GIALLO IDENTIKIT #010: Bumper Edition [DOLL OF SATAN (1969) and DEATH HAUNTS MONICA (1976)]

Some caps from the credit sequence for Ferruccio Casapinta's THE DOLL OF SATAN (LA BAMBOLA DI SATANA [1969]). The mod, cut-up style that's used for several of the static b&w shots suggests a certain kind of eye being used in assembling the film. They promise a film that, unfortunately, doesn't materialize again after this.

 [This is the twenty-ninth post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. It is also the first "Bumper Edition" for the Giallo reviews (see the info below). AS WITH ALL POSTS ON THE SITE, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED FOR EVERY FILM DISCUSSED.]

As I wrote in the first Krimi Bumper Edition, I spend a lot of time watching Krimis and Gialli. Some of them feel, for whatever reason, like they don't warrant the full-on review treatment that I give, respectively, in the Pocket Review and Identikit series. And yet I still feel the need to write *something* about them. So far, most of that writing has ended up over at Letterboxd, as I didn't have a place to slot it into here.

(Starting the Review-Cast and Pulp Art Idea Mill series was an attempt to include and/or document, for posterity's sake, some of my less-in-depth reviews, but the idea was to use those series here to highlight the non-Giallo / non-Krimi material that wouldn't otherwise get posted.)

So, from time to time, I'm going to do "Bumper Edition" reviews for the Krimi and Giallo portions of the site. These posts will cover multiple Krimis, or multiple Gialli, with write-ups that'll usually have lower individual word counts for each film (the full-on reviews tend to range anywhere from 2500-4500 words per film), and will be more scatter-shot in terms of what is and isn't covered. They will be, if nothing else, a way for me to document every entry in the two genres that I've seen, in capsule form at least.


[THE DOLL OF SATAN (LA BAMBOLA DI SATANA; 1969)]

My Giallo Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Inheritance Giallo
     ii. Giallo / Gothic Hybrid
     iii. Country Giallo
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): No (Letterboxd List)


Just kind of aimless. Elizabeth Ball Janon's (Erna Schurer's) uncle dies under mysterious circumstances and she returns to their ancestral home (with her milquetoast love interest in tow; plus their two equally forgettable friends) to hear the reading of the will. She inherits everything, including the Gothic homestead, and must decide whether she wants to keep the home or sell it off to a local landowner who is just a little too eager to buy.

Her uncle's close friend and colleague, who'd been staying on the grounds to help uncle with some "research," feels strongly that Elizabeth should keep the home. So strongly that he contradicts the story of the uncle's governess (Lucia Bomez), who claims the uncle had been talking for some time about selling the dilapidated castle. He, along with about half the cast, is murdered by the mask-wearing mystery killer of the poster, who eventually becomes so bold as to kidnap Elizabeth from her bed, bind her to an X-shaped cross in the castle's dungeon-basement, and whip her senseless (a scene that reminds you of the similar torture that Rita Calderoni's character suffers in THE REINCARNATION OF ISABEL, a decidedly crazier [as well as more tasteless] version of this film).

Add to that the requisite Gothic ghost—Elizabeth's resurrected ancestor who appears each night to molest and/or menace people in their sleep (enough, it would seem, to make anybody sell)—and an extended tour of the family dungeon full of torture devices that all come with historical curses (a la BARON BLOOD or THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM), and you've got a Gothic / Giallo hybrid that feels like a less-explicit version of Riccardo Freda's MURDER OBSESSION.

It seems that people find Freda's film notable for:

1. the cast (Anita Strindberg AND Silvia Dionisio AND Laura Gemser), and

2. how exploitation heavy it is—lots and lots of gore; lots and lots nudity in the female cast; a checklist of taboos (chief among them incest that leads to the murder of "the father"); and a nonsensically blasphemous ending that shifts from a giant rubber spider to a vulgar version of the Madonna and Son.

This film doesn't have either of those things going for it. The cast (at least for me) went largely unrecognized, other than Aurora Bautista. She is nearly unrecognizable here as the "madwoman in the attic" character (and for some reason the English dub and IMDb disagree on her name ...).

At least *I think* this is Aurora Bautista ... if it's not, then it would appear she's not in the movie after all.

There is mild writhing and blink-and-you-miss-it nudity in the ghost scenes, but nothing approaching the explicitness of Freda's film. Nor is there the kind of frisson (of mood, of menace) that you find in the best-known Italian Gothics, as Schurer is no Barbara Steele, and Ferruccio Casapinta no Mario Bava.

If the film looks good visually, it's mostly due to the transfer on the Blu-ray, which is quite strong (and considering how dodgy XT Video's track record is when it comes to upscaled and otherwise-garbage Blu-rays, whose "quality" begins and ends with the Mediabook packaging, this is maybe the most surprising thing here; reports on the quality of their recent Blu-ray release of Fulci's CAT IN THE BRAIN is probably best case-in-point for how their a/v efforts too often lack anything close to ... um ... effort).

More of the unfulfilled promise of the film's opening.

That and the fabulous opening credits (up top), which promise a mood that the film's flat direction and glacial pacing never manage to deliver. This promise seems esp. potent in the quick cuts of the prologue, which begins with a closeup on the face of a dead man being carried by persons unknown and continues with a series of disorienting edits that promise the kind of oneiric goings-on that fans have come to expect from these films. Instead, the film's execution actively works against this promise, and we're left with a weird additional mash-up of cold-war espionage, with a local painter turning out to be an undercover agent and the whole plot resting on a secret uranium mine lurking beneath the castle.

 
[DEATH HAUNTS MONICA (LA MUERTE RONDA A MONICA; 1976)]

My Giallo Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Inheritance Giallo
     ii. Sleaze-Art-Sleaze Giallo
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): No (Letterboxd List) 


For a film blurbed as a "racy and racing Spanish giallo" I guess my expectations were unrealistic? After I watched CANNIBAL MAN, I set to searching my DVD shelves for other Spanish horror films that I owned but had not  yet watched. As this was also a Giallo that I hadn't seen, it seemed the natural choice.

And it's an odd case: Half of it feels like it's stuck in a kind of procedural hell, overflowing with thriller and mystery elements that are executed in the most repetitive, unimaginative ways. There are scenes of home invasion. Scenes of corporate intrigue and scheming. Scenes of complicated, ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS-like staging of a crime scene by the killer in order to try to make it seem like the circumstances of the crime can't but clear him.

But it's all done with a dearth of style that weighs each element down. It's sort of like someone explaining why you should find a joke funny, instead of successfully telling that joke. You're supposed to be thrilled, this thriller keeps telling you in long expository patches. But you're not.

The other narrative strategy seems to be the inclusion of gratuitous and boring attempts at titillation:

Like when Monica (Naduiska) engages in a long phone  conversation that just happens to take place while she's naked in the bath (and the camera pulling back to make sure not to miss any of her body when she steps from the tub to grab a towel).

And though Monica's just finished this bath, when Karin Schubert's character arrives to tell her that Jean Sorel has been cheating on her, she finds Monica naked again, this time laid out on her stomach on a tanning bed, fully oiled.

Or when Sorel tracks down one of his employees: Of course the scene is set up by having the woman he's been sleeping with for three days emerge from the bed in the nude and leisurely walk through two or three rooms, unclothed, on her way to answer Sorel-at-the-door (and, also of course, that same actress propositions Sorel's character even as he tries to  convince her he's too busy for such nonsense).

Later, when we learn of Schubert's duplicity—the model cheating  with Sorel's character was put up to it by Schubert, as part of a scheme to discredit Sorel and allow Schubert to make  a power-play for the CEO-ship—we learn this because we are shown her stripping and getting into bed with that same, nude model, who is apparently also her lover.

What renders it all inert, though, is that complete lack of style. Or complete lack of anything enlivening about the exploitation stuff:

It's not transgressive, it's not pushing any buttons, it doesn't have anything to say, it's not so exaggerated or unflinching as to burst any taboos.

Even the more outrageous attempts at *display* just feel dead. There's a scene where Schubert goes to a club and the floor show going on is casually shown. Two nude women are mounting each other in some sort of whips and chains-slash-domination routine; a bit that has nothing to do with the plot, is badly framed, and is nothing but tacked-on window dressing for the exposition around it. And window-dressing tacked on in the most rudimentary way. A "poverty of the imagination" as they used to say.

(Which begs the question, why show it at all?)

In between all this stuff, there is (for once) pretty effective comic relief in a Giallo. He's the employee "playing away" at the start of the movie, and turns out to be the close friend and confidante to both Sorel and Naduiska. He's played by Arturo Fernández, a kind of clownish Casanova—slacker ne'er-do-well—who becomes the defacto detective figure before the end of the movie. This transition works in a way that is usually lacking when Gialli try to pull off this type of character, and Fernández's performance is probably the best in the film.

Esp. in comparison to Sorel's. He's sleepwalking through the "asshole-husband-living-off-his-wife's-money" role he's been given. Even tacking on a shady criminal past and a blackmail scheme doesn't elicit any more "oomph" (or interest) from his performance. Other than the particular use his JFK-good looks are put to (to explain the magnetism he has in so effortlessly attracting so many women), it feels like just about anybody could've played his role.

...

The other casting highlight requires you to keep an eye out: Monica's groundskeeper is played by the same actor (Luis Barboo) who shows up as the immortal (and evil) monk doing Helga Liné's bidding in Amando de Ossorio's LORELEY'S GRASP. Giallo fans will also recognize him as the knife-wielding "lawyer" from Martino's CASE OF THE SCORPION'S TAIL.

Joins THE KILLER IS ON THE PHONE as the most disappointing Giallo watch so far this year.

Also added to the Letterboxd list Death + Verb + Prepositional Phrase (or Object, or Adverb) = A Giallo Tradition.

Leonard Jacobs

April, 2015