Exhumed: A Child’s Treasury of Jimmy Wang Yu Movies

Back in the day, Jimmy Wang Yu was one of my favorite punching bags, and I’m glad I was never a punching bag for him. Because I hear he was actually pretty tough.
Read moreFestivity, Revels, and Nocturnal Dalliances
Back in the day, Jimmy Wang Yu was one of my favorite punching bags, and I’m glad I was never a punching bag for him. Because I hear he was actually pretty tough.
Read moreStrip Nude for Your Killer is a sleazy, offensive bit of giallo trash, but at least it wastes no time letting you know exactly where you stand.
Read moreSex, the Italian coast, outlandish murders — everything in The Sister of Ursula operates under the directive of “This should be good, but we’re going to mess it up.”
Read moreWhen it comes to truly loathsome characters in giallo, few can match The Case of the Bloody Iris, a film in which everyone is hateful or stupid; or more often, hateful and stupid.
Read moreThe Bloodstained Butterfly has the elaborate murders and red herrings one expects, but it also spends time on police procedure, forensic science, and courtroom maneuvering.
Read moreAll the Colors of the Dark is a a film that delivers all the requisite elements of a giallo and then some, with the peak popularity of giallo being combined with the trend in devil worship and witchcraft movies.
Read moreWho Saw Her Die? is the rare giallo that attempts this, and the rare one that succeeds, and it is thanks primarily to a committed performance from former James Bond George Lazenby in a role that puts him through an emotional ringer.
Read moreBeneath Ercoli’s tweaks of the nose is a typically giallo approach to storytelling, which is to take a relatively straight-forward story and relay it in the most convoluted, difficult to follow fashion.
Read moreThe Bird with the Crystal Plumage remains to this day a highly regarded classic, and rightfully so. Decades after it’s release, and decades after legions of imitators, it still feels fresh, inventive, and shocking.
Read moreDespite coming out in 1971 — a banner year for giallo — Slaughter Hotel plays like one of Jess Franco’s lesser efforts, or something from bottom-of-the-bucket production house Eurocine.
Read moreGiallo often treat logic as a secondary consideration at best. That said, Emilio P. Miraglia’s The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave is nonsensical even within the forgiving confines of giallo logic.
Read moreHad Dark Purpose been an hour long episode of a TV show, he would have delivered. But forced to come up with, roughly, three half-hour acts, the movie isn’t dynamic enough to make us forget nothing much is going on.
Read morePart of the fun of watching gialli is getting lost in the needlessly convoluted twists, becoming so disoriented that one simply has to throw up one’s hands and surrender to the lurid displays of sex, violence, and style.
Read moreThe Girl Who Knew Too Much is a bit like Roman Holiday if Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn got caught up in a murder mystery. It isn’t grim, and it does have a certain spirit to it, but it also dabbles in tense Gothic atmosphere.
Read moreIt’s a cause for celebration when a B movie delivers as spectacularly as Wahan Ke Log does, especially given that its genre elements also have to make room for the singing, dancing and romancing.
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