Femina ridens (1969)

... aka: Frightened Woman, The
... aka: Laughing Woman, The
... aka: Le duo de la mort (The Duo of Death)

Directed by:
Piero Schivazappa

Newly-hired journalist Maria Egstrom (Dagmar Lassander) shows up at a philanthropic organization looking for material on an article she's working on about forced male sterilization in India. Before agreeing to hand over said documents, organization director Dr. Sayer (Philippe Leroy) first engages her in a conversation about the topic. When she expresses favor for the program as she doesn't feel as if women should always bear the brunt of responsibility when it comes to taking precautions, Sayer gives her a long, impassioned and bizarrely angry rebuttal. To him, the practice is monstrous and barbaric. He likens it to a "permanent incapacity" and insists that "the potency of the male" must always be protected. Instead of taking such drastic measures to curb population growth, he instead wants to focus on sound educational programs and what he feels is "a practical appeal to responsibility." Despite his annoyance, he agrees to allow her access to the research papers, but she has to stop by his home, which is out in the boonies and difficult to find, to get them.

Upon arrival at the doctor's mansion, she's taken aback by his décor, which isn't exactly fitting for someone known for their generosity and philanthropy. For starters he has a massive collection of daggers but even more curious is his idea of charming decorative art including paintings of various bacteria, protozoa and viruses like the bubonic plague, rabies and leprosy. He offers her a scotch, which he's drugged. After she passes out, he takes her to a large, secure bunker, handcuffs her to a wall, threatens to stab her and goes on paranoid rants about a conspiracy of women planning to make themselves both socially and sexually self-sufficient. He believes women have secretly been conspiring together to collect male sperm and deep freeze it, and then incubate their offspring instead of giving birth, in their quest to eventually make men completely obsolete.

This is all the arrogant, crazed doctor's idea of weekend entertainment and Maria certainly isn't the first unwilling female to take part. Sayer likes to document (via audio recordings and still photos) the torture and murder of his captives. He even shows Maria a slide show of his various activities to give her an idea of what she's in for. But before he murders her, he first wants to play with her, torture her and try to break her ("You must face the fact that you are my slave. I can do everything to you for my pleasure.... kill you if I want."). He makes her simulate sex with a mannequin in his likeness and rub his feet and legs. He gags her and makes her watch him eat in silence, cuts off her hair and sprays her down with a high-powered hose. He eventually reveals that the only way he's capable of having sex is through torture as foreplay and then murder as climax.

After about an hour of psycho thrills, this takes an entirely different direction in the final third as we learn that a few things we were led to believe aren't true at all. Sayer remains a disturbed, confused individual, though he explains that as a child he saw a female scorpion eat the male during sex and was forever affected by it. He perhaps would even be open to the idea of Maria potentially "curing" him. However, after the hell he's put her through, she may not even be interested in helping... and who could blame her! There's also the chance she has, and has always had, her own agenda or will opt for revenge now that he's in an emotionally vulnerable state.

Visually, there's some pretty neat stuff in here, most especially the production design from Francesco Cuppini. The doctor's residence; a labyrinth of minimally-dressed rooms which have no real personality, is pretty interesting. Everything is uncluttered, sterile, pathologically orderly and electronically operated by push button. This is the kind of home where if something doesn't serve a purpose or have a direct use there's no place for it, which tells you a lot about the lead male character. The most memorable bit of wacky production design though occurs during a hallucination scene where we get a giant papier-mâché prop of a woman's spread legs with a doorway in the center complete with toothy doors. It's so big it had to be constructed in a warehouse! Subtle imagery it's not. But it's great, anyway.

The kitsch, psychedelia, feminism, psycho-drama, mild camp and Sayer's amusingly demented little monologues all make for a fairly entertaining movie, even if the events and characters don't have much emotional weight behind them. Seeing how we're squarely in the female corner from the very beginning as the male is portrayed as a cocky, paranoid control freak fueled by an irrational and ridiculous philosophy, this isn't so much a "battle of the sexes" as it is an inner battle of a disturbed man who can't handle assertive women.

There's a great score by Stelvio Cipriari, which was released on vinyl by CAM and on CD by Digitmovies, and Carlo Rambaldi, billed by just his last name, is credited with the special effects, though I'm not sure what exactly that entails. He probably either built the leg statue or the car that turns into a boat (yes, there's one of those in here, too). Or both. Or neither. I have no clue. Those seem to be the only real "effects" in the movie.

Some sources claim the uncut version runs 108 minutes but I don't believe it. The 86 minute version commonly available is also the version endorsed by the director himself so I doubt he'd be cool with a version that has a whopping 22 minutes removed! There was a tie-in novelization by Hadrian Keene released in 1970, the same year this debuted in U.S. theaters with an X rating under the title The Laughing Woman. The DVD title is The Frightened Woman. Fans of Italian thrillers / giallo and gaudy art films will most definitely want to check this out.

★★★

Apaches (1977) / The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (1973)

Directed by:
Jeff Grant
John Mackenzie

Having spent a lot of time on my grandpa's farm growing up, I still have vivid memories of many afternoons and evenings in the fields doing things like staking tobacco, pulling weeds and digging up potatoes. But the absolute worst farm chore by a landslide was dealing with the hay, which had to be baled, loaded on a flatbed wagon, taken up a steep hill by tractor to the barn, unloaded (thrown out) and then carried and stacked. As a kid, this was basically the worst thing ever. For starters, we were always doing it in 100 degree heat. And then you'd cough your throat raw because of the constant dust and dry grass in the air. The bales were heavy, especially for a kid, and the rope used to tie them together would frequently get loosened or break and you'd get loose hay all over the place. That hay had to be raked to the side and then fed through the baler again later on. But the absolute worst part was that any exposed flesh on your body was later covered with itchy red welts where the hay had irritated your skin. They weren't quite scratches and were gone the next day but they made for a pretty uncomfortable evening. But, hey, at least I never had it as bad as the kids in John Mackenzie's Apaches!

This is a well-made / shot warning-of-the-dangers-of-[fill in the blank] "educational" short running 27 minutes and produced by the Central Office of Information, maker of thousands of public information videos since the 1940s, and the Health & Safety Executive. The subject of today's class? The dangers of farm equipment and goofing around on farms and in old barns!

Six young children - Danny (who prefers to be called Chief Geronimo), Kim, Sharon, Michael, Tom and Robert - are playing "Apaches" and decide to make a raid on their small farming village. They ambush a tractor, Kim jumps on the back of a flatbed, it slams on its brakes and she ends up falling off and getting crushed under the tires. Next, a game of kick the can leads to Tom accidentally falling in a pile of manure and drowning. Yes, this is basically little more than a bunch of children accidentally getting killed. After each death, we get to see a sticker by the child's coat hook in their school being removed, their desk being cleared out and their dresser drawers emptied. While all of that's going on, oblivious adults just go about their business. Workers wave back and mock shoot at the kid's plastic cap guns and adult hands prepare for a dinner party where the child narrator muses that they'll no doubt be getting drunk.

There's also accidental ingestion of poison, being crushed by a falling metal gate and a runaway tractor going over a hill. The end credits give us a list of (first) names and the ages of children who've died the previous year on farms and the ways in which they died, some of which match what we've see here and some of which (electrocution, suffocating in grain pit, explosion...) we don't.

I was one of these kids playing on the farm around all of the same equipment featured here, and the adults around me paid about as much attention as the adults featured in this short, but I guess I'm one of the lucky ones who somehow managed not to get mangled or killed. But it's nice to know British kids got fed the same exact stuff we did here in the U.S.! This reminded me a lot of a bus safety scare video we had to watch in elementary school where a kid drops his books and climbs under a bus to retrieve them, followed by the shot of a wheel moving and then a loud *crunch* sound.

This is available on a 2 disc set distributed by BFI titled The COI Collection Volume Four: Stop! Look! Listen!, which was released in 2011 and contains 268 minutes of similar public safety videos. The other short of interest on the set is the 1 1/2 minute The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (1973; aka Lonely Water), directed by Jeff Clark, which is one of the most famous British PIFs of all time.

Donald Pleasence contributes the sinister voice of the cloaked, ever-looming "Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water" a Grim Reaper-like death figure who just can't wait for careless, foolish kids to fall into the water and drown themselves. Among his victims are a boy showing off in front of his friends, a boy grabbing onto a rotten branch trying to retrieve a ball and another kid who ignores a no swimming sign and doesn't take into consideration all of the junk at the bottom of ponds that he can snag himself on. I'm sure this creepy little short probably kept a lot of kids out of potentially dangerous waters, so mission accomplished!

★★★