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
Read more
On Diabolique: My three-part article, “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio,” examines A Chinese Ghost Story, the original story by Pu Songling, and the Shaw Brothers’ Enchanting Shadow.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.”
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
Whatever shortcomings Nobuo Nakagawa’s Lady Vampire Has are not enough to counter its chaotic appeal. It may be less gory than his next film, and it may make no sense, but it has an enthusiastic willingness to be weird.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
Giallo 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 more
Part 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 more
The Maze depends on atmosphere. Very little happens. Small tidbits are thrown the viewer’s way — a glimpse of a glistening creature, a webbed footprint, the foreboding stares of the butlers.
Read more