by ·Comments Off on Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974, Francesco Barilli)

Silvia runs a lab of brightly colored liquids in bubbly beakers, and in the evenings she alienates her boyfriend then has traumatic flashbacks to the time she saw her mom having sex with some guy. Paura all around. You gotta watch at least one nonsensical Italian movie per shocktober.

Finally something happens: friend Francesca shows up dead in the tub. “They said the water must’ve been too hot… her heart couldn’t handle it.” Then Silvia splits in two, her adult and child selves having a conversation like the poster of The Tale. Young Self kills the neighbor’s cat, Older Self kills the neighbor. They murder a few more sexual harassers, and all seems to be going well, then Young Self pushes them off a roof, leading to a culty final scene where the men she’d killed gather around her body and eat her guts.

Barilli also made Hotel Fear (Pensione paura), his cowriter worked on Who Saw Her Die?, and the DP shot the Carmelo Bene movies and Padre Padrone. Older Self is Four Flies star Mimsy Farmer, and oh no, Young Self grew up to star in Ghosthouse.

Follow the trail to the titular perfume:

by ·Comments Off on Caro Diario (1993, Nanni Moretti)

Eclectic mix of good songs on the soundtrack, which is fortunate since we’re mostly following him tool around in his vespa and listening to music. It’s very False/True: half the movie is him/us just viewing the Italian scenery from the bike, but he finds time to stop for silliness (he gets insulted by Jennifer Beals, funny bit at Stromboli asking american tourists about soap opera developments). Moretti thinks he can literally coast through an entire feature on scenery, music and charm – and he’s right. Rosenbaum

by ·Comments Off on The Tale of King Crab (2021, Matteo Zoppis & Alessio Rigo de Righi)

Gorgeous movie, multipart flashbacking story of drunk beardy Luciano, who gets very angry when the Prince locks a gate used by the shepherds, and burns down a building not knowing that his girl was inside. Later (Jay: “effectively morphing into a Western, like some lost Monte Hellman film as imagined by Lisandro Alonso”) he’s a false priest enlisted by pirates to find hidden gold in Tierra del Fuego with the help of a crab.

Maria Alexandra Lungu, star of The Wonders:

Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope:

The film’s very methodology implicitly questions the reliability of narrators and highlights the selective hearing of audiences; what is made clear is that we all contribute to the shape of the stories we tell. Somewhere amid the din of the elders’ conflicting or consenting voices, a narrative of questionable veracity is cobbled together that the film then proceeds to visualize. By revisiting the scenes from which the elders’ unofficial chronicle emanates, de Righi and Zoppis pry open the causal effects of narrative and reveal its mercurial mythmaking.

by ·Comments Off on Pink Floyd at Pompeii MCMLXXII (1972/74, Adrian Maben)

Live for no audience, the original pandemic livestream. The editing is out of control – there’s more picture-in-picture and rotoscoping than you would imagine, or desire. It’s lovely to see some pure uncut source material that inspired This Is Spinal Tap, the restoration is beautiful, and it all builds to the band’s improv blues song with a dog on guest vocals. Guess this was released as an hour-long concert film then they added 20 minutes of pre-Dark Side interview junk a year later, including a regrettable scene where Wright(?) gets defensive about the band running their technology and not vice-versa like some people say.

by ·Comments Off on The Great Silence (1968, Sergio Corbucci)

This one’s your standard sort of mysterious-stranger spaghetti-western with a few twists. Firstly, it’s a white western, snowbound like Track of the Cat (and moving around in the snow can go slowly, so you’ve gotta undercrank your movie a little). Hero Jean-Louis Trintignant (just before Maud’s and Conformist) is mute, hence the title. Then you’ve got a killer “Tigrero” who is always calm and polite, so they cast “Loco” Klaus Kinski (the spoken words and subtitles don’t always agree). The biggest twist for me is the ending, as the villains (corrupt bounty hunters) kill the sheriff, the hero, his girl, then all the families he was trying to protect.

The girl was much later in To Sleep with Anger:

L-R: corrupt Pollicut (a Bay of Bloodsman), the sheriff of Salvatore Giuliano, jailed Kinski

by ·Comments Off on Il Posto (1961, Ermanno Olmi)

Aka The Job, I watched this to see what it must be like to have a job (it sucks). Older brother goes to Milan to find work so maybe his little bro will be able to stay in school. First you gotta pass the interview, which seems to be one easy math problem, then a physical, which weeds out the desperate old guys. Then you’re mercifully given a post with nothing to do as a delivery boy’s assistant, and eventually a desk, along the way attending the saddest company holiday party ever, and attempting to connect with a hot girl who’s also the only person around your age.

After work:

Forgot I’d already seen something by Olmi – he did the best segment of Tickets. This was gloriously shot, a poetic upgrade to the early neorealists. Per Lawrence: “A collection of brilliant moments, some fleeting and improvised, others punchy and precise, fused together with an outlook at once generous and satirical”

Desk anxiety:

Kent Jones:

To say that Olmi identifies with Domenico, the young hero of Il Posto on the verge of a “job for life,” is to put it mildly. The pull of his narrative is fitted to Domenico’s inner turmoil, his curiosity and his romantic longing, like two pieces of wood joined by an expert carpenter. Even the lovely section in which the story veers off course to examine the private lives of Domenico’s future office mates (there are oddly similar tangents in Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us and Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders, made around the same time) feels like an illumination of Domenico’s own perceptions: these hushed vignettes represent the lay of the adult land, as well as a set of possible futures.

by ·Comments Off on Torso (1973, Sergio Martino)

Opens with a threesome sex scene over the credits, nice. “Torso” turns out to be code for “boobs.” This was technically pre-shocktober, part of Criterion’s giallo series from which I also watched Who Saw Her Die? and The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

Someone is strangling hot young people with scarves. Flo goes out to a sex commune and gets drowned and mutilated in the swamp on the way home. The local scarf vendor (of Toby Dammit, also a good scarf movie) knows who bought the murderscarves but instead of telling the cops he calls the killer to blackmail him, then is immediately smooshed by a car. Mostly this raises the question of why a weirdo running a scarf kiosk keeps his customers’ phone numbers.

Suzy Kendall (kidnapped girlfriend of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and macaw:

A group of hot girls decide to take a trip to the country after failing to locate their friend Stefano (Roberto Bisacco of Stavisky), presumed scarf murderer – though after watching more than one giallo, we know the most suspicious guy is least likely to be the killer, and sure enough when Stefano finally shows up he’s been scarf-strangled.

Jane’s car has Chicago (not Illinois) plates:

Jane wakes up and the others are dead, then hides while the killer hacksaws them. Their professor John Richardson (victorious hero of Black Sunday) is the baddie, and the moment he’s discovered he narrates his entire traumatic triggering backstory which involves a Mac & Me-esque cliff fall. Some guy fights him and saves her, I’m not sure who. Have I mentioned that all the dialogue is super ridiculous?

Girls who need a vacation:

What girls do on vacation:

by ·Comments Off on Who Saw Her Die? (1972, Aldo Lado)

Four years ago a kid was killed in the snowy woods by somebody in a woman’s hat. Now a bunch more people start dying so the survivors and authorities figure they’d better inspect whether Adolfo Celi (of Thunderball) has a secret brother who wears ladies’ hats and pretends to be a priest and murders red-haired girls – which he does. He’s still not as big a maniac as the people who do sound for these movies. James Bond himself George Lazenby and giallo fave Anita Strindberg play the grieving parents. Strangers online point out (coincidental) similarities to the following year’s Don’t Look Now, and seem to prefer Aldo Ladi’s debut Short Night of Glass Dolls over this one.

by ·Comments Off on The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963, Mario Bava)

Criterion did a giallo series and I went straight for the John Saxon movie. Nora is a young “New Yorker” visiting Rome (Letícia Román, also of a Russ Meyer erotic comedy and an Elvis flick). Her Aunt Ethel was being cared for by Dr. Saxon, dies almost instantly after he leaves, then Nora runs outside for help and is immediately mugged – tough town. She has a Blow-Up fever dream of a witnessed murder and ropes John Saxon into her madness, and I guess her landlady (Valentina Cortese, Masina’s friend in Juliet of the Spirits) has been doing some murders.

Italians are absolute goofballs. Last night I told Katy about Trap, and she asked how could a dumb movie be great, and as if to answer her, here’s Italy with one of the dumbest greatest movies of its era. Movies aren’t even allowed to be this beautiful or dumb anymore. Bava made this the same year as Black Sabbath and The Whip and the Body (which we just might watch this Shocktober). There are seven credited writers, which honestly makes sense.