So I mentioned before that we bought some giallo Blu-ray boxed sets[1], and we watched three of those lately:

First up is Torso. This one is kind of slasher-y (a group of horny teens get together at a countryside villa and are — spoilers — murdered at one point). It’s a good mystery, trying to figure out who the killer is, but it’s also a little on the confusing side. This turns out to be a common theme in these movies, because it is just incredibly difficult to tell all these people apart — the people out there who gripe about ethnically diverse casting are completely off-base, because if all your characters are quasi-identical dark-haired Italian men, or quasi-identical blonde Italian women (or worse: Italian women who wear wigs of different hair color in different scenes), good luck trying to figure out who everyone is.

Next up is The Pyjama Girl Case. So remember how in a previously-watched giallo, the newspapers put naked photos of a woman’s corpse on the front page of the newspaper? Well, here they go to the next level: They can’t identify the body (the face is badly burned), so they exhibit her nude corpse in a glass case, open to the public. And so dozens of people just mill around looking at this dead girl’s naked corpse. This cannot be how actual law enforcement works in Italy.

The plot is an attempt to solve this murder, in parallel with a plotline about a woman and her multiple lovers (I thought at one point she was a prostitute; but no, this is apparently all recreational, even though one of these guys is her husband). In the relationship subplot, it’s difficult to figure out what everyone thinks about this situation — sometimes people are surprisingly chill about her openly sleeping around and sometimes they are extremely not, and it’s impossible to figure out how anyone will react at any point. The past is truly a foreign country. And also I guess, so is Italy.

And finally, there’s The Fifth Cord, which is a really good mystery where — again — half our mental energy was spent just trying to identify characters. (“Wait, that guy with the dark hair and glasses, is that the same guy with dark hair and glasses from the party, or a different one?”) This isn’t helped by it having a gigantic cast of characters, who all have tangled-up relationships that are hard to parse. But that big cast and those complicated relationships did mean that the movie had some effective misleads in its mystery.

Also, a really strong element of this film, really common to all of these movies, is that Italian men of this time were (if these movies reflect reality at all) just the worst. Consent apparently hadn’t yet been invented, and also they resort to violence at the drop of a hat. Like one guy (who is himself sleeping with other women!) sees his self-described “part-time lover” in a car with another man, and then slaps her hard in the face while calling her a whore, before she gets a chance to explain that it was her brother. He never apologizes, and then they make love. Sure, okay!

None of these movies are great. When you watch a Dario Argento movie, you can tell that you’re watching something made by a highly-talented director even if it’s trashy; but these are just serviceable genre films at best. But precisely because they are so old and so foreign, I find them absolutely fascinating. The landscapes, the buildings, the bizarre cultural attitudes, the social milieu… it’s all just deeply fascinating, and the pulpy murder stories make them go down easy.

  1. They’re from Arrow Video, and I’ve now seen enough of them to say that they’re really well done. The cover insert is reversible, with a modern English design on the outside, and a period-looking Italian design on the inside; each movie is given in all the versions that have been created, with multiple language tracks and subtitles; and there are plenty of extras, interviews and deleted scenes and trailers and commentaries. It’s incredible preservation work for movies that would have registered as ephemeral trash fifty years ago. ↩︎