Tag Archives: Italian film

Home entertainment, Kim Newman’s Nightmare Movies

O.K. Connery

O.K. Connery
O.K. Connery

Format: DVD

Director: Alberto De Martino

Writers: Paolo Levi, Frank Walker, Stanley Wright, Stefano Canzio

Cast: Neil Connery, Daniela Bianchi, Adolfo Celi

Italy 1967

104 mins

This review of is an excerpt from horror luminary Kim Newman’s new book Video Dungeon (Titan), which explores the B-movie basement and digs out unexpected gems.

Only in 1967… only in Italy… could an entire movie, with a reasonably healthy budget, be built around the fact that Sean Connery’s younger brother was sort of interested in acting. Of the (many) imitations of the James Bond series, this – even more than the Charles Vine movies, which sold themselves as the adventures of the second best secret agent in the world – is most outrageous in lifting from the parent megafranchise. It’s also loopy Italian exploitation which shares personnel with the classic Diabolik – though director Alberto De Martino (The Antichrist, Holocaust 2000) is a plodder next to Mario Bava.

Neil Connery, who refused to shave a neatly trimmed beard which makes him look more like a villain than a hero, plays Neil, the brother of the coyly unnamed best secret agent in Europe. He’s not a professional spy but a plastic surgeon who uses Tibetan hypnosis as anaesthetic (and for memory recovering purposes), is also a champion archer and all-round playboy. Connery, whose infernally catchy Ennio Morricone-Bruno Nicolai theme song warbles ‘OK Connery’ wherever he goes, is approached by Commander Cunningham (Bernard Lee) and Miss Maxwell (Lois Maxwell) of the British Secret Service to fight Thair (Adolfo Celi), Number Two (codename Beta) of the SPECTRE-like evil organisation THANATOS. Thair plans to use a device (based on misuse of an ‘atomic nucleus’ and radioactive rugs manufactured by ailing blind people in North Africa) to disable every mechanical or electronic component in the world. Mildred (Agata Flori) is Thair’s all-the-way-evil girlfriend and gets killed, while Maya (Daniela Bianchi) goes the Pussy Galore route and switches sides (along with her troupe of girl sailors) after receiving serious smooching from Dr Neil and discovering her boss intends to kill her off as a loose end. With guns, planes and cars not working, Connery and archery club pals in Robin Hood/William Tell hats invade Thair’s underground lair with old-fashioned bows and arrows.

Yes, the casting is that blatant, with Lee and Maxwell in basically their regular 007 roles, and Bianchi (From Russia With Love) and Celi (Thunderball) doing Bond girl and Bond villain shtick honed to perfection in the official series. Even Anthony Dawson, the to-be-murdered Alpha of THANATOS, was in Dr No and (without credit) played Blofeld in movies where the villain stroked his cat in the shadows. Celi finds an escape dinghy built into his yacht in imitation of the boat gadget from Thunderball and a baddies-sat-around-the-plotting-table set piece echoes Goldfinger and Thunderball. Pop-eyed Connery (dubbed by a bland American) hasn’t got the charisma to carry off the role of himself, let alone prove a credible threat to his big brother (he’s rather more relaxed in The Body Stealers). However, O.K. Connery is a hoot for its non-stop parade of astounding outfits (Celi has a red leather jumpsuit with shoulder pads), weird plot turns (Connery poses as a blind Arab to infiltrate the evil rug factory and foment a rebellion, good guys dressed as van Gogh have a gunfight in an orchard with bad guys in red berets and matching pullovers), gadgets (a flick-knife that shoots a blade across the room, machine guns hidden in the ceiling), eye-popping candy colours and a general attitude of what-the-hell… In the Bond films, Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny spent all her time quipping and pining in M’s outer office; De Martino at least gets the actress in the field to mow down THANATOS goons with a machine gun disguised as a sheaf of hay.

Outstanding contribution: costume designer Gaia Romanini. Also with Franco Giacobini as a comedy relief agent called away from his wedding, Ana María Noé as an imitation of Lotte Lenya’s Rosa Klebb, and a lot of pretty girls. Story and script mostly by Paolo Levi (7 Women for the MacGregors, The Killer Reserved 9 Seats), with Frank Walker, Stanley Wright and Stefano Canzio.

Kim Newman

Check it out, Home entertainment

Death Walks Twice

Death-Walks-at-Midnight
Death Walks at Midnight

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 20 March 2017

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Luciano Ercoli

Death Walks on High Heels
Writers: Ernesto Gastaldi, Mahnahén Velasco (as May Flood), Dino Verde

Cast: Frank Wolff, Nieves Navarro, Simón Andreu

Original Title: La morte cammina con i tacchi alti

Italy, Spain 1971

108 mins

Death Walks at Midnight
Writers: Sergio Corbucci, Ernesto Gastaldi, Guido Leoni, Mahnahén Velasco (as May Flood)

Cast: Nieves Navarro, Simón Andreu, Pietro Martellanza

Original Title: La morte cammina con i tacchi alti

Italy, Spain 1972

102 mins

Hallucinations, deadly mediaeval gloves and make-up fetish are the marks of Luciano Ercoli’s entertaining giallo double bill.

This typically lavish Arrow BluRay/DVD box set collects two gialli from director Luciano Ercoli, following up his genre debut, Le foto proibite di una signora per bene (The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, 1970) with a matched pair of mysteries built around leading lady Susan Scott (aka Nieves Navarro) and more or less the same supporting cast (though the heroine has a different duplicitous love interest in each film).

In La morte cammina con i tacchi alti (Death Walks on High Heels, 1971), Paris-based stripper Nicole (Scott) suspects her useless layabout lover Michel (Simón Andreu) has donned blue contact lenses and a black ski-mask to terrorise her with a straight razor in an attempt to get his hands on some diamonds everyone thinks her murdered jewel thief father left with her. Nicole hooks up with eye surgeon Dr Robert Matthews (Frank Wolff), a fan-cum-stalker who whisks her off to a strange version of the British seaside with pub gossips (including a one-handed handyman with a secret fetish), an ice-delivering fish vendor (crucial plot point), voyeur neighbours and more murderous attacks.

In La morte accarezza a mezzanotte (Death Walks at Midnight/Cry Out in Terror, 1972), Milan-based model Valentina (Scott), duped into taking hallucinogen HDS by her sleazy photojourno pal Gio (Andreu), has a vision of a girl being murdered with a spiked mediaeval glove in the surreally empty apartment across the way. Later, it turns out she’s described a six-month-old crime which has already been solved. The heroine’s alternately sensitive and vicious sculptor boyfriend (Pietro Martellanza/Peter Martell), a desperate widow (Claudie Lange), another sinister doctor (Ivano Staccioli), some hippies and a pair of nasty drug dealers cloud the issue, and Valentina is further imperilled. In both films, Carlo Gentili plays an affably unconcerned police inspector who turns up after every violent outbreak to puzzle things out – though Ercoli prefers to resolve mysteries with shock revelations, sudden attacks, punch-ups (sound effects make fist-blows sound like planks of wood snapping) and rooftop chases.

As in many gialli, the bizarre trappings – weird weaponry, hallucinations, masked heavy-breathers, burbling lounge music, fabulously garish fashions and decors, bursts of ultra-violence – litter plots which turn out to be indecently fixated on money rather than mania. It’s all about the stolen diamonds… or the smuggled drugs. Except, of course, it’s not: these films are memorable because of everything else, and resemble fractured mash-ups of Edgar Wallace Presents programmers with post-Blow-Up swinging psychedelia. Some of the extraordinary frills are so ludicrous as to be almost transgressive – like Nicole’s black-face stripping act in High Heels, which prompts a fetish sex scene as her boyfriend is turned on by wiping off her body make-up.

The vision of a soulless, exploitative modern world revolving around poor, abused Navarro/Scott is cartoonish. Seemingly every man in these films is useless or evil, and both movies eventually despair of masculinity so much that the guy we initially take to be the most repulsive (played by Andreu) is positioned by default as the hero. The scripts – by Ernesto Gastaldi and May Flood from stories by Dino Verde and Sergio Corbucci – feel like several drafts patched together by collaborators who never met (High Heels has a mid-film twist that At Midnight acknowledges as a misstep by not repeating) but Ercoli ringmasters the material for maximum entertainment. Odd funny touches and lines (‘Inspector, he’s a bit less fuddled now’) alleviate the sourness of the genre’s habitual cynicism – so these are among the jolliest, least downerific gialli. When Bava or Argento batter or slice victims’ faces in close-up, you flinch… when Ercoli does it, you can tell he doesn’t mean any harm, really.

Kim Newman

Check it out, Home entertainment

Five Dolls for an August Moon

Five Dools for an August Moon
Five Dolls for an August Moon

Format: Dual Format (Blu-ray + DVD)

Release date: 1 February 2016

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Mario Bava

Writer: Mario di Nardo

Cast: William Berger, Ira von Fürstenberg, Edwige Fenech

Original title: 5 bambole per la luna d’agosto

Italy 1970

81 mins

A stylish but minor entry in the Mario Bava oeuvre with an Agatha Christie-type set-up.

Following a week long Mario Bava marathon, I approached Five Dolls for an August Moon with some trepidation for two reasons. First of all the cost that I and my family personally paid for the marathon had been brutal and bloody. Secondly Mario Bava himself hated the film, considering it one of his worst movies. For a director to be so forceful in his objections makes the potential viewer pause, but it must be done.

The premise is something out of Agatha Christie. On a remote island businessman George Stark (Teodor Corrà) has gathered a group of people together for a weekend of business and pleasure. Professor Gerry Farrell (William Berger) is a scientist whose new formula is the secret motive for the gathering and who will inveighed upon to sell it to George or perhaps his treacherous partner Nick (Maurice Poli from Rabid Dogs). Adding to the industrial intrigue, there’s also sexual shenanigans afoot as Farrell and Stark’s wives, Trudy (Ira von Fürstenberg) and Jill (Edith Meloni) are having an affair. Nick’s wife Marie (Edwige Fenech) is openly dallying with the manservant Charles (Mauro Bosco). Among this bohemian mélange only Jack (Renato Rossini) and his wife Peggy (Helene Ronee) are on an even keel, but the ingénue Isabelle (Justine Gall) stalks the house, a wide-eyed voyeur to the goings-on.

Following a jokey satanic ritual – only Bava would attempt such a red herring – the killings begin at a fair clip. There’s nothing particularly inventive about the kills – quite a few of the victims just get shot! – and the pace of the film doesn’t allow for much in the way of atmosphere. With Antonio Rinaldi’s brightly lit camerawork Bava replaces his mist-laced Gothic piles with postmodern kitsch and a swingy careless ease. The blistering rock soundtrack that punctuates proceedings with blaring guitars lends the film a great 70s feel but does little to promote dread in the viewer. If there were a few jokes, the film could almost be taken as a parody of the giallo genre that Bava inadvertently launched. The plot twists in a way that is so confusing as to be not so much surprising as dumbfounding, and some of the production feels genuinely rushed and slapdash. Bloodless bullet wounds and smokeless gunshots, fiendish plots that make very little sense, a title that seems utterly irrelevant and characters who are barely set up before being summarily dispatched. On the plus side, it is short at just over 80 minutes and an occasional shot will impress – glass balls cascade down a staircase like a pram down the Odessa Steps in one particularly well taken sequence. However, if you’ve never seen a Mario Bava film before I would point you towards several other films before arriving at this self-confessedly minor work.

John Bleasdale

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