Murder Obsession (1981)

Title	Follia omicida
Origin	Italy, 1981
Genre	Giallo: Horror
Director	Riccardo Freda
Starring	Stefano Patrizi, Silvia Dionisio, Anita Strindberg, Laura Gemser
Music	Franco Mannino
Blurb	-

Riccardo Freda was over seventy when he directed this his final completed work. Always adapting to the times, the Italian maestro moved through the genres of costume drama, peplum, gothic horror, and finally the giallo. Murder Obsession could be regarded as his summing up of his career.

This one even begins on a film set, the fictional director Hans (Henri Garcin) always carrying a camera with him which he calls his "third eye". He also has "Director" written on his chair in childish letters with a marker pen, and allows his assistant's dog to run free between takes. Welcome to the world of Freda, and his often slapdash approach to his art.

The star of the film-within-a-film is also the star of our real one. Stefano Patrizi plays Michael Stanford, thirtyish, a successful lead actor so we are told. His role-within-a-role is as a leather-gloved strangler, jumping out on starlet Beryl (Laura Gemser), ripping off her top, and getting so murderously into the part that it goes well beyond the bounds of method acting. Everyone is shocked by Beryl's near-death experience, but it was the last scene anyway so the director just calls "print it". But Michael is mortified - where did all that rage come from? Could he be destined to suffer it again and again, until he finally kills someone for real?

The shoot wrapped up, Michael relaxes alone at home, strumming his guitar and singing (in English) a ballad, or judging by his interpretation, possibly a dirge. Proving he can manipulate items of furniture just as ineptly as guitar strings, Michael destroys a drawer and some photos fall out. Photos of Mother! It's a surprise and almost a relief to find a character in a psychological thriller so indifferent to his mother that he hasn't bothered seeing her for nigh on twenty years, and whose memories of her hold nothing but fondness. So this is going to be a very short film is it? About ten minutes?

But what the hell, Michael decides he'll go to see his mother (Anita Strindberg) anyway, and he'll take his girlfriend Deborah (Silvia Dionisio) with him too. It's while driving there that we get a hint of the truth: Michael has some serious Father problems. In a strange flashback reverie, Michael and his mother sit watching a formal concert (the dark atmosphere and high-backed chairs are very reminiscent of the "family torture" sequence in Fulci's Lizard) conducted by his father, the "Maestro". Bizarrely, grown Michael is the very image of his father down to the last facial hair, yet Michael aged ten looks nothing like him with his curly blonde locks. And he's staring at his father with absolute daggers! Father then collapses with a badly feigned heart attack. It's all beginning to look very Oedipal.

Michael swerves the Landrover off the road at this point. Events are conspiring to make Michael look like a cack-handed moron, though I'm sure that wasn't the intention. Things like this have to happen in bad films just to keep the story moving along. But it has to be said that Stefano Patrizi is rather poor in the role. Presumably he was the best they could come up with after all the money was spent on assembling such a solid crew of totty.

Eventually Michael and Debs make it to his mother Glenda's isolated mansion. She lives in this decaying pile alone, tended to only by eccentric and rather sinister servant Oliver (John Richardson). Soon the rest of the folks from the film-crew turn up too - Hans, Shirley (Martine Brochard) and Beryl (looking very un-glam in a yellow rain-jacket). Glenda, though more than delighted to see Michael, is unimpressed by the rest of this bunch. Especially poor Debs!

So let the murders commence. I'll spare you any more plot exposition. We've got our haunted house, filled it with our cast of fair maidens and homicidal head-cases, so who needs a credible plot anyway? Certainly not Riccardo Freda! For him it's all about the pictures.

Nighttime in his world is for lightning storms and candelabras. Disembodied footprints pace the stairs. There are zombies, bats and giant Satanic spiders. All clichés, bad ones too, but orchestrated by the Maestro into an almost musical symphony of delirium.

Forest of thorns.

Magical ceremony.

Arachnid sexual harrassment.

A dream sequence goes on for so long it has time to be interrupted by another dream sequence. This short scene, an austerely beautiful magical ritual in a deep crypt of flickering shadows, is perhaps the highlight of the film, and I was disappointed that there was not more in this sublime gothic style. I was eagerly anticipating a very special visual concoction saved up for the ending, and Freda certainly did not let me down!

Freda freely borrows imagery from other horror films, and even directly quotes himself. Such as the small yappy dog zipping up and down the staircase from Double Face, or my favourite, the black leather-gloved hand cutting the circuit-breaker from Tragic Ceremony. Are these deliberate homages, or has he simply run out of ideas? Who can tell, and when the final mix is so effective, who really cares?

Veteran scream-queen Silvia Dionisio is pretty and charming as principal babe. Though Debs being often somewhat put-upon, she's sometimes required to act a little tetchy, and her mouth goes all crooked. Laura Gemser, clearly cast for her name only, is functional, though wisely she is given little to do besides take off her clothes. Anita Strindberg, perhaps perturbed at being cast as practically a grandmother, seems unsure about how to play her role until her character becomes more clearly defined as the story progresses. All three ladies undress frequently enough to maintain interest, though not so often as to move into brown-paper wrapper territory. The rest of the cast make little impact.

There are a few gore effects but they are amusingly bad (an interview with rather sheepish effects man Sergio Stivaletti is included on the disc). At one point a character was bumped off without my even realising it. I thought it was a sort of subliminal flashback and it looked cool. Truth is the effect was so poor it didn't bear holding on screen for longer than three frames.

The music is a little odd, being a mixture of electronic riffs, classics from Bach, and some ponderously clanking contemporary piano pieces. Overall it's effective enough in producing an uncanny atmosphere.

I warmly recommend Murder Obsession to the more forgiving gothic horror fan who doesn't mind his films a touch ropey, and almost completely insane.

Unfortunately this edition from Raro Video is sub-standard. It's an English dub, with some restored scenes with subtitles only. Obviously mastered from VHS it often shows analogue artefacts such as ragged outlines and flickering horizontal lines. The sound is poor with lots of noise and crackle. The image is cropped top and bottom in pretend "widescreen", sometimes cutting off heads - it happens to Laura Gemser in the very first frame.

Clips for download

Laura Gemser nude (minor spoiler, click for stills):

http://rapidshare.com/files/237589801/Laura-Gemser-in-Murder-Obsession-1.avi
(2:12 minutes, 768x576, 17.1MB)

Anita Strindberg topless (minor spoiler, click for stills):

http://rapidshare.com/files/237457156/Anita-Strindberg-in-Murder-Obsession-1.avi
(1:23 minutes, 768x576, 13.1MB)

On Youtube, Silvia Dionisio is tied to a cross (stills):

Murder Obsession Youtube clip

Ratings

Quality: 4/10   Fun: 9/10

Review copy

Publisher	Raro Video
Format	DVD Region 0, PAL 4:3 (1.85:1 letterbox)
Certificate	18 (UK)
Image	Weak VHS transfer, overly cropped top & bottom

Sex of the Witch (1973)

Title	Il sesso della strega
Origin	Italy, 1973
Genre	Giallo
Director	Elo Pannacciò
Starring	Susanna Levi, Camille Keaton, Franco Garofalo
Music	Daniele Patucchi
Blurb	-

Angelo Pannacciò is one of the more obscure Italian directors, but any Euro-cult fan who sees his film Cries and Shadows will soon want to see another one. And here is another one, Sex of the Witch, made the previous year. Though superficially sharing a theme with The Shad (a bizarre melting pot of teenage possession and supernatural lesbian rape) this title largely eschews horror for more traditional giallo territory.

We start off with a priest being chauffeured through the Italian countryside. Is he going to an exorcism? I hope so. The accompanying laconically jangling theme tune is engaging if rather incongruous. And when the director's credit appears he's the only one to have his name in that big chunky "cake-slice" Seventies typeface. Things are looking promising.

Well, it turns out it wasn't an exorcism after all. The priest arrives at the mansion of Sir Thomas Hilton to administer the last rites as the patriarch lies upon his deathbed. Surrounded by his extended family of nephews and nieces, his consciousness slowly fading, Sir Thomas muses upon his life, and the callow generation that will succeed him.

Impotently he rails against their shallow morals, their alienation from their past, and the hopelessness of their future (Pannacciò has an inexplicable penchant for lengthy sermonising in his screenplays). Typical sentiments of the older generation these may be, but in this case he demonstrably has a point. Even as these thoughts pass through his mind the manservant and the maid are attempting to copulate in the very mausoleum into which his body will soon be entombed!

So to the reading of the will, and here we have an old-fashioned Christie-esque motive for murder. The Hilton patrimony is to be distributed amongst his descendants (apart from the pointedly disinherited daughter Evelyn, and in addition to the family lawyer Boskin, to everyone's disgust), each receiving an equal share of the remaining family fortune as they attain the age of thirty. Given time to reflect on the implications, anyone of the age of, ooh say twenty-nine years and ten months, may start to see their future as rather uncertain.

The youngsters of this family seem unpromising as prospective killers. Not one of this litter of neurasthenics and consumptives looks capable of bludgeoning anyone to death without having an asthma attack and having to go home. Nevertheless, a murder is soon committed, and a detective is called in to investigate.

What about the other suspects? Aunt Evelyn (Jessica Dublin) for example? It's always a bad sign to be called Evelyn in an Italian film, and given that furthermore she runs a herbal medicine shop in a film with "witch" in the title, it's as well to monitor her activities very closely.

Then there's the lawyer Boskin (Gianni Dei), according to the cousins a homosexual, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. And the wonderfully shifty, golfball-eyed manservant Tony (Franco Garofalo) who seems to spend his entire working day trying to get inside the maid's saucy knickers, not without success. Finally, being ready-primed for silliness, we mustn't overlook the animal kingdom, the family having recently acquired a large and vicious-looking dog.

Largely unperturbed by the violent death of one of their number, the brothers, sisters and cousins go about their business (whatever that is, as none of this bunch appears to have a job), and lazily pursue romantic entanglements within and around the ancient decaying Hilton mansion in the sunny Worcestershire countryside (clearly the part of Worcestershire known as "Little Italy", due to its Mediterranean climate and the preponderance of Fiats and Alfas on the roads - at this time Italian cinema often still pretended, for obscure reasons, that its thrillers were set in England, even if as in this case it meant no more than changing the names and featuring the occasional right-hand drive vehicle).

The most notable member of the cast is Camille Keaton, playing Ann, the shy, withdrawn, and dare I say it slightly tapped, family beauty. As usual Camille sleepwalks through the role in the most adorable fashion. Occasionally she speaks a few words, and these are accepted as being appropriate to the situation.

All the while the atmosphere is low-key and dreamy. The camera often keeps its distance, allowing the characters to open up as if unprompted. Opportunities for relatively restrained scenes of nudity are never missed. The typically repetitive but infectious keyboard score is sometimes light, sometimes tense, and strangely effective as a coherent whole. And director Pannacciò proceeds with all the confidence one would expect of an 'Elo Antonioni.

Which would be all very well if he wasn't in fact a complete hack, happy to stoop so low as to splice in a nightclub scene from a completely different film in the expectation that we won't notice, or at least won't care. The cast can barely act, the dialogue is banal, and the ideas dim-witted. The production design is of amateur dramatics standard, with only the family mausoleum being an impressive original location.

But only a select contemporary audience chooses to follow cinema like this. Such pretention and incompetence is what we expect, even hope for, and it is good.

So how is this story to move along? The detective (Donald O'Brien) is of the standard-issue clueless giallo type, only there to summarise the plot and stir things up a little by arresting the wrong person.

Plot points are introduced absolutely at random. Strangers are continually turning up at the door and being admitted to the house without declaring their business or even stating their name. It is revealed that Sir Thomas made a breakthrough in genetic engineering so startlingly revolutionary that only the most far-seeing of science fiction writers would dare to contemplate it. The police inspector remarks that this was very clever of him.

And then Boskin broaches a delicate subject with Susan (Susanna Levi), the only member of the family with her head remotely together. Apparently, when she was a child, Aunt Evelyn injured her in an intimate area, leaving a scar. Casually dropped in, seemingly innocuous, this comes across as a real kink. It's even relevant to the storyline and not, as one reviewer who ought to know better suggested, just an excuse to watch Susan fondling her breasts in the mirror!

More than this I will not reveal, except to note that the resolution of the plot is even more ridiculous than I ever dreamt it could be, and that it is all wrapped up with a coda that is as delightful as it is outlandish. I enjoyed it a lot.

Clip for download

A montage to set the scene, including some nudity. Note that we see the killer's face surprisingly early. This isn't the spoiler it appears to be as the revelation leaves us none the wiser.

http://rapidshare.com/files/235057255/Camille-Keaton-in-Sex-of-the-Witch-1.avi
(5:16 minutes, 368x208, 21.6MB)

Ratings

Quality: 3/10   Fun: 8/10

Review copy

Publisher	Unlicensed
Format	DVD, PAL 4:3 (2.35:1 letterbox)
Certificate	VM 18 (Italy)
Image	Sub-sub VHS, ragged border, but watchable. Italian language with good fan subtitles.