Giallo a Venezia

I just watched Giallo A Venezia First off, it's not a giallo, it's a crime story. It opens with 2 bodies and a bunch of cops and goes from there with the investigation, and it's quite a while before anyone is actually killed. And when it does happen it's not a mystery, as we see the killers face. The story has some twists and turns to it though.

A good part of the film is flash-backs of the the 2 victims doing kinky sex things. Yeah, there's a decent amount of sex in this, probably on par with a typical Jess Franco film, some of it was okay, some a little boring. There's also some pretty gruesome gore stuff late in the film. Otherwise the plot is fairly simple, on par with say a typical 70's cop show.

To recap, I wouldn't say this was all that good... a lot of sex (some simulated, some female masturbation, some kinky stuff), a couple of decent gore killings, and not a giallo.

If you want a giallo with a lot of sex the best I've seen so far would be Slaughter Hotel, or maybe Washing Machine (though that one is kind of a borderline giallo).

This is an extremely rare, hard to find movie which to be quite honest is no bad thing. The version I viewed was in its native Italian tongue and is, as far as i'm aware, the only way anyone's likely to see it. The film begins with the dockside discovery of a murdered man and woman which starts an investigation undertaken by a cop (Jeff Blynn) whose favourite past-time is eating hard boiled eggs! (well Kojak had his lollipops I guess). A series of seemingly unrelated murders start to occur, two of which are very nasty, so nasty in fact that I couldn't possibly describe them on such a family friendly site such as this. An already cheap and cheerful film is cheapened further by endless scenes of a couple participating in various sex games, all backed by a Berto Pisano score which wouldn't seem out of place in one of your dad's "stag" flicks. Needless to say these sub- plots seem to tie up in the end (well...at least I think they do). The term "giallo", is the Italian word for yellow and these thrillers (BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, BLOOD AND BLACK LACE and WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO SOLANGE? being amongst other examples of this fascinating and addictive genre) have their origins in the mystery books published years ago in Italy, which were distinguishable by their yellow covers. When all's been said and done, I cant really recommend this sleazy, sordid affair (not that it's readily available anyway!), unless your idea of a nice night in is a showing of Lucio Fulci's equally misogynistic (but more fun) THE NEW YORK RIPPER. Happy hunting.....

Giallo a Venezia, also known as Giallo In Venice, has a reputation for being one of the sleaziest films produced in an already sleazy sub genre. Giallos, for the uninitiated, are Italian horror films known for their extreme violence punctuated by scenes of explicit sex. They heavily influenced the American slasher films of the late 70s and early 80s, but for the most part these American films were not as extreme as their Italian counterparts.

There are few death scenes in Giallo a Venezia but they are quite gory. There's an immolation, a graphic dismemberment, and the usual requisite stabbings. Giallo a Venezia does feature plenty of sex and nudity, but the bare bodies on display do further the plot. After finding a married couple's dead bodies on the Venice beach our main character, a detective, is baffled by the crime's seemingly lack of motive. We spend the rest of the movie inter-cutting between the detective working on his case and flashbacks of the deceased married couple. The film's flashback structure is unique telling the story of the married couple's last days before their death. Their marriage is, to put it politely, very rocky. The husband is a cocaine addict and frequently indulges in kinky sex to debase his wife.

While Giallo a Venezia may lack the social commentary of Lucio Fulci or the swooping camera-work and visual styling of Dario Argento, it is still a giallo that can comfortably stand on merits of its own. Unlike some other giallos that have been loving restored and even presented on Bluray, tracking down a copy of Giallo a Venezia may present quite a challenge. I had to settle for a sub par VHS rip.

This is sleazy. I've seen the English subtitled Luminous print of this film, and it is safe to report that as a giallo it fails miserably on every level. Not only is there a weak plot and zero suspense, but there is also laughably no attempt to conceal the identity of the killer who is in fact revealed in the first ten minutes or so of the film. Clearly Landi was aware of his shortcomings as a giallo director and so therefore decided to make up for it with lashings of jaw-droppingly misogynistic sexual violence, which he again showed a passion for in his later film "Patrick Lives Again".

A couple of scenes really stick out for absolute, grimy nastiness. Firstly, the vaginal stabbing of the prostitute. This scene has more parallels to old hardcore porn loops than it does the giallo genre, with poorly lit and explicit prolonged close-ups, shot on grainy stock. Secondly, the scene where Mariangela Giordano gets her leg sawed up. Even though the effects are poor, the absolute sadism and overall atmosphere makes you feel pretty sordid for watching it. It kinda reminded me of the similar (but more nasty) scene in The Last House On Dead End Street...

But is this enough to make this film good? NO. This is a failure as a giallo, and is only worth anything because of the outrageous violence.

I saw the 99 mins version of this movie for the first time recently as i got enticed into it aft reading some glowing reviews on imdb by Coventry n Harrison. The film is boring, the lead detective kept on munching hard boiled eggs, the pervert kept on his perversion while the abused girlfriend simply kept quiet, the other characters r not developed well n the killer's background story is nada. Unnecessary footage is given to weird sex scenes n less to the killer or the kills. In one scene, the killer leaves the scissor inside the private parts of a woman but the cop insists that the scissor was found at the killer's place which even the killer is not able to recollect whether he had left it at the murder site or na. The masturbation scene will give Natalie Portman's scene from Black Swan a tough competition. We have Mariangela Giordano who goes full nude n performs wild sex, the masturbatory nun from Malabimba n the pervert's mother from Burial Ground.

The film has few gory scenes but that gets overshadowed due to the unnecessary sex scenes. There is a scene where a guy gets shot by a gun n he does lots of overacting by doing writhing movements.