Italy, 1986
Review:
JA Kerswell
A Giallo that has a rather pedestrian start but amps up the implausibilities fans of the genre love in its second half—not to mention a still shocking scene of sexualised violence that easily earns its notoriety. A criminology student bases her thesis on a series of Lover’s Lane type murders of couples that are very similar to a still unsolved series of slayings from 1974—which leads her to suspect that the killer has returned. However, the more she investigates, the more she puts herself in danger.
Cristina (Mariangela D'Abbraccio) is alerted to the latest murders after her friend and fellow student Chiara (Yvonne D'Abbraccio) gives her a tip as to where the bodies have been found. A couple were attacked in their car by an unseen assailant, with a man with hairy shoulders (bear with me, this is a plot point) shot dead, and his date also shot and carved up with a knife post-mortem. Chiara’s father (Riccardo Parisio Perrotti) happens to be Cristina’s criminology professor, and she bumps into him at the crime scene, where he introduces her to the detective in charge of the case (Oreste Rotundo). Despite having no authority, Cristina visits the morgue to see the bodies and meets the coroner, Alex (Giovanni Visentin), who exclaims: “A pretty girl like yourself is interested in the dead?” He also admits: “The state of those two kids almost made me puke my guts out.”—which seems like catnip to Cristina, who agrees to go and see a Giallo at the cinema with him that evening, and they quickly fall into a romance.
Later, she sees a suspect at the police station (Luigi Mezzanotte) who has been arrested for being a Peeping Tom of courting couples. It turns out he is a gynaecologist (!) and a psychiatrist on the side. Cristina pretends to be a patient to pump him for information, but he recognises her and threatens her with a letter opener. Fleeing his office frustrated, she has an idea to investigate the voyeur scene, which she discovers has its very own bar out in the middle of nowhere: The Devil’s House. During a visit at night, she is escorted into the woods to a group of people who like to put listening devices on cars to listen to couples banging. She is also shocked to see her professor is a patron and recognises another shifty-looking suspect, who is later arrested and charged for the murders. Everyone now thinks that the killer has been apprehended, Cristina is not so sure …
THE KILLER IS STILL AMONG US lacks the gaudy excesses of other 1980s Gialli—at least style-wise. The film looks drab, not helped by the fact that it was clearly shot in deepest winter, and everything has a chilly grey hue. The eeirliy effective atonal score by Detto Mariano is unfortunately undercut by droning ballads that sound like they would have been rejected during the Giallo’s heyday in the early 70s and sound especially out of place by the mid-1980s. The first half of the film is rather plodding, and the murder sequences are clumsily handled. Bizarrely, the film reuses shots of the same couple that died during the opening scene in a subsequent murder—the hairy shoulders gave it away.
Thankfully, the second half picks up with some halfway decent suspense scenes, and the plot takes some satisfying silly turns in the best Giallo fashion (it is always good to see Ernesto Gastaldi’s name in the credits—although he has since distanced himself from the film). In an unlikely move, the professor of criminology posits that the killer could be a witch! However, the biggest head turner is the scene where Chiara suggests a seance to see if they can connect with the spirit of a friend of theirs—a bride-to-be who has just been killed with her fiance in a car on the Italian version of Lover’s Lane. Not only does Cristina attend, but so does the investigating detective! During the seance (which has a touch of the Fulci Gothic about it), the assembled group see flashes of another murder taking place—this time of a young man and woman about to have sex in a tent. It is this scene which gives the film its well-earned notoriety when, again post-mortem, the killer cuts off the naked woman’s right nipple and part of her pubis in unflinching detail. Although not especially convincing, this scene is graphic and jarring. Whilst we did see a naked dead woman being defiled with a knife in the first murder scene, the killer just gingerly taps her with a blade (and for some reason puts a twig up her vagina). That last bit was tastefully obscured—if you can call anything in THE KILLER IS STILL AMONG US tasteful.
Loosely based on the Monster of Florence case (as it was dubbed in the Italian press), who was a serial killer active in Tuscany during the 1970s and the 1980s. It was changed enough to avoid the producers being sued by the understandably still grieving families. The last murders had taken place in September 1985, and this was rushed into production mere months after to capitalise on the Italian public’s ongoing fascination with the case. The notorious scene in the tent is a quasi-recreation of the violent murders of two French tourists that had happened just weeks before shooting began (and perhaps even suggests this scene was added in during production or after it had wrapped for maximum exploitative value).
Although shot on film, it had a low budget and a tight shooting schedule of just four weeks—as producers were racing to get it in theatres ahead of another similar movie based on the case, THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE (aka
NIGHT RIPPER) (also 1986). Although clearly exploitative in intention, director Camillo Teti or the producers had the bare-faced cheek to suggest that his film was a serious meditation on the situation and it ends with a disingenuous title card saying: “THIS FILM WAS MADE AS A WARNING TO YOUNG PEOPLE AND WITH THE HOPE IT WILL HELP POLICE CATCH THESE BRUTAL MURDERERS.” The film was distributed to Italian cinemas starting in February 1986 (although it was never screened in Florence or surrounding areas). In a perhaps strange coincidence, it offers no firm conclusion as to who is behind the killing spree and, indeed, suggests the killer is still among us—with the real-life case similarly never being solved (with no more killings occurring after its release).
Director Camillo Teti was probably better known as a producer (he executively produced Armando Crispino’s Giallo THE DEAD ARE ALIVE (1972)). He was the last-minute replacement for director Giuliano Carnimeo (who had previously directed the super fun Giallo THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS (1972)). Although, incredibly, Teti also directed the animation feature TITANIC: THE LEGEND GOES ON … (2000), which features a couple falling in love aboard the doomed liner with a rapping dog and other talking animals—but no severed nipples.
BODY COUNT 8:
Female 4 / Male 3
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THE KILLER IS STILL AMONG US trailer