Tag: giallo

La bestia uccide a sangue freddo (1971)

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Dir: Fernando Di Leo
Star: Klaus Kinski, Margaret Lee, Rosalba Neri, Jane Garret
a.k.a. Asylum Erotica, Cold Blooded Beast and Slaughter Hotel

The last alternate title is particularly inappropriate, since it’s not a hotel and there’s a disappointing deficit on the slaughter front. My God, this is tedious. I know Kinski had a tendency to appear in anything, but even he looks bored out of his mind, in his role here as Dr. Francis Clay. Clay is the head of a mental sanatorium which, for reasons which quickly become clear to the viewer (if not any needed by the plot), appears to serve only young, female and attractive loonies. Someone in a mask is going round, picking off the staff and patients with a variety of weapons, but showing particular fondness for an ax. Inexplicably, nobody seems to notice this, until about 15 minutes before the end, when a crossbow bolt through the neck galvanizes the authorities into action, and they set a trap for the killer, using one of the patients as bait [it’s okay, she’s been cured, so it’s not really exploiting the mentally ill].

However, it’s nowhere near as interesting at that might make it sound. A better summary of the movie is to be found in the opening sequence, of the killer creeping round the corridors of the hospital before being scared off. This utter non-event lasts a full six minutes, close as I could figure out. What there also is, instead of plot, characterization or even good old-fashioned splatter, is an awful lot of nudity, with just about every actress here chosen not for their thespian talent, as an apparent willingness to get their kit off. Some of this is surprisingly explicit, given the time and the somewhat mainstream nature of this as a film, but it’s all depicted in such a boring manner, even red-blooded heterosexual males (or lesbians – we are nothing if not inclusive here)  may find themselves fast-forwarding through the nudity to get back to the rest of the film.

Dr. Clay, naturally, has a relationship with one of his patients, Cheryl Hume (Lee), in violation of just about every medical ethic. Mind you, the way this mental institute just leaves lethal weapons around, should also bring local health and safety down on them. I mean: they have a working iron maiden, f’heaven’s sake, and don’t even bother to lock it! That’s just asking for a class-action law-suit, I’d say – even before the obvious happens with it – and I imagine a sequel depicting Dr. Clay declaring bankruptcy as a result of the resulting damages he has to pay out for negligence, to the victim’s families.  And oh, look: another inmate, Anne Palmieri (Neri), is a raging nympho. What are the odds? Take your time curing that one, Dr. Clay. But it’s the relationship between Nurse Helen (Monica Strebel) and patient Mara (Garret) that provides a particularly large does of the gratuitous nudity, which is clearly Di Leo’s main purpose for making this one. Massage! Tribal dance! Lesbian canoodling! Truly, this film has something for everyone – at least, providing they like massage, tribal dance and lesbian canoodling.

slaughterhotelAnyone else, however, will likely find this irredeemably bad, to the point of unwatchable. I’ve seem some truly shitty examples of the giallo genre in my time, yet this one manages to scrape the bottom of the barrel, for its nonsensical plotting and feeble performances, lacking even the strong sense of visual style for which the field is generally renowned. Kinski is entirely wasted, with his doctor getting the absolute minimum of screen time, and the character could have been removed entirely without impacting the film to any significant degree. Di Leo clearly decided, “Why bother having Kinski, when you can have an apparently endless massage instead?” I suppose this choice could be considered as having some kind of artistic vision, except it’s a vision of which I want absolutely no part.

I’ve had to sit through some remarkably dull movies for this site (hello, Jess Franco), but even in these, Kinski has usually been an enlivening presence. That isn’t the case here, and of the forty-odd movies covered here at the time of writing, this is the very bottom of the barrel. While most of his other films would at least possess some re-view potential, for one reason or another it’s hardly any exaggeration to say that I would rather gouge my own eyes out than be subjected to this tedious exercise in bad soft-core porn ever again. If anyone can explain the appeal – and 800 votes on the IMDb have it scored at a semi-respectable 5.2, so there clearly is some – or make a case in favor of this one, I’d be curious to see it. Because it’s clearly entirely wasted on me.

Finally, this probably counts as a spoiler, but screw it – this film has nothing of merit which could be considered as worth spoiling. The ending of the film does contain what is likely the worst death scene ever. And, yes, I’ve seen the clip from that Turkish film which did the rounds on social media a while back – it was edited and redubbed for comedic effect [I’ve seen the original film and it’s actually not bad, in a cheerfully trashy 70’s way]. What follows here is exactly as it occurs in the film, right down to what would surely have been its majestic domination in the “Most Sudden Ending” of the 1971 Razzies. I note whoever uploaded it to YouTube shares my assessment, going by their title…

Jack the Ripper (1976)

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Dir: Jess Franco
Star: Klaus Kinski, Andreas Mannkopff, Josephine Chaplin, Herbert Fux

The Jess Franco film so good I watched it twice? Well, kinda… It’s certainly better than most of Franco’s work – I’ve had my fair share of run-ins with the “tedious dreck” end of the spectrum in his filmography, but this is solidly workmanlike, and grounded mostly in Kinski’s fine performance as the central character. However, the double viewing is less because of any quality, than the first copy I got was the English-language version which is among the worst dubs I’ve ever had the misfortune to experience. Virtually none of the characters sound anything like their characters; they could have had Betty Boop dub Kinski, and it would have been more appropriate. That necessitated getting hold of the original German version, which is (as usual) a great deal better.

Just do not expect anything like authenticity, or anything bearing much more than a tangential relationship to the real Jack the Ripper, despite a couple of nods, which I’ll get to later. That’s clear right from the start, where a lady of the night is warned outside the enchantingly-named Pike’s Hole music-hall: “You have to walk through Kensington and Chelsea, where he looks for his victims.” Er… No? And Zurich isn’t much of a substitute for London either, despite providing some waterways through which bodies can be transported. Still, as long as you’re happy with lurid sleaze, you’ll find plenty to enjoy here, even if it does fall a little short of Edge of Sanity, another take on the tale from a sometime director of porn, Gerard Kikoine. That had Anthony Perkins, threw a large helping of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde into the blender, and was shot like the demented offspring of Ken Russell and Dario Argento. Compared to that masterpiece of misbegotten excess, this is almost tame, yet there’s a good amount to appreciate.

The story has Kinski playing Dr. Orloff, a character name used a bunch of other times by Franco, from 1962’s The Awful Dr. Orloff through to one of the director’s best, Faceless, in 1987. He has what can only be described as severe mommy issues, and is acting these out by abducting prostitutes and dismembering them, with the help of an assistant, Frieda, who may be mentally deficient and/or in love with Orloff [the film is vague on such details]. It’s never clear if Orloff’s recollections of his mother as a whore are literal or metaphorical, but if the former, it doesn’t appear to have prevented him from rising up to pursue a medical career, As the body count rises, Inspector Selby (Mannkopff) of Scotland Yard investigates the case, but matters are complicated by his ballet-dancer girlfriend, Cynthia (Chaplin – the daughter of Charlie!), who decides to go undercover in search of the killer herself. Needless to say, she finds the not-so good Doctor, only to fall into his clutches as Selby searches frantically for both of them – like a number of others, a plotline also largely recycled from The Awful Dr. Orloff.

jtr13It’s certainly an epic bit of casting to have Kinski playing a largely undiluted sexual psychopath, and he is actually quite restrained in his performance, save for a couple of moments where the mommy issues burst out in a gush of scenery-chewing. There’s no doubt Kinski had an ambivalent attitude towards women, and it’s the nastier side which is allowed full rein here, in his brutal treatment of his victims, usually raping them before beginning their dismemberment, which is depicted in occasionally highly graphic fashion. The worst such is reserved for frequent Franco muse (and future wife), Lina Romay, whose promising career as a music-hall act is brought to an abrupt end by Orloff carving off one of her breasts in its entirety. Yet Orloff spends his days tending to the poor, accepting whatever they can pay. It’s an unusual dichotomy, perhaps intended to expose Victorian hypocrisy [though when one of his patients attempts to blackmail the doctor, the results are unsurprising!].

I kept expecting Mrs. Baxter, Orloff’s landlady, to play a significant role in proceedings; that doesn’t happen, and her character serves no real purpose. On the other hand, I was quite impressed by the police procedural aspects, in particular a scene where the Inspector has to wrangle witnesses of wildly varied social stature into putting together a composite portrait, only to find there are two, clearly different descriptions. Fortunately, the sharpest tool in the box is also present, in the shape of a blind man, whose heightened senses provide a couple of key elements that narrow down the inquiry, and also gives Selby a crucial clue after Cynthia is abducted. However, the ending falls kinda flat: rather than any kind of fitting retribution for or by society, on behalf of the numerous victims, Orloff simply gives himself up, though in response to Selby’s assertion, “You are Jack the Ripper,” the doctor counters coolly, “You will have to prove that first.”

There are occasional, albeit slight, nods to real Ripperology. For there is some evidence to suspect the real Ripper may, like Orloff, have had medical training, and the film does make a reference to him having “relatives at Buckingham Palace”, perhaps hinting at the connection to the British royal family which has been suggested by some. However, this is an entity appreciated for its own merits, whatever they might be, and not as any kind of historical reconstruction. In particular, it’s good to see a Kinski film which truly lives up to that label, with him front, center and given the opportunity to unleash, quite possibly, a few of his own inner demons involving sex and death. As so often, however, you are left to wonder what might have been, had the material been handled by a better director than Franco, though the results here are certainly among the upper tier of his filmography. Just don’t inflict the dubbed version on youself, for that would be far more horrible than any of the breast-removing and repeated stabbings carried out on Orloff’s victims!

Schizoid (1980)

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Dir: David Paulsen
Star: Marianna Hill, Klaus Kinski, Craig Wasson, Donna Wilkes

schizoid2Advice columnist Julie (Hill) is increasingly concerned by a steady flow of apparently psychotic messages cut out of newspapers. Who is behind them? Could it be someone from the therapy group that she attends, such as the obsessive handyman (played, oddly, by Christopher Lloyd of Back to the Future fame)? Maybe her ex-husband (Wasson)? Or is the head of the therapy group, Dr. Pieter Fales (Kinski)? Perhaps even his whiny teenage daughter (Wilkes)? The police initially refuse to do anything, but even they are forced to act, once it seems someone is acting out the fantasies described, stalking women known to Julie, and stabbing them to death with scissors.

I bold the name of Kinski’s character, not because he is necessarily the psycho, but since there’s some twisted genius here, casting Klaus in a slasher film like this. He is easily the most obvious candidate for the perpetrator, because who better to play a total psycho? Except, for much the same reasons, he is also the most obvious red-herring. So which is it? Hey, I’m not going to spoil it for you. Instead, I’ll say that there are echoes of Dario Argento here, with its black-gloved killer lurking and observing his victims from the shadows, before terrorizing and dispatching them. Except, of course, writer-director Paulsen doesn’t have a fraction of Argento’s visual flair, and the killings here largely progress in a flat and uninteresting fashion.

There are some interesting dynamics here, not least in the relationship between Julie and Dr. Fales, which certainly seems well over the boundaries of normally-accepted professional conduct. Admittedly, it’s not clear if she is seeing him in any genuine therapeutic capacity, or if she just hangs out at the therapy group to get fodder for her column, which reminds me of nothing more than the narrator in Fight Club. I would also have thought a psychiatrist like Fales would have a better approach to handling his daughter, Alison, who turns up to dinner wearing clothes belonging to her dead mother, and deeply resents any other woman – like Julie.

MBDSCHI EC004Alison seems to flaunt her body at her father rather too much: I was kinda relieved to discover Wilkes was already in her twenties since, to give you some idea, four years later, she played a 15-year-old hooker in Angel. The mere fact he doesn’t squash this immediately makes for somewhat sleazy viewing – or more than somewhat, considering Pola’s recent accusations against her father. In addition, it’s interesting to contrast this role for Kinski, with the ones his other daughter, Nastassja, was getting around the same time (1980), which inevitably seemed to involve her with an older woman. Oh, and Fales also visits a strip-club and bangs one of the dangers, in forthright fashion, right up against the wall of the dressing-room (right). Probably safe to say that Dr Phil, he most certainly is not.

This comes to a head in an argument between father and daughter which is kinda amusing, simply because we get to see Kinski on the receiving end of the kind of screaming temper tantrum, for which he became justly famous. As generally, he shows a near-complete lack of parenting skills, flapping his arms and his jaw around, with equal (lack of) effect, as his daughter shrieks at him, before locking herself in the garage and eventually careering through the wall in an automobile. To be honest, I can’t say it has too much to do with the rest of the movie, apparently having strayed in from some Lifetime original movie. However, having been through the teenage daughter thing – fortunately, without the car accident or creepy undertones – I can vouch, Paulsen got their irascible omniscience spot-on.

The film does a fairly good job at keeping you off-balance, mostly through Kinski twitchily veering between “He’s got to be the murderer” and “That’s far too blatant, he can’t possibly be the murderer.” To avoid spoilers, let’s just leave it that, and instead, I should say, I’m fairly sure “schizoid” does not actually describe any of the clinical symptoms shown by the attacker here. The title is likely just playing off other, similarly one-word slashers like Maniac from the same year, or referring back to the granddaddy of them all, Psycho. There was even another film, the not to be confused Schizo, made four years earlier, and starring Mrs. Peter Sellers, Lynn Frederick.

What’s good about Kinski’s performance is that he’s the only character who is given anything like depth. While, like all the others, he may or may not be the killer, Dr. Fales also has good and bad aspects, which sets him apart from the others, who all appear to have been given instructions to stick to one dimension in their portrayals. There are times when Fales seems almost sympathetic – a rarity for Kinski – and then, moments later, you’re convinced he’s the man who is wielding the scissors in a stabby fashion. I think the movie might have been better, or at least, more interesting, to have concentrated purely on the weird daddy-daughter dynamic Klaus has with Wilkes, rather than a pseudo-whodunnit, which we’ve seen done far too often before, and usually better.