Delitto allo specchio (1964)

... aka: Crime in the Mirror
... aka: Death on the Fourposter
... aka: Les possédées du démon (The Demon Possessions)
... aka: Murder in the Mirror
... aka: Sexy Party

Directed by:
Jean Josipovici

Baron Ricky (Michel Lemoine) has arranged to have a SeXy PaRtY at his family's secluded castle and he's invited all of his swingin' Parisian pals to come along for a weekend of champagne, cigarettes, smoked salmon and, the fellas hope, hooking up with members of the opposite sex. Some of the guys are sort of dating some of the girls, but most everyone seems open to all of the possibilities. Well, except for the guy who seems mildly outraged: "But this isn't the orient! You can't just exchange girls!" Sure you can. This is a SeXy PaRtY after all. Upon arriving at the castle, the ill-defined cast park their cars in a garage, which is then locked. Their host shows them where the one key is and tells them not to misplace it so you just know the key is going to eventually turn up missing to trap them all there.

I usually like describing the characters in a little detail but seeing how this film doesn't bother doing that itself and much of the cast sort of blurs together into one big lump of nothingness, there's no reason to bother with it myself. The notables are the naive Nikki (Maria Pia Conte), who wears a big sweater instead of a sexy dress or one-piece romper like her gal pals so you know she's virtuous, is spending her first night away from home and has a crush on the older host. Instead of casting an old crone as the obligatory stern, cold and suspicious housekeeper, they've cast a hot blonde (Luisa Rivelli), who's also Ricky's lover and getting fed up with his playboy ways. The pervert castle caretaker Aldo (Giuseppe Fortis) is a peeping tom who spies on the girls changing in the bathroom through the keyhole. The glamorous and sexy Serena (Antonella Lualdi) is Ricky's ex-squeeze who's brought along a new musician friend named Anthony (John Drew Barrymore), who's brought a 45 of his new song called, you guessed it, SeXy PaRtY for the gang to dance to.

To spice up the evening, Serena proposes they all play a little party game called "The Shattering of Illusions." Each guest is to announce what's the most important thing in their life, while Serena tries to shatter that illusion. Charlie (Mario Valdemarin) wants to be with Lucianne (Vittoria Prada), an heiress set to inherit a fortune, but Serena manages to seduce him into almost kissing her in under a minute after whispering a sweet nothing (actually, a not-so-sweet something it turns out) into his ear. Gambling addict Paul (Joe Atlanta) is willing to "loan out" his girlfriend Kitty (José Greci) to his friend Georgie (Massimo Carocci) when he runs out of money during a game of dice. The point being that "The things that we take for granted can end at any moment...like life itself."

In addition to his music, Anthony also has been dabbling around with magic and the occult and has the ability to see into both the past and the future. During a séance he has horrible visions prophesying doom and warns the guests to get out of the castle while there's still time. However, everyone's having such a ball that no one heeds his warning. Not surprisingly, soon after that one of the ladies is found dead in her bed, presumably strangled to death with a scarf that belongs to none other than weirdo Aldo. Another of the women, Frankie (Gloria Milland), is found dead by Ricky, but her body disappears before he can retrieve the others. When he continues having visions of her corpse, he can't figure out whether he's seeing a ghost or going mad.

Of course there's a silly explanation behind the strange events that's revealed after we wade through the usual assortment of red herrings, intentional plot misdirection and Gothic horror intrigue like secret passageways and a hidden dungeon. The major issue here is that this is a far more interesting movie before the mystery / horror elements even come into play. The set-up, which takes up the entire first half of the film, is quite intriguing at times but the pay-off is pedestrian in the extreme. Once the first body is discovered, the dialogue becomes more vacuous, the characters become dumber and the pacing slows to a crawl. When the characters aren't moronically wandering around just asking to be killed, they're sitting around the castle's main room looking bored out of their minds. I could relate.

A lot of time is spent trying to make this about as sexy as a mainstream early 60s movie could be. Meaning, there's no nudity but a whole lot of bare back, bra, lingerie and leg action going on, plus a lot of sexual innuendo. They do kind of nail something darkly, subtly sensual with the dimly-lit castle setting and decadent characters, but even that aspect falls by the wayside in the second half. This would have been better had it not even become a genre film at all and dealt exclusively with the characters, their relationships and the assorted jealousies, neuroses, insecurities and mind games.

With a cast otherwise comprised entirely of French and Italian stars, you may find it odd that American actor Barrymore, son of the esteemed theater legend John Barrymore, is in this. Long story short, it's because he'd already burned too many bridges in Hollywood and was the subject of so much stateside tabloid scandal that he was tarnishing the family legacy. Prior to relocating, he'd been arrested for public intoxication, spousal abuse, delinquent alimony payments and a hit-and-run accident. Despite being given roles in major studio films right out of the gate that likely had more to do with his last name than his actual talent, Barrymore had a bad habit of refusing to show up on set and bailing out of various film, TV and theatrical productions, usually with no notice whatsoever.

Nepotism was pretty much all that was keeping him in the game by a certain point. After doing over a dozen movies in Europe (mostly in Italy) from 1960 to 1964, he returned to the U.S. to find his career prospects even more limited and continued getting into scrapes with the law, which included more arrests for automobile accidents and drug possession. The biggest impact he'd make on the entertainment industry was essentially donating sperm so that Drew Barrymore could be conceived. He's also the father of the less-successful John Blyth Barrymore, who he had with one of his other four wives. JBB went on to do a lot of ADR work and was a regular in some of Fred Olen Ray's direct-to-video movies like Inner Sanctum II (1994) and Hybrid (1997).

Often considered a very early example of the giallo genre, this was released the same exact year as Mario Bava's defining film BLOOD AND BLACK LACE. The cast also includes Alberto Cevenini (who also appeared in Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES) as Lou-Lou and Monique Vita (who ended up in hardcore pornography in the late 70s) as the ditsy Edie. An English-dubbed version played theatrically in both the U.S. (under the title Death on the Fourposter) and the UK (as Sexy Party). Sinister Cinema distributed this on DVD-R and VHS and a number of other bootleg sites also carry this title.

★★

Way to Shadow Garden, The (1954)

... aka: Road to Shadow Garden, The

Directed by:
Stan Brakhage

Missouri-born filmmaker Brakhage was a college dropout, artiste and professor who was part of the experimental / avant garde communities in San Francisco, New York and various cities in Colorado at various stages of his career. He made nearly 400 (mostly short and mostly not at all concerned with conventional narrative) films, won an American Film Institute Award in 1986 and has had some of his work released to DVD by the highbrow Criterion Collection but may be best known nowadays for damaging, scratching and warping film stock, or painting or drawing directly onto it, to achieve a peculiar look that is said to heighten viewer subjectivity. That technique later carried over to other films, most notably the stylish opening credits of the popular serial killer "thriller" Se7en (1995), which have been aped endlessly since. He always shot on 8mm or 16mm and frequently dipped his hands into the experimental filmmaker grab-bag of trickery, utilizing out of focus / blur shots, collage, superimposition, experimental editing, overexposure, etc.

Brakhage was not someone really on my radar until I was made aware of his The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1972), which has turned up on some horror / "most disturbing" film lists in recent years. Act consists of 30+ minutes of silent autopsy footage which some people view as being a film that forces viewers to confront their own mortality while others view as 30 minutes of gross silent autopsy footage. That's not something that appeals to me in the least so I probably won't be viewing it, but when I discovered this guy had made a few other genre shorts, I was interested.

A handheld camera, resembling a floating spirit, travels around a room capturing a light, an open door, a spinning lampshade and other things, then goes up and down the wall, all accompanied by strange, loud and quite frankly annoying distorted sounds that appear to be a human whistling, wheezing and imitating howling wind and thumping sounds. Aside from the audio, this reminded me a lot of Sam Raimi's busy camerawork in his Evil Dead films, just far more primitive. A young man (Walt Newcomb) enters the room, looks around, grabs a timer and alternates looking confused with looking anguished. He then throws water in his face, cries, laughs and dances. His bed sheets move position all on their own. He lights a cigarette and starts reading a book. He then pokes his own eyeballs out with his fingers and wanders outside where the film goes to negative image as the man grasps at flowers and plants and the camera goes in and out of focus. What does it all mean? Well that's for you to decide, dear chum.

This comes off like an amateur student film because, well, it is an amateur student film. Brakhage was attending the California School for the Arts (later the San Francisco Art Academy) at the time and this is him very early in his career trying out a few cool filming techniques. My favorite thing about watching stuff like this is reading viewer comments afterward. You have a mix of people saying "WTF was that supposed to be?" followed by others insisting it's deeply artistic, profound, poetic, etc. and then insulting the confused viewers by calling them stupid. And the world keeps turnin'.

★★

Without Warning! (1952)

... aka: Achtung! Blondinengangster (Caution! Blonde Gangster)
... aka: Le sadique (The Sadist)
... aka: Mord uden varsel (Murder Without Warning)
... aka: Sangue sotto la luna (Blood Under the Moon)
... aka: Story Without a Name, The

Directed by:
Arnold Laven

A woman is found in a hotel room stabbed to death in the back with a twin-bladed object (a pair of scissors). The murder matches the modus operandi of a similar killing of a waitress a month earlier. Both victims were blonde and had alcohol in their system and both were killed at around the same time (3am) at the beginning of the month. The latest one was a married woman who'd signed the register using a fake name. The only physical clues left behind are "some stuff" under her fingernails, fingerprints and a piece of blue suit fabric. Police - led by Lt. Pete Hamilton (Edward Binns) and Detective Sgt. Don Warde (Harlan Warde) - run the fingerprints and come up with no matches, so they round up any man in the area who'd ever been connected to a crime similar to the one at the hotel. They all have their prints run. Still nothing. Whoever's been committing these grisly murders apparently has no criminal record to speak of. They do however discover the patch of torn fabric left at the scene comes from a rather expensive suit and, granted the killer isn't someone wealthy who could easily afford to replace it, the killer may try to get it repaired.

Seeing how this is no mystery, we're introduced to the psycho right away. He's a mild mannered and seemingly-nonthreatening young man by the name of Carl Martin (Adam Williams, who'd go on to bigger things like playing an assassin in Hitchcock's North by Northwest and a sailor in the classic "The Hitch-Hiker" episode of The Twilight Zone). Carl lives in the hills above Los Angeles and works as a landscaper and gardener. And he really, really has a hang-up about blondes since his wife, who we can assume was a blonde floozie, left him. Carl gets his supplies from a local nursery run by Fred Saunders (John Maxwell). Fred's daughter Jane (Meg Randall), whose military husband is currently stationed overseas, has come from Fresno to stay with him and temporarily help out at his business. Upon first seeing Jane, Carl quickly and awkwardly rushes off, as not to let his primal impulses get the better of him. However, he slows starts ingratiating himself into her life and makes frequent trips to the greenhouse just to visit her, which moves her high up on his list of targets.

Detectives canvas every tailor shop in town and tell them to be on the lookout for a man attempting to get a blue suit jack fixed; giving them contact information in case one shows up at their shop. However, their plan to trap the killer doesn't work when Carl overhears a tailor and decides to burn his suit instead. Even though Carl has his issues, he's not stupid and is extremely careful about leaving any evidence behind. That's one thing that ends up saving Jane when he shows up at the greenhouse late one night plotting to kill her before realizing the timestamp on a bill he'd just paid would give him away to police. Instead, Carl has to settle for a sultry blonde pick-up Janet Collier (Angela Stevens) at a sleazy bar. The next morning while he's in his latest victim's car under a bridge with the body, he gets caught up in the sand as two motorcycle cops approach and is barely able to escape. While he flees in a panic, he injures both cop, hops on a truck, ends up at a market and is forced to yield a few cabs, leaving a few more clues behind in the process.

Assorted nuts (called "the creatures" by the narrator!) who show up at the station trying to take credit for the killings "in their desire to bask briefly in the headlines" are but a minor distraction as the focused cops finally manage to get some more important clues from the cab drivers who transported Carl around after his last killing. They get a psychological profile from police consult psychiatrist Dr. Werner (Robert Shayne) and then enlist the aid of all of the force's bottle blonde female detectives, who act as decoys in local bars the psycho is believed to frequent. Virginia (Marilee Phelps) is the lucky one who manages to meet up with the suspect, but when Carl realizes he's being trailed by a cop on their drive, he lets her out of the car unharmed and then finds another victim. Police chemist Charlie Wilkins (Byron Kane) discovers that traces of wood, different soil types and chemicals found in commercial grade fertilizer are also present at all the crimes scene, getting them just one step closer to apprehending the killer. But will they be able to get to Carl before he gets to Jane?

This film noir / police procedural / serial killer psycho-thriller is very much like an extended episode of a popular current TV show like CSI or Law & Order; bouncing back and forth between the activities of the killer and new developments in the investigation as authorities start closing in. Acting and dialogue are decent enough and it looks rather good (cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc later won an Oscar for The Towering Inferno) plus features a variety of shooting locations so it never feels too staid. Seeing forensics and investigators at work during a less 'connected' time with fewer tools at their disposal is fairly interesting. There's some good suspense in here, too, plus some witty lines and black humor. The most amusing bit is when a "happily married" suspect is ensnared by one of the decoys, taken in for questioning, threatens to take them to court and is then reminded they'd have to inform his wife why he was there in the first place before they throw him out!

Roy Engel (as the police captain) and William Boyett (as a motorcycle cop) appear uncredited and the narration (which is rather unnecessary and detracts from the flow of the film) is by Reed Hadley. The story and screenplay were written by William Raynor, who wrote a lot of low budget 50s B films like PHANTOM FROM SPACE (1953), KILLERS FROM SPACE (1954) and Target Earth (1954) before settling into a career as a prolific TV writer. Director Laven also worked mostly on TV, though he directed the fun creature feature The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) and produced the very good THE VAMPIRE (1957).

For a long time this independently-made United Artists release was believed lost (which put it high up on film noir buff's wish lists for a number of years) but was finally given a belated DVD release in 2005 by Dark Sky Films.

★★★