GIALLO A VENEZIA

SPOILERS AND HOW MUCH LONGER IS THIS GOING ON?

Or Thriller In Venice. Or Gore In Venice or Mystery In Venice. Or, if you trust Google Translate, Nightmare In Venice, Blood In Venice, Intrigue In Venice or even Horn In Venice. Presumably Sleazy Rapey Boredom In Venice was taken. Certainly there's gore, a little mystery, a brief nightmare and plenty of blood, but the only horns on show are the ones in Berto Pisano's monstrously inappropriate score slapped randomly over the sex and violence (apparently tracked in from another film anyway, but appallingly placed here). Oddly enough given the title, there's not much in the way of traditional giallo: the killer's identity is not hidden and there's little of the visual or narrative style you'd associate with the highpoints of the genre.

If someone had released Giallo A Venezia in the UK at the time there's no doubt it would have hit the top tranche of video nasties. Because this is one of the nastiest and most mean-spirited of Italian psycho thrillers, as well as one of the most sexually frank that even veers occasionally in the direction of hardcore. Beginning with a man repeatedly stabbed, and his drowned wife next to him on the canal bank, much of the first half of the film is a prolonged flashback detailing the man's increasingly depraved and abusive sexual demands of his unaccountably devoted young wife. Meanwhile, a black-gloved killer in reflective sunglasses is killing off the participants of an orgy that included the first two victims....

Relentlessly sordid, miserable and glum, with none of the sexual partners graced with any love or respect or affection, it's a trial of a film to watch. Artistically it's flat and nondescript, lacking even the relative gloss of something like Fulci's The New York Ripper. The one vague stab at light relief, in which the lead cop on the case is constantly eating hard-boiled eggs (so random and inexplicable that it has to be comedic) just seems wildly misplaced. Meanwhile the sleazegore highlight, in which a naked woman is tied to the kitchen table and has her leg sawn off, might be benefitting from impressive splatter effects but that's hardly a recommendation and it's hardly the point in a film with little but prolonged scenes of rape and sexual humiliation on its mind, and which had long since decided to turn the misogyny up even further with a hooker repeatedly stabbed in the crotch.

So who's the audience? Surely even in 1979 this must have been a colossal turn-off? Even in Italy? Maybe it had some cachet as a you-won't-believe-it VHS dupe surreptitiously exchanged in the playground by undiscriminating teenage boys, but seen through the eyes of a moderately woke and mature grownup it's a charmless mix of grubby sexual violence and artless sadism. Difficult to watch and impossible to enjoy, Giallo A Venezia is a low point even for sleazy Eurogore movies and for the more rancid end of "vintage" pornography, and the lack of an official UK release even forty years later is scarcely cause for despondency.

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