La morte è di moda

Black-gloved psycho killers and defenseless fashion models nicely go together, like peas & carrots. That is something Mario Bava - greatest director in history - already discovered back in 1964 when he gave birth to the wondrous Italian horror sub-genre of "Giallo". Many great Gialli are set in, or linked to, the fashion industry ("Death Walks at Midnight", "Too Beautiful to Die", "Plot of Fear", Nothing Underneath") and I wish I could have included the late 80s outing "Fashion Crimes" to the list as well.

But alas, this film is weak and unremarkable on every level where a true Giallo is supposed to excel. I'm talking too few and bloodless murders, barely any suspense, unconvoluted plot, colorless lead characters, predictable twist and finale, absence of nudity & sleaze, dull usage of scenery, weak soundtrack, and a killer that nearly isn't sadistic or deranged enough.

Alone and exhausted, top-model Gloria is forced to take a detour on her way home at night and experiences - of course - engine trouble in a remote area. She enters a villa hoping to find help, but she witnesses a murder and runs off hysterically. When she wakes up in a hospital the next day, nobody believes her story because the villa she refers to has been sealed off and abandoned for years. When Gloria also finds herself stalked by a killer that nobody else believes really exists, she's sent through to a psychiatrist.

It's quite funny how even in 1989, more than 15 years after the glory days of the Giallo sub genre, director Bruno Gaburro still assumes that audiences can easily be fooled and misled. The psychiatrist played by Miles O'Keefe is hilarious, for instance. I promise you'll never see, in any other movie ever made, a person looking and behaving more suspiciously than he does! It borderline pathetic how Gaburra desperately wants to persuade us, viewers, that the shrink is the killer! Sure.

Ah well, the dumb clichés and underestimation of the audience aren't even the things that bothered me the most. The lack of a compelling script, the boring pace, the uninterested performances of Anthony Franciosa ("Tenebre"), and the complete absense of bloodletting are the unforgivable defaults.

By 1989, the Giallo genre had long since seen it's best days; and Fashion Crimes is a good example of that, as what we have here is a film that takes some of what made the genre fascinating in the first place, and just makes a mess of it. The fashion house has been a staple of the Giallo genre ever since it's birth in 1964 with Mario Bava's fascinating Blood and Black Lace. This film has the cheek to name itself 'Fashion Crimes', even though the majority of the film has nothing to do with fashion houses and indeed this setting barely features once we are past the film's opening. Anyway, the film focuses on Gloria; a fashion model who, while on the way home one night, breaks down, and after seeking assistance from a nearby villa; wakes up with amnesia. After coming round, she is convinced that she has witnessed a murder. She is helped by a psychiatrist who tries to unlock her memory with hypnosis; however, the psychiatrist also happens to be co-owner of the mansion! It's not long before the killer tries to silence Gloria.

The film's main flaw is clearly that it just isn't interesting. None of the things that Giallo fans will be looking for are good about this movie; there's barely any bloodshed, the mystery drags and lacks interest and none of the characters are strong enough to make any sort of impact. None of this is helped by the fact that lead actress Teresa Leopardi looks bored throughout the film. The main bulk of the film revolves around the lead character trying to regain her memory and this is extremely boring and does little to further the mystery elements of the film, leading to further boredom. Director Bruno Gaburro's style is languid, although the poor screenplay is more to blame for the film's failures. The soundtrack is suitably tedious too, just to add to the negative elements. Overall, I really can't recommend that anyone goes to the trouble of tracking this down. It is very rare and not at all worth the effort. I would even go as far as to say that this is one of the very worst Giallo's I've ever seen!

On her way home, a fashion model, Gloria, saw a man fought against a woman and killed her in a strangely noisy room in the old villa where a German Countess named Greta Stella used to live. But when the police Commissioner, who is crazy about fishing, and his dull assistant go to the problematic villa in the next morning, the villa is perceived to have been empty for twenty years and there seems to be nothing criminal left. And then Gloria asks help from a playboy-typed psychiatrist, Gianmarco Contini, who is one of the eight joint-owners of the problematic villa... In the second half of the 1980s', the Italian film-makers made what is called Giallo-with-fashion-models films, and this is the one of them. And in a sense, this is the most unique one partly because this has something common with LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH; as far as the visualness and auditoryness are concerned, the heroine, Gloria, is passive. Whatever she does, it has no effect upon her being passive. Similarly(and badly), the Commissioner's and the psychiatrist's actions have no influence upon her passiveness. And furthermore, this film has more unique element; the hypnotherapy which indeed seems to be the central element of the film. Unfortunately it is the most problematic element of the film, too; Dr.Contini puts Gloria under hypnosis many times, but he doesn't and can't make anything meaningful at all. And therefore it should be said in the most parts of the film the hypnotherapy is nothing but the decorative. But in the last sequence putting the illogically-identified murderer under hypnosis on only one occasion solves the whole case with unbelievable and unacceptable immediateness and simplisticness of his-or-her exhibitionistic self-destructiveness. And therefore it can be said in the most parts of the film every character badly wastes his-or-her time with an unbelievably simply trick in the old villa.(Actually, the trick is definitely too simple for anyone who goes there not to be realised.) This is highly problematic because all characters' wasting their time with their meaningless activities can be nothing but the audiences' wasting their time with the very film. Indeed every character in this film is too childish, or even too foolish, to be satisfactorily realistic and therefore the film per se cannot be satisfactorily realistic. Or more precisely, almost every scene of this film is as meaninglessly fluctuating and/or as meaninglessly imperious as if they were not under any of the characters' control at all.

The giallo genre has long been synonymous with style and fashion, the connection first established in Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace in 1964, which saw fashion models stalked and killed by a maniac.

The late 80's saw a brief resurgence in fashion-based Italian murder mysteries with glossy gialli such as Nothing Underneath (1985), Too Beautiful To Die (1988), and this effort from director Bruno Gaburro, in which model Gloria (Teresa Leopardi) experiences car trouble and seeks help at a villa where she witnesses a murder take place. When the police investigate, they find the villa locked up and long abandoned, and doubt the woman's story. Psychiatrist Dr. Gianmarco Contini (Miles O'Keeffe) agrees to help Gloria to remember more details of the night; meanwhile, the killer tries to bump off the model before she can reveal their identity. Anthony Franciosa, star of Dario Argento's Tenebre, plays Commissioner Rizzo, the policeman in charge of the investigation.

I've mentioned Bava and Argento, but director Gaburro is the antithesis of these legends: his forgettable giallo lacks any sense of style, suffers from a sluggish pace, and features little in the way of suspense and zero horror. Gaburro cannot even muster up any gore or nudity by way of compensation. Having watched well in excess of 100 gialli, I can safely say that this is one of the worst that the genre has to offer, a tedious mess of a movie that, judging by the fact that it only has three comments here on IMDb (none of them positive), has been given the cold-shoulder it most definitely deserves.

1.5/10, generously rounded up to 2 for the supernatural element, Gloria having apparently witnessed a murder that happened years earlier.