Testa in giù, gambe in aria

As other reviewers have pointed out, 'Head Down, Feet Up' is a difficult one to track down and only available in a pretty chewed up form, which probably doesn't help its cause. However, you can see enough to know it's not great, a pretty half-hearted giallo, neither much of a comedy nor much of a thriller.

The lead, Corrado Pani seems to have one speed as an actor, namely a sort of smarmy guy who thinks a lot of himself. (Why does he always wear such ridiculous clothes in every film? Lots of singlets.) Anyway, he stars as Andrea, an artist who (eventually, like halfway through the film) becomes obsessed with tracking down a killer. Unfortunately, most of the film is spent on boring conversations about his flailing relationship with his girlfriend and, unlike a typical giallo, none of the murders happen on screen, making for a tremendously boring film.

Sadly, there are some decent giallo regulars, Piero Vida, Maria Pia Conte and Marina Malfatti, whose talents are wasted on a boring script. The camerawork and lighting are amateurish. The climactic fight scene is so dark, you can't tell who's who. The soundtrack is totally wrong, sounding more like a '70s sitcom about studious kids than a murder mystery.

Not sure what they were going for here, because it's not funny, it's not suspenseful, it's not enigmatic, and the romance story that sucks up most of the screen time is lame. Even the sex scenes are awkward and weird. This one is probably better off left in the 'lost' bin, its only interest being as a curiosity to giallo completists.

This is surely one of the most obscure "giallo" titles out there (apparently solely available via a singularly battered, non-English- friendly print that belies its relatively young 40 years!): in retrospect, given its mediocre quality, not to mention the tenuous link it has with the genre to begin with, this is not at all surprising! Comedy has always been uneasily incorporated into what amounts to a violent, garishly-coloured form (not that the film under review has much of either!), and this certainly does not prove the exception to the rule – here involving the moody hero's hot/cold rapport with his burly pal at work (voiced by Enrico Maria Salerno!). There are also a number of gratuitous nude scenes (including protagonist Corrado Pani's butt!), appalling costumes that scream 1970s (especially an outrageously revealing one worn at a party by leading lady Marina Malfatti) and an incongruously cheerful score (we even get the obligatory nightclub dance floor sequence, where the male lead unwisely attempts to explain his current predicament to his dancing partner amid the blaring noise!). Incidentally, the title – which translates to "Head Down, Feet Up" – refers to the hero's half-hearted attempts to practice yoga; I wonder whether it could have been inspired by Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western GIU' LA TESTA aka DUCK, YOU SUCKER (1972)!

The plot basically deals with a graphic artist who gets entangled in a wave of killings of university professors: he becomes quite obsessed (copiously collecting newspaper cut-outs related to it) after dreaming about himself as an adult turning up for an exam (in an open-air venue – filmed for maximum disorienting effect with a fish-eye lens – and actually resembling more a job interview!), in which not only the assessors are the murder victims but he personally starts bleeding at the wrist!! One of them, however, he runs into at a bar…who turns out to be gay and invites him to walk home together, but he obviously draws the line at the doorstep (the handsome Pani has a girl, Malfatti, but also dallies with an attractive work colleague and even carries on an affair with a middle-aged female patron)! With respect to this general freewheeling attitude to love, when Malfatti becomes pregnant by him and decides to abort (because a child would obviously be inconvenient to her modeling career) without even bothering to inform her lover, Pani gives her a good thrashing and dumps her; hypocritically, though, he had earlier been rendered jealous by the undue attentions given to his girl by an ex-buddy being feted for having made it as a full-fledged artist!

Anyway, when the professor is found dead the morning after the meeting with the hero, the latter decides to follow the tracks of a man the victim had himself indicated as a possible suspect; indeed, he begins to see him everywhere he goes – outside the school and, most distressingly, in front of his own house! So paranoid does he become that, when this person finally approaches him in a dark alley, Pani turns on him and strangles the man…who is revealed the next day to be yet another tutor! Given the protagonist's constantly brooding countenance, it is fair to assume that the film-makers (with whose work I am unfamiliar) intended misleading the viewer into thinking he would emerge as the unwitting serial killer – but, ultimately, they do not even display the courage of their lack of convictions, as the film just peters out without offering so much as a hint of a solution (the nods to BLOW UP {1966} are palpable throughout but, in this case, it feels like the scriptwriters simply ran into a brick-wall!)…apart from having Pani succeed at the titular yoga position at long last!! In the end, if it were not for the ultra-modern trimmings, one would be excused in thinking this emanated from the early days of the "giallo", so timid is its approach to the genre's mechanics!