"Lizard in a Woman's Skin" (1971) is an early, comparatively goreless giallo from Italian master Lucio Fulci. In it, Florinda Bolkan (who would go on to play the epileptic voodoo woman so memorably chain-whipped to death in Fulci's 1972 effort "Don't Torture a Duckling") portrays Carol Hammond, a well-to-do wife living in London who suffers from dreams of a very startling nature. Her latest involves the murder of her swinging next-door neighbor, a gorgeous blonde who's always throwing psychedelic, acid-drenched orgies. (Why can't I get invited to one of these things?!?) When that neighbor is found brutally slain a few days later, poor Carol is thrown into quite a state indeed... Anyway, director Fulci uses all the tricks in his considerable arsenal--split screens, slo-mo, smeared lenses, rapid-fire editing, unusual camera angles--to create a sense of decided strangeness in his picture, and he is abetted by the maestro himself, Ennio Morricone, who provides a score that is alternately freaky and quite lovely. Despite the relative lack of gore and the low number of actual homicides, the film boasts at least one bravura set piece, in which Florinda plays cat and mouse with a crazed killer in an immense, deserted cathedral, inhabited only by rampaging bats. (Fulci would use a similar bat attack sequence in a later film, 1981's "The Black Cat.") I cannot imagine anyone being able to divine the identity of the killer in this picture (unlike detective Stanley Baker, who is very fine here, by the way), but must admit that the film does hang together logically and coherently, unlike some other gialli that I have seen. In all, a most worthwhile film indeed, and the very decent-looking DVD that I just watched from the fine folks at Shriek Show serves it well.
Review of A Lizard in a Woman's Skin
