"E tanta paura" (1976) d/ Paolo Cavara

A mere glimpse of Corinne Clery gives me an impossible testosterone boost, and I'm suddenly compelled to stealth-creep on a game animal dressed in an Enter the Dragon tracksuit, gut it from underneath with a butterfly sword before it can even notice, grill it (slightly) over an open flame, chew the freshly charred flesh between my teeth, swallow and digest it, while pounding my chest like a tattooed Tarzan. Or maybe some push ups. Either way, Clery is surely the living embodiment of sensuality, as clearly evidenced by her top ten inclusion in the Wop's Top Twenty Sex Sirens of Cult Cinema post last year. She demands full attention in every frame she appears in during E tanta paura, aka/ Plot of Fear, the 1976 effort from the man who brought you La tarantola dal ventre nero aka/ The Black Belly of the Tarantula, an excellent 1971 giallo that featured the likes of Claudine Auger, Barbara Bach, and Barbara Bouchet. Besides the aforementioned beauty, this one has a lot going for it, including solid performances from Michele Placido and Eli Wallach, a groovy rock-driven score from Daniele Patucchi, and an engaging screenplay with plenty of violent twists and turns, as co-written by the director himself.


It's always hard coming to a realization that your wife fancies a gallop upon a strange pony now and again.
Detective Lomenzo (Michele Placido) investigates the recent brutal murders of a pair of members to a secretive social club known as the "Fauna Lovers", with the each of the crime scenes decorated by torn out pages from a German children's book called "Shock-headed Peter". His assistant (Enrico Oldoni) recollects a case involving the club from five years prior, only the file has mysteriously disappeared, and the disgraced Inspector Del Re who handled it seems to have gone missing, as well. When he's not rolling between the sheets with his busty black girlfriend (or jokingly reminding her how black she is), he theorizes that Villa Hoffman, the estate where the club held their meetings and Hoffman (John Steiner) himself housed several big game animals in a menagerie, some for later sale to zoos and circuses, must be involved in the current evil doings, after serving as the center of the former case. The author of the children's book whose pages turn up at murders? Also Hoffman, it should be noted. Neither his frazzled superior officer (Tom Skerritt) nor tech-mad independent investigator, Peter Struwwel (Eli Wallach) offer much in the way of assistance.


...that's all the time we have this week, on "Cook a Hooker".
Black Ruth (Mary Ruth League) flies the coop for a flamboyant photographer with a woman's name at the same disco that Lemenzo encounters Jeanne (Corinne Clery), the striking model who's not averse to turning rich tricks and the subject of his recent carnal obsessions. In exchange for some artsy, erotic sex, Jeanne fills him in on the events of the earlier case, that the Fauna Lovers was little more than a thinly disguised elite swingers' club, where a young hooker named Rosa (Sarah Ceccarini) in attendance of one of their high brow sex parties dropped dead after the drunken group mock-fed her to one of the caged tigers. Meanwhile, other members of the secretive group are dropping like flies; men receiving Dwyer headshots on live television while being interviewed about the very case, women tied to trees and burned alive, and other brutal deaths begin to pile up. Naturally, things aren't always as they seem, and this effort only reaches conclusion after several hair pin turns, which you should enjoy greatly if you're a fan of this sort of movie, and decide to screen it for yourself.


Open mouthed Clery kisses with a tongue that's tastier than tiramisu. Place my order. 
Cavara got his start co-directing the legendary 1962 Prospero and Jacopetti shockumentary. Mondo Cane aka/ It's a Dog's World. He'd also helm 1963's La donna nel mondo aka/ Women of the World with the duo, though uncredited for his work. Sadly, tonight's review would stand as his last foray into gialli, and he'd pass away at the age of fifty-six in 1982. Placido also appeared in things like 1977's Kleinhoff Hotel and even the rarely seen 1973 giallo Mia moglie, un corpo per l'amore aka/ My Wife Has a Body to Die For. Speaking of which, Clery would also appear in Kleinhoff Hotel, as well as Pasquale Festa Campanile's Autostop rosso sangue aka/ Hitch Hike (1978), the following year. Of course you remember John Steiner from Argento's Tenebre (1982). Three Wops for this one, it's a good time to be had, for sure. Check it out!


"Yeah, ya done good dis time, Hoffman. Dose are some nice gams...bring her closer to muh cage...yessssss."

B.W.'s Top Twenty Sex Sirens of Cult Cinema : The Top Ten

                    10) Adrienne Barbeau

                              9) Gloria Guida
 
                 8) Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith

                        7) Rene Bond

                       6) Corinne Clery

                        5) Madeline Smith

                             4) Ewa Aulin

                             3) Annie Belle

                      2) Francoise Pascal

                   1) Christina Lindberg

"Autostop rosso sangue"(1977)d/Pasquale Festa Campanile

La mia Italia cara, infine ho ritornato a te.Tonight we draw focus upon an exploitation exemplar as realized by paramount Italian artisan, Pasquale Festa Campanile, winner of three Silver Ribbons, a Cannes award, and an Oscar nomination for his screenplays, and director of "comedia alla'Italia" like Dove vai tutta nuda?(1969), Il corpo della ragassa(1979), and Culo e camicia(1981).In 1977, Campanile switched gears from his usual light sex comedies to create a fascinatingly nihilistic spectacle of misogynistic immorality and grindhouse grandeur that has rarely been equalled and certainly isn't soon forgotten.On this cinematic canvas, the skeptical director paints a selfish and cruel world with grim strokes, with no easily perceptible protagonists and a less-than-felicitous denouement.To achieve this sombre tone he enlists the dramatic talents of genre vets like bountifully blue eyed antihero Franco Nero, the nectareous Corinne Clery, and one of the finest blackguards in modern cinema history, David Hess.Providing the soundtrack is no less than maestro Ennio Morricone, whose unique, dissimilar effort is rife with western twangs and folk singalongs that cut in at the most unseemly moments, creating a comparable feel to Riz Ortolani's distressing score in Cannibal Holocaust(1979).One missing element here is the graphic on-screen violence that filmmakers so often rely on to shock their audiences.It's no surprise, then, that the film, released as "The Naked Prey" and "Hitch Hike" outside of Italy, utilizes gritty cerebral shocks instead, and is fully successful in doing so.Anchor Bay released a restored, uncut print in 2002 that should find its way onto your shelves immediately if it isn't already there, where it belongs.Forwards...

The dear...uhhh, deer in Walter's(Franco Nero) scope has gams for days.My kind of venison.
We first meet Italian journalist Walter Mancini(Franco Nero) and his delectable wife Eve(Corinne Clery) as they hunt a mule deer while on vacation in Northern California(translation:L'Aquila, Abruzzo) but Walter seems more preoccupied with setting his gun's sights on Eve's inviting face than plugging an animal full o'lead.On the ride back to their camp he tells her he shot the deer instead because "the stag doesn't fuck like you do!".He tears open her shirt and grabs the right-sided steering wheel, forcing them off the road, and promptly rapes her.That night at the campsite, a knackered Mancini verbally degrades his wife to fellow campers, forgets his own name, and rapes her again.Later, the sight of a young couple sneaking off to get sexy during a hippie campfire singalong spurs on another round of insult-slinging between Eve and her drunken husband, who trips over a tent spike and breaks his hand.The next day as they drive back to Los Angeles, Eve picks up a roadside hitchhiker named Adam Konitz(David Hess) despite Walter's protests.Adam runs back to his stranded vehicle and turns the radio off before joining them on their journey.A corpse with a bullethole in his temple is strewn across the front seat.She apologizes for her husband's suspicious nature, while he apologizes for her whorish disposition, then Mancini calls Konitz "Cunts" and Konitz calls Mancini "Martini".A radio news broadcast details an armed bank robbery nearby but Walter and Eve are too busy bickering about their troubled marriage to put two and two together.Konitz asks Eve if she'd like to suck his cock(!), buying himself one of Walter's elbows to his prominent nasum.Knock down, drag out fisticuffs on the side of the road ensue until Adam pulls a handgun and holds Walter at bay with it as he paws Eve's pink pantied snatch and executes some spirited squeeze-tittin'.The honeymoon's over alright, Martini, or whatever your fuckin' name is.Back on the road, Konitz bullies the couple, exclaiming, "Easy, Martini!If I wanna fuck her, I'll fuck her and there's not a damn thing you can do about it!"Cue:Maniacal David Hess laugh.

Exploitation Rule #7:If David Hess is thumbing a ride, you should probably keep driving.
Konitz blows away two highway patrolmen(a slow-mo motorcycle helmet headshot blows brains skyward), rambles incoherently, shows an awed Mancini his suitcase full of two million in stolen money, suggests Walter writes a book about his adventure with Adam("It's a sexy outta sight story", Konitz tells him) in Mexico for a hundred grand while Eve gets them smokes(Camels, bleech) and hooch at a gas station(where gas is six bucks a gallon!), and does a lot of maniacal laughing.Camped out by a waterfall that night, Konitz' two gay gun-wielding co-conspirators drop in and cockblock him before he can ravage Eve in front of a helplessly hogtied Walter.The next day on a narrow canyon lane with the robbers in tow in the Mancini's hitched camper, Konitz returns the favor, driving them off the road in a big red industrial truck(where did he get it?) and wounding one of his former accomplices in a shootout.He loads them into the truck and steers it over the cliff jumping out before it explodes, happily exclaiming, "Goodbye faggots!"Adam rejoins Mancini and wife, and that night after she accuses both men of being "damned fags", he re-ties Walter, strips Eve by the light of the fire, and fucks her in front of her husband's tear-filled eyes.She resists Konitz for about a New York minute, but it's soon painfully obvious that she loooooves the psycho-cock.Afterwards, there's more cocky rambling and maniacal laughter out of the killer when Walter deducts that Konitz must have been the third mental hospital escapee and his wife suggests that Adam accompanies her into the camper, leaving Walter tied up outside(!).When Konitz steps outside momentarily to put Walter out of his misery permanent-like, a completely naked Eve puts a rifle shell in his chest from the camper doorway, killing him.No more maniacal laughter.With their station wagon stuck in the mud, Walter talks of keeping the stolen money, mockingly calling Eve "the girl with the gilded ass"(one of Konitz's pet nicknames for her), putting Adam's body in the camper just as they receive a tow.After some young motorcycle punks hit Walter up for some cash and Eve obliges, they catch up to the couple on the road and run them off the road(there's a lot of that in this movie), forcing their station wagon to overturn, and seriously injuring Eve.Walter pulls Konitz's lifeless body from the camper and slumps it down next to his paralyzed wife, then sets the upside down leaking wreckage on fire, walking off with the suitcase full of cash, and throwing up a hitchhiking thumb of his own...

Adam helps Eve(Corinne Clery) rewrite the Story of OHHHHHHHH.
During the initial Hess-Nero fight scene, Franco got a little too overzealous and broke Dave's schnoz for serious(I'd still lay my dough on D.A.H. in a fight, though).Though I certainly appreciate some of Campanile's other work, this is, by far, my favorite of his movies.Nero is a marvelously drunken smartass with more wisecracks than integrity, who treats his wife like a piece of meat, whereas Clery is an equally bankrupt nymphomaniac willing to be the meat-in-question whenever she can.Nobody's character can be labelled a "good guy", and speaking of bad guys...What can I say about Hess that I haven't already? He's my favorite modern actor, but you knew that.All three performances are top shelf.Thus, we've got our third movie in a row that earns a perfect rating scale score of four wops.Absolutely recommended.

"How much liquor will two million dollars buy, darling?!!!"