1970s Italian Horror Part Twenty-Two

LOVER OF THE MONSTER

(1974)

Dir - Sergio Garrone

Overall: MEH

A companion piece to The Hand That Feeds the Dead which was filmed at the same time and with the same crew and actors, Lover of the Monster, (Le amanti del mostro), is a noticeably low-budgeted Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde variation.  Klaus Kinski is his usual off-putting self, here playing a newly married doctor who undergoes personality-altering experiments after arriving at his wife's ancestral home where he discovers a book that leads him in such a disastrous path.  The details are never sufficiently explained where Kinski seems to be possessed by either a malevolent entity or just the dark recesses of his primordial, violent nature that speaks to him in an echoed, maniacal manner.  Due to the brisk shooting schedule and lack of funds on hand, the running time is heavily padded with long bouts of nothing happening where the camera lingers on already unnecessary moments long past an agreeable length.  Still, Kinski is wonderful and appropriate as a raving madman who becomes filled with just as intense of an amount of remorse in the film's final moments, leading to an ending that is more bleak than most Euro-cheapies would usually allow.

 

THE BLOODSUCKER LEADS THE DANCE

(1975)

Dir - Alfredo Rizzo

Overall: WOOF

An oddity amongst Euro-trash that comes off like an unaware parody of Gothic eroticism, The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance, (La sanguisuga conduce la danza, L'insatiable Samantha, Il marchio di Satana), is a steady combination of extremely boring, head-scratchingly strange, and accidentally absurd.  It is difficult to tell what writer/director Alfredo Rizzo is exactly going for as he he stages what is essentially an easily guessable, horny whodunit in a mansion with plot points and character mannerisms that are both routinely bizarre and derail any sense of atmospheric tension that could have been attained.  The dialog is as hilariously atrocious as the performances are; performances which are either melodramatic or wooden.  Plus in typical low-budget export fashion, the dubbed version is especially atrocious in this regard.  Italian horror mainstay Giacomo Rossi Stuart sounds the most ridiculous as if he barely has a grasp on the English language and is on some kind of sleepy time drug.  Speaking of, the lengthy expository explanation at the end features a police inspector allowing for various characters to pontificate their motives while everyone else in the room patiently sits with zero expression on their faces.  Already ruined with a stagnant sense of anti-momentum, the French cut also adds hardcore pornography with different actors who are obviously standing in for the ones that are on screen.

OBSCENE DESIRE

(1978)

Dir - Giulio Petroni

Overall: MEH

The last known work to be directed by Giulio Petroni, Obscene Desire, (L'osceno desiderio), is a softcore porn knock-off of Rosemary's Baby that manages to accomplish some creepy atmosphere despite its lackluster, derivative story.  Here, Austrian actor Marissa Mell has recently married a wealthy nobleman who keeps lazy-eyed genre regular Víctor Israel on as a caretaker, eventually revealing a diabolical plot involving a condemned witch's curse to give birth to the Devil's son eight generations later.  The cliches are all in place and they are tossed together in a contemporary setting with very little action, several exploitative bouts of slow motion nudity and/or sex, and some blasphemy for good measure.  Budget wise, this is a bare-bones affair that could not even afford a proper flashback sequences to show us the crazed witch spouting her vengeance to angry villagers before being put to death, but Petroni still makes the most out of the meager production means.  The sound design is deliberately off-putting and of course the same piece of music gets used ad nauseam, but it creates a haunting mood as is appropriate.  It meanders too much to maintain one's interest, but there is some erotic and eerie style to go along with the familiar tropes.

1970s Italian Horror Part Twenty-One

SOMETHING CREEPING IN THE DARK

(1971)

Dir - Mario Colucci

Overall: MEH

 

The second of only two completed films to be directed by screenwriter Mario Colucci, Something Creeping in the Dark, (Qualcosa striscia nel buio, Creeping in the Night, Shadows in the Dark), is a horridly slow old dark house/giallo hybrid of sorts.  Colucci had been sitting on the story for a decade by the time he got around to making it with a handful of recognizable genre faces on board including Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Stelvio Rosi, and American Farley Granger as a criminal on the run named Spike.  Certain sequences, (including the ending), are wonderfully creepy, involving eerie breathing noises, POV camera work, and stark lighting as a houseful of strangers hold up due to lousy weather and closed-off roads.  On paper, a plot involving the ghost of a dead occultist who possess people one at a time while most of the lights are off should wield more chilling results though.  The film regularly detours to characters simply standing around either doing nothing, having repetitive conversations with each other, or, (in the case of an off-putting housekeeper), going into a room where he either hits or has sex with a girl who is not wearing pants.  Whatever that is about.  Something Italian probably.

IL PRATO MACCHIATO DI ROSSO

(1973)

Dir - Riccardo Ghione

Overall: WOOF

Euro-trash at its "best" could be bizarrely inciting; weaving its exploitative sleaze in a manner where genre cliches, laughable melodrama, and hip soundtracks could wield something so strange and silly that it can be memorable at the very least.  Often times though, these movies just sucked.  The last directorial effort from writer Riccardo Ghione, (who was only behind the lens on four movies in his career), Il prato macchiato di rosso, (The Red-Stained Lawn, The Bloodstained Lawn), is a completely boring mess that squanders a ridiculous premise.  An eccentric husband/wife duo who absolutely despise each other make a habit of taking in stray hippies, drug addicts, gypsies, or any other vagabond-lifestyled people so that they can lay them on a table and have a robot drain them of blood in order to sell it on the black market.  Said robot is kept in the living room as groovy decor and most of the idiots who are soon to be victims hardly bat an eye at a shower that shoots wine, nightly orgies, and large curtains designed like private parts.  The whole thing sounds far more interesting on paper than it translates to on the screen as Ghione's sense of pacing is abysmal, none of the characters are either interesting or likable, and so very little happens that most viewers will fail to even notice the wacky bits when they do appear.

THE RETURN OF THE EXORCIST

(1975)

Dir - Angelo Pannacciò/Luca Damiano

Overall: MEH

Director Angelo Pannacciò's immediate follow-up to the wretchedly awful Sex of the Witch was one of countless Italian rip-offs of The Exorcist, being the apply titled The Return of the Exorcist, (Un urlo dalle tenebre, Exorcist 3: Cries and Shadows, The Possessor, Un Urlo Dalle Tenebre, Naked Exorcist).  Allegedly, Pannacciò was a replacement for Luca Damiano midway through shooting, the latter being particularly prominent throughout the following decades making porn.  In any event, this stands as one of the more inventive if still unabashedly silly cash grabs that jumped on and plagiarized as much from William Friedkin's masterpiece as allowed.  That said, it throws a whole lot of other nonsense in such as a Satanic cult, a cursed amulet, insane asylum footage, disco footage, and nudity, plus the main concept of a teenage boy being the one possessed by a female witch who regularly switches bodies with him.  It all still ends up with the required exorcism finale where the evil forces at play may as well just be Lucifer himself or another high ranking demon since Richard Conte, (in his final role), removes them with the usual "In the name of Jesus" mumbo jumbo.  The movie takes some slow, derivative detours at too many intervals to keep the wacky, blasphemous high jinks going, but when they do get going, they are a hoot.

1970s Italian Horror Part Twenty

NECROPOLIS

(1970)

Dir - Franco Brocani

Overall: WOOF

 

A mercilessly pretensions art film and the full-length debut from director Franco Brocani, Necropolis is a maddening experience from front to back.  Essentially an avant-garde, counter culture stage play made up of painfully long, (very, very, very long), takes while actors soliloquize against minimalist backdrops, it is remarkable that each and every line in such an enormously gratuitous amount of dialog can be completely void of meaning.  This is a movie that could be watched on mute and/or without subtitles and the audience will walk away with an equal amount of frustration and confusion over having wasting their time with such aimless dribble.  To Brocani's credit, he is certainly not making anything remotely commercial here, nor anything that adheres to any conventional confines of cinema in general.  It is a work of pure experimentation which could be appreciated if it was remotely watchable.  Instead, people pretend to be various historical or fictitious characters, (though good luck putting together which historical or fictitious characters most of them are), and deliver incoherent monologues made up of arbitrary words for well over ten minutes at a time.  As one could guess, it wears out its welcome well before the two hour running time has buried its pompous premise into the ground.

 

WEB OF THE SPIDER

(1971)

Dir - Antonio Margheriti

Overall: MEH

Prolific genre director Antonio Margheriti remade his own Castle of Blood a mere five years later as Web of the Spider, (Nella stretta morsa del ragno, Les fantômes de Hurlevent, Dracula im Schloß des Schreckens), though it unfortunately suffers from the same issues as its comparatively still better predecessor.  While it is a hoot to see Klaus Kinski in anything really, he is wasted in mere bookending cameos here as none other than Edgar Allan Poe; a hilariously inappropriate casting decision if ever there was one.  Once the story properly kicks in where Anthony Franciosa agrees to spend the night in a haunted mansion for mere shits and giggles, only a handful of those initial minutes are eerily inciting.  The spacious abode is at first completely isolated and Franciosa jumps at every sound and nuance under such suggestively foreboding circumstances.  Things quickly succumb to elongated flashback sequences though once the ghosts start showing up, at which point the movie loses its atmospheric momentum and becomes a poorly paced slog.  The initial materiel that made up the aforementioned Castle of Blood was already cliche-ridden, so yet another version of it and so soon afterwards is redundant to say the least, despite the fact that Kinski is barely in it and that the whole thing was shot in color this time.

IL BACIO DI UNA MORTA

(1974)

Dir - Carlo Infascelli

Overall: MEH

Mislabeled as a horror movie, Carlo Infascelli's last directorial effort Il bacio di una morta, (Kiss of a Dead Woman), is actually an infidelity melodrama, be it one that opens with a man visiting a woman's tomb on an eerie night only to find her still very much alive.  Outside of this macabre detail though, the rest of the film is broken up into a lengthy flashback sequence that brings the viewer up to date, followed by another lengthy conclusion that leans on the unsatisfying side.  Orso Maria Guerrini's Count is an unlikable central character due to his reckless and selfish behavior, so the fact that he does not get his just comeuppance may be an annoyance to some.  It is a melancholic turn of events in this regard where some of the guilty parties are outed for their unwholesome acts, while Guerrini is reunited with his wife in a relationship that can only continue on in the most dysfunctional of manners.  Regardless of the dopey plot, it is all played stiff as a board with every performer delivering emotionally stripped performances as to never once veer the project into anything resembling camp.  This is an admirable move, but it is also one that renders the whole thing a bore that is only mildly interesting in its final, be it disappointing moments.

1970s Italian Horror Part Nineteen

BYLETH: THE DEMON OF INCEST

(1972)

Dir - Leopoldo Savona

Overall: MEH

After a decade of mostly spaghetti Westerns under his belt, writer/director Leopoldo Savona switched gears to Italy's other chief cinematic export with the Gothic horror-tinged Byleth: The Demon of Incest, (Byleth (Il demone dell'incesto), Trio der Lust).  One of many Italian films to feature American Mark Damon in the lead, he plays a deeply troubled man who has been madly in love with his own sister throughout his entire life, only to return home from a long journey to find her married.  This naturally kicks in his psychosis where he either is possessed by or summons the demon of the title who wears a black cloak while riding a white horse and also murders women with a three-bladed sword.  There is not much to the plot as we merely witness Damon sweat and go crazy as he struggles with his taboo temptations, leaving no mystery as to what is going on but a fair amount of confusion as to the specifics.  Due to the small budget, the movie is of course heavy on the talking and low on the action, so Savona has nowhere to go in creating any type of fetching mood.  Various cuts of the film exist with more or less nudity depending on which one you watch, but they all amount to a pretty lackluster experience.

THE GIRL IN ROOM 2A

(1974)

Dir - William Rose/Dick Randall

Overall: MEH

The last directorial effort from William Rose, (with further, uncredited work allegedly being done by fellow American producer Dick Randall, who had a career making exploitation films in various countries), The Girl in Room 2A, (La casa della paura, The House of Fear), is an uninspired giallo that is largely forgotten.  Gianfranco Baldanello's script was based off of a story by Rose and it is a convoluted one involving organized crime, torture, and a cult headed by a guy in a red mask and robe.  Daniela Giordano was no stranger to sensationalized material such as this, but her performance falls flat due to no fault of her own since the material that everyone is working with is so poorly thought out.  Equally dull is Rose's direction which has none of the necessary flare to elevate what is by nature an over-the-top sub-genre.  Cinematographers Mario Mancini and Giorgio Montagnani seem to be asleep at the wheel and the musical score is laughably out of place, particularly during the opening credits which feature a woman getting violently brutalized while the romantic score tenderly serenades over it.  There are a couple of flashes of nudity and brutality, but they stick out awkwardly against the plodding, chatty plot whose mystery is ultimately solved with a combination of confusion and disinterest from the audience who most likely have already checked out long before.

NUDE PER L'ASSASSINO

(1975)

Dir - Andrea Bianchi

Overall: MEH

Taking the giallo to comical heights, Andrea Bianchi's Nude per I'assassio, (Strip Nude for Your Killer), pushes the genre's exploitative angles farther enough than most to become a near-parody.  Opening with a botched abortion, then a brutal face-smashing murder, then a single take of possibly the most Italian man ever berating an attractive woman around a hotel while literally shoving a camera in her face while saying "Mama mia!" several dozen times, the film has managed to pull off being tasteless, violent, and hilariously objectifying towards women within less than fifteen minutes.  After that, the kill scenes are staggeringly drawn out for maximum boredom instead of their intended suspense, (usually involving the killer turning on water faucets as his soon-to-be-victims very, very slowly walk around their apartment), and more preposterous moments occur where women are sexually harassed and rape is made playful light of.  The film would be insulting if not for how shamelessly sleazy it is, arriving at the peak of such Euro-trash that put butts in the seats by maximizing the amount of naked women and sadism that was allowed.  Bianchi, screenwriter Massimo Felisatti, cinematographer Franco Delli Colli, (who does in fact do some effective work here), and composer Berto Pisano would all collaborate together on future works in a similarly tacky vein, but giallo fans surely will not complain who love the more ridiculous aspects of such movies as well as scream queen Edwige Frenech having less clothes on than even usual.

1970s Italian Horror Part Eighteen

THE DEVIL'S LOVER

(1972)

Dir - Paolo Lombardo

Overall: WOOF

Out of the gargantuan number of low-rent, Gothic horror films that Italy churned out in its heyday, The Devil's Lover, (L'amante del demonio, Ceremonia Satanica, Lucifera: Demon Lover, La Amante del demonio, The Demon Lover), ranks as one of the most top-to-bottom laziest.  This could be due to writer Paolo Lombardo's inexperience from behind the lens, this standing as his second of only three directorial efforts.  It could also be the clearly non-existent budget which seemingly could only afford a few simple period costumes and a spacious abode to utilize only a handful of rooms in.  The story itself is a combination of the laughably stupid and (above all else), insultingly boring as three women check out a haunted castle just to have something to do, only for one of them to quickly fall asleep and then dream the entire movie as a flashback before waking up, smiling, and driving away.  Every scene is either all talking, all walking, or all standing around and the plot line is so aggressively uninteresting as to be incomprehensible.  Euro scream queen Rosalba Neri provides the eye candy and does her best, but the material she has to work with is void of all substance and fails as trash, atmospheric horror, and melodrama all at once.

 

FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS

(1974)

Dir - Dick Randall/Mario Mancini
Overall: MEH

An oddity amongst Euro-horror in the fact that no official director has ever been confirmed to have made it, Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, (Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette, Terror Castle, The House of Freaks, The Monsters of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, Frankenstein's Castle), is a hugely unmemorable offering.  Loaded with cliches for the mere sake of them and adhering to only the most bare-bones mad scientist themes that countless other Frankenstein adaptations have tackled, (though calling this an "adaptation" of Marry Shelley's novel is an erroneous stretch), it tacks on the usual amount of rape, sleaze, and arduous pacing that is almost universally found in other Italian trash exports.  Here, Frankenstein is called Count instead of doctor most of the time and one of the actors was billed as Boris Lugosi, so clearly some attempt was made to make it a throwback of some sorts to the Universal monster days.  Unfortunately, these minor details mixed with neanderthal men living in caves, naked women, a dwarf who only behaves in the horniest and most moronic fashion possible, angry villagers, a dreadfully talky script, plus laughably crude set design and makeup effects renders the whole thing instantly forgettable.

A WHISPER IN THE DARK

(1976)

Dir - Marcello Aliprandi

Overall: MEH

The third full length from director Marcello Aliprandi and the only one to be explicitly in the supernatural horror vein, A Whisper in the Dark, (Un sussurro nel buio), is unremarkable stuff.  Over long, overtly talky, and played too straight to be campy, it fails to navigate its imaginary friend premise in an effectively eerie manner.  Instead, it underplays its otherwordly elements to the point where they are largely undetected.  This seems to be intentional in presenting all of the strange occurrences as ones that can be argued amongst characters in a cliched manner where the women who believe them are hysterically impressionable and the strong-willed men who scoff at them are logical and condescending.  The ghostly mystery at the center of things is not that interesting to begin with so having few if any spooky set pieces, only mildly troubling events transpiring, and a hugely weak ending makes the whole thing fall flat.  That said, some of the cinematography by Claudio Cirillo is intimately atmospheric, Pino Donaggio's score is deliciously Italian, John Phillip Law brings some of his usual charming intensity to the table, Joseph Cotten is present if mostly wasted, and the little kids are comparatively less annoying than they are in other Italian exports from the time period.

1970s Italian Horror Part Seventeen - (Renato Polselli Edition)

LA VERITÀ SECONDO SATANA

(1972)

Overall: MEH

Riding a very thin line of hilariously insane and tortuously obnoxious, La verità secondo Satana, (The Truth According to Satan), is a bizarre black comedy or something from writer/director Renato Polselli that if anything else, certainly gets points for being unique.  The mannerisms of both of the male characters are eccentric to the point of parody.  As an insane man prone to psychologically torturing his fiance, Isarco Ravaioli looks disturbingly very like a sweaty, Italian Ted Buddy while Sergio Ammirata plays the far more head-scratching and annoying neighbor who makes chicken noises and throws a feminine hissy-fit if he fails to eat two fried eggs every hour.  Meanwhile, poor Rita Calderoni practically yanks her hair out as she suffers delusions including stock military footage and several naked hippies dancing to the same song over and over again, something that during the tense finale is inter-cut while people are speaking in mid sentence.  In fact, the entire film is edited as if a child on a caffeine bender was calling the shots and it all escalates at a feverish pace that is bound to perplex anyone who stays with it long enough to question what kind of movies they waste their time watching in the first place.

DELIRIO CALDO

(1972)

Overall: MEH

A demented giallo from writer/director Renato Polselli that has a largely different American dub version that throws in Vietnam footage for some on drugs reason, Delirio caldo, (Delirium), once again features wide-eyed Rita Calderoni, this time as another endlessly on-edge woman who is hysterically in love with a doctor that has a tendency to succumb to uncontrollable fits of violence against women.  Polselli's story is a love triangle though, which has another woman that is equally deranged and cannot stop murdering people.  There is also a guy whose girlfriend gets picked-off and he does not hesitate to unleash his own vengeance on who he suspects is the killer.  So, basically everyone on screen is a deranged maniac to various extents.  It has its prerequisite share of camera zooms and an up-tempo, jazzy score that all Euro-trash seemingly had to adhere to, giallos or not.  Unfortunately it is also more dull that it sounds on paper, with the kills scenes and acts of perversity spread out too thin.  That said, a few ridiculous nightmare sequences and a frenzied ending do liven things up a bit, but nothing to elevate this above just another nameless bit of Italian sleaze that is barely worth remembering.

BLACK MAGIC RITES

(1973)

Overall: WOOF

 

A logical contender for the most incomprehensible "vampire" movie ever made, Renato Polselli's Black Magic Rites, (The Reincarnation of Isabel, Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Trecento..., Secret Orgies in the Fourteenth Century), is fascinatingly absurd while still managing to be a torturous bore at the same time.  Presented as a series of practically unconnected set pieces where it becomes more and more impossible to even decipher what moments are flashbacks, dream sequences, or actually taking place, it is chalk full of naked people and characters staring directly into the camera while wide-eyed and presumably as confused as we are watching them.  At more than one instance, women are burnt alive at the stake for so long that it seems entirely possible that the filmmakers simply used every ounce of footage that they shot.  Comical music is played for a rape scene, every woman who appears has something randomly sadistic happen to them, (again, usually for many, many minutes at a time), and there is lots of screaming, characters yelling each other's names, reverberated alms to dark forces, and a barrage of other noise on the soundtrack such as chanting, minor-key music, and even what sounds like airplane noise.  Perhaps most oddly of all is that the entire thing is vividly colored and atmospheric from a visual perspective, but the repetitive, inconsequential, and laughably plotless nature of everything else makes this a fever dream of nonsensical garbage the likes of which, (even by Euro-horror standards), is rarely seen.

MANIA

(1974)

Overall: MEH

Another in a steady stream of wildly ridiculous films from writer/director/possible madman Renato Polselli, the aptly titled Mania fuses Gothic horror and giallo with a mad scientist, ghosts, and copious amounts of head-scratching sleaze.  Right from the opening credits and in typical Polselli fashion, the actors are comically exaggerating their mannerisms to the point of unintentional hilarity, but the story line is a true marvel of kitchen sink randomness and absurdity.  Eva Spadaro cheats on her scientist husband who is going to cure all human diseases by making a machine that controls things, (?!?), the person she cheats on him with is his identical twin brother, a maid with no pants on is also in love with her and then goes mute after a bag is placed over her head, both brothers burn up in a fire that Spadaro gets sexually turned on by not saving anyone from, one of the brother's survives in a wheelchair with burns all over his body until the very end when he can miraculously walk and the burns are gone, a ghost car chases Spadaro and her new fiance Isarco Ravaiolo and is promptly never seen again, a psychiatrist recommends that Spadaro go back to her ex-husband's now haunted house to face her fears, then more stuff involving lesbianism, snakes, fake dummies, and you name it happens.  The point is, you will probably need a nap when it is all over.

1970s Italian Horror Part Sixteen

IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH

(1970)

Dir - Sergio Bergonzelli

Overall: MEH

 

A particularly ridiculous bit of Euro-trash from co-writer/director Sergio Bergonzelli, In the Folds of the Flesh, (Nelle pieghe della carne, Las endemoniadas, La Folle, Mansion Sangriamente, Felicity), also serves as the final screen appearance from Eleonora Rossi Drago.  Abusing camera zooms as if he has a quota to fulfill, Bergonzelli and fellow screenwriters Fabio De Agostini and Mario Caiano, (the latter contributing the story outline), concoct a deliciously sleazy scenario where a family of traumatized, beheading murderers go about their business in their spacious, seaside villa.  Practically everyone who visits Drago and her two adult children ends up dead, (usually with their heads cut off), but not before cackling incessantly while raping or robbing them.  The film has an "everything but the kitchen sink" feel, throwing in inconsistent character behavior, naked, Nazi gas chamber flashbacks, expository dialog dumps, bad guys with guns, asinine plot twists, the same trumpet musical cue appearing every fifteen seconds, and again just so many zooms.  In any event, there is certainly enough tastelessness and unintentional hysterics to please exploitation fans who crave badly dubbed, camped-up, melodramatic mental illness.

 

SPIRITS OF DEATH

(1972)

Dir - Romano Scavolini

Overall: MEH

 

Director Romano Scavolini entered the giallo game with the lackluster Spirits of Death, (Un bianco vestito per Marialé, A White Dress for Mariale, Exorcisme Tragique).  Featuring genre regulars Ida Galli, Ivan Rassimov, and Luigi Pistilli, the screenplay by Giuseppe Mangione and Remigio Del Grosso has a remarkably predictable killer reveal, yet the plot earns some points for its unique set up which only reveals itself to be a murder mystery well into the second half.  Gathering a bunch of degenerates together in a Gothic mansion by way of a not-so-mysterious invitation, it is inevitable that they will eventually get picked off and indeed they do, occasionally in stylistic, brutal ways.  Shawn Robinson, (whose non-whiteness also serves as a means for her boyfriend to smack her around despite the usual Italian tendency to treat women deplorably on screen anyway), meets a particularly gruesome fate by getting her head repeatedly smashed while in a swimming pool.  The performances are of the standard, melodramatic variety, the misogyny is very much in place, there is a tame and random lesbian sex encounter because naked women, there is also a weird dinner party where everyone dresses in silly costumes, and its depiction of mental illness is about as nuanced as in any other Euro-trash vehicle.

 

EYES BEHIND THE STARS

(1978)

Dir - Mario Gariazzo
Overall: WOOF

Euro-trash movies from the 1970s suffered from vegetative pacing as frequently as they did poor dubbing and Mario Gariazzo's Eyes Behind the Stars, (Occhi dalle stelle), is guaranteed to whisk away viewers to slumber land.  A UFO conspiracy movie, there are a handful of ominous POV scenes sprinkled around where the heavy-breathing extraterrestrials, (who are all just actors wearing costumes that look like they were made out of gray blankets), slowly stalk a few people and abduct one of them so that he can stare wide-eyed in a brightly lit set that looks as frightening as the inside of Tom Baker's Tardis.  While these moments provide the film with some much needed atmosphere, everything else that happens is boring enough to constitute as a war crime.  A fashion photographer takes some pictures of aliens in the woods and the rest of the movie bounces between the people who have the photo negatives going up against a shady organization that wants to keep the existence of outer space visitors from the public at all cost.  Characters talk and talk and talk and goddamn talk about this until everyone watching would prefer to be anally-probed by these blanket aliens than to listen to another second of talking, then the whole thing ends in as anti-climactic of a fashion as possible.  That is the good part though; it eventually ends.