Crimine a due

Eat your heart out, Wes Craven! Here's some postmodernism right here, when the character involved in this giallo discuss what books they like, and one of them says any kind, except gialli! Ha! It's almost like...something or other.

We get right into the action here as the film starts out with Paolo (Drew Barrymore's Dad) getting chased around and beaten for owing gambling debts. Paolo approaches his lover, but she ain't got no cash, so he ends up at his other lover's house - a rich lady who has a husband with a bum ticker. Uh oh!

Double Uh oh in fact, as the husband lives in a huge Italian villa with not only a deformed crippled brother with his own nurse, but also with a horrible creepy tunnel underneath full of rats. Man, do we have the right ingredients for a giallo/Gothic horror crossover or what?

This one also has some suspicious, almost competent policeman trying to figure out with the guy with the bad heart died or got whacked, and as the film seemingly begins to get really boring, we get a few good twists thrown in to keep our interest. It isn't a body count film, but yet another proto-giallo where everyone smokes like troopers.

Within the first ten minutes, John Drew Barrymore gets beaten up by gangsters, talks his girlfriend into an abortion, and convinces his mistress they'd be better off with her wealthy husband dead but nothing is what it seems in this post-noir/proto-giallo crime thriller. It actually references the Italian horror sub-genre by having a police inspector ask one of the suspects what kind of books she reads and she replies "anything except giallo -they're too violent and improbable" but, of course, she doesn't have to since life soon begins to imitate art. There's also a horribly disfigured family member hidden away upstairs with the lovely Lisa Gastoni as his mysterious nurse. The gritty black & white photography and jazzy score give the film a "noir" ambiance and what appears to be a happy ménage à trois ending turns into a satisfyingly sick denouement just in the nick of time. Throughout his dodgy "B-list" career, psychotronic film star John Barrymore, Jr. either tried too hard or not hard enough and this is a case of the latter, unfortunately, but I was interested even if he wasn't and the film definitely belongs in a "giallo continuum" that begins with 1934's GIALLO.

Excellent old style giallo which gathers a lot of the typical genre scenes: frightful house, suffocating mood, familial hatred, gloomy alley, grim underground... Watching brings echoes of a lot of other movies: a monstrously disfigured character like in La lama nel corpo or A doppia faccia; a low-angle shot burial scene like in La morte non ha sesso; a murderer bound to burn the banknotes that lured him into crime like in Lasciapassare per il morto... and a highly unexpected final in Clouzot's style! The hero doesn't like owls while shooting at them as they remind him the ominous screams of the disabled patient, and the heroin doesn't like giallo, but it must not be the same for the spectator! Warning: not suitable for musophobiacs.