News, Reviews, Thought Pieces and Lots of what is going on behind the scenes here at the BTV cast. We are open to idea of differing opinions here. Be sure to subscribe for updates.
Viewing entries tagged
giallo
A deranged taxi driver appears to be randomly stalking and killing various young women on the streets of Tokyo. His descent into madness follows a personal tragedy that has since left him in search of a worthy victim to satisfy his own bloodlust and possible death...But is anything as it seems?
It seems the giallo is undergoing something of a resurgence. The oh-so-Italian genre, a lurid mix of psychological horror, crime thriller, melodrama and sexploitation, was one of Italian cinema’s biggest outputs in the 1960s and 70s, but sadly faded from prominence in the decades that followed.
As the release of Halloween 2018 approaches, Mark Doubt looks into the history of the slasher movie, and finds that its ancestors might be older than you think…
The finale in the Mark Doubt Giallo Series. “The first thing I thought when watching Stage Fright was “I wish I’d watched this in a triple bill with Murder Rock and Opera.” Like Fulci’s Frenzied Flashdance pastiche, Michele Soavi’s Stage Fright is a late foray into Giallo, and focuses on the performing arts. Where Stage Fright differs from (and is superior to) Fulci’s movie is in its creativity and its streak of self-awareness. Murder Rock, while a lot of fun, did feel like Fulci going through the…“
With over 70 credits to his name, Lucio Fulci was a prolific director of films of various genres including Horror (Zombie Flesh Eaters, 1979), Giallo (Don’t Torture A Duckling, 1972), Comedy (How we Stole the Atomic Bomb, 1966) Western (Four of the Apocalypse, 1975) and Musicals (Juke Box Kids, 1959).
Dario Argento, certainly the highlight of the Italian movement and the director who saw the most success outside of his native Italy, would make a slew of fantastic, decadent gialli that still found a place amongst the killer dolls, burnt-face dream demons and hockey mask killers. The US slasher film was of course itself a bastard offspring of Giallo, and Argento knew how to make the conventions of his favoured genre satisfy the bloodlust of horror fans everywhere.
The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh was the beginning of a very prolific period for Sergio Martino in the Giallo genre – over the next couple of years he would go on to direct The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, All the Colors of the Dark, Torso and The Suspicious Death of a Minor.
Born in 1948, French-Algerian actress Edwige Fenech moved from France to Rome in 1968 and found success in many genres of cinema. She is perhaps best known for her roles in two genres – commedia sexy all'italiana (softcore sex farces popular in Italy at the time) and, of course, Giallo. Fenech would star in the films of Mario Bava, Andrea Bianchi and Ruggero Deodato, and in a number of starring roles for director Sergio Martino.
In preparation for this series of articles, I watched over 40 Gialli – some already firm favourites of mine, others I had never seen before. While I have always considered myself a fan of Giallo, I soon realised there was much more to this genre than I had ever understood.
Following in the footsteps of the great auteur Mario Bava, a new generation of names were to become synonymous with horror, thriller and exploitation cinema. Bava had popularised the rise of psychosexual thrillers in Italy, but it was not until the 1970s that Giallo began to truly take off elsewhere. Ornately-titled productions such as Dario Argento’s The Bird With ….
In 1971, as Italian contemporaries adopted and adapted Mario Bava’s Giallo template to raise the fledgling genre to its headiest heights, Italian genre cinema’s original auteur returned to finish a job he started in 1964, and help to create a second new genre within horror.
As a cinematic phenomenon, Giallo also took its cues from the crime films of Danish and West German cinema (the latter known as krimi). These movies (such as The Secret of the Black Widow and The Phantom of Soho, both directed by F.J. Gottlieb) were in turn frequently based upon or took inspiration from…
Over the next five weeks I will be taking a look into that stylish Italian genre, the bastard son of horror and crime thriller, Giallo!
