All right, let’s go through our next box set of forgotten gialli.

First up, Death Carries a Cane. The first thing I want to say about this movie is that if you translate the Italian title literally, it’s “Dance Steps on the Edge of a Razor.” I understand why you might want to switch titles between regions, but why would you go from such a cool title to such a boring-sounding one?

In this case, perhaps it’s to make the excitement level of the title match up better with the actual boring content of the movie. The opening premise here is that a woman is looking through one of those little pay-a-quarter tourist telescopes, and while looking in the window of a random house[1], sees a murder.

She goes to the cops with this, and if you have ever seen a giallo, you will not be surprised when the cops basically blow off her murder report. Ladies, always getting hysterical and saying they saw a murder, amirite. After they find a woman’s dead body, they get more interested, and come back with more questions. They then do the second most characteristic giallo cop thing: Suspect the first guy they happen to see, in this case her boyfriend. He has no connection at all to the dead woman, and it would be an incredible coincidence if a woman randomly saw a murder and then it turned out to be committed by her boyfriend, but hey, you want to arrest someone, gotta solve these crimes.

But the absolute best Italian cop thing happens later in the movie, when they’re doing a sting to catch the killer by having the protagonist dress up and pose as a prostitute. When a guy finally pulls her into his car, they move in to arrest him… and then are embarrassed when it turns out he’s the head of the police, and was just out picking up hookers, I guess.

Anyway, the mystery is eventually solved, thanks as usual to civilians, and it’s extremely undermotivated; the whole plot feels like it falls apart near the end, and it wasn’t doing so great before that. Below-average giallo.

Next up is Naked You Die. This sounds like a salacious title, so you’d expect it to be a very typical giallo, maybe on the sleazier side. But no: It’s actually this kind of borderline wholesome proto-giallo. It takes place at a girls’ school, but (despite the title!) there is zero nudity and zero bloody kills — when people get murdered, it’s via strangulation or offscreen happenings.

The vibe of it is also weirdly peppy. The protagonist is one of the teen girls, who’s a bubbly Nancy Drew figure; the main musical theme is reminiscent of the Batman TV show’s; they do a James Bond joke at one point; it’s all just borderline silly.

Here, I think it’s important to know what you’re getting. I was annoyed at first because it wasn’t delivering giallo realness; but turns out (as a little special feature on the disc explained) that this is from early enough in cinematic history — 1968, a few years before Argento’s Bird with the Crystal Plumage — that it isn’t so much part of the giallo genre, as part of the vague cloud of horror/mystery-adjacent stuff that would eventually cohere into the genre. And if I forgive it for the impossible sin of not following the genre tropes that hadn’t yet calcified, it’s a mildly entertaining little romp. Even with that generosity, though, it’s not more than that.

Last up is The Bloodstained Shadow. The plot of this one is convoluted enough that I’ll not even attempt to outline it, other than to say that the Wikipedia rundown talks about “a gambler, a pedophilic count, a fake medium, and an illegal abortionist,” and if that group of characters walks into a bar, you’ve got an amazing joke setup.

Anyway, bunch of murders, bunch of suspects (though fewer suspects as the murders continue), and a total rando who has to investigate because the police are useless. It’s a classic giallo in a lot of ways, though it’s on the slower and more sedate side for the genre — it’s nearly two hours long, where most of these are a brisk ninety minutes, and it does not earn that extra runtime. But overall, it’s a basically fine replacement-level giallo.

  1. On the one hand, feels weird to have a little tourist voyeur telescope; on the other hand… it’s Italy in the ’70s, sure, why not. ↩︎