Spooktober IV: Morte all'italiana

With more sex and lust than in any of the "Black Emmanuelle" flicks, this giallo is so racy that, especially in the first half, you could be forgiven for thinking you accidentally stumbled onto some softcore porn. In this regard, all scenes involving Neri and/or Bouchet are hot and steamy, and Amadio and Giordani do a great job shooting them, not only in having some inner and outer parts of your body start to react but also in having the cinematography and framing be stunning. Granger pops up, and he’s good, though a few scenes, like at the end, were very rough.

While it succeeds magnificently in the erotica department, it utterly bombs when it comes…

Amuck takes the stylings of the Giallo and wraps it around an erotic thriller. The lack of black gloves and murder is made up for with sleazy depravity and artfully composed love making scenes. There's mystery underlying everything and the plot focuses on Greta, who has taken a job in a writer's house in order to investigate the disappearance of her friend. The film sets a real dreamy hypnotic tone - it's never quite clear what is going on, or if our heroine is even in any real danger. Amuck benefits from the talents of its two female leads; beautiful blonde Barbara Bouchet and the seductive and sexy Rosalba Neri. Direcror Silvio Amadio obviously couldn't wait to get them together…

My favorite movies in the giallo mold resemble Alice in Wonderland more than Agatha Christie. In AMUCK Greta chases her missing friend down the rabbit hole and encounters a kinky, druggy, twisted chamber group that consist of a polyamorous femme fatale, a stoic Nietzschean author, a shifty eyed house servant, and a sculpted manchild handyman. These affairs can often consist of scene after scene of people talking in a room, but director Silvio Amadio punctuates the descent into unreality with stylish lighting changes and fluid slips into slow motion that emphasize little details like the movement of bedsheets as they're tossed through the air. The whole thing has an air of excess: too much drugs, too much sex, and right…

Watched last night with via Girls, Guts, Giallo, which I highly recommend supporting for great fucked up movies.

For a genre that is so lurid, so depraved, giallo didn't embrace the luridity or depravity of queerness often enough. More often than one might know, perhaps, but not nearly often enough. In Pursuit of Pleasure makes up for that a fair amount. Gorgeous, colorful, and sensual as any good giallo is, this film indulges in it all. The plot is barely there, but what little of it is there is a far more sympathetic look at a queer couple than one would expect from trash (complimentary) like this. I was at times distracted by the other trappings of the stream I…

Amuck! has the strongest Jess Franco vibes of any giallo I've seen. Specifically, it has enormous narrative, attitudinal, and thematic overlap with 1970's Eugenie, another film about a young woman being introduced into a dark world of sex and violence against her will (and under the influence of drugs), and developing a dangerous curiosity about that world.

Neither film, unfortunately, is particularly interested in genuinely examining why that fascination occurs, or what the women in question are seeking with their tentative, voluntary engagement, preferring instead to focus on the spectacle of the sex itself. Which, honestly, is fair enough. When you've got both Barbara Bouchet and Rosalba Neri in your movie, you'd have to be a fool not to have…

“The perfect crime is possible with a superior mind.”

One of the more enjoyably lurid gialli of the period.
— Troy Howarth, So Deadly, So Perverse

Sexually! What I like to call “Farley Granger’s slut era.” I just love that he starred in two of the sleaziest gialli of 1972—this, and So Sweet, So Dead—further connecting the giallo to the classic, British thriller. And you can’t say the man doesn’t bring a special something to this Venice-in-springtime shot, “sexy-trashy” gialli (in the words of Howarth). As Richard Stuart, a whodunit writer with a sadomasochistic side, he gets to play a debonair, Hitchcockian villain that you almost want to root for. Plus, he dubs his own performance, making the English track…

1st Silvio Amadio

More like Amuck-y Weekend, Amadio's giallo fails largely to convey any sense of suspense but does appeal more as a piece of laconic sleaze, like something Jess Franco would have come up with if he'd been given a decent budget. The result is a film that's not pleasant but has a weirdly pleasing vibe, in no small part thanks to the relaxed score by Teo Usuelli, one filled with theremins and slow thumping basses that chug along without end, like the slow rhythm of the boats that go past Richard's villa on the Venetian marshes. Farley Grainger isn't an alluring male lead in the slightest but he provides a dapper sleaze to the proceedings that is very…