Get in My Arachnid Black Belly!

There's something doped up and jet lagged in the giallo tropes of La Tarantola dal ventre nero (1971), one of the many "commercially minded" animal-titled films to come out in the wake of Argento's big hit, The Bird with Crystal Plumage (1970). Everything good La Tarantola has going for it seems borrowed from Plumage, including the use of a heavy breathing avant garde percussive Ennio Morricone score. Well, sometimes a heavy breathing avant garde percussive Ennio Morricone score is enough! Add some Bond girls and... well, even if nobody goes home happy, nobody goes home disappointed either.

Our cop lead (Giancarlo Giannini--"Inspector Mathis" in Casino Royale) gets the most screen time, with the hot starlets (Claudine Auger, Barbara Bouchet, Barbara Bach) barely registering as characters before they are set up and knocked down like puling bowling pins. Too bad, because while he's very expressive--with big doleful eyes that define "puppy dog"--Giannini lacks his future self's gravitas. He's less a cop here and more a benzo junkie swimming through the tail end of a bender. He lets prime suspects go if they sass or stall him and though he's clearly way out of his depth never thinks to ask for a partner or back-up to helps solve this multiple homicide case. Not even a partner helps on a case that gets new victims nightly. Oh well, there must be a bottle of J&B somewhere around here amid all the other giallo niceties: a fetishistic serial killer, blackmailers, acupuncturist accessories; red sports cars; musty offices and plush love nests; stamps on envelopes in the jacket of the murder victims; nature films (the wasp paralyzes the tarantula then lays eggs in its big black belly!); loads of tracking shots and pull foci through trees in the park and the hustle bustle of Rome's bustling streets; running over sewer grates (shot from below) and up and down twisting outdoor staircases past little dingy gray polizia cars.

Giannini fits the bill in body but not in spirit. He needs a handsome bland photographer or musician--inexplicably linked to the killer--to play cat and mouse games with. Without such a foil, Giannini has no one to spar with but himself and a handful of trite clues: yards of film flow by depicting his subtly rendered internal struggle --usually via sitting in his car staring blankly out the side window, or buttoning his drab raincoat. When he's not moping around, however, Tarantola is giallo right down to its kinky gold curtains and fetishistic toys and latex gloves... and mannequins, naturally.

It would all be just much ado about nothing, except for the aforementioned Morricone score, which provides a cacophonic counterpoint whenever it can. You don't even need a story when Ennio is at the top of his game like he is here. All crumbling electric guitars, atonal mashes of the keyboard, deep breathing and wheezy organs, he catches and balances the woozy mise-en-scene the way a patient friend might help a stumbling drunk to his car.

Considering the by-the-numbers direction of journeyman-hack Paolo Cavara (Mondo Cane) and the fact that Tarantolo's screenplay was written by woman (Lucille Lans) it's perhaps no surprise that a) the film is lacking the drive and momentum that Catholic male guilt and sexual frustration can provide, and b) its strengths lie in its 'weaknesses,' in its swooning, feminine sexuality,  which feminist horror studies fans will note is almost completely free of voyeuristic "eye"-conography. The stripping nude of the female victims and the paralysis method seem to set the stage for kinky sexual torture, rape, etc., but censors or soft stomachs mercilessly (or--if you prefer--mercifully) make these scenes short, as if the killer, after going through all the trouble of getting victim set up for torture, wimps out and just stabs and runs (though this also serves to keep the killer's gender open to question).

Dull as the film can be in stretches, the great disc from Blue Underground is so crisp and uniformly strong in color--the music so boldly reproduced--that a discerning trash film fan has little choice but to embrace it. I can imagine really hating The Black Belly of the Tarantula on a faded badly cropped and edited VHS, but seeing it on a good widescreen TV or projector is like being part of a glorious archeological excavation, digging a window back to a long gone world of macho mustaches, shoulder-length hair, drab grey raincoats over shiny shoes, relentless drizzle, bohemians, cocaine smuggled in tarantula aquariums, and Barbara Bach, who sports some of the longest, straightest, shiniest hair in all of gialli land.

The most off-putting aspect of this film, which makes the murders more a relief than a source of tension, is the sleepwalker idiocy of all the characters (not just our Ritalin-deprived sheriff, all of them). Most notably dumb is a woman who, after running into her apartment building while being chased through the streets by the killer, rushes inside her door, and stands panting right by the door while refusing to even lock it, leaving the big heavy chain just hanging down as she stands panting by the door, dazed, perhaps struggling to remember her lines or to hear our shouts at the screen from the presumed audience of the future: "Lock the damn door!" All the victims of our maniac rush to their deaths like lemmings (note to giallo characters: if you want to rat out your friends to the cops, don't boldly announce your intentions to them in a darkened, deserted, cavernous health spa).

In the way that would become de rigueur for the slasher films of the 1980s the slack-jawed dumbness of the victims not only lightens the load for the screenwriter but allows the audience to retire to that dubious place of moral safety so cherished by repressive cultures like Catholic Italy: the she was "asking for it" defense. But while this can enable our emotional distancing so the violence is more bearable it also makes us lose interest; I found myself sighing in relief once each murder was done, knowing I'd have at least a few minutes to relax and go get a drink before having to endure watching another eloi passively bow her head to receive the morlock needle.

With so little suspense or empathy generated by the killings, the big mystery becomes how a cop as foggy and strung-out as Giannini's Inspector Tellini ever made it to homicide in the first place. He should be handing out parking tickets, at best. When you see him first step into an abandoned house where the killer might be hiding you know you have time to go to the bathroom and mix a round of cocktails for your guests, flip through your phone message, and he'll still only have made it a few feet farther inside than when you left. No wonder all these sex killers ran so rampant in 1970s Italian cinema! Drunk cops soaked in ennui are no defense. Thank God he's handing in his resignation at the end of the case, or at least considering it: "I was unable to save a woman last night," he groans to his wife/girlfriend, who is too busy dealing furniture to pay attention Meanwhile the heavy sighs on the soundtrack begin to resonate less with feminine lust and more with resigned exacerbation. He was unable to save a woman? No shit. Well at least he kind of halfway tried.

From a surrealist standpoint the detective's confusion puts him in the rarefied realm of somnambulist shamuses, inhabited by the likes of Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart; Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense; Asia Argento in The Stendahl Syndrome; Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly--characters who may or may not be already dead, as if they awoke from a dream into the film and don't really remember a damn thing about investigative protocol. But at least in those films the target always turns out to be someone or something intrinsically tied up with the pursuer. In Belly the final disconnect becomes more of a Dirty Harry sort of "this time it's personal!" punch out, which illuminates our hero's darkened path not a watt. Oh well, if you're so Xanaxed out you don't even know where or who you are it helps to have some really weird Morricone to help you home. One psychedelically twisted note of discordant guitar and you know that you're safe in the beloved giallo genre, where druggy amnesia isn't only forgiven, it's practically essential.

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Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971): Cinebolically Dario

The long-awaited decent DVD release of Four Flies on Gray Velvet is a late-inning coup for anyone trying to lose their moral compass, and you should be trying, because it's harder than you think. Luckily, Argento's films--even at their worst--are never "safe" and always rich in moral ambiguity: Good guys are hipster artists driven to risk their friends' lives in finding the killer, more out of perverse fascination than genuine empathy for the victims; the killers have their reasons and police hardly matter except as deadpan mashers waiting around on the sidelines with their pages of red herring exposition.

In Four Flies for example, there's some "experimental procedure" where lasers project the retinal image at the moment of death, a surreal trip to a coffin-makers convention with a bohemian named "God," psychedelic wallpaper, chic 70s menswear, and fantasias of being a successful artist jet-setting around Rome. There's also hot chicks, mincing gay stereotypes, and gruesome stabbing but even us paranoid feminists can get into the kinky murders of Argento. He's always feeling the pain and everything's a double-edged sword of entendre and labyrinthine cinebolism.

If you're a big lover of Bird with Crystal Plumage you might long for one of Morricone's children's music box leitmotifs to run through his score for Flies but like Exorcist 2: The Heretic, his nerve-jangle drumming, mashed piano, heartbeat bass and dropping luggage on piano strings gambits don't show up until halfway through the film; before then it's all silence or generic loung psych jams of the group our hero drums for. Argento's more into the long suspenseful silence thing for Flies, anyway, with hiding in closets and hearing faint footsteps getting louder up the stairs all the time louder. Then silence in which one strains to hear the faintest scraping. The pitch blackness stretches sometimes over 3/4 of the frame, all but daring you to wonder if there's even a movie going on. There is, but a lot of it nods to other films, by Val Lewton (a whole walled-in park sequence mirrors Val Lewton and Jacque Tourneur's 1943 masterpiece, The Leopard Man).

It may have been a little too quiet and dark on a cropped blurry dupe, but with the widescreen DVD from Blue Underground we can luxuriate in every darkened corner and realize that this movie resembles Lynch's Lost Highway in its poetic use of hipster musicians standing blankly around in the darkness of their retro chic decadent apartments, waiting... thinking... standing... as Roberto, Michael Brandon is like a handsomer version of Roger Waters but Waters could act, or at least occasionally move a facial muscle, like he's so out of it he thinks he's still in make-up (since he's had a long career I presume this was Argento's directorial note) and hot frail androgynous girlfriends (Mimsy Farmer in short blonde hair). In Rome then, as well as in America, the pretty people are so privileged they become emotionally arrested zombies, alienating those around them until they're as ugly as everyone else.

There's a lot left undone that would have made this movie hum with the brilliance of Plumage, but there's no doubt it's Argento at the helm--in full control--so even if it doesn't add up to much, it's always "in the moment." And for the psychotronic scholar it's fun to connect this 1971 film to all that came before (The Leopard Man, Peeping Tom, Psycho) and all that came after (Death Proof, Bladerunner, Eyes of Laura Mars). Who knows why it's so important for people like Dario, Ennio, and Lucio that someone's slow decapitation or eye-gouging should be accompanied by languid orchestral pop balladry?! Maybe it's some anti-Catholic thing, but goddamn it, those are the moments one lives for.

Another moment is the climactic "lost footage" restoration which adds sickly minutes to an already tense situation, the suddenly reverting into Italian is a great example of Argento's unheimliche-conjuring power. In the Argentoverse scenes collapse and disappear, whether by your mental suppression scissors, or someone's real ones, only to return, decades later, in Italian with English subtitles.

Argento's films are always worth owning instead of renting as they can be re-watched repeatedly without ever seeming like the same movie, as faceted as an one's own inner romantic torment or open wound. Our mind obliterates the trauma we "block out" all traces of the pain as it happens, leaving a jewel-like shimmer in our retinae. What was it Caligula said? "Oh, If all of Rome had just one neck..." he said that because he was itchy for something that only a genius like Argento could provide, and he kept breaking necks to find it; Dario breaks the necks so we don't have to. Dario, the cinebolical Caligula of post-modern Rome!

Read my less worshipful piece on Dario's Mother of Tears here, and my most worshipful piece on daughter Asia's Scarlet Diva here

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