Short Takes: ‘Crazy Desires of a Murderer’ (1977) ★★

When Netflix did away with its star rating system in favor of the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons, they did away with nuance. You either like a movie or you don’t, no in-between. Other streaming services followed suit: Hulu has like/dislike buttons, and now Tubi viewers have a chance to give a movie an up or down vote. The problem with this system is that most movies—or any entertainment media—don't fall within such a neat binary. Netflix recently added a two thumbs-up button, which helps a little, I guess, if you want to let Netflix know that you really, really like The Gray Man (I’m sure a couple people do), but if Netflix and other platforms really want an idea of what audiences think of their content, they need to add a shrug button.

All that to say director Filippo Walter Ratti’s Crazy Desires of a Murderer (a.k.a. I vizi morbosi di una governante), merits a 🤷. It’s not terrible, but it’s not particularly worth watching, either.

Illeana (Isabelle Marchall, who kind of looks like Emilia Clarke if she were a ’70s porn star) returns from vacationing with her friends, bringing them—plus a couple of guys she met while in Asia—back to the family castle for the weekend, much to the consternation of her wheelchair-bound, slightly-senile father Baron De Chablais (Stuart Brisbain Colin), a collector of Asian art and artifacts (none of this Asia stuff is pertinent to the plot, BTW). Dad is quickly wheeled off to his room by the housekeeper Berta (Annie Carol Edel), leaving Illeana and her friends free to guzzle champagne, play sexy charades and fuck. But the fun quickly ends when Illeana’s friend and doppelganger Ilsa (Patrizia Gori) gets stabbed to death and her eyes dug out of her head.

Crazy Desires of a Murderer, released in 1977 but reportedly (or perhaps I should say obviously) made much earlier, employs plenty of familiar tropes—mentally unbalanced siblings, secret entrances, secret agendas, grave robbing and red herrings galore—without doing anything particularly clever with them. Its pacing is slow, and its body count meager, though the murders are fairly bloody, if not particularly well executed (the grue effects in this movie are only slightly more convincing than what you’d find in a Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter flick). Perhaps more shocking than the graphic eye-gouging is a sex scene in which a poofy-haired drug smuggler (Roberto Zattini) molds a candle into a make-shift dildo to use on Gori, giving new meaning to the term “candling.” It’s also the most memorable scene in this shrug of a giallo.

Short Takes: ‘Lisztomania’ (1975) ★★★

While the films of the late Ken Russell can usually be found at the intersection of OMG! and WTF!, Russell sometimes drove the OMG head-on into WTF, resulting in a fiery collision of Jesus fucking Christ! And so Lisztomania came to be.

There are many things I could say about Lisztomania, like it’s exactly what you’d expect from the director of Tommy… if he’d injected mescaline directly into his eyeballs then listened to the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Liszt: Les Preludes/Orpheus/Tasso while simultaneously watching Behind the Green Door and The Benny Hill Show; that it’s Amadeus by way of Zardoz, but not so restrained; that it’s a period piece that makes 1836 look like 1976 and vice versa; that while the movie is set in the world of music and has some musical numbers, it is not really a musical, it just looks like one; that it features a cameo by Ringo Starr as the motherfuckin’ Pope; that its humor is alternately crass and juvenile (gas-spewing ass sculptures) or just silly (one of Liszt’s lovers urges the composer to join a monastery, saying: “You can become a Franz-ciscan!”); that while it’s ostensibly about an imagined rivalry between Franz Liszt and Richard Mahler (Roger Daltry and Paul Nicholas, respectively, and both appearing to be having a great time), Lisztomania’s story is more about set pieces than plot, and that’s OK because one of those set pieces is this:

 And really, that’s all you need to know to decide whether this one’s for you.