A dreamy, sensuous, and deliciously
“off” Italian giallo classic. Mondo Macabro has released
A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN, the 1971 Italian/Spanish/French (and some
say English) co-production from director/screenwriter Lucio Fulci (THE BEYOND,
ZOMBIE 2), and starring an A-list cast: Florinda Bolkan (her best performance),
Stanley Baker (glumly slumming), Leo Genn (paying the bills), Jean Sorel (handsome
and blank), Silvia Monti, Alberto de Mendoza (satisfying the Latin actor quota),
Edy Gall (minx), Penny Brown, and Anita Strindberg (satisfying everyone).
Notorious for early giallo fans because of a scene supposedly depicting
the vivisectionism of four dogs, A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN is far more
memorable today for Fulci’s lush, eroticized, and hyper-violent take on
a Hitchcockian murder mystery framework, a formative giallo vision
beautifully amplified by cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller’s trippy frames,
Giorgio Serrallonga’s non-linear editing, and composer Ennio Morricone’s
strange, menacing score. Mondo Macabro states this gorgeous-looking 1080p 24fps
1.85:1 anomorphic Blu-ray transfer — the first U.S. Blu release taken
from the original camera negative — is the longest (1:44:12), most “complete”
version of A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN thus far (that is, until someone
digs up a longer one from the seemingly dozens of international cuts of the
movie that went out in 1971). Hours and hours of extras here — some new
— including a commentary track with Pete Tombs and Kris Gavin, a documentary
on the movie, cast and crew interviews, radio spots and original trailers.
The last druggy, dying days of “Swinging London,” late 1970. Rich,
stunning housewife Carol (Florinda Bolkan, INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE
SUSPICION, DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING) is married to handsome barrister
Frank Hammond (Jean Sorel, BELLE DE JOUR, MODEL SHOP), who works for influential
Edmond Brighton (Leo Genn, QUO VADIS, MOBY DICK), a senior jurist seeking political
office...and Carol’s father. Carol is also reluctant step-mother to Joan
Hammond (Edy Gall, NAKED MASSACRE, EMANUELLE IN BANGKOK), Frank’s sexy,
snotty daughter. Carol enjoys “chilly sexual relations” with her
husband, Frank, so Carol is having a lesbian affair...in her sweaty, naughty
dreams. The object of her forbidden lust is ex-actress Julia Durer (Anita Strindberg,
CASE OF THE SCORPION’S TAIL, THE EROTICIST), a neighbor in Carol’s
swank block of Mayfair townhouses. You see, Julie has fully embraced the decadent
hedonism of the growing hippie counterculture, and her uninhibited orgies are
the subject of much tortured scrutiny by sexually frustrated Carol. When Carol
reports a rather startling new development in her nighttime reveries to headshrinker
Dr. Kerr (George Rigaud, THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES, GUNS OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN)
— she dreams of viciously stabbing Julia to death — the line between
reality and illusion begins to blur for Carol when Julie is indeed found murdered
in exactly the way Carol envisioned. Inspector Corvin (Stanley Baker, HELL DRIVERS,
ACCIDENT) and Sergeant Brandon (Alberto de Mendoza, A BULLET FOR SANDOVAL, HORROR
EXPRESS) of the Flying Squad are called in, but it won’t be an easy case
to solve, what with Carol, her cheating husband, her overprotective father,
her scheming step-daughter, and tripped-out murderous hippies Jenny and Hubert
(pop stars Penny Brown and Mike Kennedy), all viable suspects.
After watching and listening to the hours of extras on this Mondo Macabro release
of A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN, it seemed a pretty convincing case was
being made as to the important transformational position Fulci’s movie
had within the giallo genre; specifically, its early-on embrace of
outsized gore and edgy sexuality which helped to usher in the genre’s
more outrageous excesses of the 1970s and 1980s. In full disclosure, it took
a minute or two for this reviewer to connect up this restored version of A LIZARD
IN A WOMAN’S SKIN with my (very) vague memories of the edited AIP release
(titled SCHIZOID), which I caught at a seedy drive-in on the bottom of a triple-bill,
quite some time after its 1972 U.S. premiere. Even then it had a reputation
among hard-core gore, drive-in, and exploitation fans here in the States as
a foreign thriller that really “delivered the goods,” so to speak.
In those pre-internet days, just a mention in the trades of the U.S. version
being edited, accompanied by reviews that pointed out the movie’s high
shock quotient, could fuel whispered speculation for years about what forbidden,
heinous exploitation delights we might be missing — in A LIZARD
IN A WOMAN’S SKIN’s case a situation exacerbated by its many edited,
compromised VHS and DVD releases.
Certainly with A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN, its scandalous scene of doggie
vivisectionism has long been touted as its main claim to fame in terms of attaining
its “classic” exploitation status (I doubt I even knew Fulci’s
name back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, even though I was a fan of ZOMBIE
2 and THE BEYOND). Seen today, after countless gore-fests have numbed us to
most past efforts’ splatter...the canine scene is still impressively gross.
Special effects wizard Carlo Rambaldi’s hollowed-out coyote skins filled
with spraying blood and realistically pumping and vibrating viscera give you
that kind of “sweet jumping jesus” moment that only truly tasteless,
perfectly executed schlock can summon up (the frequently quoted true story about
Fulci being taken to court over this, and Rambaldi saving his bacon by bringing
in the animatronics to prove they didn’t really torture dogs on the set,
seems so ridiculous it sounds like publicity stunt eyewash). I was just as impressed
with Franco DiGirolamo’s hyper-realistic torso and breast created for
the extreme close-up stabbing of Stringberg, as well as Rambaldi’s madly
swirling electro-motor bats for Fulci’s THE BIRDS homage. These moments
are stand-out set pieces, to be sure...but they don’t dominate the movie’s
run time. As for A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN’s then-taboo sexuality,
there’s certainly nothing wrong with seeing knee-weakening Florinda Bolkan
and Stringberg in various stages of undress...but the lesbian angle is now tame
at best.
So if the gore and violence isn’t non-stop, and the sex chaste, then why
is A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN so compulsively watchable? Well...it’s
certainly not because of the largely familiar Hitchcockian murder mystery framework,
either. Fulci cheats left and right in the clues, the characters’ motives,
the mystery’s logical progression, and even the most basic representations
of the facts of the mystery, either because he’s unusually adept at fragmenting
the movie’s interior logic (agree), or because the movie was edited or
dubbed out of comprehension (certainly a possibility), or because scenes are
still missing (who knows). If you like your murder mysteries to “make
sense” so you can follow along and try and solve the case yourself, you
can safely skip A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN; it’s not that kind of
cozy village murder mystery outing (although the giallo’s literary origins
do owe something to that genre, such as Christie’s work).
Fulci’s script, co-written with Roberto Gianviti (ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER,
DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING), Jose Luis Martinez (A BULLET FOR SANDOVAL,
EAGLES OVER LONDON), and Andre Tranche (LONG LIVE ROBIN HOOD, IVANHOE, THE NORMAN
SWORDSMAN), touches on numerous frictions of opposing forces and themes. Carol
used to be a lawyer, but now she’s a bored housewife. She married a successful,
extremely handsome lawyer who now occupies her slot at her father’s office,
and who doesn’t make love to her anymore. Carol is supposed to be an happily
married woman abiding by the relatively conservative norms of her upper-class
society, and yet she guiltily desires sex with her female bohemian neighbor.
Her husband speaks of morality at the same time he sleeps with his wife’s
best friend, while Carol’s father runs for public office while secretly
dealing with some kind of blackmail (I’m not telling). The peace
and love hippies that are changing orderly London society are alternately wigged
out on drugs or homicidal, while the blasé cops think the upper class
Hammonds are decadent libertines, and no better than the wacko flower children
they have to bust. All of this is quite interesting...but Fulci isn’t
intent on exploring these juxtapositions; they’re merely tantalizing little
points of interest to further unsettle the viewer in between his trippy freak-out
scenes.
That doesn’t mean A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN has nothing on its
mind, or that Fulci isn’t interested in such themes — it’s
just that the poetry of his vision seems to be more important to him...or at
least more forcefully expressed. The point of A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN
is the sensuousness of it all, rather than any inherent intellectual parlor
games. It’s a sick, mordantly funny comic opera, not a term paper. The
remarkable opening dream sequence with Carol being made love to by Julia (an
event we later learn is false in a way I won’t spoil), is a stunning mix
of color (the blood red bed against the black void backgrounds) and slow motion
movement (Carol fighting through the writhing bodies in the long white hallway,
the revealed texture and color of Carol’s fur coat as it’s blown
by an incongruous wind in the bedroom), made palpable by the beauty of Bolkan’s
and Stringberg’s bodies, and composer Ennio Morricone’s off-putting,
atonal score. Later, Fulci will repeat this luxurious delight, but pervert it
with a graphic stabbing that’s just as beautiful, in a completely twisted
way, as was their lovemaking. The contrasts of his visual aesthetics are far
more interesting than any antagonistic socio-political themes in the script:
the silky, elegant slo-mos versus his shaky, paranoid hand-helds and extreme
zooms onto people’s eyes; the constant jump cuts to further discombobulate
the viewer; the downright pointlessness of many of his scenes, from police interrogations
that yield no information, to lying, false flashbacks and most famously, doggie
vivisectionism and bat attacks that have absolutely no validity in the story
proper, only serving to overwhelm the audience’s senses. By the end of
A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN, when Fulci gives us a typically Hitchcockian
“wrap up” scene where flatfoot Baker explains to the puzzled audience
what really went down, it’s a total on-purpose cock-up. We don’t
know what the hell he’s talking about, nor would we believe him if we
did. We don’t know if anything we saw in A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S
SKIN was “real” or a fevered dream. And that’s why A LIZARD
IN A WOMAN’S SKIN is enjoyed so much more if taken like listening to a
piece of music — something to be just experienced, rather than “figured
out.”
The MPEG-4 AVC 1080p 24fps 1.85:1 anomorphic Blu-ray transfer, taken from the
original negative, is most impressive. Grain structure is dense, image fine
detail is on the high side, depth of image is notable. Colors are saturated
and finely balanced, with skin tones varied and subtle. Contrast is mostly smooth
(if it varies at times, I’m assuming it’s faithful to the original
elements), and the image quite bright (blacks are solid). Some scratches and
dirt, but not at all a distraction. The two PCM split mono audio tracks, English
and Italian, are unexceptional, with relatively clean dialogue, a decent re-recording
level, and some faint hiss at times. MM is advertising new English subtitles
for the Italian track, and I recommend having them on while you watch the English
dub, since most of the actors spoke (or mouthed) English; as well, the Italian
track offers some entirely different perspectives on characters and plot points
that are amusingly pointed out by the difference in what’s being said
in English (the best, in Italian, is Joan telling Daddy she wouldn’t date
girls if he loved her more).
The extras are copious. First up is a full commentary track featuring MM’s
Pete Tombs and director Kris Gavin. Tombs in particular is an encyclopedia of
minutia on this movie and the giallo genre (and that’s a good thing),
so the track is quite illuminating (it’s also amusing to hear enthusiastic
Gavin repeatedly cutting off Tombs when Tombs is almost ready to make a point
about something). The two funniest remarks? When Tombs references the “10
people who are going to listen to this” track...and his theory that the
CIA introduced LSD to distract socialists from changing the world (hee hee!).
Next up is "Dr. Lucio Fulci’s Day for Night" (32:04), an absorbing
interview of Fulci directed by Antonietta De Lillo, that finds the director
discussing his troubled career. I have to imagine Fulci probably didn’t
like how De Lillo made it seem as if he was droning on an on by repeatedly fading
out his image and voice before he finishes a thought, before she jump cuts to
another milestone in his life (it all sounded interesting to me; I’d rather
have had the entire interview than “smart” editing). Some best quotes?
“I’m not a monster — I just entertain people with monsters,”
“I want to be judged, not loved or hated,” and “I’m
a liar,” said with a sad smile. Next, 2003’s "Shedding the
Skin" (33:46), which was included on a previous DVD release of A LIZARD
IN A WOMAN’S SKIN, is hosted by Penny Brown, and features background on
the movie’s production, with interviews of some of the (then) surviving
cast and crew, including Bolkan, Sorel, Kennedy, Rambaldi, and Franco DiGirolamo
(director Kris Gavin has a commentary track for this doc, if you want to hear
how he shot this). New interview "When Worlds Collide" (29:09) features
author Stephen Thrower discussing the various dramatic themes in A LIZARD IN
A WOMAN’S SKIN. It’s a fascinating discussion of Fulci’s work
and his career (apparently, the director burned a lot of bridges throughout
his troubled life and career), but jesus couldn’t somebody back that goddamn
camera off Thrower for two seconds? He’s uncomfortably close to the lens,
always looking down, perhaps, at his right foot, with the overall effect at
almost half an hour being ridiculously claustrophobic. Next, "From Burton
to Baker" (12:29) finds actor Tony Adams — blink and you’ll
miss him in A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN — reminiscing about working
with Richard Burton on the unjustly neglected crime thriller VILLAIN (which
has nothing to do with Fulci’s movie, by the way), before basically stating
he hated Stanley Baker. Not terribly illuminating, but fun gossip. Two peripatetic
radio ads (1:30) from AIP’s 1972 SCHIZOID re-title are included (if I
heard that on the radio today, I’d line up the day before to see it).
Remember: “SCHIZOID is not recommended for persons with schizophrenic
tendencies!” Check. The original Italian opening credits are also included,
if you read Italian, while four original trailers for A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S
SKIN (4:52) are included. (Paul
Mavis)