Two more gialli, and they’re both weird in different ways.

The Killer Is Still Among Us starts off with a very non-giallo killing: People are murdered with guns. It’s almost shocking to see a murder weapon so callous and modern and impersonal. Whatever happened to tradition, to the black gloves and the straight razor? Truly tragic.

But so our hero for this movie is a criminology student, who is studying… this serial killer, I guess? Feels a little weird. Anyway, she starts investigating, and this investigation gets her following a gynecologist who is also a voyeur (which is probably just a whole thing for male gynecologists in Italy at this time, tbh); she follows him to a “voyeur bar,” which sure, that’s a thing. This leads her to the local lover’s lane, where roving gangs of voyeurs are spying on couples banging in their cars. Yadda yadda, there’s a murder, and then there’s a psychic who prophesies more graphic murders, which then occur (with some more traditional knife stuff going on, including cutting off a nipple because why not).

But the really wild part is the ending. This is, I guess, a spoiler, but c’mon: They do not catch the killer. Instead, she goes into a movie theater at the end, and watches what turns out to be this very movie. The End. It is bizarre and meta and it would be kinda arthouse-y if I thought the filmmakers had any real intention behind it other than trying to be surprising. (It then ends with a public service announcement about helping the police find killers, because turns out this is based on real-life serial killings that had happened recently when this was made, and they thought they should be tasteful about it. I mean, other than the nipple slicing, I guess.)

Arabella: Black Angel, meanwhile, is probably the giallo that gets closest to being actually porn. And that’s counting The Sister of Ursula, the previous most-porny giallo I’d seen.

As the movie starts, a woman goes to a sex party at what seems to be an abandoned building outside of town. Sex party-style activities ensue, up until the cops come. The cops break things up, but also engage in a little light rape, because I guess Italy. Later, a cop goes to this woman’s home to a) apologize for raping her, and b) blackmail her for more sex, activities which seem a little at odds with each other. When he ends up dead, it’s hard to really be broken up about it.

And this is all the normal part of the movie, before the really weird shit with her paralyzed husband, tragic family murders in the backstory, near-fatal blowjobs, and a bunch of castration.

The whole point of gialli is to abandon good taste and give in to absurd excess, so it feels a little hypocritical to criticize these two movies for absurd excess. And ultimately they’re not bad, they do in fact deliver weird giallo vibes, for the most part. But they’re also just a little bit off, and I think would be better if they dialed it back to 11.