The publisher Artus continues, with four new titles, its fruitful exploration of popular Italian cinema long passed under the radar of critics. Too broke, too trivial, too vulgar, often distributed in France in obscure and dusty neighborhood theaters, these films find, even find, thanks to the emergence and the affirmation of a sort of contemporary pop cinephilia , a hint of nostalgia, a paradoxical desire for ennobling, an existence, henceforth more legitimate. Unless we put this resurrection under the sign of a confusion of times.
“The red lady killed seven times” takes up the recipes of the giallo, this type of detective film, built on the sedimentation of barbaric murder sequences
The Smugglers of Santa Lucia Alfonso Brescia (1979) is part of the sub-genre that was the Neapolitan thriller. Cop in jeans by Bruno Corbucci (1976) will be the first appearance of a character then embodied ten times on the screen by the great Tomas Milian, Brigadier Nico Giraldi, rude and astute cop, brilliant Roman figure and particularly earthy proletarian. But it is undoubtedly necessary, of this new delivery, to retain the two other titles signed besides by the same director, the mysterious Emilio P. Miraglia, author of six films between 1967 and 1972 and then nothing more. Call of the flesh and The red lady killed seven times are two thrillers, produced in 1971 and 1972 respectively, shot at a time when the genre was very popular in Italy.
The red lady killed seven times takes up the recipes of giallo, this type of detective film, built on an alloy of violence and eroticism and on the sedimentation of barbaric murder sequences. A wave that the success of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage of Dario Argento, in 1970, had engendered. The mystery flirts with the fantastic in this tale where a series of assassinations seems to have its origin in an ancestral and family curse doomed to repeat itself every century. This intrusion of legend, at the heart of a detective story with prosaic springs, gives a strange quality to a work that resembles a dark fairy tale, erotic and macabre at the same time.
Supernatural dimension
But it is undoubtedly Call of the flesh, shot a year before, which stands out for its strangeness and its almost heroic way of not doubting anything. The story of the film, whose Italian title would translate as “The night Evelyn came out of the tomb”, is set in England (although it was undoubtedly filmed around Rome). A wealthy English lord, mentally disturbed since the death of his wife, regularly takes strippers and red-haired prostitutes to his home, a castle inside which a neighboring medieval torture chamber with a living room with ultramodern furnishings. He whips them to death at the end of a sexual ritual before, it is guessed, to get rid of their remains. He marries, on a whim, a young woman crossed one evening and seems, since his marriage, to be the object of macabre visions, in particular that of the corpse of his wife, returned to life. While it ultimately comes under the classic story of machinations, in the tradition of Evil by Clouzot, the film touches on a supernatural dimension.
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