Finishing School

With its rather edgy, alluring title, 1968's Naked You Die (also known as The Young, the Evil and the Savage, as well as Schoolgirl Killer), you’d think you are in for a highly controversial giallo, but, as this dates from the 60s, a few years prior to when this style of film started pushing the boundaries of violence and sex, you’re actually in for a slightly more traditional murder mystery compared to what the title might suggest. After an unknown piece of luggage in the form of a giant, heavy trunk arrives at St. Hilda’s College (which is basically a posh boarding school for young women) along with a few new staff members, including husky voiced, goth like science teacher Mrs. Clay (Betty Low) and ultra athletic gym teacher and swim instructor Di Brazzi (Giovanni Di Benedetto), things turn unexpectedly murderous rather quickly.

Unlike most other memorable Hammer horror movies, the 1964 mystery thriller Nightmare, directed by Freddie Francis (perhaps better known as the cinematographer of films like David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear) eliminates all of the monsters for an old fashioned quasi ghost story... the piece deserving to be remembered up there with those Hammer horror films centered on vampires, resurrected corpses, and lycanthropes. Shot in shadowy black and white, the story follows struggling seventeen year old Janet (Jennie Linden), who is currently away from home living at a finishing school for girls.

Don’t get the wrong idea... the 1973 giallo Death Carries a Cane, co-written and directed by Maurizio Pradeaux, may make it sound like the grim reaper-like killer at the centre of all the carnage is simply some feeble hop-a-long struggling to meander the streets of Italy, but that may not be the case when you hear some of the other titles that this film has been gifted for different markets or releases: Dance Steps on the Edge of a Razor, The Tormentor, Maniac at Large, The Night of the Rolling Heads, and Devil Blade... perhaps it’s a bit more ominous sounding now. Poor Kitty (Nieves Navarro; aka Susan Scott) is at the right place at the wrong time... showing her visiting parents some of the tourist sites in Rome, she just so happens to be looking through some pay-for-use binoculars on a hilltop when she witnesses the murder of a young woman (through a house window) by a silhouetted assailant wearing a black hat, overcoat and stylish sunglasses who has a bit of a hobble.

The very Italian giallo meets burgeoning blaxsploitation in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in the 1972 crime mystery Tropic of Cancer (sometimes also referred to as Death in Haiti or Peacock’s Palace), directed by Giampaolo Lomi and Edoardo Mulargia (both also co-write along with star Anthony Steffen). A couple on the rocks, Fred and Grace Wright (Gabriele Tinti and Anita Strindberg), make their way to the island paradise to seemingly rekindle their relationship... yet the husband also plans on meeting up with long unseen friend Doctor Williams (Anthony Steffen). Unbeknownst to them (or is it), the M.D. and veterinarian by day and scientist by night (this guy can do everything) has discovered a rather desirable aphrodisiacal hallucinogenic drug formula that everyone is out to get – some legitimately, others not so much.

Who knew that killers in a giallo could accessorize... for in The Killer Nun (1979), the prototypical black gloves are replaced with a colourful pair of pink ones – much more fashionable. Co-written and directed by Giulio Berruti, he fuses the aforementioned themes of the giallo with the growing craze of nunsploitation...as well as being loosely based on the real story of Belgian nun Cecile Bombeek. This sordid tale follows Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg), a middle aged nun who has recently had some rather serious health problems. Having recovered from brain surgery, she is quite hysterical... fearing that she is still sick and in need of care. Leading her through an almost male-like form of mid-life crisis, dare I say that she starts quite a few bad habits: a serious addiction to morphine, leaving the hospital she works for in order to have affairs with unknown men, and creating a rather unique bond with her busty roommate nun, Sister Mathieu (Paola Morra) – you might call them bosom buddies, or breast friends with benefits – okay, enough.

Nearing the end of the Golden Years of Universal horror, The Cat Creeps (1946), directed by genre specialist Erle C. Kenton (Island of Lost Souls, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Who Done It?), is the dying whisper of the old haunted house murder mystery film (at least until Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! brought back the excitement for kids in the late 1960s). In fact, this would be the last horror movie produced by Universal until 1951's The Strange Door – excluding Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, which is more of a spoof of horror movies. What started with horror films (followed closely by comedy spoofs) like The Cat and the Canary (1927 and 1939), The Old Dark House (1932), The Black Cat (1934 and 1941), The Ghost Breakers (1940), Hold That Ghost (1941), was then met with a supernatural element found in Cat People (1942), The Curse of the Cat People (1944), and She-Wolf of London (1946), to name but a few, The Cat Creeps pulling from all of these sources to make a, dare I say it, ‘copy-cat’ of the previous filmography.