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: 'Al tropico del cancro' (1972) ★★★

Dr. Williams (spaghetti western star Anthony Steffan, who also has a story credit), chief surgeon at a Port au Prince hospital, as well as the city’s meat inspector (?), has created a new drug during his free time, and since that drug is a powerful hallucinogen and not a vaccine, everyone wants to get their hands on it. But the doctor has no reason to suspect his friend Fred (Gabriele Tinti, before he married—and started doing softcore sex flicks with—Laura Gemser) of having any motives beyond enjoying an exotic holiday with his wife Grace (Anita Strindberg). Fred, however, definitely suspects Grace of wanting to bump uglies with Williams. (Who would blame her? Not only is Steffan ruggedly handsome, but unlike Fred, he is not a raging asshole.)

This one was a pleasant surprise. True, there are better giallos out there, but I found El tropico del cancro (a.k.a. Tropic of Cancer or Death in Haiti) a lot of fun, with generous helpings of sex, violence and weirdness. Directors Giampaolo Lomi and Edoardo Mulargia make the most of their film’s location, juxtaposing the exotic glamor of the tourist spots with the poverty of the people who live there. The locals themselves seem to be little more than colorful background, however, performing voodoo rituals, serving drinks and, in the case of the young manservant for flamboyant businessman Mr. Peacock (Gordon Felio, giving us a Divine-out-of-drag performance before Divine was even a star), providing more intimate services, or so it’s heavily implied. El tropico del cancro isn’t worthy of either a NAACP or GLAAD award but considering the time in which this was made it isn’t nearly as problematic as I feared it might be.

The movie’s most notorious scene — the one reviewers on IMDb bring up the most, anyway — is when Grace is drugged by Stewart’s potent hallucinogen and embarks on a trip that has her fleeing a colony of tarantulas and running down a deep red hallway, wearing nothing but a sheer dressing gown, while naked Black men reach for her. The scene culminates with Grace losing her gown and stepping into the arms of a well-hung voodoo priest, a moment prominently featured in the poster. Some of the negative reviews I saw cited this scene as the movie’s nadir, but I suspect that might have more to do with sequence featuring a lot of penises. (Calm down, fanboys, this movie features plenty of tits, too.)  The sequence is kinda’ silly, but it’s also trippy and sexy and deliciously ’70s— it looks like porno chic perfume ad — so I found it to be one of the movie’s high points. Also, did I mention the scene features a lot of penises?

Short Takes: 'Delitto carnale' (1983) ★ 1/2

The amoral family of a wealthy man gathers prior to his funeral at the hotel he owned, but the next funeral any of them is likely to attend will be their own. So, might as well get laid!

This movie’s a.k.a.’s include Killing of the Flesh and Sex Crime, but it should be known as Drink, Fuck, Repeat, because that sums up about two-thirds of this sleazy giallo from director Caesar Canevari. As intriguing as that sounds—it was enough to get me to seek out a gray market copy—the actual movie is a slog. Save for some lesbianism and incest, the couplings are pretty much vanilla and very repetitive. One gets the feeling that most of the script just instructed actresses to walk into a room, take off their clothes and act hysterical until a fellow fully clothed actor falls on top of them. Oh, yeah, this is yet another softcore movie where sex only requires women to remove their clothes. Then again, only a couple actors — Marc Porel and poor man’s Franco Nero Vanni Materassi — piqued my prurient interests, and mildly at that. If you like staring at tits and vaginas, however, Delitto carnale has plenty of them (future porn star Moana Pozzi is one of the featured cast members). It’s an even worse giallo, with the murders not happening until well-past the movie’s halfway mark, as if Canevari suddenly decided he wanted to make a giallo instead of a sex film. If you like your giallos on the sleazy side, check out Giallo a Venezia or Play Motel instead. They’re not much better but at least they aren’t as boring. If you like looking at tits and vaginas, well, you know where to go. 

The Sony Walkman Giallo

“The ulitimate hi-tech thriller” only if you think
Pong is the ultimate video game challenge.

A future murder victim; a future sit-com star-turned-Fat Actress-turned-QAnon conspiracist; a future Star Trek counselor; two established actors with rapidly dropping Q Scores grabbing a quick buck and a Greece vacation on their way down— all appearing in one of my favorite genres, the giallo. And all of them brought together by a director whose most notorious film featured, among other things, a man pissing in a wealthy socialite’s face and fucking a goat.

These were the ingredients that drew me to Nico Mastorakis’ 1984 thriller BLIND DATE (a.k.a. Deadly Seduction). So, why was I so bored watching it?

Things start off well enough. A young woman in serious need of some dental work leaves her amusement park date and takes a cab home. We already know before she closes the car door that the cab driver has sinister intentions as the camera is careful—in the beginning, at least—to only show his hands and feet. And, sure enough, as our young woman is showering (tits at three and a half minutes in; Nico doesn’t waste time) the cab driver is letting himself into her darkened apartment because his victim—like so many characters in thrillers and horror movies—hasn’t bothered to turn on any lights for the sake of maintaining a spooky atmosphere. When she steps into the living room, certain she’s heard something but still not switching on a single lamp, she’s grabbed from behind, her mouth covered by a chloroform-soaked cotton pad. A second later she’s in the cabbie’s makeshift operating theater, about to get dissected. If only she’d thought to flip a light switch.

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk,
I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk.

Suddenly we’re watching Joseph (The Black Hole) Bottoms strutting through the streets of Athens, dressed in a tan suit and a white t-shirt reading “I ❤ My Dentist” (your guess is as good as mine). Bottoms plays Jonathon, an American marketing executive whose job seems to consist of boning his assistant, Claire (a pre-Cheers, pre-weight-gain and, presumably, pre-batshit Kirstie Alley) and watching commercial photo shoots. It’s during one such photo shoot for a travel company promotion that Jonathon thinks he recognizes one of the models, Mary Ann (the late Lana Clarkson, who gets an “introducing” credit even though she had already been in a few films prior), his former girlfriend from the U.S. Except the model’s name is Rachel, and the U.S. Embassy has no information about her under either identity. 

“My E-meter is all warmed up and ready for you.”

So, what’s a guy to do? Maybe approach her and ask? Something as simple as, “Excuse me, you look like someone I knew in the States. Are you…?” should do the trick. Worst case scenario, she misreads this as a lame pick-up line—and most likely would, given Jonathon comes across as a smug asshole—and tells him to fuck off.

Or he could stalk her, which is exactly what Jonathon chooses to do. The movie tries to explain away Jonathon’s decision with a few quick flashbacks to when Jonathon and Mary Ann were attacked on the beach by a group of thugs, who beat the shit out of Jonathon and raped Mary Ann. The incident resulted in Mary Ann landing in a psychiatric hospital and Jonathon barred from seeing her lest his presence trigger memories of that night. Yes, this is the movie’s logic: approaching Mary Ann/Rachel directly could traumatize her; better to stand outside her apartment building with a pair of binoculars and spy on her instead.

Lana Clarkson has a Nice Guy looking out for her.

Meanwhile, a hooker (Marina Sirtis) turns her last trick when she takes the scalpel-wielding cabbie back to her place. 

Counselor Troi in more traditional Betazoid wedding attire.

Jonathon’s stalking blows up in his face when Rachel’s boyfriend Dave (James Daughton of Animal House fame) catches him watching them at a mountainside make-out spot. Jonathon eludes Dave in a chase only to run face-first into a tree branch, which may not have been intentionally funny, but I laughed anyway.

Somehow, this collision with a tree blinds Jonathon even though, as his doctors stress, there is no damage to his optic nerves. “You should not be blind,” says specialist Dr. Steiger. Dr. Steiger is played by Keir Dullea, perhaps best known for starring in the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, so it’s only fitting that his appearance marks Blind Date’s hard left into sci-fi territory, if “sci-fi” were short for “Science? Fuck it!”

The doctor has invented a way for Jonathon to “see” that bypasses the eyes, implanting a “minute, platinum electrode plate” in his skull that interprets Sonar-like signals sent to his brain as images, something he calls CompuVision. (Isn’t interesting the number of sci-tropes that hinge on an ableist mindset?) And how are these Sonar-like signals received? Perhaps with a small device that’s worn like a hearing aid. Or maybe Dr. Steiger must remove one of Jonathan’s eyes and replace it with a glass one that contains all the necessary technology for receiving the necessary signals. Or, if you’re Nico Mastorakis, you could just give Johnny a Sony Walkman and a bunch of bullshit and hope nobody notices.

“And after we hook up your CompuVision device we’ll get
you a Swatch watch for the pain.”

Seriously. There isn’t even an attempt to disguise the Walkman and headphones with different casing or decals or just wrapping the fucker in tin foil. Nope, it’s just a Sony Walkman with all its branding in place. Though Dullea is clearly phoning it in, he deserves an honorary Oscar® for maintaining a straight face as he explains how the fast forward button activates the device and the rewind button activates the cassette inside the unit. Despite Dullea’s efforts, his explaining how this Sony Walkman is really a CompuVision device was the moment I gave up on this movie.

Vision restored!

Joseph Bottoms, the Not-Quite-Blind Avenger.

Alas, there’s a lot more movie to go as we watch Jonathon try out his new “eyes,” starting with his resuming his creeping on Rachel, going so far as breaking into her apartment and watching her nude slumber (just a reminder, he’s our protagonist). Then he heads to the subway avenge his beating and robbery by three sexually ambiguous hoodlums prior to his being outfitted with the magical Walkman. He handily beats the shit out of them with a lead-filled cane. He also plugs his, um, CompuVision device into his video game console, apropos of nothing, nearly giving himself a brain hemorrhage in the process.

In case you’re wondering, the movie hasn’t forgotten about its killer. While Jonathon is taking his special Walkman for a test drive, the homicidal hack is still killing his fares, including a young couple on a date, whom he politely allows to enjoy one last orgasm before slicing them up. The cabbie has to get in line before he can attack his next victim, who comes home to discover doddering old man hiding in her bathroom hoping to sneak a peek, something that’s played off as harmless fun instead of a dial 112 situation (seriously, movie, what is wrong with you?) As always, our killer waits until the victim gets in a gratuitous nude scene before whipping out his scalpel.

It’s OK, he’s just a pervert, not a killer.

Except, this time the Jonathon happens to be strolling by the victim’s apartment building when she screams. Jonathon runs inside to investigate, but he’s not in time to prevent the woman’s murder, and he nearly gets killed himself trying to escape the killer. However, he does inadvertently get some clues to the killer’s identity, and the audience does, too, when the camera shows the back of the murderer’s head and his distinctive hair color.

Prepare for more bullshit: It turns out that when Jonathon nearly fried his brain plugging into his game console, he gained some extra abilities, like being able to hear voices from within the passing cab and get more detailed images when he rewinds the tape in his Walkman/CompuVision. Yeah, the movie is pulling more things out of its ass than a Club Inferno Dungeon video, but I still found Jonathon’s sudden development of special abilities easier to believe than that goddamn seeing-eye Walkman.

Jonathon is also able to determine—via the special ability of knowing his thriller tropes— that the killer cabbie’s next victim will be none other than Rachel. If only he can get to her apartment without killing himself or anyone else as he speeds through the streets of Athens in his Renault Farma.

The Renault Farma: Giving the small pickup the meter maid
cart makeover drivers didn’t know they wanted.

Eager to Sleaze

On the surface, Blind Date seems like promising trash. As always, Mastorakis is eager to sleaze. Though the murder scenes are fairly restrained, the movie makes up for the scant amount of blood with liberal amounts of skin and misogyny, with the camera lingering over a victim’s bare breasts while the killer prepares to cut into them. There is also plenty of what-the-fuckery, such as when Claire plans a surprise birthday party for Jonathon, arranging for guests to arrive while she and Jonathon are fucking, which, “Surprise!”

Also, get the fuck out!

Lana Clarkson (right) wears the finest
’80s street(walker) wear.

And then there’s the cast. At the time Blind Date was released, Joseph Bottoms and Kier Dullea were the “big” names in the cast, but viewers today will likely be more interested in getting a peek at Kirstie Alley and Marina Sirtis before they became TV stars and Lana Clarkson before she became a tragedy. Unfortunately, none of the women get much to do. Sirtis doesn’t do much beyond stripping down to a pair of bikini panties and screaming, but if you’ve been wanting to see Counselor Troi topless, I guess that could be enough. I’d like to say that Clarkson, who achieved greater fame when she was murdered by Phil Specter in 2003 than she had for any of her film and TV roles, is a standout as Mary Ann/Rachel, but her role is largely decorative, most of her time on screen spent modeling swimwear and some of the worst of early 1980s fashions (the clothes in this movie are so atrocious I suspected actresses requested nude scenes to limit the amount of time they had to spend wearing them). She was undeniably attractive, but she showed more acting chops in Barbarian Queen.

Only Alley gets much to do, and she does it fairly well, though her character is largely on the sidelines (and not really necessary to the story, in all honesty). For the past couple decades Alley has gotten more attention for her struggles with her weight, her devotion to Scientology, and being someone next to whom Sean Young stands to appear sane by comparison, so it was nice to be reminded that she was once a gifted comic actress, something Mastorakis must have picked up on as Claire is often this movie’s comic relief.

A pre-fame Valeria Golina also makes an
appearance, and this is as much of her that appears.

But for all its WTF storytelling and pre-fame celebrity titties, Blind Date is only intermittently entertaining. Like Mastorakis’ 1990 erotic thriller, In the Cold of the Night, Blind Date wastes too much time on extraneous scenes that only bloat the runtime and slow the movie’s momentum, while completely ignoring other story points introduced earlier (i.e., it’s not entirely clear if Rachel is Jonathon’s ex Mary Ann). At 90 minutes, Blind Date would be a trashy good time, but it’s 103 minutes and by the time you hit the 40-minute mark you’ll feel every one of them. In the end, watching Blind Date is better than going on one, but like a real blind date, you’ll be wishing it ends much earlier than it does.

RANDOM TRIVIA: The end credits tease a sequel to Blind Date — Run, Stumble, Fall — that never materialized. However, I’d argue that In the Cold of the Night, with its mix of tits and cheap sci-fi, is its spiritual sequel. Further bolstering that argument is that Cold star Shannon Tweed was originally cast in the role of Claire.