By 1978, the giallo cycle was pretty much over. Beginning more or less with Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964), then hitting a crescendo with Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and Deep Red (1975), the lurid blend of style, old fashioned whodunit, sex, and violence was regarded as somewhat old hat as the horror film shifted its obsession away from giallo and toward their next natural progression, the slasher film. For the most part, and with a few notable exceptions, post-1978 giallo were like glammy, prancing hair metal bands who hit the scene a month after Nirvana. They were the Danger Danger or Von Groove of the giallo world. Mind you, the Italians weren’t going to let a good thing go until they drained it of every last drop of blood and then some, especially since the giallo formula could be so easily tweaked to deliver a slasher (and indeed the distinction between the two is blurry, though gialli generally have an older cast wearing cooler clothes) or a sexploitation film.

As far back as 1971’s Slaughter Hotel, the giallo had been flirting with explicit sexuality. The primary difference between then and 1978, the year in which The Sister of Ursula (La sorella di Ursula) was released, is that Slaughter Hotel, for all its absurdity and ill-considered medieval weapons displays, still tried to be a somewhat stylish murder mystery in between all the sex. Director Fernando Di Leo might have been slumming it compared to the usual quality of his work, which was generally quite high, but even when he was making a bad film, he couldn’t actually make a bad film. He was to much the professional and too talented as a director. Not so for Enzo Milioni, the director of The Sister for Ursula and very little else. This is his rookie outing, and although he does manage to complete the film, there’s not much more to be said about it than that. The murders are silly, the pace is off, and Milioni has no idea what to do when he isn’t filming long scenes of sex, masturbation, and star Stefania D’Amario undressing in ways that take far longer than it would take a normal human to accomplish the same task. The Sister of Ursula is happy to drop the “thriller” part of erotic thriller and concentrate on the erotic tot he degree that it’s not even particularly erotic. Even when it does get down to the business of murder, it’s a decidedly sexual take on the act, given the movie’s rather unique choice of murder weapons.

Austrian sisters Ursula (Barbara Magnolfi, Sergio Martino’s The Suspicious Death of a Minor, Argento’s Suspiria) and Dagmar (Stefania D’Amario, Lucio Fuli’s Zombie and Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City) have come to Italy’s Amalfi Coast in search of their mother, who left them when they were young. Their father has just died, and the sisters want to share their inheritance with their absent mother. Their effort to find their mother is relegated mostly to hanging out at the hotel, seeing nightclub acts, and occasionally perching on the balcony or down on the beach. Ursula has been particularly affected by the death of their father, a fragile mental state that is expressed mostly by having Barbara Magnolfi sneer at and insult everyone while pouting like a child. Dagmar does her best to care for and tolerate her sister’s outbursts, which is oddly compassionate in a genre where most trauma is met with reactions like “So you were raped by a sex maniac who killed your boyfriend, get over it.” But don’t worry. Dagmar’s empathy for her sister will not be reflected in the way she or anyone else reacts to the murders that are about to spoil everyone’s holiday.

The hotel the sisters have checked into is a typical “Italian sexploitation film” hotbed of sleazy activity being perpetrated by shady characters. Local hunk Filippo (Marc Porel, Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling and The Psychic) splits his time between romancing hotel lounge singer Stella Shining (Yvonne Harlow) and shooting heroin, which is provided to him by the hotel’s manager, who supplements his resort income by dealing smack so that he can keep himself well stocked in cravats and velour leisure suits. The manager’s wife Vanessa (Anna Zinnemann, a seasoned veteran of the Italian exploitation racket who has appeared in the fumetti caper Il marchio di Kriminal; the spaghetti western Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead; gialli The Bloodstained Butterfly and Hallucination Strip; and Eurocrime films Gang War in Naples, Day of Violence, and The Big Racket) is carrying on a lesbian affair with local young hot thing Jenny (Antiniska Nemour). Pretty much everyone else in the hotel seems to be moonlighting as a prostitute. However, the rooms are clean, the lobby is nice, and the lounge seems lovely. In other words, it’s a fun place until the murders start happening.

The first victim of the mysterious maniac is a curvy prostitute, but others follow. Soon a pattern emerges: a woman will engage in a very lengthy and repetitive sex scene, either with themselves or someone else, then while they’re basking in the post-coital glow and puffing a cigarette, someone will show up to murder them, making sure that the focus of their ire is the genital region. Although The Sister of Ursula contains sex scenes that flirt with the pornographic, they are still mostly composed of the tried and true elements of giallo sex scenes, which is lots of people mashing their noses against one another’s collar bones while the camera lingers lovingly on elbows, crotches, and parts of the body filmed in such extreme close-up that not even a skilled anatomist would be able to discern what they are. On the plus side, the film boasts a lot of attractive people willing to put pretty much everything out there. On the minus, the scenes themselves go on for interminable length and repeat themselves, like a long-lasting lover who is, despite his stamina, not actually good at lovemaking.

This seems to have been the only way Enzo Milioni could achieve a feature length run time. Everything goes on for several minutes longer than it needs to. Even for someone more than happy to just sit back and watch the flesh, it gets to be monotonous. This is basically a sex film masquerading as giallo, and as such it’s primary job is to deliver sex and nudity. In one of the film’s early scenes, Stefania D’Amario’s Dagmar strips and changes into a robe while Ursula unpacks her suitcase. There is a difference between stripping and changing clothes. One takes a while, involves some skill and artistry. The other is a task to be complete. Dagmar takes as long to change into her robe — caressing her own sides and striking poses for no one other than, one assumes, her sister — as most people would take to actually fashion a dressing down from scratch. And lest you think some incestuous lesbian incitement is going on, rest assured that’s not the case. Dagmar goes about her business oblivious to the fact that Ursula is lingering around. But at least Dagmar is naked when she gamely kills five or six minutes of the film’s run time. For her part Ursula is absorbed by the fascinating task of removing things from her luggage, staring at each item, rotating it in her hands, and finally putting it down so she can move on to the next item.

Other of the sex scenes seem to have been conceived not just by someone who has never has sex, and not just by someone who has never masturbated, but by someone who actually isn’t human at all and has no idea how the human body works, but has had some of the primary functions summarized for them. This manifests primarily in a scene in which Dagmar, having nothing better to do with her time, pleasures herself with a gold chain — but not in the way you might guess, which would involve some degree of insertion or at least the application of pressure. No, instead she mostly just sort of lightly drags the chain across the top of her pubic hair, which is enough to send her into the throes of ecstasy and devour another five or six minutes of movie. Hey, everyone has their thing. It’s a rare accomplishment for a sex scene to reach the point where even a dedicated swinger and aficionado of perversion sighs and says, “You know, maybe we could just move on.”

If this seems needlessly and too graphically focused on the sexuality of the film, there’s a reason for that. Although The Sister of Ursula contains several murders, few of them elicit much response from anyone in the cast, and if they can’t be bothered to care, then why should the viewer? The Amalfi Coast is admittedly a pleasure seeker’s paradise, and a certain amount of laissez-faire is expected in matters. But even the most laid back den of hedonism seems like it might start to attract attention after a third murder victim turns up in one of its rooms. Sure, the hotel has a nice view, a pretty good floor show, and lots of prostitutes; but when those prostitutes keep getting murdered, surely that results in a few early check-outs. At the very least, one would think the police would do something more than show up every other murder and proclaim, “Well, these things happen.” Dagmar and Ursula must have gotten a really great rate on that room, because no amount of discovering horribly mutilated bodies can convince them to pack up. Even in the world of the giallo, where no one reacts to anything in the way an actual human would, the blasé attitude of everyone toward the piles of corpses borders on the ludicrous.

Speaking of ludicrous, given the genital nature of the violence inflicted on the film’s victims, one might expect it to be unsettling while it’s being unsavory. It never rises to that level, however, content to wallow about comfortably in its own absurd filth. The reveal of the killer is shocking only in that it turns out to be the most obvious suspect, and the one the film has been hinting at the entire time. It’s like expecting a curve ball only to have the pitcher throw it slow and right down the middle. And then there’s the reveal of murder weapon, which for most of the film is seen only as a shadow which becomes a little clearer with each killing until finally, the film whips it out proudly for all to marvel at. Rather than being shocking, however, it’s simply idiotic, and one can’t help but wonder exactly how you go about murdering someone with that particular implement.

Stefania D’Amario goes about the business of being the film’s lead with reasonable commitment. She’s not trying too hard, but it’s not a role that asks her to try hard. Her primary functions are to get naked and roll her eyes at what a nutcase her sister has become. She’s competent at doing both of these things, and toward the film’s finale she even gets to do a little acting, albeit acting of the “bug out your eyes and scream” variety. Barbara Magnolfi plays Ursula less a damaged, fragile woman and more as just a hateful, spiteful brat who, just because this film isn’t weird enough, also possesses the power of limited precognition. which she uses mostly to hiss at Filippo and Dagmar that Filippo is a scumbag who will end up killing Ursula. For his part int he whole sordid affair, Marc Porel as Filippo actually turns in a pretty good performance. Actually, no one in this movie is bad. It’s the movie itself that is bad. Most of them obviously have no idea what was going on, but that just makes them easy to relate to. The majority of them are there to be introduced during a meandering sex scene, then killed in the next scene. Oddly for a giallo, especially one this sleazy, most of the characters aren’t horrible human beings, with the possible exception of Ursula herself, and even she has a trauma that temper her foul mood.

Enzo Milioni was a director of no particular skill, and he enjoyed a career to match that skill. he circled the bottom of the barrel during a time in Italian exploitation filmmaking when the previous bottom of the barrel had drifted to the top. No one realized how good we had it in the early 1970s when the worst of the genre was still somewhat inventive. Milioni has nothing to offer as a writer or director, and one suspects based both on the thinness of the finished movie and the disengaged presence of actors who are trying to do their best with nothing, that the script for The Sister of Ursula ran no more than a couple pages and consisted mostly of “insert sex scene here.” During the decade he was active as a director, he only managed five films in an industry where some directors produced than number in a single year. His career as a writer was longer but not much more prolific and, like his stints as director, at best aspired to one day attain mediocrity. Even the cinematography by Vittorio Bernini is grubby. The Amalfi Coast is the sort of location that does most of the work for you. You just have to point your camera and get the proper exposure, and just as this film over-exposes during its sex scenes, so too is the travelogue footage spoiled by too much light, rendering the sky washed out and yellowish-white when it should be blue and beautiful. Maybe it was the weather. Bernini has some interesting ideas about how and where to place his camera, but for whatever reason, it never achieves the level of sophistication or style it should.

Other than marveling at the sheer stupidity of it all, there’s little to recommend in The Sister of Ursula. Well, OK, the music, composed by Mimi Uva (who, like most of the crew of this film, had no real career to speak of), is actually pretty good in that “cocktail lounge meets funk” way. Truly determined (or is it “demented”) fans of Eurocult cinema will find it easy if monotonous going, like having sex with a prostitute who can’t quite be bothered to pretend like she isn’t bored. It gets the job done, or at least a certain type of job, but there’s not much to recommend beyond that. If you are a fellow traveler in the world of the giallo film, especially its murkier, dirtier alleyways, then you might, like me, find The Sister of Ursula to be harmlessly tedious. It’s like watching a Luciano Ercoli film without that director’s flare for fashion and cinematography. For that matter, the whole affair is a bit like a Jess Franco film without that director’s flare. Contemplate that one on the Tree of Woe. Sex scenes, the Italian coast, outlandish murders — everything about The Sister of Ursula seems to operate under the directive of “Well, this should be good, but we’re going to mess it up.”

Coming to prominence around the same time and often revolving around similar subject matter, there was frequent crossover between the giallo and poliziotteschi genres. Poliziotteschi were Eurocrime films focusing on determined cops struggling to make a difference in a corrupt system, and like giallo the formative examples of the genre emerged in the 1960s, but the formula was perfected in the early years of the 1970s. Both genres delved into the world of murder, prostitution, kidnapping, and the vices of the rich and powerful. The primary difference is that in giallo, the police are rarely the driving force behind an investigation. That work is left up to some determined or desperate amateur. If the police are on hand (and some giallo seem to occur in an alternate universe where they don’t exist at all), they are often portrayed as incompetent and openly hostile toward victims, suspects, and the innocent alike. This could very well be a reflection of public impressions of police work in Italy during the 1970s, when crime and terrorism were rampant, and the authorities seem unable or uninterested in doing much about it.

Duccio Tessari’s The Bloodstained Butterfly is the odd giallo where not only are the police present, but they seem dedicated to their job (Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage features sympathetic police characters, but they are never the focus of the film). Although it boasts the elaborate murders and cast of red herrings one expects from the genre, it also surprises by spending at least as much time on police procedure, forensic science, and courtroom maneuvering. Like most giallo, it begins with the murder of a young woman. While no one witnesses the murder itself, which happens in a wooded park near twilight, several people catch a glimpse of the killer making a getaway (though none of them know they’re watching a killer at the time).

Working with eye witnesses and known associates and friends of the luckless young victim, police led by the dogged Inspector Berardi (Silvano Tranquilli, who starred as Edgar Allan Poe in Antonio Margheriti’s excellent Gothic chiller Castle of Blood as well as a slew of giallo, including Black Belly of the Tarantula, and a few top notch Eurocrime action films, including High Crime and Manhunt, directed by Enzo G. Castellari and Umberto Lenzi respectively), follow a trail of clues that lead to popular television talk show host Alessandro Marchi (Giancarlo Sbragia). The evidence against Alessandro is daunting, and his case isn’t necessarily helped by the fact that his legal defender is romancing his wife and would just as soon see Alessandro sent to prison. Of course, this being a giallo, there is a messy tangle of other likely culprits, including the lawyer Giulio Cordaro (Günther Stoll) and a nervous young man named Giorgio (Helmut Berger), the identity of whom isn’t immediately clear. Sarah (Wendy D’Olive), Alessandro’s daughter and a friend of the victim, plays the role of amateur detective, but unlike most giallo, her investigation is a sideshow. The bulk of the film sticks to the efforts of the police, the lawyers, and a team of forensic investigators whoa re able to take advantage of a wealth of new scientific crime fighting gear.

Like many early-cycle giallo, the film’s title is a riff on the trend started by Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage of including animals that usually end up playing a minor role, at best, in the plot itself. The Bloodstained Butterfly also follows Argento’s lead in making the limits of human perception central to the plot. Eye witnesses and circumstantial evidence that seems to result in a slam dunk case for the prosecution are revealed via a non-linear narrative to be more deceptive than they might initially appear. In the case of the two main eye witnesses, it is literally their ability to see that is called into question.

For the forensic scientists, it’s not the results of their tests that are questionable, but rather the way those results are interpreted and the way the preconceptions of investigators lead them to certain conclusions that, while seeming reasonable and perhaps even likely, are not explicitly confirmed. Forensic investigation was nothing new in itself in 1971 — people had been using science in pursuit of criminals since the 1800s — but the use of computers and other advanced electronic gear was still novel and, as is often the case with emerging technology in such an important field, the source of much trepidation both within police departments as well as the general public. Could you trust a machine to do a human’s job? Will it put the police out of business? Can we trust technology? The Bloodstained Butterfly isn’t a criticism of this technology in and of itself, but just as the reliability of the human eye is called into question, so to is the reliability of the human brain when it comes to interpreting the raw data generated by science. In this approach, The Bloodstained Butterfly takes a central theme from Argento but explores a much different avenue.

In fact, other than the basic theme of the questionability of perception and the general structure of the title, The Bloodstained Butterfly is very much its own sort of beast, very different in tone, structure, and plot from the Argento film that inspired it. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is infused with a certain rambunctious energy, a zest for what’s going on. Even when its central characters are in danger, there’s a sense of playful adventure as well. Lurking under the murder mystery of Argento’s picture, there is also an action film, full of chases set to thumping Ennio Morricone jazz. In contrast, The Bloodstained Butterfly is a much moodier, melancholy affair. With only a couple exceptions, most of the characters have something unsavory about them. They’re not exactly evil or unsympathetic, but there’s the sense that they’ve brought this awful suffering upon themselves. They all have something to hide, something about which they are ashamed, and they are willing to let other suffer in order to prevent themselves undergoing hardship. There’s a sense of doom looming over everything in The Bloodstained Butterfly, a feeling that a glum, depressing outcome is unavoidable.

A slower, more melancholy pace does not translate into a dull film, however. Director Duccio Tessari made his name directing a couple films in the popular “Ringo” spaghetti western series, but first and foremost he was a screenwriter, with dozens of scripts across a variety of genres under his belt before he set about making his first (and only) foray into the world of giallo. As was the case with films by the directing/screenwriting team of Sergio Martino and Ernesto Gastaldi, Tessari puts more emphasis on writing than would become the norm in subsequent films in the genre. Although the plot is twisty, it never becomes overly outrageous or illogical. Characters don’t always make good decisions, but they rarely made decisions just because the script demand sit of them. They stay well within the realm of believability.

British mystery writer Edgar Wallace gets a screenwriting credit for the film, though that was purely marketing. Wallace, who wrote primarily in the 1930s and was perhaps best known for writing the screenplay for 1933’s King Kong) became a sensation in Germany, where is labyrinthine plots and outlandish characters struck a chord with Weimar Republic Germans. During the war, his books were inevitably denounced by the Nazis and banned, but in the 1950s, he enjoyed a resurgence in Germany that resulted in a whole slew of film adaptations. Where as pre-War adaptations of Wallace stories were generally low-key affairs made in Great Britain, the German films of the 1950s were wild, bizarre, over the top, and once they started getting made in color, positively psychedelic. They are often considered progenitors of the giallo, as much responsible for the genre as the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Given the nature of the stories, it’s inevitable that actual giallo would turn to Edgar Wallace — or rather, that they would invoke his name, if not his actual stories. There are several giallo that claim to be based on the works of Edgar Wallace. That was rarely the case, but there was still a certain commonality between giallo scripts and Wallace books. Tessari, collaborating with Gianfranco Clerici (who worked on the screenplays for several Lucio Fulci films as well as some poliziotteschi and the bizarre cop-vs-monster by way of Michael Mann film Miami Golem), puts substantial work into The Bloodstained Butterfly‘s script, crafting a deliberately paced but consistently interesting potboiler that plays with the structure of its narrative in a way that heightens the mystery without seeming like a cheat to the audience. For much of the film, the viewer may find themselves a bit at a loss when it comes to interpreting certain scenes and details. The central plot remains straight-forward, but the branches manage to be confusing without being frustrating. As it reaches the finale, all those disparate bits are clarified, making for a satisfying (if not totally surprising) final revelation.

Film production being what it was in the 1970s, it was common for Italian films to get financial backing from other countries, most often neighbors in Germany, France, and Spain (and sometimes, the US and the UK). As a trade-off, Italian filmmakers would remain sensitive to what might be popular in those countries at the time. They’d also generally be willing to bring on talent from other countries, either to satisfy financiers or to increase the potential success of a film across Europe. That certainly seems to have been the case with The Bloodstained Butterfly, which leverages Edgar Wallace’s name (though, again, not one of his stories) as well as several high-profile German and Austrian actors. Helmut Berger was an Austrian who rose to prominence in Italy, gaining notoriety for his appearances in films by neorealist pioneer Luchino Visconti during the 1960s. In the 1970s, he started making more genre fair, including Massimo Dallamano’s Dorian Gray and, most controversially, Tinto Brass’ grotesque and controversial 1976 Nazi sexploitation film Salon Kitty. He even became a regular on the American television series Dynasty and had a part in Francis Ford Coppola’s ill-advised The Godfather: Part III.

He’s joined in The Bloodstained Butterfly by German actors Günther Stoll, who appeared in an actual Edgar Wallace krimi movie (1966’s The Hunchback of Soho) as well as one of the best giallo-meets-poliziotteschi, 1972’s What Have You Done to Solange?; and most famously, Wolfgang Preiss, who starred as the titular criminal mastermind in Fritz Lang’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse as well as many subsequent lesser Mabuse films (which were rushed out to capitalize on the success of the Edgar Wallace krimi). He also starred in the star-studded World War II epic The Longest Day, the German krimi The Mad Executioners, the Jean-Paul Belmondo/Jean Seberg thriller Backfire, and the WWII adventure Von Ryan’s Express starring Frank Sinatra. He was one of the most prolific and dependable actors in Europe, even if it seems like 90% of his roles were Nazis.

Preiss has a relatively minor (though not unimportant) role in The Bloodstained Butterfly as the chief prosecutor in the case against accused murderer Alessandro Marchi. Stoll has a much larger role as Alessandro’s seemingly dedicated though not-so-secretly sleazy defense attorney, just as Berger has a larger role as the would-be lover of Alessandro’s daughter and, quite possibly, poor murdered French exchange student Françoise (Carole André, whose fruitful career in genre cinema includes everything from Fellini’s Satyricon to Yor, The Hunter from the Future). The Bloodstained Butterfly doesn’t demand a lot from its cast beyond acting desperate, furtive, or melancholy, but within those confines, there’s no weak performances. At times, it can be a little difficult to remember who’s who as characters appear out of nowhere, disappear, and reappear as part of the film’s fractured timeline, but eventually one can sort it all out (this is a film that rewards repeat viewing).

The Bloodstained Butterfly, while certainly part of the giallo genre (or subgenre, or style, or whatever you might consider it; at times it’s as nebulous as “film noir”) as it was forming in the early years of the 1970s, is one of the more unique examples of the genre. Integrating aspects of the emerging poliziotteschi became more common as the decade and giallo developed, but this is one of the earliest examples of that oft-fruitful crossover. It would be done better in What Have You Done to Solange? and it’s quasi-sequel What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, both of which, like The Bloodstained Butterfly, claim a connection to Edgar Wallace that isn’t actually there. But saying The Bloodstained Butterfly isn’t as good as those other two films leaves a lot of room to still be pretty damn good, and Tessari’s “giallo meets police procedural plus courtroom drama” is a unique, entertaining (if sombre) addition to the giallo canon. It’s a shame Tessari didn’t stick around the genre for another film or two, but I suppose if you have to make just one film in the genre, you’ve done well if it’s as good as The Bloodstained Butterfly.