Sergio Martino: Master of Giallo

In the cinematic niche known as the Italian giallo film, Mario Bava is father and Dario Argento is king. And Lucio Fulci is the gifted but misanthropic prince who ruins family dinners with his nihilistic rants.

So where does that leave Sergio Martino? For if there’s a fourth member of the royal family, it has to be Sergio.

His five gialli—THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH, THE CASE OF THE SCORPION’S TAIL, ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, the incredibly titled YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY, and the grindhouse classic TORSO—count among the best the genre offers. Made in uninterrupted succession from 1971 to 1973, these five films reveal their director’s remarkable breadth of visual style and storytelling ability.

Yet Martino’s gialli receive scarcely a small fraction of the ink dedicated to maestros Bava, Argento, and Fulci. Why is he so overlooked? I think it’s because his body of work in the genre, as a whole, is difficult to deconstruct and discuss.

Martino biographer Kat Ellinger said as much in her audio commentary for Arrow Video’s 2018 blu-ray release of TORSO by pointing out that there are no overt stylistic or thematic threads running through Martino’s work. His films are simply (yet complicatedly) excellent gialli that do not appear, in the absence of prior knowledge, to have been directed by the same person.

In comparison, Argento, Bava, and Fulci are easier to write about. Argento’s films tend to favor style and feature epic, set-piece kills that are staged with the auteur’s unique flair for gruesome beauty. The camera work and editing are pre-digital bravura, and the imagery tends toward the stark and vivid. Bava, meanwhile, is the master of painterly shot compositions and can tie a story together, thematically and visually, through color. Fulci’s gialli are dreamlike, full of dread and drifting toward inevitable doom. The director presents a grim view of humanity, and his films part ways with the viewer on the bleakest of notes.

Martino’s giallo output offers no such easy summary. Therefore, we have to assess the films one at a time. In the interest of brevity, I will discuss only his final three gialli in depth. Of his first two, THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH is a kinky thriller with a smart, twist-filled script that best approximates what 1940s and 1950s readers would have experienced when absorbed in the lurid “giallo” detective novels of the time. The second, THE CASE OF THE SCORPION’S TAIL, is closer to a conventional crime thriller that nevertheless offers clever deceptions and the outrageous, implausible story turns that make the genre so much fun. Now onto the rest:

ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK (1972)

For his follow-up to THE CASE OF THE SCORPION’S TAIL, Martino moved in a starkly different stylistic direction that recalls Bava’s use of garish colors and surreal lighting, but he does so with his own flair.

The plot concerns Jane (Edwige Fenech), a mentally fragile woman who believes she is being followed by a dagger-wielding assassin (Ivan Rassimov). Her boyfriend (George Hilton), sister (Nieves Navarro), and neighbor (Marina Malfatti) each insists on “helping” Jane in opposition to the others, until she no longer knows who to trust.

ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK is filmed in soft-focus and employs a mix of deep colors and overexposed white light to create a dreamy, disorienting effect that symbolizes the protagonist’s deepening confusion and paranoia. The depth-of-field is shallow, blurring backgrounds and foregrounds as the action plays out in the middle. Leaves, branches, reeds, and even hanging beads are placed between the camera and the actors to emphasize that the truth is obscured and, like the characters, resides somewhere between the extremes.

Part of what renders Martino’s gialli elusive, from a standpoint of analysis and discussion, is that they do not fully embrace the genre. ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK owes more to ROSEMARY’S BABY than to Argento’s THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, the film that inspired the hundreds of gialli produced in Italy and elsewhere throughout the 1970s. It’s equal parts devil-cult movie and “neurotic-female” horror, both popular sub-genres at the time. Ultimately, ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK is a giallo by virtue of the murder-mystery aspect and the body count, though one wonders if Martino (and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi) incorporated those elements out of commercial necessity. Most of the kills occur off camera and feel perfunctory (just a splash of blood here and there), as if Martino was more enthused about the other components of the story.

YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY (1972)

The evasiveness of Martino’s fourth giallo merely begins at the title; the film as well provides a difficult access point for viewers. There’s no introductory murder scene featuring a black-gloved killer, or glamorous travelogue shots of Venice or Rome. Rather, we are greeted by a long sequence of cringe-inducing humiliations endured by multiple characters at a debauched party inside a crumbling villa.

What’s more, we soon realize YOUR VICE lacks a protagonist (of the type viewers latch onto). Every character is a villain, from Luigi Pistilli’s drunken, abusive novelist to Edwige Fenech’s manipulative, conniving vixen to Anita Strindberg’s cat-mutilating, hysterical housewife. The maid, Brenda (Angela La Vorgna), is the only sympathetic character, but she hardly qualifies as a protagonist because, well, spoiler alert. It’s a giallo.

And that’s what makes it tricky to analyze, because it’s also not a giallo. Yes, there are kills and a mystery of sorts, but even more so than in ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, those elements feel shoehorned.

YOUR VICE is at heart a non-supernatural gothic horror film about an alcoholic writer, his humiliated wife, their miserable marriage, and his dead mother who casts a pall over their entire existence. There’s also a (metaphorically) haunted dress and a sinister black cat who does not get along with Strindberg’s character very well.

I’m convinced that Martino is subtly mocking his audience. Not only are the giallo-style kills scenes shoehorned (though well shot and much gorier than those in ALL THE COLORS), the reveal of the killer—SEMI-SPOILER WARNING—comes just over an hour into the movie and is only peripherally connected to the main story. Only upon second viewing are you even likely to recognize the killer’s face, so minor is the character. It’s as if the director had said, “You want a body count and a flimsy plot about superficial characters? Here you go. Now let’s get back the Gothic horror story I was telling.”

Stylistically, YOUR VICE couldn’t be more different from ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK. Here the focus is crisp and the colors naturalistic, and in contrast to the earlier film’s abundance of hazy white light and lens flare, the action in YOUR VICE takes place in the dark, with the exception of one outdoor set-piece. Like each character’s motivations, the film’s text lies in the shadows … and emerges as your eyes adjust to repeated viewings.

TORSO (1973)

A series of brutal slayings rocks a university in Perugia, Italy, prompting a group of students to seek refuge in a remote countryside villa … only to discover the killer is not going to give up the chase so easily.

Whereas Martino’s earlier giallo plots are built around troubled relationships and bourgeois foibles, TORSO is pure slasher-movie material: beautiful young college girls, about whom we learn little, are stalked and murdered by a masked psycho. The kill sequences are quite violent, and the actresses’ clothing falls off with regularity. Yes, his prior films featured copious nudity, but those scenes were generally story relevant, and those characters had other duties besides stripping.

It’s as if the director had capitulated to audience demands for lurid content and then delivered it with mean-spirited panache. Given that this film takes place not in the sophisticated cosmopolitan centers of Rome, Venice, or Milan but rather out where the audiences who craved such exploitation fare actually lived, it’s plausible that Martino is once again satirizing his primary consumers. They are on display as peripheral characters in TORSO and are represented, one-and-all, as leering rubes.

Once more, Martino reinvents his approach to giallo filmmaking. The pace and energy are ramped up through quick cutting and hand-held camerawork, and the kill sequences take center stage. The emphasis is on pulsing suspense, and the climactic “final girl” stalk-and-chase sequence between the killer and star Suzy Kendall is ripped from a horror film.

In contrast with YOUR VICE, most of which takes place in a single setting, TORSO is in constant motion, tracking its story from set to set and location to location.

There are a few threads that tie Martino’s gialli together. The first is the repeated casting of George Hilton, Edwige Fenech, Anita Strindberg, and Ivan Rassimov (until TORSO). The second is the recurring “neurotic female” trope. The third is shots of eyes in extreme close-up, though that flourish is hardly unique to Martino in Italian genre cinema.

That’s not much fuel if the finish line is understanding Martino’s gialli as a single body of work.  Watch any two classic films by Bava, Argento, or Fulci, and the third becomes immediately recognizable as that director’s work. Martino’s versatility meanwhile, instead of being celebrated, earns him the label of “journeyman.”

Also, he tended to mash up genres. His first effort, THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH, is pure giallo, but onward he stirred many outside elements into his plotlines in equal or sometimes greater measure than the giallo components. Two years after TORSO he directed SUSPICIOUS DEATH OF A MINOR, a film that mashes three genres: poliziottesco (cops and criminals), giallo, and slapstick comedy. No wonder this guy is hard to pin down.

Though TORSO is one of his less substantive gialli in terms of character depth, it is a crowd pleaser, especially for those of us whose gateway to giallo cinema was slasher movies. If Martino’s other four entries had featured the same levels of graphic violence, scantily clad college girls, and horror-style suspense, he would probably be more widely recognized as one of the genre’s greats. Even if, at the same time, we’d be losing out on films that are more diverse and, ultimately, rewarding.

***

My informal, very personal, highly-subject-to-change ranking of Martino’s gialli, from favorite to least favorite (though I like them all):

1. YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY
2. TORSO
3. THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH
4. ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK
5. THE CASE OF THE SCORPION’S TAIL

My Top 10 Horror Films of 1975

1975 can be considered a down year for horror. Outside a few classics, there’s not much to get excited about. The trickle of Hammer and Amicus chillers had dried up. Spanish filmmakers moved away from vampires and toward gangsters. The Italian giallo, with one obvious exception, began to lose its luster with audiences. The American grindhouse aesthetic—violent and lurid content shot on grainy film stock with harsh lighting—no longer horrified the way it had before Linda Blair rammed that crucifix into her crotch in The Exorcist.

Boiling it down: If Hollywood was willing to go there, the indie filmmakers and distributors had lost their one advantage, shock value.

To be fair, I’m missing a few 1975 titles from my viewing resume. I’ve never seen Exorcismo, Lips of Blood, Bug, or Picnic at Hanging Rock, plus undoubtedly other obscurities that have yet to cross my path. Future revisions of lists, and perspectives, are always possible.

 

My Top 10 Horror Films of 1975

 

1. Deep Red

 

The giallo genre, which began in earnest in 1964 with the release of Mario Bava’s seminal Blood and Black Lace, by 1975 had become tired. You can only have so many black-gloved killers slashing pretty models with razors before attention drifts elsewhere.

So leave it to Dario Argento to return to the genre after a four-year break and remind everyone how it’s done. Not only did Argento imbue his murder mystery with brilliant set-piece kills, he showed a new maturity and sophistication as a filmmaker that promised viewers the best was yet to come.

 

2. Jaws

Unseen, Jaws sounds like a B-movie. The premise is basic, banal monster-movie fluff, and the script employs standard genre clichés (e.g., the mayor refuses to close the beach because of the big fair/festival, despite the obvious foolhardiness of doing so).

But truly gifted artists are transcendent in ways that are hard to describe with words. You know you’re experiencing such a filmmaker when camera shots that should be bland are striking and when moments that normally serve as padding vibrate with energy. It’s doesn’t hurt to have great actors on board, one of whom, Robert Shaw, turned in a performance for the ages.

Biographical note: The director, Steven Spielberg, quickly faded into obscurity and was never heard from again. Or something like that.

 

3. Shivers

 

A.K.A., the instant classic that propelled David Cronenberg into the ranks of horror auteur directors.

Before Cronenberg, horror films generally played on a universal fear: death. We, as viewers experiencing the story through the heroic characters, don’t want the monster to kill us. In Shivers (and many of his subsequent movies), Cronenberg tapped into a different source of terror, which is that of our own bodies. Of things invading and changing our bodies, not necessarily killing us but taking our autonomy, changing our looks, robbing our identities, making us repulsive and different.

His movies have a way of causing viewers to feel uncomfortable. A jump scare is easy. Getting in people’s heads … that’s talent.

 

4. Night Train Murders

 

Aldo Lado, the underrated filmmaker who gave us the excellent gialli Who Saw Her Die? and Short Night of Glass Dolls, here gives us a rape-revenge shocker modeled after Last House on the Left. Instead of two young women abducted on their way to a concert, however, we have two young women taking an overnight train home for the holidays. They get on the right train but at a very wrong time.

Like its inspiration, this film is rough and violent, only there are no slapstick cops around to distract us from the horror.

 

5. Autopsy

 

A pathology-horror film that stars Mimsy Farmer (Four Flies on Grey Velvet) as a medical examiner who starts to wonder if all these suicides coming through her lab might actually be murder victims. In the meantime, she keeps hallucinating that bodies are getting off their slabs and groping her. The autopsy room scenes do not hold back, so if you like your full-frontal nudity cold and horizontal, this is your film.

It’s too bad director Armando Crispino had such a short career. This flick is pretty tight and delivers the gruesome goods.

 

6. Night of the Howling Beast

 

Good old Paul Naschy, still bringing comic-book horror to a world drifting in a different cinematic direction. This time, however, Naschy moves his werewolf saga off the gothic estate and into the big city. That is, until the cast finds itself in the Himalayas tracking the Yeti. Think of it as an alternate version of Werewolf of London, where Henry Hull’s Dr. Glendon, after being turned into a werewolf, sticks around the snowy mountains for some rampant sex with flesh-eating demon priestesses.

Although Night of the Howling Beast isn’t any more lurid or shocking than other Naschy films, it’s the only one to appear on the U.K.’s original list of video nasties (alongside 71 other movies, including the fourth title from today’s spread).

 

7. Satanico Pandemonium

 

In its first act, this Mexican nunsploitation film seems more like erotica for nun fetishists than a horror flick, but as soon as the compassionate and sensitive Sister Maria (Cecilia Pezet) drifts from dabbling in girl-on-girl action to committing bloody murder, you know Satan has gotten his claws in.

The movie passes on the opportunity to ask meaningful questions about the nature (and potential cost) of religious belief, and it’s bedeviled (haha) by a lame backpedal ending. It could have moved closer to classic status if the filmmakers didn’t hedge on the thematic elements. As is, the shock value is impressive but superficial.

 

8. The Devil’s Rain

This movie tends to get knocked by horror fans, but for a PG flick, it’s got some delightfully gruesome imagery, a few nice twists, and decent payoff at the end. And a hell (pun intended) of a cast: Ernest Borgnine, William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Ida Lupino, and Eddie Albert.

It’s no masterpiece, but it has its moments.

 

9. Trilogy of Terror

 

Conversely, here’s a beloved anthology movie that is far better remembered for that Zuni doll that shows up in the final 15 minutes than it is for anything that happens in the preceding hour.

Trilogy of Terror tells (as one surmises from the title) three stories connected only by the presence of the always cool Karen Black in the lead role. Although Richard Matheson is one of my favorite writers, I don’t feel these stories represent his best work (William F. Nolan wrote the actual script). The first two tales are fairly predictable and drag even at 22 minutes each. The final story is a classic, of course, and the one everybody remembers when speaking so fondly of this film.

 

10. Strip Nude for Your Killer

 

You know it’s an off year when a trash giallo like Strip Nude for Your Killer makes my top 10 list. Directed by Andrea Bianchi of Burial Ground infamy, this flick retains the giallo genre’s more lurid elements—nudity and violence—and chucks out anything resembling style or visual flair.

If your taste in euro-trash cinema leans toward exploitation fare like Slaughter Hotel and “Emanuelle meets the cannibals” type films, Strip Nude should hit the sweet spot.

 

Honorable Mention

 

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom

 

Like many horror fans, I’ve made an effort over the years to see the most notorious, disturbing , and twisted creations filmmakers have come up with. Outside a few moments in Cannibal Holocaust, no film besides Salo has ever prompted me to ask myself, “Why am I watching this?” It’s that fucked up.

Many view this movie as a substantial work of art. I don’t. I get that it’s a “message film,” but I simply can’t find entertainment or enjoyment in watching a bunch of children get tortured, degraded, and humiliated for two-and-a-half straight hours. I’m including it here for cinematic significance, not because I like it.

 

The Stepford Wives

This is another of those nihilistic movies that would never get made in today’s Hollywood. The focus groups wouldn’t allow it. Well, you may get a kitschy remake, perhaps (insert eye-roll emoji).

The Stepford Wives is a well-made movie that, in spirit, is really just a big, colorful Twilight Zone episode. Overall, it’s a solid mainstream production. It’s not on my top 10 list because 1.) it’s not visceral enough for my tastes, and 2.) It’s a message film with message that has no relevance anymore.