THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE

(Riccardo Freda, 1971)

A woman, disfigured by acid, is found with her throat slit in the trunk of Swiss Ambassador Sobieski's (Anton Diffring) Rolls Royce. Inspector Lawrence is called to the scene and begins questioning Sobieski and his staff of shifty individuals. When this leads only to dead ends, he hires former police detective John Norton (Luigi Pistilli), a man still suffering from the guilt of a past tragedy that ended his career.

Shortly after a threatening exchange with the ambassador, his mistress, a nightclub singer, is found dead in her dressing room with her throat cut. Sobieski's daughter Helen (Dagmar Lassander) runs into John outside the club in the ensuing panic, and he escorts her back to the embassy. By unorthodox means, and with help from his quirky, mystery-loving old mother, John continues his investigation, but soon finds the lives of his nearest and dearest threatened by the acid-wielding madman. So whodunit? Was it the busybody maid? The secretive, sweaty butler? How about the light-sensitive chauffeur, or the ambassador himself? Or was it Mrs Peacock in the library with the lead pipe?

Freda's first giallo, TIWTTOF, was obviously inspired by the then-recent success of Dario Argento's The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. Among the parallels are the use of an animal in the long-winded title, the black gloves and razor, a sinister redhead, and even a silly being-shaved-with-a-straight-razor scene. In fairness, though, Brian De Palma must have seen this, or at least it's ending, prior to making Dressed To Kill.

All the trademark Freda-isms are present in TIWTTOF, from the kooky camera angles to the messy, though unrealistic, gore. There's a fair amount of the red stuff here, a decent amount of action, and a cringe-inducingly mean ending that includes elderly abuse and underage nudity (talk about opposite ends of the spectrum!). It's too bad the entire film couldn't keep this pace; there's far too much investigation and chatter going on to keep one's interest for long.

The humor also detracts a fair bit from what suspense Freda was hoping to create, though it does give Norton's mother and daughter enough substance and sympathy to make the viewer fear for them. It's not a bad giallo, but definitely not the best place to start.It has yet to have a north American DVD or BluRay release, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed because *shhhtttt, don't tell ANYone!* I actually kinda like Freda's films. So sue me.

THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY

(Lucio Fulci, 1981)

Fulci's last great film before his gradual fall from grace, The House By The Cemetery is a dark, surreal outing that will immediately appeal to his fans. The Boyle family, Lucy (Catriona MacColl), her husband Dr Norman (Paolo Malco), and their oddly effeminate son Bob (Giovanni Frezza) move from New York to a more spacious house by a cemetery in the country. Prior to the move, Bob is warned by a ghostly little girl to not go, but his parents disbelieve him.

Norman's motive for the move was to resume the unfinished research of his predecessor, Dr Peterson, prior to his suicide. Upon moving in, Lucy is frightened by the discovery of a tombstone set into the floor. They learn that the house used to belong to Dr Freudstein, a man of ill repute who's said to have killed his family and taken his own life.

Shortly after, a mysterious woman named Anne (Ania Pieroni) shows up at the house and professes to be "the babysitter". Nonplussed by the intrusion of the strange woman, the Boyles take her in. Anne, it seems, knows something about the house that the others don't as she first attempts to break into the barricaded cellar, then washes away a trail of blood left by the murder of the house's real estate agent, Mrs Giddleston (Dagmar Lassander). When Anne goes missing, and Lucy and Bob are driven to hysteria by noises and corpses in the cellar, Norman looks into the history of the house and realizes they may have an unwanted tenant living there.

THBTC was the last of Fulci's dark, almost hallucinogenic, and certainly nightmarish films. The lighting is minimal, the Walter Rizzati synth soundtrack is appropriate, and as in The Beyond and City of the Living Dead, the interactions between the characters are enigmatic and nonsensical. In fact, much of the film is nonsensical, but I feel it works as well here as it did in the previously mentioned films. My only real disappointment came not from the amount of gore, but the lack of realism in the other effects ie: the waxy severed head, the mannequin parts representative of real body parts in the cellar, etc. But that's a minor point. I'd recommend it. Buy it here.