So we’ve finished off the (in-print) “Essential Giallo” discs, and have now moved onto “Forgotten Gialli” discs. I’d thought at first that these were just meaningless names for box sets from two different boutique publishers, but turns out that they’re not: The “essential” ones are actually more well-known, and the “forgotten” ones are legitimate deep cuts, some of which had never been available in the US before.

But on the basis of one (1) movie, I’m so far happy to report that there’s no quality drop-off going from the near-canon to the obscurities — this movie was lots of fun. Maybe not, y’know good in the classical sense, but welcome to giallo.

So the premise is that these models are getting killed after being photographed by this apparently semi-famous photographer. Kinda sus for him, but turns out he’s surrounded by a whole cast of characters, each of whom has some real shit going on. Basically the mystery here is trying to figure out which of these characters might be the killer, and the movie sets the difficulty high by giving all of them a big secret that they’re hiding.

So you’ll be watching this movie, and you’ll be like “okay, this person’s suspicious,” and they are but only because they’re covering up for something totally unrelated to the murders, it turns out. Or sometimes just because they’re being weird for no reason, or maybe just being ’70s Italians. (Like: Is it suspicious that the protagonist refused to go help his girlfriend when she was in danger, because he was sleeping with another woman at that moment? Turns out, no! That’s just Italian men of the era.)

The end result of this is a totally bonkers movie, with every character basically amped up to eleven in wildly different directions. Oh, you’re actually a schizophrenic nymphomaniac? Well, I’ve been developing a camera that reads people’s minds. We’re in the same movie, because why not! It shouldn’t work, and there’s a sense in which it doesn’t, but if you take it all in the giallo spirit, it totally does.