La Bambola di satana
A group of people head to a remote castle with a dark history for the reading of a will and get bumped off one by one by a mysterious black gloved killer.
Made in 1969 it carries a lot of the tropes of Italian Gothic horror and Giallo and represents another transnational film where the Gothic would make way for black gloved killers. Not as successful as other examples of the genre it features a great location let down by a lack of any real thrills. There's a bit of nudity and it threatens to get perverse but ultimately feels a little bit of a mis-fire.
The wild-eye
Like Cannibal holocaust this ones more a comment on the morality of film making and a critique of the Mondo pictures of the time. The director Paolo Cavara was a co-director on the original mondo cane. Here a director of mondo type pictures picks up a married woman and they head to Asia where he pushes for more and more exploitative and extreme footage. Like the protagonists of Holocausts he becomes complicit in the crimes he's seeking to capture on film while ruthlessly exploiting the locals.
Its not as extreme as Holocaust but still features some shocking (for the time) sequences and a great score. It lacks the clever construction of Holocaust as well but remains a film worth checking out if you have any interest in the subject matter.
No the case is happily resolved
Another real discovery for Camera Obscura. Here a working class family man stumbles across a college professor murdering a woman. Intending to go to the police he panics and ends up at home. By the time he resolves to contact the police the Professor has beat him to the punch and is busy framing him for the killing. As the film progresses he makes numerous futile attempts at covering himself that ends up making him seem more guilty.
Not at all sleazy or violent, aside from a shocking murder near the beginning, the film is a cracking thriller that had me screaming at the screen at how dumb the main character is. This is pretty much the point as he's depicted as being rather naive and straight forward and ultimately this makes him a victim of the system. Well worth watching.
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