Flesh and Blood

Exhumed Films presents a double shot of giallo — Italian horror/mysteries.

by Shaun Brady

screening

The opening credits of Dario Argento's Tenebre play out over the image of a book bearing the same title being consumed in a fireplace. In onscreen terms, it's the latest effort by the film's novelist main character, Peter Neal (Tony Franciosa), which sets off a series of grisly murders; but it's also Argento's sly acknowledgment of returning to the giallo film, the Italian horror/mystery genre with which he's most closely associated.

Exhumed Films is presenting a giallo double feature this weekend that grabs entries from two extremes of the tradition. Be prepared for black-gloved killers, homicidal maniacs fueled by adolescent sexual traumas and key information just out of reach of a character's conscious memory.

Tenebre, to be shown in a rare uncut print from (of all places) Sweden, was Argento's giallo comeback after a few years spent in the Technicolor fairy-tale nightmares of Suspiria and Inferno. But he didn't quite leave the delirium of those films behind; Tenebre proceeds with a good deal of hallucinatory imagery and dream logic. It contains much that brands itself indelibly into the viewer's memory: the vertiginous tracking shot up one side of a house, across the roof and back down; a razor slicing through a shirt to reveal the victim's face; the killer's reminiscences of humiliation at a beachfront idyll, reflected in the brightly lit murders; and of course, a suddenly armless victim painting a wall with blood from her stump.

Sergio Martino's Torso is less memorable in its particulars, though it's a virtual giallo Rosetta stone, stripping down to the base stylistic elements. Martino does muster up a few memorable set pieces, from a murder in a mist-shrouded swamp to a final fight scene shot with all the vigor of a spaghetti Western showdown. The title, sadly changed from the grandiloquently lurid original Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence, refers to the killer's habit of providing a limb-removal service for his victims, but could just as easily reflect how often that part of the body is on display; the interchangeable female characters don't much like buttoning their shirts even when they're not skinny-dipping or sunbathing nude. If they can't quite separate their character's misogyny from their camera's, Martino and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi do create a nasty, blunt little thriller.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Exhumed Films Giallo Double Feature, Fri., Feb. 1, 8 p.m., $10, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, exhumedfilms.com.