On a weekend evening, there sometimes comes a time in the night when we’ve finished up the movie(s) we intended to watch, but it’s not yet really time to go to bed. This is often Guy Fieri time, but this past weekend, basically by chance, I put on Shudder.

On launch, Shudder starts off as a collection of simulated (ad-free) linear TV channels where a movie is already playing. You can push a button to get to the menu where you’re looking at a normal on-demand streaming service, but… well, we weren’t looking for anything in particular, and there was an intense credit sequence going on, so we just sat back and let it play, unsure if this was opening or closing credits.

Turns out it was the opening credits of The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, a 1970 giallo. And without ever quite intending to, we ended up watching the whole movie.

As I find myself saying a lot about gialli from this time period, I’m not sure it was good, but it was interesting. So upfront, I’ll say that the movie is basically a psychosexual thriller, and its attitude toward consent is extremely mid-century Italian, so obviously stay away if that’s a deal-breaker.

The other thing you need to be aware of is that this movie has zero interest in helping you recognize which character is on screen at any time. There are two main women in this movie, and they both have long red hair, but also just randomly from scene to scene, they will sometimes put on wigs of different color and style entirely.

There was one scene in particular where I thought the movie was introducing a new character, to the extent that when someone called her by name, I was like “wow, this movie has two characters named Minou? That’s really confusing.” As the scene continued, it became clear that no, this woman with short blond hair is actually the same woman as the woman with long red hair. But then next time I saw a woman in a random wig, it was the other woman (all the more confusing, because she was sleeping with Minou’s husband).

The two main men aren’t quite as bad, but they’re both generic Italian guys with dark hair parted on the side — one of them has puffier hair than the other, though, so I was able to successfully tell them apart like 80% of the time.

Beyond that, there’s also a weird turtle thing going on. Like, you know how in horror movies, there’ll be a scary sound or a jump scare, but then it’s just the cat? Well, here that happens, and it’s a turtle. Not once, but three separate times. There’s a time when there’s water on the ground, and then she’s all worried it might be an intruder, but oh look: turtle. Then there’s a time when a shoe is visible around a corner, and it’s moving, but oh look: The turtle was just nudging it. And then, most implausibly, there’s a time when the patio door is open and wind and rain are blowing in, but oh look, there’s the turtle again. (PS it actually was a guy that time, the turtle did not open the patio door.)

I honestly don’t know if these people just have a loose pet turtle, or if in Italy turtles are the equivalent of like mice over here, where people are just like “oh yeah, we’ve got turtles, put out the traps.”

I’ve gotten this far without talking about the plot, but basically the outline of it is: A man stalks Minou at night in a street in a tense scene, and then finally after a brief fight subdues her. As he stands above her with a knife, he cuts the ties on the bodice of her dress and… tells her that he’s not actually attacking her, but he just wanted to tell her that her husband is a murderer. Which, uh, there are probably easier and less assaulty ways to do that?

And so then the movie is all about her trying to figure out if her husband is a murderer, and about her interacting with this creepy weirdo who it now turns out is blackmailing her for sex, and twists and turns abound (I guess I spoiled one of them by mentioning that her husband was sleeping with that other woman, but to be fair, you’ve had a half century to watch this movie and explicably haven’t), and there’s a tense, turtle-laden final showdown that ends in surprising ways.

It turns out that this movie is not only on Shudder, but also on Mubi, which says of it: “In favoring psychological tension over the usual slice-and-dice set pieces, this sinuous giallo owes more to Hitchcock and Clouzot than many of its Argento-apeing contemporaries.” Which, okay, I can see where that’s coming from, it is more psychological thriller than slasher; but I think comparing it to Hitchcock is extremely generous. Still, this is the kind of movie where I’m only a little surprised to see it on an indie cinephile site like Mubi, even if it does only rise to the level of interesting curiosity at best.

After finishing that movie, we bumped over to a different livestream on Shudder, and suddenly we were watching Sorority House Massacre, which we also watched to the end, completely destroying our sleep schedules before the DST shift. This movie is not on Mubi, and I’m not surprised by that, because it’s garbage.

I don’t mean that in any kind of moral way, I mean it from a pure craft perspective. It’s doing a by-the-numbers slasher movie, except also they apparently are bad at counting, because they even fuck up those numbers.

The shape of the movie is that a killer who is not named Michael Myers escapes from a mental institution and takes off to this sorority house, which — we quickly learn — used to be a regular house where a family was killed, all but one girl who survived. Oh, by the way, one of the girls in this sorority keeps having weird visions where everything seems super-familiar about this house, no reason.

So anyway, the killer comes there to kill that girl and finish his job from before (I don’t know how he knew she was there, but we did miss the first 5-10 minutes of it, so it’s possible there was an actual explanation for this pile of coincidences), but along the way he’s going to kill all the other sorority girls.

Like I say, very rote slasher stuff, but here’s the thing: If you’re going to make a movie like this, where it’s set entirely inside of a house, you need to really nail that house’s geography. It needs to be almost a character, something you know as well as you know the actual people in the movie.

Instead, they went the other way: Destroying all sense of physicality by having people move around in seemingly-impossible ways — like, there’s a single staircase, and they run down it with the killer behind them, and then suddenly he’s at the bottom of the stairs. (No, he’s not supernatural, he’s just a guy.) Or having him burst into the house through a third floor window when there’s no tree or anything outside, with no explanation at all.

It’s all just incredibly sloppy, and the kills are just as lackluster — people get stabbed and nobody cares in any way, it’s just a plot checkbox being ticked off to get down to the final girl, who of course kills the killer… or does she?

Just lazy, sloppy film-making all around, devoid of any redeeming value or interest, other than the slight curiosity of seeing cultural detritus aged forty years.