[NOTE: Some NSFW screencaps below. And, as with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]
I mentioned in my NIGHT SCHOOL review that one of the things qualifying it so strongly as a Giallo was the visual signature of its motorcycle-masked killer—and how that distinctive look reiterated any number of Giallo killers come before. For this [SOURCE CODE] entry I’ll cover two of the most prominent examples of this visual trend: Massimo Dallamano’s WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? (1974) and Andrea Bianchi’s STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER (1975).
In Dallamano’s DAUGHTERS, the “Schoolgirls in Peril” Trilogy shifts from the Krimi-Giallo mash-up of its first entry, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?—equal parts late-Krimi sleaze and early-Giallo trauma (with a cast and crew equally straddling the two worlds)—to a Giallo/Eurocrime Hybrid. The police procedural aspect is pushed to the forefront, to the point that there’s no room for amateur detectives. Or for personally invested bystanders, whose witnessing of some traumatic event compels them to risk their own life to investigate it.
Bookending the movie with quotes about how unsolved crimes and the disappearance of girls “without a trace” continue unabated helps give it a “true crime” vibe. We get long discussions about how political corruption is keeping the honest, hard-working members of the police from being able to truly fight crime. We get the corrosive, tabloid influence of a free press who are as interested in making money as telling the truth. And we get a truly heinous secret at the back of “respectable” society, where middle- and upper-class schoolgirls—out of boredom, greed, or a total isolation from their own family unit—allow themselves to be possessed (in some cases murdered) by a sex-trafficking ring that goes straight to the top.
In short, we get stock, exploitation strains of these two Italian genres, Giallo and Eurocrime, spliced together to create a new hybrid offshoot. And, in the midst of this sleaze coupling, we get our motorcycle-masked killer. Gone is the fake-priest father-killer from SOLANGE, replaced here by a blank-faced, leathered-up biker, whose weapon of choice is a meat cleaver and whose exact motives are murky at best.
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| These caps are from the Shameless UK DVD and leave a lot to be desired (esp. in the darker scenes). The Blu-ray announced by Camera Obscura can’t get here fast enough! |
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| Capping this also made it abundantly clear what an eye Dallamano had, surely carried over from his days as a cinematographer … one wonders if this actress was picked precisely because of the look of her face, and her ability to contort it in so many visually interesting (also, disturbing) ways … it reminds me of how visually striking the sustained close-ups on Olga Karlatos’ face are, in that infamous, eye-gouging scene in Fulci’s ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS. Or the focus-and-dissolve close-ups of Nieves Navarro’s face, as she witnesses the opening murder in DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT under the influence of drugs. |
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| In the third Schoolgirls in Peril movie, ENIGMA ROSSO, there is also a motorcycle-masked killer, though his visual signature (and weight displaced as a character) is much less pronounced. Instead of extended stalk-and-slash scenes where we watch the glint of his monster-blade, he’s a much more low-key presence. He first appears, really, as only his bike, peripherally, in the opening scene of the girl’s body dump by water (capped and compared here). Later we do get an extended chase scene that shows him helmeted and fleeing, but his dispatch confirms him as a minor flunky, who could very well not be in the film. |
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| There are also scads of other Giallo echoes in the film: For instance, when Giovanna Ralli’s character is stalked and terrorized in the parking garage of her apartment building, it strongly recalls Edwige Fenech’s own stalking ordeal in a parking garage … as well as any number of elevator attacks, ranging from BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE to CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS, all the way to De Palma’s DRESSED TO KILL. |
So we see STRIP NUDE taking the plot from SOLANGE and the killer from DAUGHTERS, and then transplanting this Schoolgirls-in-Peril root to the sleaze-art-sleaze world of a fashion house: A place where impotent, morbidly obese men whimper for human contact and predatory, abusive bisexuals use their positions of power to force their own urges on helpless employees.
It is about as un-p.c. as you might imagine, with rampant sexism, sadism, homophobia—in short, a movie whose sexual politics aim for nothing but “misogyny” and “poor taste”. Women exist to be ogled, deceived, and abused, and any dramatic weight that maybe could be carried by the social implications of the murder are reduced, by the last scene, to a joke about anal sex.**
(The character given to Edwige Fenech is a particular bummer, as her stock damsel-in-distress-ness is actually made more pathetic, more helpless, more abused here; in her relationship with a male photographer she is absolutely dominated by his “hairy macho bullshit” … and is written in a way so that it seems she enjoys it.)
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| THE RECONSTITUTED KILLER: The motorcycle-masked killer in STRIP NUDE. In his first appearance, he stalks his victim in the dark (so dark that taking screencaps of the scene on the milky Blu-ray made it hard to even see him). In the subsequent set-pieces, the killer’s presented in a series of close-ups that fetishize his motorcycle accessories. (Though, interestingly enough, unlike the other films, we never see STRIP NUDE’s killer ride a bike.) |
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| Certainly, on rewatches, one appreciates some of the aesthetic and technical choices made around the sleaze: The use of hyper-saturated colors to light whole scenes; the staging of set-pieces like the one with Femi Benussi’s character; even a key detail—running water—that must be present at all of the crime scenes for the killer to take revenge … not unlike the way that “rain” must be present at all of the killings in Argento’s TRAUMA in order for the killer to go through with the ritual crime … |
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| Regardless, work like Bianchi’s typifies one of the problems inherent in writing and talking about the Giallo genre—i.e., how do you talk about a STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER in the same terms, and in the same breath, as a DEEP RED? Part of this problem I answered in my review of the uber-sleazy SO SWEET, SO DEAD … there, the sleaze is inseparable from the aesthetic and artistic success of the movie, and thus creates a class of Giallo where unrepentant sleaze is one and the same with the movie’s art appeal; for more about this, see my review. |
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| (Can I say, though, no matter what one thinks of Bianchi’s sleaze-for-sleaze’s-sake sensibility, STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER has, bar none, one of the downright funkiest soundtracks of any Giallo of the ‘70s? It does.) |
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| A shot that reminds me of a very similar one outside the apartment building in Argento’s DEEP RED. |
And that brings us to 1981’s NIGHT SCHOOL. I’ve already talked about its several Giallo connections but the killer’s visual signature is certainly one of the mains. Notice, also, how the killer’s brutal m.o. also calls back to DAUGTHERS. In NIGHT SCHOOL, the victims’ heads are decapitated by a wicked blade that is shot, often, in the same manner as the meat cleaver from Dallamano’s film, and is as much an integral accessory of the killer as his motorcycle, jacket, or helmet. (Also, it goes without saying that the female college students being stalked and killed during NIGHT SCHOOL can be seen as the older counterparts of those students in the Giallo trilogy.)
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| Here, the first decapitation is represented by the film “fading” to red. |
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| The extreme edge (and blunt violence) of the Motorcycle Killer’s meat cleaver gets picked up again in NIGHT SCHOOL, where that film’s Motorcycle Killer wields a ceremonial big blade whose edge repeatedly separates victims from their heads. (In WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS?, it’s a cop’s hand and a victim’s body, Black Dahlia-like, that get taken apart by the blade.) |
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| More similarities among these three movies: Two of the three have the twist that the motorcycle-masked killer is actually a woman (I won’t spoil which two). And, interestingly enough, NIGHT SCHOOL also carries over, in slightly watered-down form, the specious sexual politics of STRIP NUDE (see, e.g., the squirmy scene between the headmistress and one of her students, in her bedroom, right before she is beheaded herself). |
Not only is the killer’s DAUGHTERS iconography repeated here, both films also feature an extended, high-speed chase that involves the police killing their motorcycle-studded suspect ... a suspect whose capture does exactly zero to bring the real culprit to justice.
Leonard Jacobs
April, 2016
**See below for my first reaction to watching the movie, some years ago. I’ve softened my stance a bit, at least to the extent that Bianchi’s brazen, bald-faced sleaze is, in some ways, an aesthetic unto itself—and the kind of aesthetic uniquely afforded by European exploitation of a certain era (watch the kitchen scene between Henry Silva and Barbara Bouchet in Bianchi’s CRY OF A PROSTITUTE, e.g., and try to keep your jaw from hitting the floor):
“The Bianchi I’ve seen gives me the impression that his only real aim in making movies was to be as offensive (and to make as much ripoff money while doing it) as possible. And not offensive in any kind of interesting way—ero guro envelope pushing, or narrative experimentation that hinges on that offensiveness (like extended set pieces of gore that suspend narrative time), or using genre conventions as an excuse to push societal taboos. Basically the stuff that Fulci/Argento/Martino/Miraglia/Ercoli et al. regularly excelled at. Bianchi, instead, always feels needlessly mean and cheap and nasty (not to mention misogynistic). His is the type of sensibility that would end a movie about a botched abortion on a joke about the hero forcing his girlfriend to have anal sex just so they don’t have to worry ‘about that sort of thing’ in the future. I mean, really?”
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