Historical Facts as the year draws to an end.

This year was the tenth year of me writing this blog. As 2022 draws to an end, I thought some probably true historical facts could be amusing as the next entry will be on January 2^nd 2023. So thanks for reading, have a great new years eve, as well as a safe and great week, and I'll see you all next year!

-From 1912 to 1948, the Olympic Games held competitions in the fine arts and awarded medals.

-Napoleon Bonaparte was attacked by a horde of angry bunnies during a rabbit hunt.

-The owners of the Titanic never claimed the ship was unsinkable, despite what the press said.

-Mary actually existed and she owned a little lamb.

-Nixon was a skilled musician and could play the piano, saxophone, clarinet, accordion, and violin.

-In 1830 ketchup was sold as indigestion medicine.

-Abraham Lincoln is in the wrestling hall of fame and was a licensed bartender.

-No one was burned in Salem for being a witch. Most were jailed and a few were hanged, but no one burned.

-Walt Disney was cremated, not frozen.

-Before the drink Bloody Mary was called such, it was called Red Snapper and before that, A Bucket of Blood.

-In 1917, four years before women in the U.S. could vote, one woman was elected to Congress.

-Machu Picchu was built in 1450. The Tower of London was built in 1078.

-The shortest war in history is the Anglo-Zanzibar War which happened on August 27, 1896 and lasted 38 minutes.

-Tablecloths were originally designed to function as communal napkins to be used by all the dinner guests at once.

-100 million years ago, there were galloping crocodiles in what is now the Sahara Desert.

-Oliver Cromwell banned eating pie, claiming that is was too pagan.

-It is estimated that about 97% of history is lost in time.

-Even mentioning Genghis Khan in the Soviet union was illegal.

-The year 46 BC was 445 days long and included two leap months. Julius Caesar arranged this to make his new Julian calendar sync up.

-The worlds oldest still functioning parliament in the Islandic Althing which was started in 930.

 

Don't Torture a Duckling

When researching the recent movies I have talked about, I came across a giallo with the silly name of:

Don't Torture a Duckling (1972).

First off, don't worry. There are in fact no actual ducklings in the movie, tortured or otherwise. Secondly, I may have seen this movie back in the 90's, but I had no real memory of it, nor did I recognize any scenes.

Set in the poor rural town of Accendura in southern Italy, this giallo is directed by horror maestro Lucio Fulci, and marks his first cinematic use of heavy gore. He has also called it his favorite movie in his catalogue.

Don't Torture a Duckling stars Florinda Bolkan, Tomas Milan and Barbara Bouchet. Bouchet has been in several of the movies I've talked about recently and Tomas Milan starred in Almost Human that I've also reviewed.

So on to the plot. The movie starts by showing us some of the immoral and sinister people in town. The slow witted Giuseppe Barra who spies on people. The mysterious witch La Magiara who unearths a baby skeleton. Young thrill seeker Patrizia who taunts and flirts with an eleven year old boy while naked. This scene landed Fulci in hot water with the law, as he was accused of corrupting a minor until he could prove that the child actor was substituted for an adult little person when on screen with the naked Bouchet. Fulci was cleared off all charges.

Soon enough, a boy disappears and a few more are murdered. The police start an expansive investigation with several competent officers. In many giallo movies, the police are usually just there to answer the question; “Why don't they call the cops”, but normally it's the main hero who solves the case. In Don't Torture a Duckling the police are pretty sharp, especially once the eagle eyed and clever journalist Andrea Martelli arrives from Rome to help.

Every time a boy gets killed, the townsfolk get more angry and a mob soon starts forming. Violence follows and everyone is on edge. It all comes to a boil in the end, and as usual, I'm not spoiling it.

Don't Torture a Duckling stands out from many of the other gialli I've written about. It feels like a much bigger movie with a larger budget, and the whole piece feels a bit more competent. I'm not trying to trash anyone's work, it's more a gut feeling than anything else. I have no technical complaints whatsoever, even though none of the shots feel as artistic as some that appear in other movies. Despite that Fulci demonstrates a smooth competence throughout.

My biggest and perhaps only real complaint apart from the title, is that there is such a small pool of suspects and once the police starts eliminating them, the field is very narrow. I would have liked to see more paranoia between the townsfolk, but I get it. With a runtime of 105 minutes, it is already a long movie and one that drags a bit as it is. For the paranoia to work, we'd have to get to know even more characters and that just isn't possible. You'd need a mini series for that to work.

So, do I recommend this movie? Oh yes, to giallo fans, absolutely. It is one of the benchmark movies in the giallo genre. Not as good as Argento's Bird With the Crystal Plumage perhaps, but a solid movie nonetheless. Other thriller fans might like it, so perhaps give it a shot.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a safe and great week! Oh, and Happy Holiday's to you all!

 

Two Titles

I watched two giallo movies this week. The first one has the suggestive title:

The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970).

Minou (Dagmar Lassander) is the young wife of businessman Peter (Paolo Capponi) and one night while out by herself, she is attacked by a sinister man. He threatens her with a stick that has a knife blade in it, but instead of violating her, he tells her that her husband is a fraud and a murderer, then lets her go. Minou is understandably terrified and confides in her best friend Dominique (Nieves Navarro), as she feels that she can't got to Peter with this. Soon the man is back, this time with a audio recording of Peter and another man talking about disposing of a mans body. In return for the tape he demands sex. Once Minou gathers up the courage to tell Peter, she finds it impossible to prove anything and everyone including her starts to doubt her sanity.

That's as much as I can tell without going too far into spoiler territory. Overall, The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion is not a bad movie. It is well shot, the actors are fine etc. The problem is that everything that transpires is to set up the ending, which I won't spoil. It's not that it is boring, it's just a pretty average journey until the end, which was quite good.

This realization left me with a problem. What now? Clearly this isn't enough so I sat down and randomly chose:

Amuck (1972).

Greta Franklin (Barbara Bouchet) arrives at a large villa in Venice to work as secretary to a big time writer, Richard Stuart (Farley Granger), as his previous secretary has disappeared. At the villa she also meets Eleanora Stuart (Rosalba Neri), Richards wife and their butler Giovanni (Umberto Raho). The real reason Greta is there is because the previous secretary, Sally (Patrizia Viotti) was Greta's best friend since school. Once settled in, she quickly discovers that the Stuarts like to host drug fueled sex parties, and she is equally quickly drawn in with some spiked drinks. She wastes no time in her investigation, getting into one scrape after another.

Amuck is really interesting as there are very few possible suspects, but with its 100 minute run time, you have all the time in the world to suspect them all, dismiss half and then suspect them again. Ultimately it isn't the truth that is the important part in Amuck. It is the journey. Barbara Bouchet does sterling work as the scared but determined heroine that takes risk after risk to find out what happened to her friend. The atmosphere is a great mix of tension and relief that actually sustains you throughout the whole movie.

Both movies do what they set out to do with Amuck doing it considerably better. Both movies have a good share of nudity, but very little gore overall. Nothing too bad for sensitive audiences, but I wouldn't watch either movie with your kids or parents in the room, if you know what I mean.

So, would I recommend these films? Concerning The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, maybe. As I said, it isn't bad by any means, it's just that this story has been told by other better movies. Watch it if you like, no harm done. What about Amuck? Yes, this is a really nicely done giallo. Quite racy but that does not get in the way of the plot, and is not used to cover up a lack of ideas or story. A well crafted movie, no doubt about it.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great and safe week!

 

Eye in the Labyrinth

I was in the mood for Italian mystery cinema and randomly picked:

Eye in the Labyrinth (1972).

Directed by Mario Caiano and starring Rosemary Dexter, Adolfo Celi, Horst Frank and Sybil Danning. Adolfo Celi is perhaps best remembered from his role as the main villain, Largo, in the James Bond movie Thunderball.

The movie opens with a creepy scene where an injured man is fleeing for his life from some unknown enemy or enemies through a labyrinthine place. We soon discover that it was all a bad dream his girlfriend, Julie (Rosemary Dexter), was having. Someone soon after calls her and asks where he, Luca (Horst Frank), is but she doesn't know. The following day she goes to the psychiatric hospital where he works as a psychiatrist, but his colleagues don't know his whereabouts either. A patient screams that Luca is connected to Maracudi.

Julie gathers some more clues and soon finds herself in the small town of Maracudi. Asking around after Luca, she eventually meets the kind old gentleman Frank (Adolfo Celi) who suggests that she heads off to a villa owned by his acquaintance Gerda.

Gerda's luxurious villa is a kind of artists enclave with amongst others a composer who only works with natural sound, a photographer obsessed with closeups of body parts etc. They welcome Julie at first, but together with Frank, she soon starts to uncover strange secrets, unsettling facts and several attempts on her life that culminates in a smart finale.

Eye in the Labyrinth is honestly a strange movie. For the most part it is brilliantly filmed with some very interesting angles and dramatic shot composition. But at the same time, it is for the most part pretty pedestrian. Many scenes sort of plod along and I got the feeling more than once that small scenes are missing. The worst one is when Julie wants to cool off by going skinny dipping on a lonely stretch of beach. However a trio of hoodlums find her clothes and grab them while laughing at her. Rather than going back to the beach naked, she swims further out and in the next breath, Gerda wraps a towel around her and welcomes Julie to the villa. We had no inkling that she was that close to the house, and we never find out when or how her car arrives there. In a movie that functions on several levels, these inconsistencies are a bit of a problem.

Despite these problems I found myself genuinely intrigued to see the end and have the mystery solved, since I didn't manage to figure it out. The actors are a cut above the norm but like The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, the music is again a problematic jazz score that only fits some of the scenes. Still not a deal breaker, but worth noting.

So, do I recommend this movie? Yes, absolutely. Fans of Giallo or just mysteries in general should enjoy it. Sure it is a bit of a slog to get though at times, but it is worth it as the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a bit of gore and nudity but not so much that more sensitive viewers should have a problem. You should of course exercise your own judgment. All in all, I found Eye in the Labyrinth an entertaining watch.

That is that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great and safe week!