Nothing Underneath (1985)

One of the more interesting things that the Giallo genre has going for it is its dalliances with the supernatural.  Many times, there will be a psychic or some spectrally focused aspect to the story, and these are often uncovered as being totally banal.  Just look at the opening to Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso, where noted psychic Macha Meril foresees death as water slops out of her mouth, and a raven flies over the audience.  Or look at Emilio Miraglia’s The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, where a dead woman makes appearances as characters are knocked off, one by one.  The thing of it is, yes, typically these elements are nothing more than red herrings, but sometimes they remain unexplained.  This shifts the atmosphere of a film, because the audience knows that the killer has to be a human while simultaneously harboring a tiny mote of doubt that maybe, just maybe, they’re not.  It positions a conflict between the rational and the fantastic, generating a level of tension in its uncertainty.  So, we have siblings Bob (Tom Schanley) and Jessica (Nicola Perring) in Carlo Vanzina’s Nothing Underneath (aka Sotto il Vestito Niente) who share a mild psychic connection.  When Jessica is assaulted in Milan, her brother physically reacts in Wyoming, like Dumas’ Corsican brothers.  But Vanzina cheats this aspect in order to give us a few Killer’s POV shots.  Why would Bob be able to see what the killer sees if his rapport is with his sister, unless his sister is the killer, which she couldn’t be since she’s being stalked by the killer, right?  It’s the kind of superfluous, sloppy construction that marks this film as a low rung on the Giallo ladder.

Anyway, Bob abandons his job as a park ranger to fly to Milan in search of his sister who went missing after his vision of her being menaced.  There, he meets a bunch of fashion models and teams up with Commissioner Danesi (Donald Pleasance) to get to the bottom of things.  Meanwhile, people are being stabbed with a very large pair of scissors (I guess at this point, they should just call them shears).

Bob is a dullard hero.  He has no real personality to speak of.  At the local general store, he gets all excited because his sister finally made the cover of a fashion magazine.  Sure, we might all get excited when a family member succeeds, but Bob takes it to another level of gee-whiz-ness.  He’s not so much a fish out of water as a fish who’s never seen the stuff before.  It’s as if his job out in the wilderness has left him completely oblivious to the civilized world.  Bob is intended as an everyman, an entry into the world of high fashion as an identifier for the audience.  Unfortunately, all he winds up being is a sort of gormless yokel.  This might not have stood out so egregiously if the audience didn’t already know more about the world (fashion and otherwise) than Bob does.  The movie gives no insight, makes no revelations, about fashion, models, or anything else.  Vanzina and company portray the models and their lifestyle exactly the way it’s expected to be.  The interesting thing, if it can be called interesting, is that the film is adapted from a novel by the pseudonymous Marco Parma (actually Paolo Pietroni, editor of Amica magazine; you can guess what the mag’s focus is), and, from what I’ve read about it, is far more complex and, probably, more satisfying than the film version.  The filmmakers appear to have stripped away any of the depth or commentary present in the book to fashion (pardon the pun) a standard-as-they-come mystery.  Bob is a reflection of this, as an underwhelming protagonist in every possible way.

The world of fashion in the film is possibly meant as a cynical analogy for the apathetic carnality of people in general and the “elite” in particular.  Scumbag diamond merchant George wants cocaine and sex, and he takes these things whenever he wants them.  Women are nothing but holes for him to fill.  Money is meaningless to him, since he has so much of it.  He draws models into his web with the promise of wealth or at least a passing brush with it.  They do what he wants because he can give them what they want, and the superficiality of it all is standard fare for stories about models.  Naturally, Jessica stands out as the one who resists George and his advances.  Certainly, she’ll do coke with him, but she won’t have sex with him, and this only brings out the even bigger asshole in George.  George is the price to be paid to breathe in the rarefied air of model-dom.  Resistance is met with retaliation and abandonment.  Further, when models start getting stabbed, it can be seen as a comeuppance for their shallow venality.  Their willingness, nay enthusiasm, to debase themselves for a glamorous lifestyle is unforgivable in the eyes of the film.  It’s a moral we see constantly in stories centering on this universe, and Nothing Underneath is no different.

I think that the title Nothing Underneath is appropriate.  There is nothing underneath this film’s surface that we haven’t seen before.  To be fair, the film is slick as all get out (kind of like a fashion magazine, no?), though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it stylish.  The characters are uninteresting, and even Pleasance’s presence is not enough to elevate this material.  The central mystery of the piece is blatantly obvious (that is to say, nonexistent), and the killer’s identity is evident from the second time we meet the person.  The only aspect that does remain outside the audience’s grasp until the end is the motivation, and while it is mildly intriguing, the filmmakers still don’t do anything to make it stand out (aside from a quick sexual tease, reminiscent of the film in total).  Vanzina and his cohorts took something that screams out for an overdose of Eighties excess and gave us vapid vacuousness.  Maybe this was intentional as commentary on the meaninglessness of lives spent looking fantastic.  But the end result is as shallow as the subject is skin deep.

MVT:  The women in the film are attractive enough, though some of their clothing choices are tragic.

Make or Break:  Following suit with the film’s two-dimensionality, I’ll go with any scene where we see a little female skin.

Score:  3/10    

Body Puzzle (1992)

Tracy Grant (Joanna Pacula) mourns the recent death of her husband while maintaining her career as a book editor.  Meanwhile, a deranged man (Francois Montagut) cuts up a series of victims, removes certain body parts, and sends them to her.  Intrepid detective Mike (Tomas Arana) is on the case!

Lamberto Bava’s Body Puzzle (aka Misteria) is a late-cycle giallo which plays more like a Cinemax erotic thriller (minus the eroticism) than a traditional giallo.  Bava learned much from his father Mario, and, if nothing else, the film is technically well-done.  There are a variety of murders, but only one of them is all that stylish or inventive.  Montagut spends the movie running around, knifing people practically in full view of any number of witnesses, and staring blankly at the world around him.  

As the story begins, the killer sits at a broken piano, fingering the dead keys to a recording we assume he made well in the past.  Like Don Music the Muppet, he smashes his hands and head into the keys which no longer sing for him like they used to.  This is the first indicator of the film’s dealing with the idea of the Self and the loss of same.  As the story unravels, we find out that Tracy also had a brother named Rad (who also recently passed away), and dead husband Abe and Rad may have known a certain unseemly character named Tim.  The removal of the victims’ body parts is a way for the killer to reconstruct Abe, for himself and for Tracy.  This becomes clear when it’s discovered that Abe’s coffin and remains were mysteriously disinterred and absconded with.  The killer’s physical identity is plain from the outset.  He doesn’t wear a black trenchcoat and black gloves.  If anything, he disguises his face with a stocking, but not from the audience.  He is also without personality, except in his murderous purpose.  The central question of the film is never “Who?” but “Why?”  Clearly, the killer is hellbent on becoming someone else to replace what he’s lost, but as a cinematic presence, he’s simply some stabby guy.

The film also concerns itself with the idea of the Observer and the Observed.  Bava makes stealthy and clever use of framing and reflections throughout the film in this regard.  As the killer trails a potential victim through a mall, we see her stare into a number of shop windows, her image reflected back at both she and us.  At the same time, the camera frames any number of mirrors and windows to show us the killer.  She never catches sight of him, but we do, and the way in which he is shown in these reflections (skewed, upside down, etcetera) emphasizes his Otherness.  Similarly, Bava uses POV shots to provide a voyeuristic sense to the film.  The killer watches Tracy at home through her bedroom window and her glass front door.  Of course, the reverse angles of these shots portray his perspective.  And yet, the POV is not always the killer’s.  Many of the tracking and Steadicam shots are from his viewpoint, moving along behind bannisters or clinging to the walls.  These we expect.  The other type of POV shots are his victims’.  One example peers up at the killer from underwater at a pool.  Another watches from inside a toilet as he lops a person’s hand off and it drops into the water (okay, that’s not an actual person’s POV, but it achieves the same effect).  These are shot from low angles, augmenting the killer as a figure in control and meant to be feared.  The undulating water distorts his image, making a mundane-looking guy into an apparition.  The director also wisely chooses to shoot many of the reactions to these POV shots at odd angles, almost never straight on.  The Observed “feels” the eyes of the Observer upon them, and the compositions reflect their unease.

There is also a hint of ideas about class in Body Puzzle, and while these are not central to the film, they do stand out the more one thinks about them.  Tracy comes from a moneyed family.  Mike is just a working class cop, and, naturally, he finds himself attracted to her (her physical desirability is matched by the wealth she possesses and doesn’t seem to pay much mind to).  Tracy can be seen as either a free spirit who does what she wants in spite of her parents’ wishes or because of them.  In other words, she “slums it” just to give them the finger, whether they know it or not.  As she tells Mike, Abe was a sort of gadabout.  He could do most things he set his hand to with some degree of facility, but he was not solid in the career department.  Further, Tracy’s father disapproved of Abe, believing that he was only there for the money.  Abe was a cocaine user, but, as his widow is quick to point out, not a junkie, though he always knew where to score (and note, she never states that she partakes herself).  Abe’s past is delved into, revealing seedier, lower class origins.  He used to live in a tiny portion of the flamboyantly gay Guy’s (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) carriage house.  After he married, he would bring his flings, male and female, there.  The film posits Abe as both a product of the lower class and an enthusiastic participant in it.  The stalking of the victims, the grimy, sweaty portrayal of the killer, and the way he looks in at Tracy’s life signify that he is also of the lower class.  He envies the Haves of the world, and this frustrates him to murder.  In that sense, his activities are as much a method of revenge on the upper class as it is a desire to enter or re-enter it.  The gathering of body parts is an offering as much as it’s an effigy, and it doesn’t quite matter to him that he is simultaneously destroying that which he seems to desire most.  

For as slick as Body Puzzle is, it is equally frustrating and tedious.  The plot points revolve around the killer stabbing someone and Tracy receiving a body part.  Mike takes some action which never moves him any closer to catching the murderer.  The dialogue between the characters is lifeless and cliché, more like small talk than anything progressing a narrative.  There is one major twist toward the end which is actually quite guileful in its revealing of how the audience has been duped.  Nonetheless, it also sends the audience’s mind reeling back through the rest of the film to consider just how sloppy and dimwitted the characters have all behaved up until this point.  Granted, many gialli don’t have the most coherent of solutions, but this one seems more brickheaded than the majority.  By the obvious, facile climax, Mike barely acknowledges Tracy’s presence (maybe he got all he wanted from her?), gets set to move on to the next case, and waltzes off into the night to get some much-needed sleep.  Unfortunately, the audience is already well ahead of him.

MVT:  Bava’s technical proficiency and what thoughtfulness he put into the film.

Make or Break:  The classroom scene.  It’s a delightful standout in a film that mostly sits down.

Score:  5/10         

Scream for Help (1984)

Christie Cromwell (Rachael Kelly) sits wistfully at a lake and peers off into the distance.  In voiceover, she states her name, age (seventeen), and that her dad is trying to murder her mom.  With that feminine-hygiene-product-esque intro out of the way, the rest of Michael Winner’s Scream for Help concerns itself with Christie’s efforts to prove this statement without dying.

For the first two thirds, the film is about Christie’s temerarious attempts to catch out stepdad Paul (David Allen Brooks).  She follows him for several days on her bicycle until she finds where he goes everyday from work.  And how did she come to suspect him in the first place?  She came downstairs in the middle of the night and saw him coming out of the basement.  The camera gazes down the cellar steps, and we hear water.  The next day, a utility worker is killed when he touches the wet electrical box in the basement.  Suspicious?  Maybe.  But Christie wants Paul to be a murderer, because her mother left her biological father (whom we never see nor learn anything about, not insignificantly, I believe) for him.  It is possible that everything Christie discovers or witnesses could be put down as confirmation bias, but the script (by Tom Holland) doesn’t even try to beguile us like that.  It’s blatantly obvious from the giddy-up that Paul has malfeasance on his mind.  I’ve never read a Nancy Drew story (or Hardy Boys, for that matter, but I have seen a lot of Scooby Doo and Clue Club), but the instant that Christie begins her investigation, that’s what I thought of.  I imagine that a Drew tale probably involves more mystery than Scream for Help does, though (and probably less violence, sex, and blood).  

Of course, no one believes Christie.  Even her best friend Janey (Sandra Clark) thinks Christie’s gone off the deep end.  The police commissioner (Tony Sibbald) at first takes her accusations seriously, but after some mindbogglingly shitty police work comes to not only disbelieve the young lady but also to develop a sort of grudge against her.  Christie’s mother (Marie Masters) doesn’t take her daughter seriously, even though, from what I recall, her relationship with Paul is not that old.  Apparently, mom took up with Paul, ditched her husband, and married the other man in a matter of months.  Christie’s allegations are seen largely in this light by the other characters but not by the audience.  Christie watches (and we do, too) as Paul gets it on with Brenda (Lolita Lorre, whom I’d like to believe is related to Peter, but I couldn’t find anything confirming or denying this) multiple times, and his flimsy excuses would raise eyebrows in even the most devoted of marital partners.  It may have been interesting to see the story develop with a more enigmatic approach to what’s going on, but the filmmakers aren’t really interested in that.  Instead, they draw out this cat and mouse aspect just to get to the meat of what the film is actually about.  This is either a master stroke of deception or a happy accident.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

And here’s where it becomes difficult to discuss Scream for Help any further without getting into SPOILERS.  More than anything, the film is about the initiation of Christie into adulthood and how both sex and violence are the means of that inauguration.  Beyond this, it’s about the choice between sex and violence that Christie has to make.  Christie lives in a world where absolutely everyone around her is having sex except her.  When she races over to her friend Janey’s house to tell Janey about her theory of Paul’s murderous intent, she waltzes in on Janey having sex with Josh (Corey Parker, whom most will recognize as the effete Arnold Epstein in Biloxi Blues).  Janey, probably pissed for being interrupted pre-orgasm, is openly hostile to Christie, who, in turn, is pissed at Janey for not telling her that she was having sex at all.  Christie comes home to the sounds of her mother and Paul having sex, and she runs to her room in anguish.  But Christie is, of course, curious about sex, and Paul’s affair with Brenda is the window (literally and figuratively) into this fascination.  At several points, she spies the two doing the job, and it’s always at a remove through a pane of glass (like watching a live Swedish sex show in a porn booth).  Paul asks if Christie is writing “the life and times of a sex maniac” in her journal.  Nope, it’s all about murder.  Intriguingly, Corey is the ostensible love interest, but he’s about as big a jerkoff as every other man in the film.  Christie catches Corey flirting with another girl at school (the day after she caught him with Janey?).  She tries to rope him into helping her out by threatening to tell his father about Janey, and Corey proudly states that his dad would congratulate him.  Rather, it’s the threat of cutting him off from Janey’s pussy that motivates the kid (and puts her own in his crosshairs).  After Janey is out of the picture, Corey and Christie hook up pretty fast.  Corey continues to pressure Christie, telling her he cares about her, but we know that he’s simply horny, and while we can’t necessarily blame him for this, it makes him no less of a douche.

When Christie and Corey finally have sex, it’s unpleasant for Christie, but then again, it’s her first time.  It’s painful, and the blood from popping her cherry scares her.  The ties between sex and violence in the film have been leading up to this moment, and here is where Christie chooses which of the two she prefers.  When Corey brings up the possibility of more sex, please, Christie tells him that she “doesn’t want to go to bed with anybody ever again.”  In the last third of the picture, when Paul and his accomplices hold Christie and her mom captive, things come to a head.  Faced with their imminent deaths, Christie, with ho-hum determination, states, “There’s only one way.  I’m gonna have to kill them.”  With MacGyver-ian resourcefulness and icy resolve, she sets about doing just that.  The film becomes Death Wish if Paul Kersey’s wife and daughter fought back (or maybe just Home Alone with corpses).  After the siege of her house, Corey and Christie get down to some foreplay, but violence rears up yet again, and Christie, without hesitation, goes into kill mode.  Sex is something she may still want to do despite her inexperienced protestations, but violence is something she likes.  This is what maturity means in the world of Scream for Help.  That the film is so frank about these facets is rather startling, considering its almost juvenile plot and dialogue, flat direction, and a score that is insanely incongruous (it sounds like it was taken from a Seventies industrial film about the future of plastics mixed with a buddy cop show of the same era).  Nevertheless, this forthrightness is what also makes the film so special.

MVT:  The remarkable depths to which the film dives and the unsparing attitude it takes in going there.

Make or Break:  The vehicular homicide that comes out of nowhere.  It’s fast, brutal, and contains a spectacular mannequin death.

Score:  7/10