THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE
Director: Riccardo Freda
Original / Alternate Titles: L’ Iguana dalla lingua di fuoco
Rating: UR
Running Time: 92m
Description: Riccardo Freda is probably not a name on the tip of your tongue, even if you are an avid giallo fan. From doing a little research, it appears that this may be his only entry into the genre (a couple of other Freda films could arguably be considered gialli, but you would have to argue your point), even though like many other gialli directors, Freda has entries in most of the popular Italian genres of the time (spaghetti western, sword & sandal, spy thriller, etc.) To add to his lack of gialli experience, many critics feel that Freda’s only really good movies were I, Vampiri (which has later been mostly credited to Mario Bava), The Frightening Secret of Dr. Hichcock and its sequel, The Ghost. I personally can’t comment on any of those films, because The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire is the first and only Freda film I’ve seen.
Truth be told, TIwtToF will also probably be the last Freda film I’ll be watching. I wouldn’t rule out his films forever and ever – nothing like that – but based on this flick I most definitely will not be having a Freda Film Festival at my house this weekend! TIwtToF has a lot of good stuff going for it – a giallo killer that uses acid as a main weapon, creeping & peeping killer POV, red herrings, “weapon POV” on some killings, some really funny and absurd dialogue, and really: how cool is that title? Unfortunately, even with all that good stuff, TIwtToF is just average at best.
I really wanted to get on board for TIwtToF, but I just couldn’t. I felt that the film was just Freda’s stab at trying what was the dominant genre of the time, and that his film was very formulaic for this genre. Black-gloved killer sneaks around in the dark and kills women with acid (cool) and a razor (cool, but very common); policeman on the verge of retirement tries to stop aforementioned killer. Red paint blood ensues.
I guess if you had never seen any gialli before, TIwtToF would be a decent place to start, but if you are familiar with the genre, the only real appeal this film holds is in the very strange dialogue throughout. Some of my favorite lines: “What did you expect… the murderer’s name and address, and an invitation to drop by for tea between 5 and 6?” “If you wait a couple of years, you can read the book I’m writing about my life.” And my favorite: “When will you learn that if you don’t wear your glasses you can’t hear anything? Somebody could come in and kill you!” I’m not joking. There is a grandma who somehow goes deaf when she takes her glasses off. I actually had to rewind the film just to be sure I heard that right: no glasses = deaf. Wha???
If you were hanging out with your gialli buddies, and one of them decided to put The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire on, don’t storm out pissed off or anything like that. It’s not that bad. But if you’re at the video store with your gialli buddies, and it comes down to choosing between TIwtToF and something else, chances are you should go with something else (unless something else is Knife of Ice…)
2.5 out of 5 Old Ladies that Can’t Hear Anything without Their Glasses On
Not Commercially Available
DVD Available for Trade
FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET
Director: Dario Argento
Original / Alternate Titles: 4 mosche di velluto grigio, The Four Velvet Flies
Rating: UR
Running Time: 104 Minutes
Description: Why isn’t this movie commercially available? It makes no sense to me, when you can get much lesser Argento fare like “Phantom of the Opera” or “The Card Player,” why the final film of Argento’s famed animal trilogy (along with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat o’ Nine Tails) would be unavailable. More so than the fact that this completes one of Argento’s trilogies, 4FoGV is also a great Argento film from early in his career, and it has a component rarely seen in his canon – comedy!
4FoGV opens with a band in their recording space, rocking out. After the session is over, Roberto (Michael Brandon) leaves the space, and notices that he is being followed… again. He confronts his stalker, who claims to not know what Roberto is talking about. The stalker pulls a switchblade, which ends up in his own gut after a scuffle. Roberto is horrified by what has happened, but is quickly more horrified by the fact that there is a man in a creepy mask photographing the whole event. The next day, the murdered man’s ID shows up at Roberto’s house, and the cat and mouse play begins.
I know that there is the occasional quip or funny situation in Argento’s films, and I do not mean to imply that the man has no funny bone, but 4FoGV is a weird hybrid of Giallo and comedy, unlike any I have seen. There is Roberto’s attack on the mailman (he thinks it’s another stalker), and the mailman’s subsequent preparedness for battle. Also, there is a very funny, very gay private detective, Gianni (Jean-Pierre Marielle), who likes to point out his sexuality, and would be considered “flaming” today. Not to mention Roberto’s friend, God (short for Godfrey), who’s name being called incites a quick “Hallelujah” from the score! 4FoGV is the closest to a Giallo-comedy hybrid I have ever seen.
Unfortunately, as mentioned before, 4FoGV is not commercially available. Therefore, the version I saw was cropped incorrectly (there’s obviously a bit missing on the side of the screen), very dark and murky, and the sound was bad. Even with these shortcomings, I highly enjoyed 4FoGV, and would highly recommend it to fans of the Giallo genre, and especially to fans of Argento himself. The film has many elements that come up later in Argento’s films – the surrealistic feel (especially when an entire park full of people just disappear!), the stylish camera work, the suspense – but may be more striking for what is not present – the gore is minimal, there is nearly no sex / nudity, and the comedy that is rampant in this film I have never seen in any subsequent Argento flicks.
Paramount, why won’t you either give up the rights to this flick, or give it a good release? Maybe you can help, here’s a petition to have the film properly released: http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?4flies&1
3.5 out of 5 Friends Named “God” (if this were a better quality copy, I do not doubt I would have rated it at least 4 out of 5)
Not Commercially Available
DVD Available for Trade
TORSO
Director: Sergio Martino
Original / Alternate Titles: I Corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale, Carnal Violence
Rating: R
Running Time: 92 minutes
Description: The first time I saw Torso, I was less than impressed. This was back when, as a video store manager that often closed the store, I was first discovering the Giallo (and watching them by myself VERY late at night). I’m not quite sure what it was about this flick; it just rubbed me wrong.
I recently re-watched Torso, and I can’t figure out what it was I didn’t like the first time! Torso is a classic Giallo, with nearly all the elements covered – the flick opens with a boobie-filled three-some which identifies the killer’s penchant for eyes (eyes and sight unseen being a big part of many Gialli), there are red herrings a plenty, lots of good stalking killer-POV, Americans in Italy, red-paint blood and gore, prostitutes, drugs, the list goes on and on! Torso even features an element that I have felt is lacking from many Gialli – suspense.
The story starts out with an American student studying in Italy (foreigners in a foreign land is a very common theme in the Giallo genre), who decides with some friends to head up to a villa away from school, as some madman (as they always are in Gialli) has taken to killing young women. This is a bad idea, as the killer also heads for the hills, and works on emptying the villa!
The story is very basic Gialli territory – black gloved killer stalks and kills women. But where Torso shines is the huge amount of twists and turns (supposedly even the female actresses weren’t told who the “real killer” was during filming), good uses of the red herring (did the killer use a black scarf with red details to strangle the girls, or was it a red scarf with black details?), lots of chances to decide who the killer is (and be wrong), and the addition of the aforementioned suspense angle.
Many Gialli have a character being stalked, and yes that can be made suspenseful, especially through the use of killer-POV. Torso takes the suspense t a different level, as our heroine Jane (Susy Kendall) sits in a closet with a badly-damaged ankle, watching a murder occur just outside and trying to hold her breath. Or the many shots Sergio Martino has of doorknobs, slowly being forced open. Or the topper for this flick: Jane has to watch the masked (which is not often found in the Giallo genre, most killers faces are just not shown) killer dismember her friends as she tries to not make a sound.
Torso is a great shining example of the Giallo done very well. There are enough twists and turns to derail a train, the requisite boobies and blood, a scary stalking killer with a freaky knife, red herrings upon red herrings, the themes of both “foreigner in a foreign land” and “sight unseen” being played out, and a really hard to swallow motive for the killings (as they usually are in Gialli). I need to go get me some more Sergio Martino Gialli and see if they stand up to Torso.
4 out of 5 Black on Red Scarves
DVD Available from Anchor Bay
KNIFE OF ICE
Director: Umberto Lenzi
Original / Alternate Titles: Il Coltello di ghiaccio, Silent Horror
Rating: UR
Running Time: 91 minutes
Description: I like Umberto Lenzi. I know that if you go on the imdb and look up his titles, you will see over and over again people criticizing his films as being boring, or outrageous, or disjointed, or whatever, but I like Umberto Lenzi. I think his dialogue is extremely (and usually unintentionally) hilarious, his situations are creatively crazy, and his films as a whole are underrated. Except this one.
This giallo is an extremely odd entry into the genre for more than a few reasons. First - unlike most every other Lenzi flick I’ve seen - there is no nudity, and nearly no blood. “What the? I thought this was a giallo,” you’re probably asking your self. I was asking my self the same thing as I watched… where is the skulking killer POV? Where is the liberally flowing red-paint blood? Where are the tits??? Not here. Actually, the most horrific images in the entire film are in the opening sequence; shots of a real bull fight, with a real bull being killed. I realize that if I were Spanish, this probably wouldn’t have bothered me so much, but as I am a friend to animals, and a person who just doesn’t like the REAL gore, I found these opening shots to be 10 times more appalling than any other images in this film.
KoI follows a mute, Martha (Carroll Baker) who is afraid of trains. Yes, afraid of trains… because (as is explained in some really heavy-handed exposition towards the beginning of the flick) she was thrown out the window of a moving train by her father just before it crashed, and she then watched as her parents burnt to death. She hasn’t spoken since. She converses on the telephone by tapping the receiver, and somehow everyone knows that it’s her on the other end of the line, and can interpret what she is saying (an even more impressive feat, I think, then people understanding Lassie when she tells them little Timmy has fallen down the mine shaft), and in person she usually uses her own sign language (again that is understandable to those that know her).
The “carnage” (I put that in quotes because, really, there isn’t much to qualify as such) starts when Martha grows some balls and goes to the - gasp! - train station to pick up her cousin, Jenny (Ida Galli), a singer who has come to visit Martha and their Uncle Ralph (George Riguad). That evening, Jenny is killed in the garage, and the viewers get the only glimpse of the “black glove” archetype seen in this film. Nearly immediately suspicion is put on “a sex maniac,” as another girl is found dead just down the road. Jenny and Martha caught a glimpse of a man with crazy eyes peeping on them on their way home from the train station, and creepy-eyes shows up again at Jenny’s funeral. So it must be creepy eyes, and to make it even worse for our ocular-deficient possible killer, he’s a British-Satanist-hippie-junkie. Yup, a Satanist hippie. Free love and goat entrails. Morphine and black mass. For some reason, that just doesn’t gel for me.
While I really do love me some Lenzi flicks, this one lives up to the imdb opinion of Umberto. Slow, ridiculous, tedious, and really, not a whole lot of fun. Every time I thought it was about to get better, KoI let me down. There wasn’t even much of the unintentionally amusing dialogue that I look forward to in Lenzi’s usual fare. The “red herrings” in this flick made no sense, and then ending “twist”… really? That’s the killer? Really? Well, if you say so, Umberto.
1.5 out of 5 British-Satanist-hippie-junkies
DVD Not Commercially Available
DVD available for trade
THE NEW YORK RIPPER
Director: Lucio Fulci
Year: 1982
Original / Alternate Titles: Lo Squartatore di New York, Psycho Ripper
Rating: UR
Running Time: 93 minutes (unrated version), 85 minutes (US cut version)
Description: This is one of the more infamous gialli out there; mostly for the extreme gore value (as is often Fulci’s trademark) and the perceived misogynism running rampant in this film. And TNYR’s reputation is well deserved.
TNYR follows Lt. Fred Williams (Jack Hedley) and his “profiler,” a college professor named Dr. Paul Davis (Paolo Malco), as they attempt to track down a serial killer operating in New York. The killer provokes his pursuers, as he calls Lt. Williams and speaks to him in a Donald Duck-like voice. “You’ll never understand me! You’re too stupid,” the killer taunts.
TNYR features some of the more brutal violence seen in the giallo genre. One of the first killings is a close up of a woman’s torso, as a switchblade slices her open. Another victim is stabbed in the crotch with a broken bottle, while another has her nipple cut in half (and you wonder how this film was labeled misogynistic?) So be prepared if you intend to view TNYR, for there will be no easy ride here, buddy.
There are other good reasons to label this film misogynistic, and I have to agree with those critics that label it so. While many gialli have women as the exclusive victims (and often are even more specific, killing just prostitutes or lesbians…), TNYR just treats the female characters like shit.
Even though there are so many ugly aspects to TNYR, I still really enjoy this film. The murder mystery is great, and even unresolved – Fulci shows you the killer, but then throws a little curveball saying “oh, by the way, it could have been this guy, too” – and the film has Fulci’s style. Many would say Fulci’s “style” is just a bunch of tits and gore, and while TNYR contains such, this is not what I am talking about. Fulci takes us to the peep shows and back alleys of early 80’s New York City, and you can feel the grime on the lens. This is a dirty, dirty film, and through TNYR’s lighting, camera work, and of course the previously mentioned tits and gore, the viewer FEELS dirty by the time the movie is over. At least this viewer did.
4 out of 5 Crazy-Voiced Killers
DVD Available from Anchor Bay
The New York Ripper for sale at Amazon.com
