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Original title: Nude... si muore
Italy: Antonio Margheriti, 1968

So far, all of the gialli that I've watched for this project have demonstrated a wide variety of influences. Naked You Die is where this all changes, as its sole frame of reference seems to be Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, with an all-girl boarding school standing in for the earlier film's fashion house and its various pupils replacing the models. Margheriti, however, doesn't have half the visual flare of Bava, and the cinematography is overall flat and unattractive, particularly when it comes to the lighting which, day or night, has the same harsh brightness. Nor does he possess Bava's imagination: almost everyone dies as a result of a straightforward strangling, which seems to take little more than a couple of seconds.

Margheriti does, however, make occasional use of the subjective camera to represent the killer's point of view, beating Dario Argento to this technique by nearly two years. (One of the interesting things about tackling these films chronologically is that you begin to get a sense of at what points various trends began to become popular.) There is also a rather effective moment in which a girl strangled in a basement drops to the floor, her head angled directly at the camera - staring, as it were, at the audience. That's about it for creative kills, though, and the film's title turns out to be incredibly misleading as most of the victims are fully clothed when they are murdered.

Elsewhere, a bland cast and unbelievable, perfunctory dialogue kill pretty much any potential interest in the plot itself. Mark Damon is hopelessly ill-equipped as riding instructor Richard Barrett, while the fact that virtually every girl on campus seems to be on the verge of swooning at his feet just boggles the mind - "I think I'm in love; he's the man I've always dreamed of!" is an actual line, spoken within minutes of his arrival. Naturally, he has his own ideas about the students, and ends up romancing one hapless girl who - coincidentally - is deathly afraid of horses.

Naked You Die can pretty much be summed up by the first couple of minutes, as a woman sheds her clothes, takes a bath and is promptly murdered: Margheriti teases but shows very little with regard to violence and nudity. This is effectively an exploitation film without any exploitation, and there certainly isn't anything more intellectually stimulating to compensate. It just amazes me that a giallo about a killer stalking the pupils of an all-girl school can be so damn chaste! One for completists only.

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USA: Robert Schwentke, 2005

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USA: Edward Zwick, 2006

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Original title: La Morte ha Fatto l'Uovo
Italy/France: Giulio Questi, 1968

Marco (Jean-Louis Trintignant) has married for money, which comes in the form of the chicken farm owned by his wife Anna (Gina Lollobrigida). It's a state of the art affair, employing all manner of high-tech machinery and avant garde music to get the chickens in the correct psychological frame of mind. Marco, however, has a few sordid secrets up his sleeve. Not only is he carrying on an affair with Anna's cousin Gabriella (Ewa Aulin), he also takes regular trips to a hotel, where he indulges in the murder of prostitutes. Nothing is quite as it seems, however, with multiple conspiracies brewing beneath the surface, and everything eventually explodes in a cocktail of mind games, backstabbing and, yes, headless chickens. (From my review at DVD Times)

I defy anyone to claim that the giallo was a movement aimed exclusively at grindhouse audiences, as Mikel Koven's book La Dolce Morte suggests, after watching this film. The clearest frame of reference seems to be Jean-Luc Godard, as evinced by the wildly experimental editing, while the sweltering heat that can be palpably felt throughout the entire film recalls the Western Django, Kill... If You Live, Shoot! for which Questi is best remembered. You won't find much Bava here... then again, you won't find much Antonioni either. Death Laid an Egg sports one of the most bizarre titles in the entire giallo catalogue, and is a baffling mindfuck of a movie. As an experiment, it's an interesting one, but as a commercial film, the end result is somewhat less than the sum of its parts, for, while the various avant garde techniques of narrative and editing that co-writer and director Giulio Questi exploits are definitely interesting and give the film a tone unlike any other giallo, they ultimately serve to make the film more frustrating than engaging.

This is a film that seems to be off-kilter right from the start, as the opening titles play out over stock footage of microscopic close-ups of living organisms, set to the crashing and banging of Bruno Maderna's weird, jaunty, atonal score, which manages to be both incredibly annoying and incredibly catchy at the same time. This segues into a truly baffling scene showing various hotel guests doing a mixture of mundane and bizarre things in their rooms - polishing knives, combing hair, preparing to commit suicide, and so on. Like much of the rest of the film, this first scene promises much but ultimately delivers little: a series of non-sequiturs with little pay-off. In a sense, it doesn't work because, despite using experimental editing techniques and throwing in a whole bunch of inexplicable cutaways and seemingly irrelevant plot strands, Questi still insists on tying it all to a relatively straightforward narrative structure. The thriller element, which doesn't really surface until well into the second half, and has more in common with a domestic melodrama than the urban slashers popularised by Dario Argento, doesn't really fit, while what seem to be various criticisms of commercialism don't really go anywhere meaningful.

What does work very well, however, is the claustrophobic atmosphere. The film seems to take place in the middle of the Italian summer, with the light so bright and the heat clearly so intense that at times it feels as if the characters are actually being suffocated. Even during the night scenes, the characters (or is that the actors?) look as if they are on the verge of collapse, while the fact that everyone looks (and sounds, at least in the English version) incredibly bored and tired seems somewhat appropriate given the film's rather biting portrayal of this section of society. In true giallo fashion, everyone is deceiving everyone else (the constant allusions to masks are perhaps just a little too bludgeoning), and the glee with which certain characters approach the prospect of pretending to be someone else just serves to underscore how thoroughly tedious their everyday lives are.

Death Laid an Egg has built up quite a following in certain circles, most likely on account of its obscurity and weirdness - how could a film which features genetically mutated chickens that are basically falls of meat with pulsating veins and feet not be embraced by the cult circuit? A film doesn't, after all, have to be brilliant in order to develop a cult following: often, simply being weird is enough. While Death Laid an Egg is not a bad film per se, it is an unsuccessful one - one that add two and two together and doesn't quite make four.

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USA: Adam McKay, 2004

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USA: Stephen Gaghan, 2005

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UK: Matthew Vaughn, 2004

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France: Luc Besson, 2005

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USA: Mark Pellington, 1999

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UK/Italy: Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966

"Slowly, slowly... against the beat." - The unnamed photographer of Blowup

"What's the meaning of this?" you ask. "I thought this was the Giallo Project?" It's a valid enough question, and I thought long and hard about whether or not to include Blowup in this rogue's gallery, but eventually I came to the conclusion that I couldn't afford to ignore it. You see, while I don't believe it possible to describe this as a giallo in the truest sense (although both Blood and Black Lace and The Giallo Scrapbook 2 do so), I suspect that it had a profound impact on virtually every giallo beyond a certain point in history. It undoubtedly had a huge influence on Dario Argento, who adapted several of its themes into The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and indeed all of his 1970s gialli, and, in turn, the various directors who set out to imitate Argento's work ended up adopting these same themes and stylistic traits second-hand - imitations of an imitation, as it were. Besides, I thought it only right that I do something to acknowledge Antonioni's recent death.

Beyond the plot, which, if you break it down, is basically the same as virtually every Argento giallo - an artist living as an outsider in a contemporary urban space, flitting around unable to settle, witnesses (or believes he has witnessed) a crime taking place, the solution to which lies in a single image or memory that he can't quite understand - it's the very atmosphere that so closely mirrors everything from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh: a sort of decadence, a society of bourgeois excess, where people are obsessed with useless commodities and avant-garde art, and seem to have to real purpose in life. I wasn't around to experience the 60s first-hand (far from it!), but I can easily see this as a defining statement of the atmosphere and mood of the period. In some respects, it makes the same point as Blood and Black Lace, and yet the bleak urban landscapes are a world away from the gothic opulence of Bava's film.

David Hemmings' unnamed photographer is clearly the forerunner to Sam Dalmas and Marc Daly - and indeed, Argento even cast Hemmings as Marc in the seminal Deep Red, itself a clever inversion of Blowup which actually manages to outclass its predecessor. In many respects, though, he's a far nastier piece of work than the two of them put together. Daly had some rather antiquated ideas about the place of women in society, while Dalmas seemed to treat his girlfriend as a commodity, but they pale in significance to the character in Blowup (referred to as "Thomas" in many sources but never actually named in the film itself - actually, names are almost completely absent, a reference, perhaps, to the characters' lack of identity and failure to find a place for themselves in the world), who manhandles several models, forcibly "posing" them and berating them for being useless, not to mention toying with blackmailing a woman (Vanessa Redgrave) who objects to having her picture taken on the sly. That's effectively Antonioni's (and Argento's) point, though: he is a vain, self-absorbed prick, continually searching for a perfect image that doesn't exist, and searching for meaning where there is none. Of course, it's therefore entirely appropriate that the central mystery is a single image whose very meaning continues to elude him (and the more he focuses on the image, the more he loses perspective).

In many regards, Blowup is about as anti-giallo as you can get - there are no on-screen murders, and the film is famous for its deliberate refusal to provide a solution to its central mystery - and yet in orders, you can see the roots of so many 70s gialli in it that it's impossible to ignore it completely. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the giallo of the golden age is effectively a marriage between Bava's early efforts and Blowup, filtered through Argento's sensibility and adopted by a slew of imitators - a reinterpretation of the form in the context of the post-1968 cultural revolution. It's a brilliant, baffling, mesmerising film in its own right, but when you consider the knock-on effect that it had on the giallo movement, its importance becomes all the more clear.

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