even though this taunting consists of the killer saying “you’re so stupid” a lot and quacking (yes, quacking), Davis determines from this that the killer is very intelligent and cultured. In theory, Williams is working with Davis to catch the killer, but they confer maybe three times over the whole film – large sections go by apparently having forgotten this was supposed to be happening. Davis’ analysis of the killer is empty psychobabble, but really, that’s just par for the course. It’s easy to tell that everything in this film is based on someone’s speculation about what police work and psychology are, since presumably there was no money or time for a consultant, and so they just made shit up. Most of the film is just ping-ponging between characters, setting up red herring after red herring. Is it the man with two fingers missing, who attacks a woman on the subway? Is it the wealthy doctor with some very specific kinks? Is it the young painter whose girlfriend narrowly escapes the killer? Is it Dr. Davis? Hell, is it the police chief? The answer will surprise you, because it’s totally unrelated to any of the clues the film has planted.

So it’s a clumsy, incoherent story, told in clumsy, incoherent fashion. The dialogue’s as stilted as you’d expect from an Italian production set in New York (Williams to the police chief: “Well, if it isn’t the big chief person himself”), although there’s enough location shooting that it feels like New York, and it’s New York of the early 80s, all grubby and run-down, subway cars scabbed over with graffiti and dingy apartments and porn theaters in Times Square. All of which is explored in the most prurient and salacious way possible. Is there any real reason why one of the murders requires a lengthy sequence at a live sex show? Not really, and yet here we are. There are more than a few shots of nude female bodies on morgue tables, many of the women happen to be naked when they get killed, and there’s one sequence involving a nude woman and a razor blade that is genuinely nasty. The effects are still obvious, but well-done enough that it isn’t as comical as it could be. And there’s one sequence with the wealthy doctor’s wife and two men in a bar that had me wanting to take five or six showers once it was over. Put simply, the film is misogynistic as fuck. Women exist in this movie to be naked and/or stabbed. They’re sex workers, or someone who had the nerve to talk back to a man, or stuck-up rich women slumming for rough trade, and even the one the film goes out of its way to tell us is a genius? She’s also prone to hallucinations. Bitches be crazy, am I right? We learn that Davis is most likely gay – does it end up mattering? No, thank goodness, given the genre’s track record with homosexuality, but it’s portrayed through a fairly leering one-off scene that ends up contributing nothing to our understanding of him either. It’s an uncomfortable film to watch, and not in the sense of being confrontational, so much as it feels like you’re stuck in conversation with an oily little creep who thinks jokes about rape are funny.

It just sort of bounces back and forth between murders and aimless conversation until the third act, which keeps you guessing (or more specifically, confused) right up to the end, revealing a rationale for the murders absolutely head-clutching in how convoluted it is. Even by giallo standards, it’s kind of a doozy, coming out of nowhere, just like everything else about this film. It’s a thriller without the visual flair of those giallo at their best, and it’s got the graphic violence of the more straightforward horror giallo without being evocative, and it manages to preserve all of the gross attitudes of the period. So it’s evocative of another time, absolutely, but it’s a time that nobody in their right mind would want to revisit.

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I Corpi Presentano Tracce Di Violenza Carnale: Sex And Violence

For as much lip service as Halloween gets for being the beginning of slasher films, there are any number of films that precede it, and something I’m starting to realize the more I dive into Italian horror is just how much of the prototypical slasher film’s DNA comes from giallo. Sure, it’s a term that encompasses more than just horror, but within the ones most commonly associated with horror, starting with The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, you see what would eventually lead to Halloween and all the dross that came after. And as someone who doesn’t really like slasher films, a lot of the early examples are more interesting in how they don’t hew to a formula (because the formula didn’t exist yet) or bring in elements of other films. 

And to this end, I Corpi Presentano Tracce Di Violenza Carnale (Torso) is a noteworthy addition to the list. It’s an Italian horror film that doesn’t have the visual flair of something like Suspiria or Deep Red, or the gonzo weirdness of something like The Beyond, but acquits itself well and probably works even better now because of a shift in cultural norms.

It opens, as many of these films do, lurid and weird. Someone’s photographing a bunch of women sort of writhing around naked in soft focus. There’s a child’s doll, and a set of fingers comes into frame to gouge out its eyes. So already we have a pretty good idea of what we’re in for. Cut to an art history lecture, and a professor examining the relationship between sacred art and artists who are non-believers. We’re introduced to a number of female students - Flo, Carol, Dani, Katia, Jane and Ursula. It’s coming up on the weekend and they’re making plans. For Flo, “plans” consist of driving to a remote area and making out with a guy.

They did not include a masked figure murdering both of them, but there you go.

The basic structure of the film is as simple as any slasher film - people try to figure out who’s doing all the murders, murders keep happening, often strangulation with a very distinctive-looking scarf, eventually there’s a final reveal and confrontation. The music’s pretty stock, the settings aren’t especially flashy, but it’s well-paced and has, I think, a couple of things going for it. First, intentionally, it makes good use of the trappings of the whodunit. Just when you think you’ve got a particular character nailed as the killer, something comes along to upend that and make you question your own judgment. It’s pretty engaging on that front, and the final reveal feels earned, if not just as melodramatic in its explanation as any other film in the genre. I don’t like thinking of films in terms of “kill scenes,” but I think it handles the requisite scenes well - they’re mostly set-up, and though the violence is sufficiently graphic, it’s not lingering or gratuitous. It gets pretty gnarly at points but you never feel like it’s indulging for the sake of it.

The second thing is, I think, not intentional, but more a factor of the way sensibilities have changed since the 1970s, when this was made. It’s a film that is very much of its time. The original title translates to “the body showed traces of carnal violence” and if I didn’t know better, I’d say this film was key in the inclusion of sexual content in later slasher films. There is lots and lots of gratuitous nudity in this film, starting with the opening credits but by no means ending there. The scenes don’t need it, and it’s lingered upon. It’s strictly directed at the female characters and it’s utterly unapologetic. The camera leers and so do pretty much all of the men in the movie. Like, literally there’s one scene that’s just a bunch of men gawking at a woman. Like, that’s it. Both in how they’re treated visually and in how the male characters talk about them, the women in this film are completely objectified. So right off the bat, there’s something alienating about this film, in the degree to which it is the product of a sensibility you rarely see depicted so blatantly any more. But I think the alienation helps it - we’re presented with a world very different from our own, and that creates a certain atmosphere.

This is further assisted by the nature of the men in the film. With a couple of exceptions, all of the men in the film are creepy to one degree or another. It’s tough to tell how much of it is intentional and how much of it is just because it was an Italian film made in the 1970s. but, as it does in Black Christmas, it adds this uneasy layer to the film - it’s already a hostile atmosphere, and on top of that, pretty much anyone could be the killer. Is it the art professor who hits on Jane and takes a compliment about his eyes really strangely? Is it the student clearly obsessed with Dani, who wears a suspiciously familiar-looking scarf and starts choking a sex worker when she suggests he might be gay? Is it the apparently well-meaning doctor who gives a bunch of them the once-over on a train out of town? Is it the weaselly owner of the newsstand who sells scarves like the one from the killings? Is it one of the two dudes who grope Katia and then try to beat her up when she rejects them? Is it Dani’s uncle, who isn’t above checking her out surreptitiously while she’s just wearing a towel? It could be any of them because they’re all equally complicit in treating women like objects that exist for their pleasure and nothing else. It’s like these women are adrift in a sea of predators because misogyny makes everything a minefield for them.

The first act sets up all the suspects, the second act starts picking people off, and the third brings it home, though interestingly enough, instead of getting more frantic toward the climax, it slows way down and plays most of it as an extended game of cat and mouse, making the big reveal pretty much at the last possible minute. True to the form, there are plenty of cryptic flashbacks, murders performed by a mysterious figure in black leather gloves, the requisite pop-rock soundtrack (chase scenes are never more mellow than they are in films like this), and plenty of blood. There’s strangling, stabbing, eyes getting gouged out, heads getting crushed by a car, the usual, though the violence is far less fetishized in this film than the sex, about which attitudes are as confused as you’d expect - plenty of women traipsing around naked for reasons, dialogue about what this particular man would do to that particular woman, but a scene of the killer peeking in on two women kissing has the kiss itself obscured by a conveniently placed headboard. There’s also an early instance of the Final Girl, predating Halloween by a good five years. It doesn’t hit the most deliriously berserk heights of the form, but it’s also much more coherent and keeps up a good sustained feeling of tension and unease. Nobody and nowhere feels safe in this film.

It is, in some ways, a very workmanlike film. It doesn’t exceed expectations, but there’s also not too much to complain about - there’s one very goofily choreographed fight scene that looks more like a slapfight than anything else, but that’s about it. If you have a low tolerance for men being gross about women, this is not your film, and though it isn’t as transcendent as something like Suspiria or The Beyond, it’s very solid.

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L'uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo: An Odd Bird

Today, I’m going to be writing about my latest in an ongoing attempt to familiarize myself with classic Italian horror. Most of what I’ve taken away so far from the films I’ve seen is that classic Italian horror is visually stylish and utterly unacquainted with things like “subtlety” or “nuance.” And L'uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo (The Bird With The Crystal Plumage) is where a lot of this begins. It was director Dario Argento’s first sole directing credit, and it…for better and worse…really lays out the thesis for what would follow.

The film opens on an unseen figure typing a note that appears to be the location for a meeting. And then a pair of hands, clad in black gloves, unwrapping an impressive array of knives. There’s a lingering over the knives, over the leather of the gloves. It’d be really obvious to call it “fetishistic,” but that’s because it’s really obviously fetishistic. It’s an opening that leaves nothing in doubt: People are going to get stabbed.

And then we’re whisked away to meet Sam Dalmas. He’s a writer from the United States, in Rome to write a manual about varieties of birds. He was hoping for a novel, but writer’s block means he’s taking the work he can get. He doesn’t even want a copy of the book he’s just written - the check is enough. Sam is maybe kind of a dick, but he’s a dick with a hot model girlfriend and a week or two left on the lease for his apartment. He’s getting ready to move back to the U.S. with abovementioned hot model Julia. And so Sam’s walking home one night, and he ends up going past an art gallery, well-lit, full of sculpture and a front wall and entryway made entirely of glass…

…which makes it very easy to see the black-clad figure inside attempting to stab a woman to death.

Sam manages to drive the attacker off by creating a commotion, and to his credit, sticks around to make sure the potential victim is okay. He is now also the sole eyewitness to this crime, and after an interview with a detective ends in a game of “whoops, got your passport” that Sam loses badly, he’s stuck in Italy until there’s some kind of resolution. So he does what anyone would do in this position, and begins his own search for the assailant, even though he has no background or credentials in law enforcement. It’s not like there’s much else he can do.

The basic structure of the story revolves around Sam’s attempts, working both with the police and on his own, to figure out who tried to kill this woman even as more bodies start to pile up. It’s a mystery, but not necessarily an especially artfully crafted one. In fact, I think the best way to describe this film is as…eccentric. 

It’s eccentric from a visual standpoint - there are a lot of point-of-view shots from both the killer’s and victim’s perspectives (which actually work pretty well even if they are a little predictable(, a lot of close-ups of eyes and (screaming) mouths, and an editing style that can only be described as “jarring.” It’s a film where scenes of violence cut immediately to scenes of domesticity, often in the middle of a conversation, without any real transition or indication that the scene is about to change. It’s also a film in which a police crime lab is represented by a sterile white room with banks of whirring tape drives, as classic a visual shorthand for “SCIENCE!” as you could want. It’s a more visually subdued affair than Argento’s later film Suspiria, depicting everyday Italy in both its glamorous art galleries and modest apartments in crumbling neighborhoods, but the way it’s shown lends it a sheen of strangeness nonetheless.

But it isn’t always gratuitously strange, some of the visuals can be quite inventive. One especially memorable scene has Julia recounting the other murders to Sam in voiceover while we see stills of the crime scene photos from each killing, and it works really well. It also makes good use of flashbacks, sometimes freeze-framed or played over and over, inserted into the middle of scenes in a way that makes them feel almost like intrusive thoughts. And all of this is scored with a soundtrack that is equal parts discordant jazz and wordless female vocalization, landing it somewhere between a crime film and a supernatural horror film, which is appropriate. Though the killer isn’t a supernatural figure, the narrative requires that we don’t see their face until the final reveal, so for most of the film they seem less like a person and more like a presence, an undetectable, unstoppable force.

It’s narratively eccentric as well. It’d actually be more accurate to say that it’s all over the shop. It’s tough to believe that law enforcement would just let a civilian - an American one, no less - just run around conducting his own ad hoc investigation, and on multiple occasions, we get flashbacks to things Sam’s experienced that depict events clearly and vividly, but he struggles to remember the things we’re seeing right in front of us on the screen. It almost makes it feel like he’s holding something back, though at no point is he implied to be the killer. There are strange comic touches as well, like a stuttering pimp and an informant whose portrayal borders on slapstick and who feels like he wandered in from an entirely different movie, along with a deeply eccentric artist with some peculiar dietary habits, and one especially odd scene where Sam recounts an upsetting phone call to a friend, only to turn around and start making out with Julia with such fervor that the friend shows himself out. Between this and the cinematic choices, it’s a film with a tone best described as abrupt. 

None of those things are necessarily weaknesses, given the right context, but it’s got some full-on weaknesses as well. The sexism is toned down compared to Argento’s film Profondo Rosso, but the casual homophobia and transphobia from that film shows up here as well and is, equally juvenile and off-putting here. The end is a mess of fake-outs before the final reveal, jettisoning the offhand clues we get through most of the film to land on a final reveal that mostly comes out of nowhere (unless you’ve seen Profondo Rosso, in which case you will, like me, be expecting it), explained with a lot of psychobabble that to modern sensibilities will probably land as at least a trifle offensive. 

Still, it was Argento’s first sole directing credit, and though it might not have been the first giallo, it’s certainly where the form took off and it sets a tone for a lot of the films that followed. On that level, it’s an assured and confident debut with a distinct vision, and it pioneers themes and techniques that echo through his later work and into the work of other directors. It’s a clumsy mystery, but one that blazed a trail.

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Profondo Rosso: What Did I Just See?

For as long as I’ve been writing this thing (holy shit it’s been ten years), there are still gaps in my horror film education, and every now and then I try to fill those gaps as best as I can. A couple of weeks back I noted that even though I could tell A Classic Horror Story drew from a tradition of Italian horror, I hadn’t actually seen many examples of the style. So, with Italian horror on my mind, I decided to take a look at Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), directed by genre mainstay Dario Argento, whose Suspiria I covered here some time back.

Let me tell you, this film was a ride, for reasons both good and bad, equal parts fascinating, strange, tiresome, and frustrating.

The film opens on the silhouette of someone stabbing someone else to death, overlaid with a child singing, so you know we’re in for the weird shit. We cut from this to a talk being given by a psychic about her abilities, interrupted by her near-hysteric reaction that someone in the audience has killed and will kill again. We cut from that to the psychic in her apartment, finishing a phone call, only to be stabbed to death by a mysterious figure in black leather gloves.

Meanwhile, jazz pianist Marcus Daly and his friend Carlo are having a drunken, spirited discussion about their approaches to music as they stumble toward Marcus’ apartment building. where it just so happens the psychic is his upstairs neighbor. They get there just in time to see her get murdered and pushed out the window onto the pavement.

What follows is - well, loosely - Marcus, along with reporter Gianna Brezzi, trying to solve this strange murder, only to find every lead they chase ending in another murder. This film is best described as jarring. It’s not as visually riotous as Suspiria, but the soundtrack is heavily dominated by the kind of rock music you might associate more with 70s cop shows than horror films, all keyboards and percussion and guitar. Sometimes it undermines the tension of the scene, but then others it lends a real strangeness that gets under your skin. There’s just something so odd about chase-scene music applied to someone creeping through an apartment that your brain doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

This extends to the editing and direction as well. Transitions between scenes are abrupt, sometimes mid-conversation, and even the most straightforward scenes are punctuated with close-ups on otherwise innocuous things like running faucets, squawking birds, open doorways, and random strangers in the street, rapidly cutting back and forth in a way that gives those scenes a real sense of anxiety. If that’s not enough, the action is periodically interrupted by close-ups on baby dolls and lingering, almost fetishistic shots of the black leather gloves worn by the killer. No context is provided for these interludes, they just sort of happen. And sometimes it’s almost played for comedy, as in a phone exchange made difficult by a noisy cafe and uncomfortably close espresso machine.

A lot of this film is outside of cinematic convention, and I think that both helps and harms it. On the one hand, the relentless strangeness and tonal whiplash makes it an uneasy watch, simply because you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next. It’s one of those films where it feels like all bets are off. But on the other, it’s extremely hard to follow (and there’s a reason for that, more on that in a bit) and individual scenes really seem to take place in a vacuum, causally disconnected from what came before or what comes after, It plays at times less like a single narrative and more like a series of loosely related vignettes. It was also made in 1975, and its takes on gender and sexual orientation are very much of that time period, which is to say they’re pretty gross by modern standards. The sexism isn’t great, but it’s more eye-rolling than anything else, but the homophobia is pretty unpleasant in depiction and how it plays into the narrative. Sensitivities to this sort of thing vary, and I’m usually pretty able to look past stuff based on cultural context, but this left a bad taste in my mouth.

All of that said, I’m not sure all of the film’s problems were its fault. The sexism and homophobia, sure, but the version I watched (one I’d…ahem….obtained…some time ago) was clearly a transfer from VHS (detectable in the tracking errors that popped up toward the end of the film), and so it was pretty murky and fuzzy, which didn’t help matters. Also, after doing a little research on IMDB, I was able to determine that it was a heavily edited version released in the U.S., with about 20 minutes of its run time excised. This apparently took out a lot of graphic violence (some of the cuts being obvious in the print I saw) along with a couple of subplots, and what appeared to be most of the actual interaction between Marcus and Gianna. Truth be told, the editing on the version I saw seemed like such a hack job that I can only imagine that at least some of the disorienting abruptness wasn’t intentional. Still, the film’s basic vision shines through, and it’s a deeply weird one. It doesn’t look like the unedited version is available on streaming services, and I’m not sure I liked it enough to purchase a Blu-Ray of it, but this one seems like it’s going to need some kind of revisit at some point.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon