GIALLO SUNDAY: Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye

Of all the gialli I’ve seen, Antonio Margheriti’s 1973 slab of gothic has one of the most wonderfully eclectic casts. Have you ever wanted to see Serge Gainsbourg as a highlands police inspector dubbed with a really bad Scottish accent? Then this is the movie for you!



In addition to Gainsbourg, we have Jane Birkin (the absence of “Je T’Aime...Moi Non Plus” from the soundtrack is a positive disappointment), Hiram Keller (‘Fellini-Satyricon’), Doris Kunstmann (Eva Braun in Ennio di Concini’s ‘Hitler: the Last Ten Days’), Francoise Christophe (Princess Daniloff in the 1947 film version of ‘Fantômas’), Dana Ghia (a giallo stalwart with appearances in ‘Smile Before Death’, ‘My Dear Killer’ and ‘The Bloodstained Butterfly’) and Anton Diffring (typecast as a German military type in everything from ‘The Sea Shall Not Have Them’ to ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and the TV series ‘Winds of War’).



Diffring gets a break from the Nazi uniform here, playing Dr Franz, consort to the hifalutin Lady Mary MacCrieff (Christophe) who’s hellbent on retaining the ancestral castle despite the exorbitant upkeep, the isolated locale and the medical attention required by her eccentric (and possibly delusive) son James (Keller). James, a socially inept and attention seeking young man who inexplicably morphs into romantic hero halfway through, keeps a pet gorilla and paints nude portraits of his, ahem, French teacher Suzanne (Kunstmann). Suzanne has been engaged by Dr Franz to seduce James and get herself impregnated with an heir; when it becomes clear that James’s only interest in seeing Suzanne au naturel is the opportunity to complete another canvas, Franz enjoys himself with Suzanne instead.





The family’s evidently depleted spiritual needs are catered to by Father Robertson (Venantino Venantini), but Mary is more concerned about her financial needs and proceeds to hit up her sister Alicia (Ghia), recently loaded courtesy of an inheritance, for a loan. Alicia, who would rather Mary sell the castle, moved to London and have James properly looked after, outright refuses to sink any capital into old pile, creating a frosty atmosphere between the sisters.



Into this environment comes Alicia’s daughter Corringa (Birkin), a free spirit recently expelled from convent school. James takes a fancy to her (the avaricious Mary instantly equates a potential match as a fast-track to Alicia’s inheritance), as does the bi-sexual Suzanne. Murder, mistrust and sexual duplicity ensues, with the eponymous cat slinking around as portent to a series of swiftly executed killings (a rare example of a giallo not dwelling fetishistically on its death scenes).



For a while, you’d be forgiven for pegging the moggy as number one suspect (perhaps in league with the gorilla, the simian being better suited to the asphyxiation killing); the fat, waddling, lazy-eyed feline is on the scene for every murder and its alibi is non-existent. It even manages an escape from a sealed tomb after Mary has it interred with the deceased as punishment for disrupting a funeral. Which is a tad harsh.





The fate of – well, that would be telling, but let’s just say the second victim (and the first character to die onscreen) – keys into a local superstition and steers ‘Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye’ into the quasi-supernatural territory of ‘The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave’ or ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’ (what is it about giallo titles and the number seven, by the way?) before the final act revelation confirms the machinations of considerably more earthly motives.



Margheriti takes a slow-burn approach, setting his characters against each other and keeping the tensions at a nice simmer for the first half before cutting loose with the first of the murders. Carlo Carlini’s widescreen cinematography provides some excellent and atmospheric compositions and Riz Ortolani’s score is magnificently overcooked. There are some good, disorientating moments, particularly Corringa’s arrival at the castle where an almost subliminal series of cuts to the watching gorilla left me bemused and slightly unsettled. Architecturally, the castle never convinces as Scottish, nor does the geography in the film’s few exteriors. Likewise, the dubbing is hysterically bad, the work of bored voiceover actors doing comedy Scottish accents. In this respect, ‘Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye’ hoves very very close to being more ‘Goon Show’ than Argento. Still, after the slow-burn first half, it whips itself into an eccentric and entertaining frenzy.

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Amy Adams

The immensely likeable Amy Adams - who embodies a winning combination of smouldering vamp and girl-next-door - is 37 today. A large glass is being raised at chez Agitation.

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SUMMER OF SATAN: Lady Death

According to a song on The Smiths’ first album, pretty girls make graves.



‘Lady Death’ is a zestfully cynical anime about a pretty girl (with anime-typical exaggerated décolletage) who makes a fuckload of graves. Difference being, she makes them in hell for a bunch of bad dudes who are not already dead, but damned and unrepentant with it.



The story starts in fifteenth century Sweden where nobleman Mattias is subjugating the serfs, pressganging the able-bodied peasantry into his army, defying the clergy and generally trampling down anyone who gets in his way. He treats his wife as badly as everyone else and keeps his daughter, Hope, confined to the ancestral castle. When Hope plays hooky to hang out with sensitive student Nicolo, Mattias takes umbrage, enslaves Nicolo and promises Hope an unpleasant punishment.



Unless you’ve had your morality surgically removed, you’re probably thinking by now that this Mattias geezer is basically a bastard. And you’d be wrong. He’s worse. Hope, sneaking about the castle by candlelight, discovers that her dastardly daddy is basically the devil incarnate. At this point, led by a priest who can stand Mattias’ tyranny no longer, a mob of angry villagers lay siege to the castle. Mattias transforms into Satan, destroys the castle in a fireburst and decamps to hell.





Only Hope survives, which the clergy interpret as a sign of witchcraft and have her arrested. Chained up in a dungeon, a harlequin figure visits her (an avatar of Mattias/Satan) and promises her reconciliation with Nicolo in hell if she pledges herself to the evil one. She rejects the offer. When the church decide to burn her at the stake, however, she takes the pledge out of desperation. Finding herself in hell, Hope discovers that the harlequin is basically a lying bastard and he delights in tormenting her for a while. Eventually summoned before Satan, she finds her dear ol’ pa keeping the company of lizard-tongued concubines who put on lesbian floor shows for his gratification.



This is not the kind of behaviour that I imagine anyone wants to see their dad indulging in. An altercation breaks out and Hope finds herself banished to the furthest reaches of hell. It’s here that she meets the similarly exiled weapon-maker Cremator, who also has a score to settle with Satan. Cremator trains Hope, who morphs from the flaxen haired, good natured and improbably large-bosomed Swedish maiden to the pale-skinned, white-haired, vengefully-inclined and improbably large-bosomed ass-kicking hardcore bitch Lady Death.







Long and short of it, Lady Death puts together a quite literal army of the damned and sets out to fuck Satan’s shit up. While dressed in the kind of nothing-to-the-imagination outfit that makes Vampirella and Red Sonja look like paragons of propriety. All of which I fully and wholeheartedly respect.



Adapted from the Chaos Comics series originally authored by Brian Pulido and illustrated by Steven Hughes, but making some fairly broad departures from the mythology of the comics, ‘Lady Death’ clocks in at a brief 75 minutes and is that rarest of beasts – a movie that could have done with being longer. It fair rushes through the original story section, then hurls itself into the Lady-Death-takes-on-hell-and-hell-gets-scared part of the plot in equally propulsive fashion. Hope’s transformation into Lady Death is dealt with in a series of dissolves lasting mere seconds, and it’s not long after that that our lass has thieved a sword of indestructible power and is offering Satan to come and get some if he thinks he’s hard enough.



The old saw has it that less is more. In the case of ‘Lady Death’ – which, in its present form, is a really terrific outline for a movie – more would have been more. Hell, yeah.

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Sucker Punch

Picture the scene: self and Paula settle down to watch ‘Sucker Punch’ (because nothing says “classy dude” like making your wife sit through a film predicated on fantasy sequences featuring a quintet of attractive twenty-somethings in mini-skirts) and the following exchange occurs:

Paula: So what’s this movie about?

Me: It’s a kind of layers-of-reality thing. Like ‘Inception’.

Fast forward 105 minutes:

Paula: So what the hell was that movie about?

Me: Buggered if I know.

And sitting down a few days later to write about ‘Sucker Punch’ – which, for all its flaws, has managed to lodge itself in the back of my mind in a way I can only describe as niggling – I’m buggered if I know how to approach it, where to start, whether to put the scalpel of my critical faculties to use and deconstruct all the ways it doesn’t work, or try to pin down why/how it’s managed to get under my skin in a way I almost wish it hadn’t.

Even the tried and trusted let’s-start-with-a-plot-synopsis approach seems redundant. ‘Sucker Punch’ is the kind of movie that dares you to sketch out a plot synopsis. You can, but you’ll soon find yourself wallowing in a gratuitous amount of incidental detail to try to explain exactly why a baby dragon with two crystals in its throat is so important to stealing a cigarette lighter from a fat guy and why that in turn is essential in an escape attempt from a brothel that’s doubling up for an asylum. Or is a representation of it. Or vice versa.

This leads you into a discussion of the brothel as one of the most sexless dens of inquity modern cinema has given us. Short of ‘Showgirls’, I can’t remember a film so packed with nubile young women that managed to be so unerotic. ‘Showgirls’ remains the worst offender, though, since it managed to make female nudity uninteresting. I am still at a loss as to how Paul Verhoeven achieved this.

I am also still at a loss as to how to approach ‘Sucker Punch’. I can’t even blame my stupefaction on unrealistic expectations of the movie (although, to be fair, you only need to glance at the poster and think “hmmmm, Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jamie Chung, Jena Malone and Vanessa Hudgens in the same movie modelling a nice line in sailors suits, I’ll have some of that, thank you very much” in order to cultivate unrealistic expectations) since I went into ‘Sucker Punch’ expecting an incoherent mishmash at best and a train-wreck at worst.

But I guess what was was expecting, at the heart of either the mishmash or the mangled remains of carriages and locomotive, was an exuberant and unapologetically cheesy action-fest. This, after all, was a movie I had it on good authority as containing a major set-piece featuring clockwork and steam-powered Germans circa First World War getting their trench-dwelling asses whupped by our foxy fivesome. A movie that featured samurai elements, sword and sorcery elements, sci-fi elements and feminist elements. That huge tranches of it take place in an alternative reality was a foregone conclusion this feminism certainly doesn’t equate to girls ‘n’ guns posturing in this reality. Certainly not when the girls have names like Baby Doll, Sweet Pea and Blondie. I’m guessing Germaine Greer’s services were not engaged during rewrites.

I was, in short, expecting a lightweight piece of fluff. Something fun. Surely it’s not possible to shove ‘Inception’, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, ‘Lord of the Rings’, ‘Hellboy’, ‘D.E.B.S.’ and ‘Cabaret’ in the blender (along with a train full of killer robots) and come out with a movie that’s anything less than big dumb fun. Surely?

Zack Snyder manages it. How? He also shoves ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and ‘Through a Glass Darkly’ into the blender. He puts in bigger spoonfuls of these ingredients than any of the others. He plays out the big action scenes in the shadow of institutional miserablism. He depicts the burlesque atmosphere of the brothel in the shadow of the asylum. The threat of sexual violence hangs over his heroines in both realities. The only time they’re not in danger of being raped is when they’re battling steampunk Germans or gleaming robots – none of whom, I’m guessing, are packing a penis anyway.

(After I thought about ‘Sucker Punch’ for longer than necessary – and I guess I’d better throw up a SPOILER alert here, even though this is pure supposition – I came to the conclusion that the brothel is the top layered of reality, the asylum is how Sweet Pea has come to think of it, and ostensible main character Baby Doll is actually a figment of Sweet Pea’s imagination, an alter ego the introduction of whom into her fantasy world gives her the impetus to make an escape attempt. Please feel free to debate this theory in the comments section. SPOILERS/ABJECT GUESSWORK end.)

Maybe that’s why Snyder called it ‘Sucker Punch’ in the first place. It’s a movie that seems to promise a specific set of tropes, a certain vibe, a fanboy aesthetic of kick-ass action heroines and OTT spectacle – and to some degree lets you think you’re getting it – but continually challenges you with its unremitting returns to a milieu of incarceration, threat and depersonalization. Which denies you the payoff you want.

All told, short of painting his bizarro vision in the visceral palette of an R rating, Snyder seems to have made exactly the movie he wanted to with zero thought spared for commercialism, audience satisfaction or critical response. ‘Sucker Punch’ is a balls-to-the-wall exegesis of big-budget auteurism. And it frustrates the hell out of me that I’m unable to wholeheartedly embrace it the way I want to.

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Barbara Bouchet

I was going to mark Barbara Bouchet's 68th birthday with a review of 'Milano Calibro 9'; unfortunately, the copy I'd acquired started playing funny buggers half an hour in, skipping back to the start. The lovely Ms Bouchet hadn't even played her first scene. Epic fail!

Here's a triptych of world-class cheesecake shots instead ...

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GIALLO SUNDAY: A Blade in the Dark

Until I watched Lamberto Bava’s ‘A Blade in the Dark’, my favourite line of dialogue in a giallo was a straight toss-up between “Right, send in the perverts” (‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’) and “I killed them because they were dolls, just stupid dolls” (‘Torso’).

I now have not one but two lines of dialogue – from the same film – that challenge these. The first, during an argument between film score composer Bruno (Andrea Occhipinti) and his actress girlfriend Julia (Lara Naszinsky), is apropos of her obsession with sun-bathing: “Is it possible you’re such a vacant nerd?” Bruno snaps. “Your satisfaction is to sit like a frog in the sun.”

Calling your g/f a nerd and likening her to a frog in the same breath – way to go, Bruno, you silver tongued devil, you.

The second concerns the murderer’s psychopathology. Now, I watched a lot of gialli – and I’ll happily admit that there’s still a good number of titles I have yet to acquaint myself with – and the motivations for a genre’s worth of black-gloved psychopaths are manifold: childhood traumas, botched abortions, inheritances, schoolgirl prostitution rings, sexual hang-ups, religious mania, property deals, inconvenient spouses and just plain old blood-lust. ‘A Blade in the Dark’ gives us a killer the key to whose psychology is – ready for this – “a morbid fear of tennis balls bouncing in the night”.

Because I don’t know about you, but those nocturnally buoyant tennis balls give me the willies good and proper. The more I think about it, the more I’m at a loss to understand why other filmmakers haven’t picked up on this. (“Are the snooker cues still screaming, Clarice?” “You can take our lives, but you’ll never take … our penalty!”)

Okay, let’s hit pause on the sarcasm and rewind for a plot synopsis. Bruno rents an isolated villa from rich pal Tony (Michele Soavi) so he can have some peace and quiet while he works on the score for a horror film directed by Sandra (Anny Papa). Between visits from the erratic Julia, he is visited by the flighty Katia (Valeria Cavalli) and the seductive Angela (Fabiola Toledo), both of whom have connections to the previous tenant, an individual known only as Linda.

In short order Katia and Angela go missing, Katia’s diary is torn up and burned, and a tape reel on which Bruno hears a voice saying something that seems to connect Linda to the strange events currently unfolding is destroyed. Bruno questions shifty groundsman Giovanni (Stanko Molnar) about the previous tenant, but he’s less than forthcoming. Then Sandra lets its slip that she has a connection to the mysterious Linda. Bruno grows increasingly edgy as events escalate, but without a body to prove that Katia or Angela have been murdered, and his story roundly scorned by Julia, he finds himself with no-one to whom he can turn.

Where it succeeds, ‘A Blade in the Dark’ does so on Bava’s twitchy directorial style: from his father and Dario Argento he obviously learned the effectiveness of a prowling, subjective camera. The villa – a building so seemingly sprawling that half the time I wanted to cast an eye over the architects drawings just to see if it really was that big – offers opportunities for tense cat ‘n’ mouse sequences and architecture porn cinematography which are both seized with equal glee.

Made in 1983, it harks back to the gialli of the previous decade, particularly Argento’s ‘Deep Red’: musician protagonist, long sequences of said reluctant hero exploring a house that may or may not be deserted, a major clue (visual in ‘Deep Red’; dialogue in ‘A Blade in the Dark’) hidden in plain sight, sexual ambiguity in the last reel revelation. And for the most part it’s a stylish and compelling enough throwback.

However, there’s little investment in the ostensible mystery with Bruno, atypical for a giallo protagonist, neither witnessing an actual murder or getting hung up on an overlooked clue, the importance of which only becomes clear late in the day. Bruno’s tenuous reasons for believing that Katia and Angela have been killed – while explicitly proved to the audience in two extended setpieces – don’t really hold water and make for some awkwardly exposited scenes when he tries to discuss his concerns with Julie, Sandra or Tony.

Katia’s diary, the strange voice on the tape (no explanation for which is ever satisfactorily provided) and the peregrinations of the thuggish Giovanni are herrings of various shades of red, but Bruno never really pursues or discounts any of these angles. There’s an illogicality about ‘A Blade in the Dark’ which – while it’s kind of petty to carp about illogicality in gialli – becomes increasingly notable the longer the film continues. (Subject of which, twenty minutes shorter would have been an ideal length.)

This illogicality is present in scene after scene. It’s there in the discontinuity of Sandra discussing the revelation in the final reel of her film (“wait till you see reel twelve”), a clue which ties in to the killer’s motivation, only for the killer to break into the studio and hack apart the contents of reel ten (“the final reel,” as Sandra’s projectionist breathlessly gasps). It’s there in the ability of the killer to be at Bruno’s villa (described early on in the film as “isolated”) just minutes after vandalizing the film, while it takes Bruno three or four times as long to get back after he realizes that Julia is in danger. It’s there in the scene where Bruno asks Julia to accompany her on an errand and she snubs his company for the pleasures of sunbathing (hence the aforementioned “vacant nerd”/“frog in the sun” diatribe; Bruno’s errand turns out to be a secretive enquiry into Julia’s recent inexplicable behavior … so why invite her along?

‘A Blade in the Dark’ often seems like a collection of cool set-pieces strung together by a patchwork quilt of a narrative that hadn’t been particularly well thought out. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen plenty of gialli you can say that about which have been deliriously entertaining. ‘A Blade in the Dark’, for all its technical prowess, doesn’t quite achieve the delirium and grand guignol gratuitousness that defines the top flight examples of the genre.

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SUMMER OF SATAN: The House of the Devil

Ti West was a name I’d heard a lot, not in mainstream film criticism, but via bloggers who are passionate about horror cinema and make the effort to seek out new and interesting work. But until I picked up a copy of ‘House of the Devil’ dirt cheap on DVD recently, I knew nothing of his work.

That gets remedied. As of now.

‘The House of the Devil’ is both an homage to 1970s and 1980s low-budget American horror movies, and a reclaiming of an aesthetic all but mothballed in an age of blurrily fast cutting and overuse of CGI. West films his incrementally creepy tale in the style of a late 70s film and using techniques redolent of the area: zooms instead of dollying, lengthy tracking shots, extensive title credits, etc. But, to his credit, he emerges with something more than a mere filmmaking experiment; something more satisfying than, say, Soderbergh’s ‘The Good German’.

Opening with the assertion that, in the 1980s, 70% of Americans believed in the existence of abusive Satanic cults, ‘The House of the Devil’ immediately submerges us into a world of personal cassette players (explanatory note for under-18s*: kind of like the iPod, but bigger and with far less songs), cheesy music, Farah Fawcett hairstyles and boxy Volvo station wagons. (West also mentions that the film is based on “true unexplained events”; a wonderfully paradoxical sentence that presumably covers a multitude of invention and/or falsification.)

We quickly meet our heroine, Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), a college student looking to move out of the room she shares with a boy-crazy fellow student whose name I either didn’t catch or wasn’t important enough to be given a name in the script. (That’s “shares” as in “has to find other accommodation while roommate is entertaining anything with an X and a Y chromosome”, by the way.) She lucks out finding a landlady who cuts her a deal because Sam reminds her of her daughter; she waives the deposit, leaving Sam with only one problem: coming up with $300 for the first month’s rent.

This was the first thing ‘The House of the Devil’ did that I found particularly canny: while rooting itself in the 70s/80s aesthetic, it provides its heroine with an all-too-contemporary financial motivation (a narrow but valid parallel to ‘Drag Me to Hell’ here). Answering an ad for a babysitter, and calling on her pal Megan (the wonderful Greta Gerwig) to give her a lift out to their isolated homestead, Sam finds herself in the employ of Mr and Mrs Ulman, a couple so creepy that the Addams Family would probably cross the road to avoid them.

Another canny victory for West: the casting. Sam’s future landlady is played by Dee Wallace (‘The Howling’), Mrs Ulman by Mary Woronov (‘Death Race 2000’, ‘The Devil’s Rejects’) and her cadaverous husband by Tom Noonan (the man who launched a thousand involuntary bowel movements as Francis Dollarhyde in ‘Manhunter’). Indeed, Noonan gets his best role since Michael Mann’s psychological classic (and, for my money, still the best Thomas Harris adaptation) – he’s avuncular, refined and downright fucking scary in just the right combination. That he gives such a fine, nuanced performance – as does Donahue, easily one of the most winning horror heroines in recent years – is proof positive that West isn’t just an insightful student of the genre with a keen intuition for a tense set piece. He’s also a bloody good actor’s director.

And while I’m singing the guy’s praises, let me offer him fervent thanks for this above all: he assumes from the outset that his audience is intelligent, able to make connections, and won’t get bored if he concentrates on atmosphere and tension instead of delivering wall-to-wall torture porn viscera or crass sexual objectification. Shout it loud – Ti West respects his female protagonist and takes her seriously. He respects his audience and trusts them to respond to atmosphere, suspense and the occasional well-timed revelation.

Sure, he delivers the goods in a sustained, but not unnecessarily protracted, finale which plunges Sam into a waking nightmare and drives her to a desperate but gut-wrenchingly understandable final reel act without the need for laboured exposition or agonised overacting. But it’s the time and attention to detail he invests into building up to said finale that pays dividends and proves you don’t need swathes of CGI and geysers of stage blood to orchestrate a genuinely dark and nasty denouement.

Released at the culmination of a decade in American horror cinema defined by remakes (‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘Halloween’, ‘The Omen’, ‘The Amityville Horror’, ‘The Wicker Man’ etc etc), ‘The House of the Devil’ is infinitely more in tune with the spirit of an earlier – and arguably better – age in genre cinema than anything Platinum Dunes or the other bandwagon-jumpers have offered us. Ti West plays his hand perfectly, creating a slow-burn skin-crawler of the old school that lingers in the mind.

*Please don’t tell your parents you read this blog.

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