"Stupid dolls made out of flesh and blood." (Torso (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Torso (DVD)
Date:	31/08/09 (49 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very tense second half, looks good

Disadvantages: First half is too much like other films, predictable

A review of the DVD by Shameless, which costs £6 at the moment on amazon.

This is a better-than-average giallo from 1973 (it's also known as 'Carnal Violence'). I find a lot of 70s Italian horror disappointing, especially gialli, which are excessively formulaic. But this, after an unpromising first half, really pays off.

Someone is murdering sexy young art students. His efforts seem to focus on the friends of a pretty, rich girl named Daniela. She and three of her girly chums decide to go stay at an isolated villa in the country to get away from it all, and you probably don't need me to tell you what happens from there on in.

The first half, before they go to the villa, is very typical of the genre. The murder scenes contain lots of prowling camera movement, a killer in black gloves and a ski mask, and a perverse sexual element (the first two female victims both manage to have their boobs out when they get killed, allowing for a quick post-mortem fondle by the killer). But they are at least suspenseful, especially the one that takes place in marshland. There isn't a lot of gore, and what there is is woefully unconvincing (body parts seemingly made of papier maché squirting red goo), but the two murders we see at length are pretty nasty nonetheless.

The plot is typically silly, as in most gialli. People get killed; one girl knows a crucial detail but can't quite remember it; and everyone - everyone! - gets to throw suspicious looking glances around. The red herrings are crushingly obvious, and I'd guessed who the killer was after about ten minutes. The killer has flashbacks to a childhood trauma while he kills, and some idiot tries to blackmail him with hilariously predictable results. These things happen in almost every film of this type.

It's very well directed, and beautifully photographed. The director delights in shooting commonplace things from odd angles, which works well in a genre as artificial as this. It doesn't have the visual stylishness of the best Italian horror, but it more than holds its own. The film sometimes goes to ridiculous lengths to almost-but-not-quite show us the killer's face, but that always happens in these things. The music is great, too, with soppy lounge plinky plonky piano music for the quiet bits and a throbbing, prog-like burst of guitar and organ for the murder scenes.

When the young ladies get to the secluded villa the film becomes seriously frightening. The final half hour is almost unbearably suspenseful as the heroine, an American art student named Jane, tries to hide from the killer. She seems perhaps a little calm considering her plight, but these scenes reminded me of the scariest scenes in Haute Tension, and aren't much less suspenseful. It's not doing anything new, but it's doing it well nonetheless. Inevitably the climax is a bit of a disappointment, as they always are, but the killer does get a great rant at the end ("Bitches! Bitches!")

The cast are very typical, consisting mainly of attractive young things. A few are familiar from other Italian horror (Suzy Kendall, John Richardson). All of them are dubbed into English using that weird, neutral accent that is always used for dubbing, so characters from America and characters from Italy sound the same as one another. A few scenes are in subtitled Italian, as they were the only copies of those bits that the DVD compilers could find.

The DVD claims it's uncut for the first time in the UK. I guess the early murders are the kind of thing that the BBFC used to shy away from, being brutal and vaguely sexualised. The gore level is pretty low, and although there's a lot of nudity, none of it is full frontal. There's very little sex, and what there is either out of focus or disappointingly half-hearted (like an initially promising lesbian scene).

As ever with Shameless DVDs, I wish they didn't put stupid slogans on the front. "Where Whores Meet Saws" gives a completely false impression of what the film will be like, and represents the worst kind of laddish humour. The picture quality is all good, although the soundtrack is a bit distorted in places. The only extra is a trailer for the film (with some great psychedelic effects that are sadly not present in the film). There are also trailers for other Shameless releases.

This is much better than I thought it would be. It takes a genre that is very hit-or-miss and, without trying to do anything radical, manages to be scary and satisfying and nice to look at. It's cheap enough to be worth picking up.

Summary: An above-average giallo