So now we've finally come to Mario Landi's infamously sleazy Giallo a Venezia, rougher than a pair of stucco underwear and seedier than the couch cushions in a V.I.P. lounge. Impressive, when you think about it, that a movie set in as lush, picturesque surroundings as Venice could have you reaching for a bar of soap as quickly as this one does. The suspense and mystery elements typically found in gialli are nowhere to be found here, instead, Landi chooses to emphasize the misogyny and sadism of the sub-genre, and even then, it all seems pretty phoned in, in the end, thanks to lifeless performances from the cast, sequences that suffer from poor lighting, lengthy, pointless extreme close-ups, or the film's overall dull look, due to the dogshit film stock utilized within. Still, despite being little more than a cheap porno with some amateur gore thrown in, you might be embarrassed at how much you're entertained by it, under the proper substances, errr...circumstances.
" 'Ay Babalugats, scommetto che posso mangiare cinquante uova..."
We open with a man being stabbed repeatedly in the goodies, and a woman floundering in the drink, with both corpses turning up on dry land, and thus, perplexing the fuck out of one Inspector De Paul (Blynn), a frazzle-headed wise ass with an affinity for hard-boiled eggs (seriously...there's maybe two or three scenes in all where he's not sloppily chain-eating them, or at least peeling one and throwing the bits of shell on the floor like an ignorant scumbag, but I digress...) for much of the duration. His lazy investigation reveals that Flavia (Leonora Fani) and Fabio (Gianni Dei) were a romantic couple at growing odds with his increasingly deviant and perverse sex kinks and cocaine abuse, as flashbacks show what begins as harmless exhibitionism (he fucks her in front of an effeminate-looking peeper), soon degenerates into humiliation, rape, prostitution, and finally, murder. After blowing some nose candy and thumbing through antique pornography while an unsatisfied Flavia scolds her beav elsewhere (for, I dunno, twenty boring minutes solid?), Fabio forces his girl into a sweaty, public threeway in a movie theater with a perverted Joe Spinell lookalike, who whacks his meat on camera.
Let Jim Kelly up from that leg scissors, sister, you're gonna kill the brother.
Through the late girl's friends, like Marzia (Mariangela Giordano), who's dealing with an obsessive stalker herself, De Paul learns that Flavia had also been cat o'nine tailed, forced into seducing the delivery boy, and ultimately, to turn a daylight trick while Fabio watched from a distance, only to be gang raped by a pair of men, in the process, while her boyfriend does fuck all. Elsewhere, Marzia gets laid, which causes her stalker to burn the man alive in a jealous rage, and saw off the woman's leg with a hacksaw... all while she remains conscious, mind you (she passes out from the agony, but he sportingly slaps her awake). De Paul arrests the perp, who confesses, yet denies murdering Fabio and Flavia, but the inspector discovers through yet another source how both bodies came to end up on land, since that particular detail seems to be the only one he's at all concerned with (t'was murder-suicide after all, as the audience will figure out about five minutes in), wrapping up both the case, and the movie.
Post-groceries handy? Now that's what I call gratitude.
Landi worked mostly in television during his long career in the industry, though he did offer audiences the deliriously inept Patrick vive ancora (1980), which also starred Dei in the lead. Fani also appeared in Enzo Castellari's Sensivita aka/ The House by the Edge of the Lake(1979). Giordano, you'll probably remember as the incestual mother who gets her nipple chewed off by a zombified Peter Bark in Bianchi's Lei notte del terrore (1981), though she also turned up in Landi's aforementioned Patrick sequel, La bimba di Satana(1982), Malabimba (1979), and Michele Soavi's La Setta (1991), among others. On the scale, Giallo rates an unimpressive single Wop and not goose eggs, as I've seen quite enough of those for the evening...
Who is that, amputating a girl's leg with a hacksaw, behind those Foster Grants!
.jpeg)
