Il mostro di Venezia

A guy with a snorkle steals the beautiful women of Venice and takes them in to his parlour to preserve their beauty. A clean-cut reporter investigates.

This b/w spaghetti-schlocker first showed in a drive-in double bill in 1966 with Michael Reeve's first film, THE SHE BEAST with Barbara Steele. It was then picked up again in 1973 in a triple-bill alongside T.V. Mikels' THE CORPSE GRINDERS and THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS where a nurse checked everyone's blood pressures before they watched these three absoulutely terrorfying movies!

Pretty interesting screening history for such an ordinary movie. Well, I suppose it's just standard drive-in fare. Enjoyable in it's own dull sort of way and worth the effort for all us completists.

A man in a diving suit keeps going into the same underwater passage, picking girls off the same area on the wharf, for the purpose of preserving them. A reporter gets wind of this and tries to figure out what is going on. This takes place in Venice. It is full of stock footage and ridiculously long chases. At one point the hero has to slow down so he doesn't catch the guy he's chasing. There is never an explanation why the bad guy is doing this, nor do we care what happens to anyone. It's just another one of those movies made in the sixties to be put in double features at drive in movies where no one watches anyway. The sound is bad; the acting is awful, dubbed from Italian. There are barely any laughs.

This is not a great movie, but it's reasonably good, I think (and certainly not overlong). I saw it on Alpha's full-frame DVD, with the title The Embalmer, and dubbed in English. I understand Sinister Cinema's copy is widescreen, but I think it's also dubbed.

The cinematography is never particularly exceptional, but serviceable. The wet-suit clad killer emerging from canals, revisited in Amsterdamned (1988), is a decent idea. The jazzy musical score was enjoyable, if occasionally repetitive. The Venice locations are well used.

I didn't really understand who the killer was, and it was surprising how brutal the movie was with regard to who it was willing to kill off, while the movie lacked scenes of explicit violence.

This film predates Amsterdammned as a film with a scuba suit wearing psycho killer. Problem with scuba suits is that you can't move around well on land in them. That is no problem for this killer since many of his victims seem to literally walk right into his arms.

The series of killings, part of this film is the weak section, but the lair of the killer (which I won't spoil by telling what it is) final reel is worth the wait. Everything improves including the music during the final reel and when it's all over you'll feel better about the whole film than you will during parts in the middle. Most of the best images in the film are from that final 10 minutes but there are definitely some you'll remember.

Comedy intentional and unintentional also helps keep the film going. At least the American print I saw has almost no on screen violence, other than the macabre chase at the end. Dubbing is pretty poor but that goes with the territory.

A restoration of the original Italian version would be a great improvement I'm sure. Fans of films set in Venice will want to give this a look. Too bad the budget couldn't allow for any underwater photography that would have helped the early sections a great deal. All I'll say about the killer's identity is that in some Giallos the revelation is one of those, who was that guy again? In some Giallos that's the way it is.

Like the sour and salty odour of Parmesan, this film reminds you that not every Italian horror film is as serious as Il Demonio. Instead, the Embalmer embraces you like a melted Tellagio and a warm Cacio (with Pepe, of course). We have a killer who alternates between dressing up as a skull faced monk and dressing up as a scuba diving serial killer! This film takes place in Venice (hence: the killer using scuba gear to snare his victims), and although the kills are spread across the film like Bel Paese over a nice Panini, there are patches of the film where my mind was wandering, which caused a jerk reaction like that of the olfactory sensation of sniffing a particularly ripe Cambazola.

For the most part though the film is like cutting into a Calzone and seeing the contents ooze out. Loads of Mozzarella cheese, basically. From the Italian-Elvis clone bursting from a sarcophagus and singing an Italian-Elvis Clone song to the killer having a severe case of expositionitus, this film is like eating a sandwich which consists of a sharp Provolone with Parma Ham - High notes mixed with dull, Earthy plodding plot.

The milky Fontina element comes from the bad dubbing, the gratuitous touring of Venice (including a glass blowing shop!) and the bad acting. The pecorino like goodness comes from the surprisingly high body count and the fact that the killer is really the guy you though immediately was the killer.

It's kind of sweet (like Marscopone and Ricotta) that the film does try to give you some red herrings, but the film is not the best in terms of what Italian 1965 horror has to offer, kind of like Goronzola, you wouldn't pick it first if someone served you a plate of bad analogies.

This might come as a surprise, but I used to sell Italian cheese. Now I just watch it.