Two more gialli off the Forgotten Gialli discs.

Murder Mansion is — ugh — another Spanish one. I’ve said before that Spanish gialli just don’t hit right, and this didn’t change my mind at all. It doesn’t feel especially giallo-esque, as it takes place in a seemingly-haunted mansion in the countryside, complete with seeming undead in the graveyard.

I’m using the word “seeming” here because — I’m okay spoiling this for you — it’s a Scooby-Doo movie, where all the seemingly supernatural stuff is just a scheme that a couple of people are doing for reasons that I don’t remember, and which tbh probably didn’t make sense anyway. It’s not necessarily a terrible movie, but it’s just not a giallo. That’s not a giallo setting, that’s not a giallo plot, and it doesn’t have giallo vibes. (For one thing, it’s weirdly prudish in its salaciousness — I suspect that Spain actually had censorship laws about nudity in a way that Italy didn’t have, based on this pattern repeating so durably.)

I’m actually wondering at this point if maybe the real problem with these Spanish movies is simply their inclusion in this collection; if there was a “Spanish Countryside Horror” collection, I could see these movies all belonging to it in a way that would make sense, and wouldn’t annoy me with the tonal mislead so much. Maybe I should be blaming these Vinegar Syndrome curators rather than the Spanish filmmakers.

Crazy Desires of a Murderer, on the other hand, is a true Italian giallo and it absolutely works as one. It is wildly over the top, featuring all of:

  1. a car being pushed off a cliff and exploding, 2) a crazy kid secretly locked up in a basement for years, 3) a killer who plucks out the victims’ eyeballs, and perhaps most unforgettably 4) a sex scene where a dude molds a candle into a dildo to his partner’s delight.

Its plot about drug smugglers who glom onto a rich girl in her travels doesn’t necessarily make sense, but the vibes are legit, and it’s fun, and that’s enough.