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I’m just going to say right off the bat that Play Motel didn’t do a whole lot for me. This effort from writer/director Mario Gariazzo comes straight out of the sleaziest, trashiest Italian cinema bargain bin. And here’s the thing, I like that bin. I’m a fan of a lot of Italian sleaze. Play Motel […]...

Purveyors of Eurotrash should delight in the resuscitation of the obscure 1979 eroto-giallo Play Motel, directed by Mario Gariazzo under the pseudonym Roy Garrett (a director of twenty or so features best remembered for casting into a sea of Friedkin capitalizations with 1974’s The Sexorcist, aka L’Ossessa aka Enter the Devil). By this period, the provocative Italian subgenre was already well into its dog days, with imitators churning out murder mysteries imbibed with a healthy dose of pornographic soft-core elements. It would be unfair to rightly classify Gariazzo’s film as classic giallo, a muddled narrative cramped significantly by enough naked women to rival Jesus Franco.

The sleazy Play Motel is a den of infamous iniquity, and wealthy businessman Rinaldo Cortesi (Enzio Fisichella) hires the voluptuous Loredana (Marina Frajese) for a kinky round of S&M. The next day, explicit pictures are sent to his office via registered mail in...

Here’s another helping of immorality and mayhem courtesy of Emilio Miraglia, the man responsible for one of my favorite gialli, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (which, ironically, was glimpsed in last week’s Saturday Nightmare, New Year’s Evil, under the Us title - Blood Feast).

This film, the first of Miraglia’s only two forays into giallo cinema, isn’t as accomplished as its successor but has plenty of perversity to keep things interesting. If you’ve come to expect ludicrous plot twists, unscrupulous characters, sexual debauchery and a solid dose of murder, then you’ll find much to love about this atmospheric little shocker.

To put it mildly, Alan Cunningham has issues. As the Lord of a sprawling estate, the smarmy playboy spends his evenings luring attractive young women to his castle where he tortures them before savagely killing them. It seems as though Alan has...