Night Terrors

A deep dive into 60s Swinging London, or should I say ‘dream dive’, Edgar Wright follows up his 2017 hit Baby Driver with another film that gets its title from a song – Last Night in Soho (a 1967 single by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mich & Tich – I know, quite the band name). Set in the present day, Eloise ‘Ellie’ Turner (Thomasin McKenzie – Jojo Rabbit) is a fragile, mousy young woman who has immersed herself in 60s culture... constantly listening to records of the time, her dream is to bring the swinging era’s fashion back. Leaving for fashion school in Soho, she is still haunted by her mother’s suicide – something that happened when she was just a young child (in fact, she sometimes sees her mother’s spirit in the mirror).

A sugar stalker, milk chocolate peeping Tom, juice sucker, and cookie cadaver all mean... well, absolutely nothing, but they sure do sound like they would fit nicely in the 1969 giallo So Sweet... So Perverse, directed by Umberto Lenzi. Inspired by the movie that started the whole twist-ending trend, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955), the narrative follows Jean Reynaud (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a wealthy businessman living in Paris. Married to disenchanted Danielle (Erika Blanc), he is more interested in playing the field (from what we hear, so is his wife), rather than spend time in their expansive third floor apartment together.

Sometimes the heat makes us go a little crazy. Likewise, alcohol can have a similar effect... pair them both together, and all bets are off. Transporting us into the dog days of summer in the City That Never Sleeps, Deadline at Dawn (1946), directed by Harold Clurman (the only feature made by the legendary stage director), is full of drunken danger. With perspiration dripping from every pore, baby-face Navy sailor Alex Winkler (Bill Williams) finds himself waking from a nasty bender at a New York City newsstand. . . if that wasn’t bad enough, he discovers a wad of cash that isn’t his and a faint memory of stealing it from loose femme Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane), a slinky blackmailer who’s definitely on the fatale side.

A musical murder mystery? Yes, you read that right. . . and that was the type of film you often saw during the Pre-Code era. If 1934's Murder at the Vanities was made just six months later, it never would have passed code and been released – fortuitous for the film makers and us. Directed by Mitchell Leisen, this on stage/backstage premise finds Jack Ellery (Jack Oakie – The Great Dictator) putting on a sumptuous musical revue, featuring his two stars, an Austrian making his American debut, Eric Lander (Carl Brisson), and up and coming Ann Ware (Kitty Carlisle). Unbeknownst to everyone, a whirlwind romance has swooped up between the two stars. . . and they plan to marry after the opening show (they make the announcement upon their arrival at the theatre).

Perhaps the most wild and audacious opening ever seen in a giallo, 1975's Autopsy, co-written and directed by Armando Crispino, starts with a rotisserie of people committing suicide in both shocking and outlandish ways. . . only for the camera to then take us into one of the last taboo places in film, the morgue, to show us the bodies piling up in the life of half American/half Italian Simona Sanna (Mimsy Farmer) – this is clearly not the Rome we normally see in movies. Now, you may be wondering what all these bodies have to do with her. . . well, she is a young doctor working on a research project revolving around the difference between suicides and well hidden murders made to look like the former. As you might imagine, it is grave subject matter. . . so much so that she is struggling in her romantic relationship with photographer Riccardo (Ray Lovelock) and is even hallucinating that those dead bodies are coming back to life.

Walking a narrow tightrope between giallo and horror, 1972's Murder Mansion, by then first time director Francisco Lara Polop, pulls from films like The Cat and the Canary (either the 1927 or 1939 edition) and House on Haunted Hill (1959), as well as sources like Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” and maybe even Scooby-Doo, to create a bizarre concoction that mostly works. Opening in a most unexpected way for either a giallo or horror feature, motorcycle meets sports car in a blistering country road race, the former driven by calm, cool, and collected Fred (Andrés Resino), while the latter is floored by cocksure Mr. Porter (Franco Fantasia – talk about a name). Only fueling the fire, sultry fashionista Laura (Lisa Leonardi) is spotted hitchhiking. . . the motorist winning the pick-up over the biker, the chase continuing as they weave in and out of sporadic traffic. . . only for the biker to convince her to join him at their next gas station stop (as Mr. Porter is a tad too handsy).