[GIALLO SOURCE CODE] Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Crimes of the Black Cat, & New York Ripper

[NOTE: Some NSFW screencaps below. And, as with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

I first posted about this connection four or five years ago, when I still had my old Mubi account (before that site traded its community of users for the chance to monetize every last square inch of itself). When I migrated over to Letterboxd, I also mentioned it in a capsule review I published there. But listening this week to the commentary on Mondo Macabro’s stellar Blu-ray of Fulci’s LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN brought it back to mind. So I decided to take a few caps and briefly revisit what’s there.

In short, we have actual scenes from Fulci’s 1971 film appearing—as scenes from an actual film—in 1972’s CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT (aka, SETTE SCIALLI DI SETA GIALLA; aka, SEVEN SHAWLS OF YELLOW SILK). The film, directed by Sergio Pastore, stars Anthony Steffen in the genre’s familiar amateur detective role. He plays a blind composer whose work includes scoring films. In one scene, we watch him and another technician watch a brief snippet from the murder of Julia Durer in LIZARD—specifically, those moments that feature the prosthetic breast that was created to allow for the shooting of some blood-drenched Fulci gore. (Apologies for the quality of the caps from CRIMES—the only source I have is the old OOP Dagored DVD, which is complete garbage.)

And here are a couple shots from MM’s new Blu-ray, to show just how far we’ve come in the quality of our Giallo home-video options:

What rarely gets mentioned as part of this connection, though, is that the footage from Fulci’s film appears to be included here for the sole reason of foreshadowing the climactic death of a key character, Steffen’s on-again, off-again love interest. She’s the last of the cast who gets murdered, and her killing features a number of close-ups of a much less-convincingly mocked-up prosthetic breast ... also, it should be noted, that the murderers in both films are women hiding a secret that they believe will alienate them from their acquaintances if revealed, so they’re killing to keep that from happening ... and that both films feature a bisexual woman attempting to blackmail the murderer (and getting killed instead).

Here are a few frames of that set-piece murder (there are much bloodier shots of the prosthetic breast, but I chose not to include them here):

   

What is of further interest, in the context of Fulci’s later Giallo work, is how the brutality and gore of this scene actually seems to prefigure Daniela Doria’s murder in 1982’s NEW YORK RIPPER, that infamous scene where the killer uses a razor to mutilate her breasts. 

Here, the murder is a bracingly violent, bracingly graphic scene, esp. for an animal-titled Giallo from 1972. Though the attack itself lasts for only about a minute, the rapid and aggressive cutting (not to mention closeups) create a barrage of images overflowing with the massive bodily harm being done—and to the character who has basically been the female lead for the majority of the film ... it certainly feels like it shares the misanthropy that gets expressed in RIPPER’s murder set-pieces.

Perhaps if Pastore’s film were more widely seen—or if the version available wasn’t in such awful shape—these connections would be talked about more … likewise with the way that the woman-plunging-through-window climax of CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT very clearly was an influence on Helga Ulmann’s famous death in Argento’s DEEP RED three years later (for cap comparisons of the two scenes, go here).

Leonard Jacobs

January, 2016