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The Obscure Giallo Thread

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  • The Obscure Giallo Thread

    A place to post your recommendations for off-the-beaten-track giallo. The sort of films that aren't necessarily going to sustain a thread but still deserve a mention. I figured a collective thread for them is overdue. First up:

    Yellow: The Cousins.



    It's fascinating how closely some of these films adhere to a working formula. This one is the "respectable middle aged woman living alone somewhere remote who suddenly has a couple of sexy, disruptive, young things turn up on her doorstep" trope. Don't know how many of these I've seen. Sometimes there's an inheritance, usually there's a car crash at the end. It was best done in Orgasmo and Dirty Pictures. This ones not bad though. It's on the budget end of the spectrum so there's no wild fashions, extravagant sets or Carrol Baker but it's not so cheap that it's budget gets in the way of the story. There's as many twists and turns as you would expect from a self respecting giallo without getting overly silly. Probably closest in tone to The Fox With The Velvet Tail.

    There is an inheritance in this one but though it ends with the sole alive and unimprisoned protagonist zooming off across a mountain it surprisingly does not end with a car crash. A missed opportunity.

    Don't know if there's a good copy available. Mine had a lot of print damage and a strong magenta shift. Perfectly watchable though.
    "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

  • #2
    Erotic Games Of A Respectable Family



    I put this on last night. I was about half an hour in before I realised I'd seen it before. You'd think I'd remember seeing a film called Erotic Games Of A Respectable Family but no. I gotta stop drinking.

    Anyway this is a good one. Our hero comes home to find his wife in the sack with someone else, so he drugs her whisky with sleeping pills, hustles her into a hessian sack and rolls her off down a cliff. Then he takes up with a prostitute (Erika Blanc), shags his neice , and is haunted by his wife ghost, driving him insane.

    I guessed the twist almost immediately though that maybe because I've seen it before. It's still great fun though. The script is predictably WTF considering it came from the typewriter of one Renato Polselli.

    Extra points for this one because Blanc once again sports the black, bellyless, jumpsuit she made iconic in Devils Nightmare. How many films did she wear this in? Love the idea that with these films the actors were just bringing their costumes from home.
    "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Dom D View Post
      Erotic Games Of A Respectable Family

      The script is predictably WTF considering it came from the typewriter of one Renato Polselli.

      Extra points for this one because Blanc once again sports the black, bellyless, jumpsuit she made iconic in Devils Nightmare. How many films did she wear this in? Love the idea that with these films the actors were just bringing their costumes from home.
      Renato Polselli and The Devil's Nightmare caught my attention. Can I watch this online somewhere? Or is there a cheap DVD I can get?

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      • #4
        Originally posted by James Reed View Post

        Renato Polselli and The Devil's Nightmare caught my attention. Can I watch this online somewhere? Or is there a cheap DVD I can get?
        PMd
        "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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        • #5
          Your Sweet Body To Kill (1970)



          Considering that this is entirely lacking in the sex and violence one expects from a giallo it's actually great fun. Giorgio Ardisson is beset with dreams of killing his ball-busting, philandering, wife. Whether running her down in his E-Type Jaguar or tying her up and force feeding her worms. When she kills his fish he decides it's time to act on his fantasies. Then he comes up with the worst plan I've ever seen- for anything!- to get rid of the corpse. Pack it neatly in two separate suitcases and go on an international trip with it so that he can throw it into some pits of acid he knows will be waiting for him in Tangiers. No really. Shockingly this plan goes off the rails very quickly leaving our man to chase his suitcases through the streets, hotels and bars of Tangiers which totally threatens to fuck up a budding relationship with a rather tasty model he met on the plane.

          As I said up top, no sex, no violence. It's still gripping enough though as our very stupid protagonists descends into paranoia. Despite the stupid story there's some smarts to the script, a nicely ironic ending and a dry dark humour to it. Recomended.
          Last edited by Dom D; 10-01-2022, 10:17 PM.
          "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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          • #6
            Nothing to add at present, except to say that I'm enjoying this thread, so thanks for starting it Dom.

            All of these are new to me (though I have downloads of a few awaiting my attention), so recommendations are being duly noted.

            Also enjoying the poster artwork, which is fantastic, and duly downloaded for future reference. (I have a set of pillow cases I inherited from my Mum with the exact same pattern seen on that lady's dress on the 'Yellow: The Cousins' poster.)
            https://breakfastintheruins.blogspot.com/
            http://stereosanctity.blogspot.com/

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            • #7
              ^ Seconded. YOUR SWEET BODY sounds like a lot of fun.

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              • #8
                ^ cheers guys.

                The Cat In Heat (1972)



                That's some pretty serious value judgement on our heroine in the title there. Hard to argue though. She makes some very questionable choices.

                Silvano Tranquilli arrives home after some time away to find a dead body in his driveway and his shellshcoked wife playing with a loaded gun. Most of the rest is in flashback telling the tale of how we got here. Seems our man is away on business an awful lot leaving his wife lonesome at home. Next door there's a drug addicted, ex con who has naked screaming matches in his garden with various women. Our lady decides he can fill her spare hours. Which all goes very wrong in very strange ways. We've got satanic rituals, group orgies, rape with a glass bottle. None of this is shown in a particularly graphic way but it still all there.

                This is probably the least of the films mentioned in this thread so far. Which is not to say its poor, it definitely passes the times. I enjoyed it even. But the framing device means there's not a lot of tension. There is a twist at the end but only one. I like my giallo's to pile a few more twists on the twist. This one just ends after the reveal.
                "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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                • #9


                  Great thread.

                  Stumbled across this just now...
                  https://youtu.be/Vbbv4WbYwMU
                  JonesyTheCat
                  Member
                  Last edited by JonesyTheCat; 10-03-2022, 12:40 AM.

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                  • #10
                    The Hook (1976)



                    Okay technically this film is from Greece and so not a giallo. But it's European, from the 70s and stars Barbara Bouchet as a Femme Fatale in a convoluted, twisty, turning, murder mystery so who's arguing?

                    Anyway Miss Bouchet is the trophy wife of a much older grey fox who likes to spend his days racing yachts. Always easy to kill a man who likes boats. They can go out to sea and not come back and who's to say what happened? Just ask Robert Wagner. Anyway she and her younger lover hatch a plot to murder the old man during his next race. While they are scheming there is a tape recorder in the bedroom recording their every word so who knows who knows what?

                    This is solid stuff. The sequence on the yacht with the murdering is very well shot considering how difficult that must have been to do. You've got Babs wandering around in bikinis and exotic European fashions. And you have the requisite number of twists and turns before you get to the dark ironic ending. I think all fans of the more laid back gialli will get a lot out of this one.

                    Apologies for the poor quality on the poster. The only scan of this online is postage stamp sized and super low res with it so I had to run through an AI upsampler. Came out better than I expected but still...
                    "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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                    • #11
                      I enjoyed The Hook too, but it's kind of heavy. None of the characters are happy. You nailed the ending: "dark ironic;" although a bit contrived and you could see it coming from a mile away.

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                      • #12
                        Death Falls Lightly



                        This movies nuts! Sometimes feels supernatural, sometimes surreal but, ultimately, its a giallo.

                        Man comes home from some shady dealings to find his wife dead. His lawyer sets him and his girlfriend up in a deserted hotel to hide out while they clear his name. Then thing get fucking weird with monkeys and murders and shit.

                        Tonally this is all over the shop. It's starts like a solid giallo with an Argento-esque prog rock soundtrack giving things a lot of drive. Then it slows to a crawl as our hero and his main squeeze get cabin fever in the hotel. Then it gets weird and, frankly, quite fucking creepy.

                        I'm not sure it's good but it's one of the most unique films I've come aross of late and I definitely enjoyed the strangeness.
                        Last edited by Dom D; 10-08-2022, 06:30 AM.
                        "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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                        • #13
                          A couple less than amazing ones.

                          Two Males For Alexa



                          Rosalba Neri is young gold digger shagging around on her doting octogenarian with a young lothario. The old man comes up with a particularly nasty revenge plan.

                          This film is structurally screwed from the start. It begins near the end of the story as our young couple are locked into a room with no escpe. Then we tell the rest of the story in flashback. There's nothing in the flashbacks that we didn't intuit from the opening scenes. They're just there to kill time. I wonder if the film would have worked if told sequentially? Maybe. As is, its a chore.

                          Shadow Of Death



                          Full disclosure, I didn't make it to the end of this one. Our heroine wants her husband killed so she can inherit his wealth and make off with his twin brother.

                          They come up with the strangest plan I've seen in a while. The brothers are so alike that no one can tell them apart. So brother A goes out committing crimes and then drugs brother B and by keeping him awake for days starts implanting memories in him that he, brother B, was the culprit.

                          It's very strange. I like strange. This plan though just takes so long to play out that I think passed out from lack of interest at some point. You want to tell a story that dumb you have to move fast and stack absurdity on top of absurdity. You cant dwell on it.
                          "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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                          • #14
                            Off track but i couldn't think of somewhere relevant to put this so here it is: I was listening to the Tarantino/Avary podcast last night and they're doing a special American giallo thing with Eli Roth. As an introduction they gave a quick history of the giallo and made the very surprising claim that the genre begins with The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. I've never heard someone put that as a start point before. Very strange. You're just knocking out so many great films. Blood And Black Lace is not a giallo? By what definition? How about So Sweet... So Perverse or A black Veil For Lisa? Hell the genre was already so much a thing in the Italian conscience before BWACP that they actually released a giallo that's just called Yellow.

                            It's not that they were uneducated, they were talking about Krimi etc, but they just believed that it wasn't a formal subgenre before Bird With the Crystal Plummage. Personally I go The Girl Who Knew Too Much. I just can't see a way in which that's not a giallo. Though I'm happy for people who say Blood And Black Lace because that laid down so much of the groundwork Argento et al built on. Thoughts?
                            "Never let the fact that they are doing it wrong stop you from doing it right." Hyman Mandell.

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                            • #15
                              One of them, Roth or Avary, does mention Blood and Black Lace. They kinda jump all over the place.

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