"Nelle pieghe della carne" (1970) d/Sergio Bergonzelli

Tonight we look at an early giallo of Italian/Spanish descent, from the man who would later direct Ajita Wilson and Lina Romay in the hardcore Apocalipsis Sexual (1982), that's heavy on the trippy psychedelia of the era and Freudian lunacy and features performers like Elenora Rossi Drago and Pier Angeli, a year before her tragic suicide. The translated, international title, In The Folds of Flesh, refers to a Freudian quote about the effect of life experience upon the brain, not the body, as some might be misled into believing, and the levels of sex and nudity within are appropriately tamer than one would expect to see in gialli of the period. Don't let that sway you, though, as Bergonzelli more than compensates with incest, rape, murder, outrageous concentration camp flashbacks, vultures, and more bloody mannequin heads than three Herschell Gordon Lewis movies, ferchrissakes. I can't help but think a pre-movie bubbler sesh ( for self-medication purposes only, of course) might act as the perfect compliment for anyone thinking about sitting down to this one, especially if they aren't able to score a ten strip of acid, readily...


"Hiyata empowers himself by lifting the phallic Beta capsule over his head, and thus becomes an Ultra Man"- Freud (not really)
Just before he's apprehended by the authorities, Pascal (Fernando Sancho) the murderer seemingly witnesses Lucille (Rossi Drago) burying a body behind her sizeable estate as a young boy looks on. Thirteen years later, Lucille has a couple of vultures in cages as pets, and is also mother to Andre (Alfredo Mayo) and Falesse (Angeli), who may or may not have been molested by her own father as a child, causing her to murder her suitors by dagger or sword when their sexual advances trigger her traumatic memories, as Andre peep-toms from a safe distance. Afterwards, Mom grants her the criminal mulligan by disposing of the corpses via acid bath(!), and slagging the bones off to visitors as "Etruscan remains". Yeah, maybe in a technical sense...More heads roll than on the set of a 1981 Ted Nugent video (Intensities in Ten Cities was a good album with a couple of great tracks on it, I don't care what you say) while Andre takes fashion to the eyesore extreme with clothes that'd make Liberace blush.You probably don't want to act on your first impressions of anyone in a giallo, as the twists soon come like Arch Hall, Jr. himself induced them, in a tux with a (wild) guitar and dirt bike down on the beach.


"Slap me another tab of acid, this Grateful Dead album still sucks, maaan!"
Pascal finally butts back in on the scene, hating on animals (a vulture eats lead and a dog gets C.T.F.O.ed), and raping the women of the household, and while the thought of forced penetration from a slathering, overweight, unkempt Hispanic criminal tortures Lucille, Falesse is strangely cool with it! None-the-less, Lucille does the unwanted house guest in with cyanide capsules in the bath while flashing back to her own black and white childhood, where she waved goodbye to the condemned as they asphyxiated in gas chambers (through improbable large glass shower windows, of course). A man claiming to be Falesse's real father appears, having faked his death, conflicting with the idea that she had beheaded him after molesting her all those years ago, as flashbacks would have you believe. Another flashback (what's one more, at this point?) reveals that it was her mother's lover who had raped her, and that she beheaded, and that the details of that night were purposely kept from her to maintain her sanity. Her sanity? What about the viewer's sanity after bearing witness to this Italo-Spanish soap opera-on-Krokodil? What about it, I ask you.


"The realism of Flesh's gore disturbed me very deeply."- Nobody
Angeli, who earned a Golden Globe for 'Most Promising Newcomer' a decade earlier, walks around in much the same haze that she would in the laughable American Z-grade monster opus, Octaman, a year later before succumbing to a sleeping pill overdose. Sancho made his name in westerns during the previous decade, and appeared in De Ossorio's 1973 Blind Dead sequel, Return of the Evil Dead. The folks over at Severin have released the English dub of tonight's review in a very acceptable, highly collectible package, should any of this strike you as vaguely appealing (...or even appalling, if that's yer bag. Nobody's judging you here, man.). On the scale, Flesh rates a respectable two biggies, a worthwhile addition to any genre collection. Look for it!


"Ohhh, help me, Will Robinson! Save meeeeee!"

"La bestia uccide a sangue freddo"(1971) d/ Fernando Di Leo

More Kinski? If you're into gialli, and who isn't these days, how about this one: A dubbed, chain smoking Klaus Kinski as a doctor in an asylum fulla oft-nude seventies Euro-eye candy the likes of Margaret Lee, Rosalba Neri, and Monica Strebel, as directed by none other than the late Fernando Di Leo, the man responsible for such enjoyably sleazy genre-fodder as I ragazzi del massacro, aka/ Naked Violence(1969), and Avere Vent'anni, aka/ To Be Twenty(1978). Di Leo, a director seemingly unfamiliar with the concept of "high roads", spills plenty of painty-looking stage blood and fills his lens with explicit crotch shots of no less than three of his actresses, in weaving this sometimes sluggish, always visually lush whodunit that's far too vile to not be a dynamite viewing experience for any genre nut worth his or her weight in shadowy, exotic weapon-wielding, black-gloved maniacs.


"Zis fahkink zigaret isss goink to taste zo zo gute."
At an out-of-the-way psychiatric clinic that seemingly only caters to (and hires, in some cases) young  women, some more nymphomaniacal than others, Professor Osterman (John Karlsen) runs an odd boat, indeed, with an impressive open display of various medieval weapons in an easily-accessible lounge, for those moments when a cloaked villain in black gloves fancies repeatedly clobbering a writhing naked woman with an ornate battle axe. It happens. The patients, errr, guests are free to come and go as they please, but seem content to play croquet, drink cocktails, smoke cigarettes, cop sensual nude rubdowns and sponge baths from attending staff members, like the petite ginger Nurse Helen (Monica Strebel), or simply fuck the groundskeeper in the greenhouse, like the sex-mad Anne (Rosalba Neri). Near constant masturbation also seems to be one of the rehabilitative techniques encouraged by the staff, like Dr. Keller (Kinski) who chain smokes and rambles psychoanalytically, when he isn't administering his own, personal brand of treatment to Mrs. Hume (Lee) in private.


I think phonetic Kinski dialog may have replaced preserves jokes here at the big W.
Anne takes an unbelievably groovy shower, and tries to seduce her own brother... like old times (blech), while Nurse Helen sets race relations back a hundred years with an interracial chicken dance with a black patient that naturally progresses into lesbo sex, but play time's undoubtedly over when one of the other nurses gets her head scythed off. Oh yeah, there's a killer afoot. Strangulation, followed by some sensual dagger-play, dude-in-an-iron-maiden, then oversexed Anne gets a post-masturbatory axing, beckoning the shadowy killer to fuck her first(!). Mrs Hume professes her eternal love for Dr. Keller, while the killer is revealed as he's trying to slip a noose around her neck. With the authorities hot on his trail, he locks himself in a room full o' chicks and a flail in hand(!!), and goes Richard Speck on the cornered lot of them, before getting stopped dead in his murderous tracks by some dramatic slo-mo squibs and a final head shot. The end.


Spoke too soon. Heyyy, you smeared some jam in close proximity to yer clam...
While most directors merely flirt with or skirt around the baser instincts of mankind, Di Leo never seemed to have a problem displaying it in his films, cinematically rolling around in it on occasion like a contented sow, hoof-deep in filth. We love him for that, here at the Wop, really we do, regardless of whether the hardcore quim-diddling shots here were inserted post-production, or not. Bestia was only one of eleven credits in 1971 for Kinski, which included Antonio Margheriti's Nella stretta morsa del ragno aka/Web of the Spider, and Giuseppe Vari's Prega il morto e amazzo il vivo aka/ Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead. We could probably cover a different Klaus Kinski movie every day here until the end of the year and end up with leftovers.My obvious favorites on board, Rosalba Neri worked with all the top genre directors of the day, from D'Amato to Franco, while the lovely Margaret Lee you'll probably remember from The Bloody Judge(1970), and the firey Monica Strebel would go on to play Death in Brunello Rondi's Racconti proibiti...di niente vestiti, the following year.On the scale, the Cold-Blooded Beast garners a warm reception, two wops. Check it out!


Love to ruin it for ya. I, Spoiler.

"La morte ha sorriso all'assassino" (1973) d/ Aristide Massaccesi

Let's kick it off properly with what is arguably Italian sleazemeister Joe D'Amato's best genre work, in a Poe-inspired gothic 1973  giallo that stars Euro staple-creep Klaus Kinski and Swede-born confectionery item, Ewa "Candy" Aulin. Insert: lip smack here. In fact, those only familiar with the director's later, more crass efforts might be pleasantly surprised at the attention he dedicates to the film's dreamy look, a juxtaposition of horrible images against beautiful ones that I'm unsure he was ever able to purvey to an audience as effectively as he does here. As far as I know (a range that encompasses "just about everything" to "next to nothing" on any given day), it stands as the only other film in his two hundred (besides 1977's Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals), in which he uses his real name on a directorial credit, from a period when he clearly cared more about the artistic aspects of his movies than the financial success, as was visibly the case later in his career. Some might even go so far as to call it his "masterpiece"... Don't get the wrong idea, folks, this is still a D'Amato movie, and there's plenty of gory splatter and  nudity abound here, and you might have difficulty tracking the incoherent plot line even with the help of microchip implants, but such is the cinema, no?


More style and profile here than a Ric Flair wrasslin' promo. Woooo!
At the turn of the twentieth century, after a handsome doctor (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) impregnates the female half of an incestuous pair of siblings, resulting in the death of mother and child, her jilted, hunchbacked brother Franz (Luciano Rossi) sets out to restore her life. Three years later, on the doorstep of the estate of Walter Von Ravensbruck (Sergio Doria), son of the aforementioned doctor, a gruesome carriage accident finds beautiful passenger, Greta (Aulin) injured and the carriage driver skewered through the heart on the vehicle shaft.Walter calls in Dr. Sturges (Kinski) first to examine the driver's corpse for the authorities, then to diagnose the young, unresponsive woman. Sturges unflinchingly sinks a needle clear into her wide-open eye(!), then recognizes an inscription on the amulet around her neck as just the Incan formula for resurrection he's been looking for, for years! He scurries down to his sub-basement lab and laboriously fiddles with beakers and test tubes, before getting C.T.F.O.ed by mysterious hands just as his latest concoction brings a male corpse back to life. Thorough as a shadowy killer usually is, he re-snuffs Sturges' mute assistant and the reanimated corpse, for good measure. Upstairs, both Von Ravensbruck and his wife are mesmerized by their lovely new guest and play nudie prod games together while a maid that's haunted by visions of Franz gets her facepiece blown the eff off by the shadowy killer, who proves he's not against using a gun once in a while.


"Hold ztill. I'm goink to inzert zis pin into your eyeball..."
Walter's wife Eva (Angela Bo) walls up Greta in the musty cellar, after failing to drown her while giving her a bath, but ultimately fails in stopping the inevitable spectral haunting/ violent death in store for both she and her husband. The Von Ravensbruck's trusty manservant, Semian, reveals himself to be Greta's murderous accomplice, but she inexplicably rewards his loyalty by sending him off to join the choir invisible. After her objet du vengeance, Walter's father, is trapped in his daughter-in-law's crypt as her eyes ominously snap open, we flashback to Greta's resurrection at Franz's hands three years earlier, his success garnering him a nasty end from an ornery black feline that has issues with eyes. The grisly aftermath is discovered by a police inspector, who rehashes the strange details of the case to his elderly, invalid wife, who's been turned away from him in her wheelchair the whole time. When she turns to face him, he realizes that she is in reality, Greta, a harbinger of his own horrible fate, perhaps? Roll credits.


"...and the big dance is tonight! I'm ruined!!!"
What manner of insanity is this? A D'Amato movie that's not hardcore porn, and it merits a Wop, doubled, on the mostly infallible and oft-imitated ratings scale?? Believe it or not, despite his under-use of Kinski here, the convoluted story line, and some signature jerky handheld P.O.V. shots that he'd revisit again and again, in things like Porno Holocaust(1979) and Antropophagus(1980),  this just might be my favorite of all of the director's genre work, with mostly solid performances from the cast, palatable cinematography, and an aptly phantasmagorical score from Berto Pisano. D'Amato would follow this one up with several over the next few years under the name Michael Wotruba, including 1974's Eroi all'inferno, a war movie that also starred Rossi and Kinski. The adorable Aulin would next appear in Jorge Grau's Ceremonia Sangrienta (1973).


"Ho bisogno di aiuto! I've got a sheep's eye glued to my face!"