60's Italian Horror Part Fourteen

THE 10TH VICTIM

(1965)

Dir - Elio Petri

Overall: GOOD

 

"Man hunting man", (or "woman hunting man in this case"), thrillers had already gone back several decades before Elio Petri's adaptation of Robert Sheckley's novel Seventh Victim dropped right smack in the middle of Italy's pop art movement.  The resulting film The 10th Victim, (La decima vittima), also throws in romantic comedy and dystopian science fiction, with the hip stylistic touches of European spy movies and A-listers Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress as the dashing leads.  Bipping and bopping along with a kitschy scat score by Piero Piccioni and set a century in the future that never for a moments stops looking exactly like 1965, the story of commercialized murder does not dig deeply into such themes, instead taking a satirical and tongue-in-cheek approach with likeable, smirking characters that seem complacent in the dark joke that is their lives.  Mastroianni in particular comes off as cool as a cucumber, both nonchalantly bored with such a celebrity hunter/victim society and seemingly three steps ahead of everyone in the process.  Andress comes close to matching his low-key energy, leading to a ridiculous ending that is hilariously dry and in keeping with the sharp and overall fun tone of the entire thing.

 

THE SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH
(1968)
Dir - Romolo Guerrieri
Overall: MEH

The first of several giallos to feature Carroll Baker in the lead and her second Italian film after moving to Europe, The Sweet Body of Deborah, (Il dolce corpo di Deborah, L'adorable corps de Deborah), is uninspired tripe which comes off as if all parties involved where asleep at the wheel while making it.  At one point, Baker and Jean Sorel's newlyweds murder an intruder in self-defense after notifying the police that they are being harassed, only to immediately proclaim that "no one will believe us" so instead of reporting the incident, they bury the body in the backyard of a rented villa that a consistent stream of future guests can discover.  Such laughably lazy plotting is only one issue with the mundane story, one that was allegedly cobbled together from a different, unmade Baker project by producer Luciano Martino and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi.  The finale "twist" renders the previous ninety minutes as both pointlessly convoluted and illogical, but the pacing is dreadful, with the only "exciting" things happening around Sorel thinking that he sees someone he knows or getting annoyed by a piece of classical music being played.  Shot in English, the dialog is ADRed anyway and comes off as clunky if not embarrassing, plus as the title would suggest, Baker's body gets the focus in a few mild nudity instances.  The overall bundle is too lackluster to make such exploitative components worth one's time though.

NAKED VIOLENCE
(1969)
Dir - Fernando Di Leo
Overall: MEH

Mislabeled as a giallo, Naked Violence, (I ragazzi del massacro, The Boys Who Slaughter), is more in line with the poliziotteschi genre and is the first of two Giorgio Scerbanenco adaptations that director Fernando Di Leo would make.  A condensed version of Scerbanenco's crime novel I ragazzi del massacro, the film is bookended by the insinuating rape incident, first shown as stills during the opening credits and later as a surreal nightmare played out over industrial ambient noises.  While these moments are striking and disturbed, everything in between follows a lethargic structure where Pier Paolo Capponi mildly roughs up a group of teenagers, asking the same questions over and over again with no forthcoming answers.  A police procedural drama that is all talk and no action, Di Leo fails to give the stark material much cinematic flourish besides the aforementioned rape sequence.   Italian giallo queen Nieves Navarro is wasted as a social worker that is barely on screen and when she is, utters so few words as to be inconsequential to the chain of events.  There are also bizarre, annoyingly loud screeches on the soundtrack that accompany several zoom-ins to character's faces, which is supposed to punctuate some kind of dramatic intensity but instead come off as laughably grating.