So this is actually not a giallo, even though it is an Italian horror movie by Andrea Bianchi, who you will of course remember from Strip Nude for Your Killer. This is mostly because it’s from 1989, well after the heyday of giallo, but also because it’s actually got a supernatural element to it.

The premise is that we’ve got a killer who’s murdering prostitutes, and meanwhile we also have a crew making a horror movie. (Given that Strip Nude for Your Killer was on the Criterion Channel, and that cinephiles looooooove movies about movies, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this on there as well at some point, except for how it’s not very good.)

And so the director of our movie within a movie decides that he wants to do a seance for reasons that I forget; the seance seems to go badly, with the spirit of Jack the Ripper, that famous Italian killer, being summoned up inadvertently.

The problem for the movie is that the way it handles this scene makes it extremely clear that this is what happened, as well as who Jack possesses. It’s like, okay, so this guy is now possessed by a Bob and will be doing the killings from here on out, got it.

And if the movie were committed to being a slasher, that’d be fine. We’d now watch this guy make his inexorable kills until we get down to the final girl. But no: The movie is still influenced by its giallo heritage, and it wants to remain a mystery, so we keep following people around as they try to solve the puzzle of the killer’s identity.

And it’s so obviously this guy that you’re like… well, maybe it’s a mislead. Maybe there’s something else going on, and the supernatural element was fake all along, and this is a twisty-plotted giallo? But no. The killer is exactly who it seemed to be, and he is in fact possessed by Jack the Ripper just like we thought. The movie gives this to us as a big reveal, but it’s a reveal that we saw coming the whole time.

Part of me thinks they could have fixed this problem by just filming that seance scene differently, so that what happened was less obvious. But then, if we got to the end of a giallo-esque movie and the big shocking reveal was that actually Jack the Ripper had possessed this guy and he was the killer, that’d be infuriating too. So I think the movie ultimately just has some structural problems that would need a whole rewrite to fix.

Still, even if it falls short of the satisfying trash baseline that I look for in obscure horror, it’s not a terrible movie. It is lurid and Italian, and it has some absolutely bonkers musical choices — these bright, cheery, bouncy videogame-style themes at completely inappropriate times — and it’s interesting enough that I don’t regret watching it. But there are at least twenty Italian horror movies I’d recommend above it, so not really recommended.