So the next set of gialli are all from the ’80s, which means that they’re not really gialli.

Because the thing is, being a giallo is more about a kind of vibe than anything else, and that vibe is inextricably linked to the ’70s (which plausibly extends into the late ‘60s and early ‘80s). It’s not just the style of the clothing and the house decoration — though there is some of that — it’s also about the people’s attitudes and what the moviemakers are interested in. And while these movies are clearly giallo influenced, they’re also clearly doing their own things.

Take Mystère. The movie starts with a killing, in true giallo style, sure… but the killing is a political assassination. And someone is killing prostitutes, sure… but it’s because one of them has an object that can shed light on who was behind the assassination and they don’t want it to get out. There are twists and turns a-plenty in the plot, but they’re all spy thriller twists, not giallo twists: It’s about cold betrayals and the like. And the plot even involves train rides and visits to Hong Kong. If what you want is a kinda meh James Bond installment with a giallo flavor, here you are. But did anyone want that? If this were better, maybe it’d work; but as it is, not really recommended. It’d be a perfect movie for MST3K to riff on, though.

Or look at Obsession: A Taste for Fear. Here we’ve got a woman who photographs (frequently nude) men and women in elaborate and artistic situations for… ad campaigns? Art? It’s not fully clear, but she’s obviously successful at it, because she’s rich and fancy, even though she’s also part of a deviant, libertine underground — a milieu she shares with her ex-husband (also a photographer, apparently focusing on bondage fetish photos, somehow also rich). And so eventually one of her models is murdered, and then more people are murdered, and hey, this seems very giallo, right?

Sort of, but no, because the vibes are wrong. Part of this is just the style of the thing: Her photography is extremely eighties, as are her models. Part of it is the aesthetic of the movie, which is somewhere between a music video and David Lynch. Part of it is that it seems to be set in a lightly science-fictional future for no reason — people have bizarre future cars, there are video discs (which obviously do exist in the real world, but probably didn’t in 1988), and oh yeah at one point a cop shoots his gun and it’s a laser pistol.

Even the horniness of the movie isn’t giallo-style horniness, but is the more underground gbltq-adjacent “perversion” that you’d see from transgressive stuff in the ’80s. What I’ll say in this movie’s favor is that while it’s not a giallo, it’s arguably what a giallo in the ‘80s could have looked like, if the genre had fully evolved into that decade. Also, giallo or no, the movie is stylish as fuck, and gets some real points for that. This is one of the most interesting giallo-adjacent films I’ve seen, and is an easy recommend.

And then last up is Sweets from a Stranger, which has a very traditional giallo premise — a black-gloved killer is using their razor blade to slit the throats of prostitutes (uh, and then mutilating their bodies with a bolt gun, which is a little weird). But the treatment of it is extremely non-giallo: The prostitutes all team up together to solve the mystery. There are multiple scenes of the Council of Prostitutes making plans about how they’re going to work together and change their practices to make themselves safer, they go to the police as a group to push for cooperation with law enforcement, etc. It’s very socially conscious.

But the result of all that is that you end up with something that feels more like one of those family movies where everyone has to come together and solve a problem, except that it happens to be set in a giallo universe. It’s a weird vibe, and only partially successful. I’ve given a lot of gialli three stars on Letterboxd, but usually it’s because they’re just basically-competent by-the-numbers movies. This one got three stars for being continually surprising, but maybe not fully good. I can’t quite recommend it, but it’s an interesting twist on the genre.

Not a bad batch of movies overall, but when I pull out a “giallo” disc, I kinda just want it to be a giallo, you know? So I confess that I’m glad that the next batch of movies were all made in the ’70s.