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Five Dolls For An August Moon
There’s an opening feint in
Mario Bava’s
Five Dolls For An August Moon that would have been a superior set up to the actual scenario, a retread of
Agatha Christie’s
And Then There Were None, with a convoluted spin of an inventor fielding bids on a mysterious revolutionary formula. There’s deception after deception, and an assortment of beautiful, libidinous, duplicitous characters in typical giallo style. The first body’s journey to the walk-in freezer is creepy, draped in a clear tarpaulin, hung alongside carcasses of meat, but with each successive murder a blackly comic streak becomes prevalent, a jaunty tune accompanies, and it feels as if Bava is playfully getting his kicks where he can.
Five Dolls For An August Moon feels effortless in its direction, the material just isn’t quite up to the standard of its director.
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The Case Of The Scorpion's Tail The Case Of The Scorpion’s Tail is perhaps
Sergio Martino’s most traditional giallo. The elaborately plotted narrative is a layered tapestry of characters and motives, cohesively knitted together. An explosive tragedy, featuring an amusingly inept plane sequence, results in a potential inheritance, an insurance investigation, and a series of shifty characters coming out of the woodwork. The comparisons to
Alfred Hitchcock’s work are evident, particularly with the false heroine structure. A succession of misdirects feels inventive, cunning subterfuge that doesn’t leave the viewer feeling cheated. There’s an artful meld of beautiful locales, and breathtakingly violent murder set pieces, but in comparison to
Martino’s other gialli,
The Case Of The Scorpion’s Tail feels lacking.
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All The Colours Of The Dark Sergio Martino directed numerous gialli, managing to infuse unique elements, making each a distinct experience. From the psychosexual take of
The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh to the more procedural poliziotteschi hybrid
The Suspicious Death Of A Minor.
All The Colours Of The Dark is one of the more fascinating examples, melding occult elements and laced with paranoia creating a uniquely aberrant experience. Haunted with menacingly atmospheric dreams of a killer with piercing blue eyes, Jane seeks help. Traditional means don’t quite cut it, when the blue-eyed killer from her nightmares is in the psychiatrist’s waiting room, leading to Jane accepting an invitation from her neighbour to a black mass. It’s one of the most remarkable scenes from the film, claustrophobic and unnerving, and serves to heighten the paranoia for the remainder of the running time. The devil’s mark on the cultists looks as if applied with a child’s face paint kit, but any kind of budgetary or production issues are rendered null by the intensity of the film’s compelling psychosis.
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The Suspicious Death Of A Minor Sergio Martino’s
The Suspicious Death Of A Minor is layered in its delivery, blending elements of gialli and poliziotteschi. Despite the severity of the material, the plot centred around child sex trafficking, it has a light tone, verging into slapstick comedy at numerous points.
Martino deftly navigates and knits the disparate genre conventions, but the 100-minute running time sabotages some of the more breathless set pieces. The characters are overly stylised, caricatures at times, the protagonist a detective with perennially broken glasses, the landlady feels the perfect match for
Alphonso DeNoble’s character from
Alfred Sole’s
Alice, Sweet Alice, grotesque, lacking in any kind of redeemable traits. It’s not
Martino’s most accessible entry into the subgenre, but the hard-boiled, noir pastiche execution makes it one of the more fascinating.
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Death Laid An Egg
Satirizing the advertisement industry
Giulio Questi’s
Death Laid An Egg would deconstruct the popular giallo framework, delivering the conventional traits of the genre in an unorthodox way. The cycle of life is emphasised, from the embryonic opening to the bizarre futuristic chicken farm setting, playfully nodding to the cyclic nature of the genre’s trappings, no matter how subverted. Visually clinical, clean lines, arresting segmentations of the frame, a lack of the typical sleaze or violence, one set piece involving an accident with a feeding contraption leads to a far more subtle outcome than genre conventions dictate,
Questi more interested in the psychology of his characters, the sociology in his dissection. There’s an uneven pace, it often feels as if the film is keeping the viewer at arms length with deceptions not just in the narrative, but the telling.
Death Laid An Egg has a fascinating DNA, despite infrequent success with its formula.
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Eyeball
A typically lurid giallo from
Umberto Lenzi,
Eyeball features a killer stalking a tour bus through Barcelona, plucking an eyeball from each victim. Clad in a red raincoat and gloves, the killer’s look is effective, but not quite so much as the spectre of death that features on the film’s artwork. A trip to a theme park is an atmospheric and visual delight, but for the most part very little of
Eyeball feels significant, lacking in style, and the flair of execution you would usually associate with
Lenzi’s output. The film unfolds with an effortless pace, picking up in velocity as it heads towards a grisly killer reveal, in the film’s most ghastly set piece. Considered
Lenzi’s last ‘true’ giallo, it’s interesting to note he would go on to a career as a novelist, writing murder mysteries featuring characters from the Italian film industry.