Eyeball(1975)d/Umberto Lenzi

As I watched my hulking baby,Trevor,devour his Christmas present last night,a full slice of seeded Italian bread,I courted the notion that the 1970's were indeed the decade of the giallo in Italian film.All the top genre directors churned them out,with the maestro,Dario Argento,surely at the top of the list.It's no surprise then,that jack-of-all-trades and father of the cannibal subgenre,Umberto Lenzi,added his two hundred lira worth with several gialli by the time the decade had passed.Lenzi tackled all sorts of subject matter in his heyday,with varying degrees of commercial and artistic(?) success,and it can be said that the Italian crimedrama/whodunnit was NOT cinematic kryptonite for the Grosseto native.His work in gialli was at least passable,lightyears ahead of movies like,say,Incubo sulla città contaminata(Nightmare City).Eyeball,aka/Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro is a decent viewing experience across the board,and I can also add,in the holiday spirit,that though lots of pretty young girls get snuffed, no animals meet a violent on camera demise in the making of said film!Merry Christmas!

Martinez(Raf Baldassarre),the practical joker/tour guide, guffaws his way right into police custody.
Alma Burton cancels her flight to New York to book a trip to Barcelona instead,where a tour bus full of people are taking in the sights,one of which being her husband Mark's(John Richardson) secretary,Paulette(Martine Brochard).Mark has also travelled to this Catalonian capital,to rendezvous with Paulette,and inform her of his impending divorce from Alma.No sooner than tour guide Martinez can drop a mouse at the feet of a young girl in the group for a flirtatious gag,the corpses of beautiful young girls start turning up one by one,all with missing left eyes.Burton recalls returning home a while back,and finding his wife,Alma,unconscious in the yard,clutching his bloody dagger from Vietnam in her right hand,and a disembodied human eye in the grass next to her.Hmmm,he may be onto something there...At the fun fair,another girl is found,dead,eyeless,and clutching a phony gag wind up spider in her dead hand,leading the local constabulary to take in the tour guide for further questioning.But the murders don't stop with his arrest.

If you can't keep your eyes on the prize,at least try to keep them in their respective sockets.
It's soon evident that the murderer may be one of the tour group itself,as a bloody red rain parka is discared by the killer at the scene of the crime,identical to the parkas that Martinez had handed out to the group during a patch of inclement weather.Meanwhile,Burton is contacted by his wife,who's booked a room at the Hotel Presidente,but when he arrives,her suite is empty save for the same bloody dagger he'd seen in her hand earlier.As the plot thickens so does the web of deception.Could it be the kindly Reverend Burton?Mr. Alverado?Mr. Hamilton who lovingly caressed his straight razor while gazing upon his sleeping granddaughter Jenny?Is it Mark's soon-to-be estranged wife Alma,in some psychopathic jealous frenzy?Or is there an unknown suspect with a hidden agenda for the murders?By the film's close,you'll have these and many more questions answered for yourself.

It's not what it looks like,really.The priest(Georges Rigaud) is offering the servant girl money for...oh forget it.Your minds are prepetually gutterish,people.
The cast is filled with all sorts of genre staples,from Rigaud who was in Horror Express,Lizard in a Woman's Skin,and All the Colors of the Dark,among many others,to John Bartha,who acted in Cannibal Ferox,Don't Torture a Duckling,and Violent Rome,to name a few.The list of female victims also contains some memorable names like Ines "Salo" Pellegrini and Mirta Miller,who gained popularity in a few Paul Naschy pictures in the seventies. The Spanish scenery is outstanding,and the soundtrack by master Bruno Nicolai is quite enjoyable,as always.That said,the gore is sparsely sprinkled throughout the story,but not necessary to keep the plot moving at a steady pace,which it does admirably.Not my favorite giallo of all time,not even my favorite Lenzi picture,but certainly a viewable hour and a half stroll down the yellow road waiting to be had.On the snow-laden Woplspolitation scale of excellence,it rates a respectable score of:

Ignoring Ralphie's cautionary Christmas tale,Paulette(Martine Brochard)shoots her eye out.