Festivity, Revels, and Nocturnal Dalliances
On the Cultural Gutter, I’m writing about apocalyptic scifi and horror from the normally well-behaved Japanese film studio Shochiku. Shochiku was most closely identified with shomin-geki, dramas about the lives of everyday people, and the undisputed master of such films was Shochiku director Yasujiro Ozu. But a studio can only exist for so long on movies in which a middle-aged
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By adulthood, I couldn’t even remember why I hated Condorman. I could only remember that I did. That was just too much like those stories where two sides have been killing each other for so long that they can no longer even remember why they are fighting.
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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.
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On the Cultural Gutter, I am Searching for Odin, My Love — one of the most expensive, most lavish, most boring, and most infamous anime flops of all time.
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World Without End is an action-packed, low-budget blend of HG Wells’ The Time Machine and Planet of the Apes, which it predates by many a year. That’s time travel for ya.
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Strip 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.
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Sex, 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.”
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When 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.
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The Bloodstained Butterfly has the elaborate murders and red herrings one expects, but it also spends time on police procedure, forensic science, and courtroom maneuvering.
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All 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.
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Who 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.
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Beneath 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.
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The 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.
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Despite 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.
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Before Salon Kitty redirected his career and before Caligula became the most infamous movie in the world, Tinto Brass was just a young director looking to capture the zeitgeist of the 1960s.
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