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.

Embalmer, The (1965)

** (out of 4)

A psychotic killer is on the loose in Venice but the police don't have a clue to who's killing all the beautiful women. This Italian film is also known as The Monster of Venice and is mildly interesting since it tries to mix the Italian giallo with the German krimi but the end results aren't as good as I had hoped. I'd still recommend this to those wanted to see where Dario Argento was influenced. The biggest problem is that the film is simply too slow to be any good and the actual mystery really isn't all that interesting. A few interesting ideas pop up including the killer who uses scuba gear so that he can make his escape and kill his victims at the same time. This is part of a Vintage triple feature that includes The Screaming Skull and I Eat Your Skin, which can be picked up at Best Buy for $7. The print here is in very bad shape but it's letterboxed, which I believe is a first for this film.

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.

I was really expecting something pretty good from The Embalmer...but unfortunately all I got was a dreary horror flick with a couple of good ideas and a complete lack of suspense. The film was apparently inspired by Edgar Wallace, who was the inspiration for a lot of the German "Krimi" style of film-making. Not being too familiar with Wallace's work, I can't say how true that is - but The Embalmer is certainly not the Giallo I was expecting. The film is set in Venice, and makes best use of the scenery...though it does get a bit boring as the film sets the scene without putting anything relevant to the story with it! The film was possibly an inspiration on the brilliant Dutch "Giallo" Amsterdamned as it focuses on a killer who lives under the Venetian canals. The killer is selecting young women of Venice and dragging them to the depths of the canal, where he has his way with them - by filling them up with embalming fluid to keep them beautiful for all time (etc etc). A journalist picks up the story, and soon ends up falling in love with the killer's next victim.

The main problem with this film is that it's entirely lacklustre! The cinematography, acting, direction, plot line etc all stink of a group of people that couldn't really be bothered to come up with something half decent. The film is not very suspenseful at all, and a lot of is made up of mind numbing diatribe, which means that when we actually get to watch the killer with his victims, most viewers will already be bored out of their brains. The killer himself looks cool - completed clad in black with a skull mask, but that's the only good thing about him. He makes long winded speeches to his dead victims that were obviously intended to be scary, but actually come as being rather silly. It does boil down to a fairly decent finale, which despite not justifying the rest of the film; at least ensures that the movie doesn't just leave a bad taste in the viewer's mouths by the end of the film. Overall, this is a good film to track down because it's extremely rare and seen in some circles as a precursor to the Giallo genre - but trust me, it's not worth the time and effort!

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.