Dinner With A Vampire

Dinner With A Vampire (1989)

Dir. Lamberto Bava

Written by Lamberto Bava and Dardano Sacchetti, story by Luciano Martino

Starring George Hilton, Riccardo Rossi, Patrizia Pellegrino

It's technically Dinner with A Vampire, but apparently German audiences demand definite articles.

            If there is one immutable and universal iron law of pop art, it is this: when something achieves a certain level of popular success --no matter what the thing originally was, no matter how idiosyncratic the product, or how obviously a fluke the success-- you can count on at least one rich guy to grab the artist responsible and say “make me more like that.” In this case, the inspiration was the financial success of DEMONS and DEMONS 2 in 1985-86 Italy, the rich guys were executive producers Massimo Manasse and Marco Grillo Spina of Italian TV production company Reiteitalia, and the lucky recipient of this enthusiastic artistic patronage was DEMONS and DEMONS 2 director Lamberto Bava. The result: from 1987-1989, Bava cranked out four (out of a planned five) made-for-TV horror movies that played on the channel Italia 1. Needless to say, none of them matched the feverish frenzied perfection of DEMONS, none is very well remembered today, and considering Bava The Younger does not exactly have an unimpeachable track record of quality, I was little inclined to doubt that assessment. Little inclined, that is, until I unknowingly watched UNTIL DEATH back in 2016. Obviously it’s no DEMONS, and nothing ever could be or will be again. But I found it a surprisingly solid, well-made little film noire horror riff that managed to entertain me even without any tits, gore, or swears. So I figured, what the heck, might as well tempt fate and see if lightning sometimes does strike twice.

Lightning did not strike twice. But if DINNER WITH A VAMPIRE is monumentally cheesier and crappier than UNTIL DEATH, it is not utterly without merit. In fact, it’s a rare Italian horror movie which seems to be at least marginally self-aware of how batshit it is, leaning into its silliness with a zeal that probably crosses the boarder into intentional parody. Or at least, everything about the script and performances scream campy, tongue-in-cheek fun, and the only thing that holds me back from wholeheartedly believing this was intentional is the simple fact that it would require the director of DEMONS to be self-aware enough to know when a film has gotten ridiculous, and I don’t see how I can square that with reality as I understand it.

            Anyway, DINNER WITH A VAMPIRE will deliver its titular meal eventually, but it starts with a film crew unintentionally resurrecting a vampire and enthusiastically filming the results until he predictably murders them all. This is the first, but not the last touch which could be seen as a bit of meta humor; you can easily imagine Bava himself (dubbed by an American accent, of course) shouting at his cameraman, “don’t miss a thing! This is incredible!” even as his crew gets slaughtered. Tedious backstory now out of the way, we then move on to the euphemistically titled “talent” portion of the movie, where we’re introduced to various young people and future vampiric victims of dubious ability, who are auditioning to be a singer (“well, I’m trying to be. I don’t have a great voice, but I have a good ear!” [??]), an actor (hot take: the romantic words of the immoral bard in Romeo and Juliet don’t sound so hot via the medium of a dubbed Italian woman mumbling the English phonetically), a “dancer” (skipping around vaguely to the rhythm of a pop beat) and… I dunno, some guy who’s really into finger puppets? What, specifically, they are auditioning for doesn’t seem to be an immediate concern for them, so they are dangerously unsuspicious when, after the audition, all four of them get “the call” to a mysterious castle which they all happily assume has need of dancing, singing, acting, and finger puppetry.

And what a castle it is! If ever there was a castle where one was obviously going to have an unexpected Dinner With A Vampire instead of a finger-puppet routine, this is obviously it. “Where’s the headless horseman?” asks one dude, apparently not as familiar with the setting of The Legend Of Sleepy Hallow as he believes himself to be. When the door is answered by a hunchback who appears to have taken Marty Feldman’s YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN role as a challenge to go broader (and I’m not the only one who thought so, since the young guy actually calls him "Marty Feldman" -- guess he’s more up on his Mel Brooks than his Washington Irving), they’re only slightly more surprised than they are when they’re told they can’t meet the promised “director” until… after midnight (this by an assistant with a rather pronounced Transylvanian accent). Soon a old-timey lady with very nicely crimped hair is warning them about an unspecified danger, which they take as an invitation to split up and wander around alone (“where are you going?” “To the bathroom!” “Alone?” “I always go to the bathroom alone!”).

Once the plot is introduced, much running around in a line through the most stunningly beautiful castle I’ve ever seen ensues, and it’s all very silly and could certainly be set to the Benny Hill theme song without losing much in terms of spine-chilling terror. The characters are notable for panicking when there’s no reason to panic (at the start, when they don’t even know there’s any danger, just watching a black and white movie causes one girl to faint!) and then being bizarrely nonchalant once they actually have to face rampaging ghouls. Faced with an obviously real vampire sitting two feet away and monologuing about the torments of immortality, one of his guests can only think to nonchalantly ask, “Well don’t you have a vampires’ union or something?” At an hour and seven minutes, this mental giant solemnly mansplains, “girls, I think we may have to accept the fact that he’s a real vampire,” as if that hadn’t been established forty minutes before.

            Still, it makes its silliness something of a charm, best embodied in the titular vampire who eventually makes an appearance at an elegant dinner where he informs the motley assembled “talent” that they’re actually here for a very unexpected reason (and indeed, one which might be unexpected even to the audience, who doubtless assume our collected protagonists were summoned to be Dinner For A Vampire). The courtly vamp in question is played by Uruguayan actor turned Spaghetti Western star George Hilton (THEY CALL ME HALLELUJAH, ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK), camping it up gamely as an ageless supernatural menace bound and determined to have a good time with his unsuspecting guests, and fond of teasing them with phony hints about how to kill him (when they suggest killing him with a cross, he points out that he’s wearing one [“I wear it for good luck!”], and I like the implication that vamps have overcome their old nemesis of garlic and crosses by investing in big corporations which come up with scientific cures).

Hilton cements the movie’s sense of silly, giddy fun, and that tone is sufficient to keep things lively and tolerable, even when technically speaking there’s not a whole lot of whammy going on. The movie, for example, spends a surprising amount of time with our protagonists just watching a black and white film-within-a-film starring a suspiciously familiar vampire. This movie looks quite handsome in black and white and does turn out to be relevant to the events at hand, but somewhat typifies the film’s comically ineffective protagonists, who find it challenging even to successfully watch all the way through a movie. Their complete uselessness is kind of funny, but also makes them somewhat inert narratively, meaning we spend a whole lot of time basically watching them run around screaming. There’s some monsters and chasing and creepy dungeons backlit by an eerie blue light and all that, but it’s a little short on showstopper moments, which gets to be a bit patience-testing even at 92 minutes. Still, if one must watch a bunch of nitwits run around screaming for an hour and a half, one could hardly imagine a more pleasant setting for it. Shot in the Tuscan Sammezzano Castle, which sports 365 rooms each featuring a unique Moorish design, the location itself is such an eye-popping marvel that it almost doesn’t matter what’s happening in the foreground. Even when the movie is corny and kinda uneventful -- which is almost always—it’s never entirely uninteresting because it’s in such a sumptuously imagined palace, lit as elegantly as you would hope from an Italian production.

The juxtaposition of this stunning work of architecture against a dorky Scooby Doo story about a campy vampire film director is, perhaps, a fitting symbol for Italian genre filmmaking as a whole, especially by the late 1980’s: impressive technical artistry backing up a bunch of muddled, schlocky nonsense. Where the best films of this era blended those two things indissolubly (as in the immortal DEMONS), though, this one stratifies them almost entirely, leaving the schlocky stuff a little stranded and too lacking in the goods to stand on its own. But it’s a friendly, goofy enough experience to squeak by on charm and good looks, if only barely. Self-awareness is not the best lens through which to experience Italian genre films, but it’s at least unusual enough that I’ll allow it in a single TV movie that no one could reasonably have much hope for in the first place. Lightning may not have struck twice, but perhaps I was foolish to think myself capable of finding any Italian horror film from the 80s completely worthless. Bring on GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE and THE OGRE!      

But seriously dawg, look at this fuckin' place!

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	None
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a literal dinner with a vampire in there, though it’s mostly just exposition. But I guess HALFHEARTEDLY RUNNING AWAY FROM A VAMPIRE wouldn’t be as good a title.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampire, horror-comedy
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Not specifically horror, but George Hilton is something of an Italian B-movie God, appearing in Westerns, actions movies, and gialli
NUDITY?	One boob appears in the horror movie they watch
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	The vamp turns into one of those adorable 1930s bat puppets, but the poor thing looks like it can barely stay aloft, let alone harm anyone
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Vampire, but the building doesn’t seem to be the problem.
POSSESSION?	Vampiric hypnotism
CREEPY DOLLS?	One girl stumbles onto a prop room with a bunch of weird mannequins, including one with a arm for a head with one eye in the middle. Man, I wanna see THAT movie
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Vamp into bat, Sexy George Hilton into scary vampire Hilton
VOYEURISM?	None, oddly; you’d think this would be a prime opportunity to have the antagonist peeping on his guests while they’re vulnerable, but he’s actually quite the gentleman.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Finger-puppetry as a career won’t get you as far as your High School Career Councilor told you it would.

Sodoma's Ghost

I do have to say, this poster is pretty baller. They should have used this for THE KEEP.

Sodoma’s Ghost (1988)

Dir. Lucio Fulci

Written by Lucio Fulci, Carlo Alberto Alfieri

Starring Claudio Aliotti, Maria Concetta Salieri, Robert Egon, Al Cliver

Well, one minute and 30 seconds into SODOMA’s GHOST, including credits (which play over stygian blackness in total silence) we’ve got a Nazi cocaine orgy. Unfortunately it’s the same Nazi orgy I already saw in CAT IN THE BRAIN, which blunts a little bit of the shock value they were probably counting on here. And in CAT IN THE BRAIN you also had the added bonus of watching director Lucio Fulci intensely staring at everything from behind the camera, which gave it a little more pizzazz. But still, Nazi coke orgy! I guess that lets you know what kind of party it’s gonna be right off the bat, anyway. Six minutes later it’s still going. Finally, a Nazi shoots a pool ball into a reposing woman’s vagina, and there’s an explosion, and then we’re on to the actual plot. Which is not exactly as severe a pivot as you might assume, because that plot turns out to also be mostly porn, and a lot of it with Nazis, though admittedly the beginning is the only orgy. I realize that to the casual filmgoer, the idea that a movie could just unexpectedly turn out to be Nazi porn* seems even more alien than the idea that you could unintentionally stumble upon the same Nazi porn twice, but I assure you that in the particular cultural beat I report on, this is an ever-present possibility and you just have to learn to roll with it. Well, this is no time to self-reflect about the genre I’ve spent my life studying, come on guys let’s move on nothing to see here.

Once we’ve established the narratively “vital” fact that there is this Italian villa where one time there was a Nazi coke orgy, we’re introduced to the six blandest actors in Italy as they arrive at the very same Nazi villa in modern times, and find it deserted. They hang out there, and one of them has a Nazi S&M dream. Then they leave. And then they come back, and this time they find they can’t leave, the doors and windows are locked (and can’t be broken open). So they prattle obnoxiously at each other for awhile. This takes up roughly 50 minutes of an 84 minute movie. Finally, at 50 minutes, some kind of horror part starts to kick in; it seems there’s an evil, possibly Nazi, ghost and/or ghosts in the house that can tempt you by showing you things in a mirror. “Things” which, in every case, turn out to be boobs. There are endless, endless amounts of boobs in this movie (every female cast member gets topless, with no exceptions) and although this is an admittedly friendly gesture on the part of the movie, it gets old pretty fast when you’re hoping for some kind of horror. Plenty of hustling genre movies try to hedge their bets by dumping a bunch of softcore nonsense into the inevitable downtime that arises from the necessity of putting something on-screen for a minimum of 75 minutes, but this seems like a case where they started to shoot some filler nudity and then just got distracted and kept shooting more and more and then forgot to go back and add the genre stuff. I’m unclear if the Nazis are able to tempt you with other things too, and it just never occurs to them to try. But at any rate, boobs seem to consistently do the trick, so why mess with a winning strategy?

There are literally almost no screenshots from this movie that can be posted unedited on a wholesome family site like this one.

Director Lucio Fulci  (ZOMBI 2, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, THE BEYOND, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE NEW YORK RIPPER, CAT IN THE BRAIN, DOOR INTO SILENCE) is one of those slippery genre auteurs who is justifiably ranked with the greats, but did not exactly have an unimpeachable track record of quality. Probably his most widely recognizable auteurial trademark is that his films have boldly nonsensical, haphazard narratives redeemed by a few absolutely stellar setpieces. It’s been maybe a decade since I’ve seen it, but my recollection is that even his arguably most famous film, ZOMBI 2, is almost entirely absolutely unwatchable dreck except that it also happens to have maybe the three best zombie gore scenes ever put on celluloid. That forgives a lot -- and to be a Fulci fan is inherently to forgive a lot-- but SODOMA’S GHOST is, regrettably, almost entirely unwatchable dreck, minus any of the good parts.

But even this deep into his late-career decline, Fulci was still Fulci, and so, from about minute 50 to minute 60, suddenly Fulci the thriller director, not Fulci the softcore porn director, turns up out of the blue. For a hot moment, things get inexplicably good, with a disquieting, intense Russian Roulette sequence, a surreal walk through an impressionistically lit house with unsourced, untranslated German being shouted from somewhere, and a crazy sex nightmare which ends with the guy grabbing his paramore's boobs, only to find they're filled with decay and maggots. They follow that up by dragging the guy’s body downstairs, where it suddenly starts decaying really disgustingly while the camera digs in close to check out the gnarly detail. Granted, that may not sound like a universally appealing description of a fun night at the movies, but at least it’s making some effort. Stephen King famously said, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out.” Nothing in this movie was ever going to terrify or horrify, but at least going for the gross-out means they were trying.

Anyway, starting right at minute 50 there’s a legitimately functional 10 minute stretch of a movie which otherwise barely has a worthwhile 10 seconds. It’s enough to get your hopes up that maybe the movie will manage to stick the landing and redeem itself. Alas, immediately thereafter the Fulci who cares checks out again, and things settle right back into the previously established standard routine of people taking their tops off and having sinister Germans offer them more boobs through a mirror, none of which really goes anywhere (for example, there's a long scene where a topless German woman makes a lesbian think her girlfriend is getting it on with another girl, but then she storms downstairs to catch them and they’re not, so nothing happens with that. Not sure why someone felt it was worth including in a movie).

As the MIRROR MIRROR series unequivocally demonstrated, evil mirrors are not exactly the stuff of gripping cinema. Nazis have a slightly better track record, as least as far as sleazy genre entertainment goes, so no real surprise, then, that the best part (of a movie almost entirely lacking in good parts) is Robert Egon (“Italian Street Boy” in MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, “Perfect Young Italian” [seriously] in 1990’s CAPTAIN AMERICA) as the young Nazi who is filming the orgy (not participating) and shows up to tempt two of our “heroes” in the present. He has an arresting presence, half smug Aryan malice and half infuriatingly mild politeness. I prefer the idea that he’s not a Nazi at all, but rather some sort of ancient spirit in the house which got to the venal Nazis even more than he’s able to with the horny teens. There’s never anything specific to suggest that, but if there’s anything at all interesting about the movie, it’s the inhuman, opaque quality of the antagonists, which Egon embodies best. Most ghost stories are fundamentally built around the mystery of who the ghosts were and what they want. Here, that question is never raised, and the answer never appears. Do they want, like, revenge, or corruption of the innocent, or what? Does their being Nazis and trying to seduce the youth read like a metaphor? The movie never even seems aware that you might have these questions, which is certainly a symptom of its abject idiotic incompetence more than its narrative boldness, but at least the effect is a little exotic. Anyway, Egon’s only really in two scenes, which is a shame since the whole climax could really use him.

Speaking of which, the climax is such a wispy bit of tired nothing that it feels wrong to even describe it with that term, but I do sort of like the film’s final, insipid twist of a coda. (SPOILERS) See, it turns out that after a long night of obnoxious arguing and death and boobs and Nazis, everyone just… wakes up on the lawn, apparently having dreamed the whole thing! They just laugh it off and drive away, and that’s the end of the movie! Obviously, an ending so amazingly corny and insulting has drawn quite a bit of ire over the years. And it’s not hard to see why; if you somehow managed the seemingly impossible feat of taking the movie seriously up to that point (and there’s certainly nothing in the movie itself which would suggest you aren’t meant to) one can well imagine how an ending this flagrantly dismissive would be an absolutely mortifying affront (see [SPOILERS for THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW]: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW). But I actually sort of enjoy the dorky, sincere niceness of it; you get the feeling Fulci ended up kinda liking these dumbass kids and wanting to give them a happy ending, especially after so many of them were nice enough to show him their tits. It’s sort of sweet, really, which is a weird and possibly psychotic thing to have to say about a movie which opens with a full five minutes of Nazi orgy, but here we are. And here we will leave it.

PS: I have no idea who Sodoma is.

Alternate take: “The problem with this movie is it’s just not sleazy enough. So, a sleazy Nazi film without sleaze? Yep, that’s all we have here. While it’s not entirely true that there’s no sleaze as actresses like to shuck their clothes to show us their very modest endowments – though most are small enough that it seems like Fulci did his casting calls at junior high schools – there’s no eroticism or sizzle with the sleaze. It just plain doesn’t feel sexy or even dirty.” --Cult Review’s “Perfesser Deviant” who probably needs to take a break from Italian movies for awhile.

* Hello there, Academy-Award-For-Best-Picture-Nominee THE READER.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	None, but with a title that lurid, what else do you need to say?
TITLE ACCURACY	Since I have no idea what it means, I can’t begin to tell you. There does seem to be one or more ghost, anyway.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted Houses, Nazis
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, but I do want to point out that Art Director Franco Vanorio performed the same duties on PIRANHA 2: THE SPAWNING, which means he worked with James Cameron.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Lucio Fulci behind the camera.
NUDITY?	Almost non-stop
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Probably, but if you didn’t stop reading at “Nazi coke orgy” I doubt anything else the movie can throw at you is going to upset you.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	Not really
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Yes
MORAL OF THE STORY	Whatever moral this movie is trying to get you to learn, I would resist it.

Rings Of Fear

RINGS OF FEAR aka TRAUMA aka Enigma Rosso (1978)

Dir. Alberto Negrin

Written by (seriously!) Marcello Coscia & Massimo Dallamano & Franco Ferrini & Stefano Ubezio & Alberto Negrin & Peter Berling. All named in the opening credits. IMDB goes on to name Thomas Danneberg (dialogue: German version) and Miguel de Echarri (screenplay). Maybe they didn’t have room on-screen to include them?

Starring Fabio Testi, Christine Kaufmann, Ivan Desny, Jack Taylor, Fausta Avelli

(WARNING: in case the following pullquote doesn’t ring your alarm bells, this is probably one of those reviews you shouldn’t read if you would be the type to get upset about things which it would be completely reasonable to get upset about. Italy, man, what can I say?)

“The pace is brisk and the school shower scene is truly gratuitous.” -- IMDB reviewer HumanoidOfFlesh, Nov 19, 2010.

  

            RINGS OF FEAR starts out by ogling the nude breasts of an underaged corpse. But before you get too judgmental, I have some reassuring news: except for one scene where it blatantly ogles a bunch of 16-year-olds playing together in the showers (the camera reluctantly follows the action of our leading girl as she leaves the showers, and then zips back in for one more peek before it cuts) and one scene where a girl is murdered at an orgy via penetration by a giant dildo… well, other than those scenes and a few others it gets a little classier as it goes on, at least as far these things go! I wasn’t aware of this going in, but apparently RINGS OF FEAR is considered the third film in the loose “schoolgirls in peril!” trilogy which began with WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? and continued with WHAT HAVE THEY DONE WITH YOUR DAUGHTERS?, and would have continued seamlessly here if not for the death of director Massimo Dallamano* (still one of the six credited co-writers). But the dream was too beautiful to die with its author, and so, just as it looked like we might have to live in a dark world with only two sleazy "schoolgirls in peril!" Italian movies from the 70's, in stepped TV director Alberto Negrin (the Secret of the Sahara miniseries starring Michael York, Andie MacDowell, and Ben Kingsley[!]) to offer us one last wild ride with those schoolgirls who, darn it, just can’t seem to stay out of peril.

            The peril these particular schoolgirls have found themselves in began prior to the events of the movie, as our protagonist, Inspector Gianni Di Salvo (Fabio Testi, THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS, but most known for having a name which literally translates as “Fabulous Testicles”**) discovers when he steps in on a case which concerns a 16-year old schoolgirl. This particular schoolgirl is now thankfully out of peril, as she is currently deceased, having been killed by a giant dong (hey, I warned you!). Her classmates seem to know more than they’re saying, which becomes a real problem for them when they start to get targeted by a mystery avenger operating under the nom de guerre “Nemesis,” who may be a vigilante trying to avenge the dead girl, or the real killer trying to intimidate these co-conspirators into silence. Either way, Di Salvo is on the job, and he knows just what to do: kick his way into the school in the dead of night, rouse everyone from their beds, and shout at everyone incoherently that a girl was murdered and raped with a huge penis. When that somehow fails to produce the desired results, he’s gotta get creative.

            Despite the three “M”s prominently on display,*** this is probably more poliziotteschi than giallo, with a tough-guy cop as the main character, and most of the movie devoted to his hard-nosed attempts at shaking down the local underworld characters for information on this mysterious fiend with the killer johnson. Its style is more gritty than surreal, with a handful of action-packed chase scenes and fights, nearly always shot on-location during the daytime. But it has a few appreciably nutty stalking/suspense sequences too, probably just barely enough to justify describing it as a horror-thriller, if you were inclined to be generous about such things for some reason, such as if you were a person who blogs mostly about horror movies and saw this during October and was consequently honor-bound to write about it, for example.

It is a whodunnit, anyway, and, in fact, one with a batty enough solution to please even the most discerning connoisseurs of psychotic Italian exploitation cinema. (SPOILERS FOLLOW!) It turns out, in fact, to be a double mystery -- “Nemesis” and the dildo murderers are actually unrelated, and Di Salvo has been unknowingly chasing two perps, not one. The whole thing with the dead schoolgirl actually ends up mostly only being a sex conspiracy, not a murder conspiracy; it seems the young woman in question was just an participant in a totally normal and consensual school-wide orgy between underaged classmates and creepy old men, and one of the participants simply miscalculated what size of dildo he could use on her without fatal results. You know how that goes. What a faux pas! Anyway, just a completely understandable misunderstanding; in fact, I’m not even sure the movie ever bothers to actually identify the person responsible for the original death, it’s much more interested on the subsequent coverup. “Nemesis,” though, turns out to be a little more interesting: it is, in fact, the adorable little sister of the dead girl, resorting to some straight up fucking SAW shit to punish her sisters’ complicit classmates. The movie seems pretty comfortable with her assessment that these terrified 16-year-olds are equally culpable (if not more!) than the adult males who presumably put together this sordid little soiree; so much so that when Di Salvo finally figures it out, he doesn’t even punish this little fucking psycho, and in fact the movie implies that they may team up from here on! Seriously, it ends with an unmistakable "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" scene! Jesus, this has to be the most depraved, Machiavellian little kid since… well, I DRINK YOUR BLOOD only eight years earlier. What the fuck was up with the 70’s and thinking murderous little tykes were cute? (END SPOILERS)

Anyway, that’s a pretty nutty solution to a pretty nutty mystery, but still, it does basically kind of make sense. Not, like, in the way real things in real life make sense, of course, but in the sense that most of the basic questions posed get answered, and the solutions roughly conform to the basic tenets of the plot up to that point. Frankly six screenwriters (and possibly as many as eight!) adding up to a whodunnit which even vaguely coheres is kind of a miracle in itself, and when you throw 1978 Italy into the mix, we’re basically talking about quantum probability here. Nice work, RINGS OF FEAR. Not that the solution really matters, of course; the real enjoyment of this sort of thing --if you are, like me, the sort of person who has it in them to enjoy this sort of thing, and if you’re not, I sincerely commend you on being a better person than I am-- is in the journey, not the destination. A lot of it is disappointingly down-to-earth, considering the ludicrous premise, but it’s peppered all the way through with colorful details. You got a red herring character with a mysterious fake hand, a death by spilled marbles, an interrogation on a real roller coaster which absolutely looks none-too-safe (featuring the venerable Jack Taylor, THE GHOST GALLEON,  something of a Euro-sleaze staple), and one of the most hilariously abrupt suicides of all time. So it’s a pretty good time, especially when it’s rockin’ the jazzy, uptempo title track by Riz Ortolani (DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST), which is as funky and catchy as it is wildly inappropriate. RINGS OF FEAR is by no means essential cinema, even by Italian trash standards, but it is both idiosyncratic and sleazy enough to satisfy the only people on Earth who would ever come across it.  

Which is all, now that I think about it, just a unnecessary longwinded way of saying exactly what we began with: “The pace is brisk and the school shower scene is truly gratuitous.” Next time I’ll let it go at that.

* Dallamano, by the way, directed a handful of giallo and poliziotteschi flicks, but is most known as the cinematographer for A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE. Seriously!

** Warning: translation may not be accurate.

*** Murder, Mystery, and Misogyny

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	No Girl Can Ever Feel Safe, warns the poster.
TITLE ACCURACY	Yeah, no idea what that means. I think the Italian title is just “Red Mystery,” which also is inaccurate, in fact I’m not sure there’s even any blood in here.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Nope
SEQUEL?	None.
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Giallo (sort of), Whodunnit
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, although Fabio Testi worked with Vittorio di Sica, which is pretty baller.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	Yes, but you’re obligated by law not to enjoy it, so don’t get too excited you creep.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No.
THE UNDEAD?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No.
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Just by the camera.
MORAL OF THE STORY	It is entirely possible to have a productive conversation with a murder suspect while also riding a roller coaster, and you should do it.