A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971)

One of Lucio Fulci's most enjoyable movies, Lizard in a Woman's Skin tells the sordid tale of Carol (Florinda Bolkan), a wealthy barrister's daughter and respectable society woman with a disturbing problem: she keeps having wet dreams about screwing the hot bohemian chick (Anita Strindberg) in the flat next door during wildly surrealistic orgies. Admittedly, most of us wouldn't consider that much of a problem, but it becomes more so after Carol makes what her analyst considers a breakthrough by dreaming about killing the neighboring harlot, who then actually turns up dead. Damned Freudian psychology always makes shit worse!

Carol has other problems, including the fact that her husband Frank is screwing his secretary. Then she spots two hippies from her dream walking around London, chases them down, and finds they have no recollection of the killing. The police focus their investigation on her and she gets locked up, but soon there are hippies showing up to snuff her. Is there an evil conspiracy trying to ruin her life? Or is this a story about the psychological damage inflicted upon a woman by sexual repression and upper class hypocrisy? Maybe a little bit of both!

Lizard in a Woman's Skin is sort of Fulci's psychedelic mod mystery flick and two things help him here: the Swinging London setting, which allows for him to slip in his usual surrealistic weirdness, and the mystery plot, which forces him to stick to a coherent narrative. The Ennio Morricone score is great too, of course. I don't know that I'd consider most of Fulci's movies to be giallos, although this one definitely is; and I'm not actually a fan of most of his movies. Granted, City of the Living Dead holds a special place in my heart as the first horror movie my parents let me watch (at age 8! Thanks Mom and Dad!), but Fulci has an irritating tendency to shoot gore scenes with extremely long closeups that start to resemble the boring snatch shots in porn flicks. The problem with filming someone getting killed in slow, long closeups is you start wondering Why the hell are they just sitting there getting killed? Here, the gore is minimal and therefore more effective. There was a scene with some mutilated (fake) dogs that was a bit barf-inducing, but otherwise it's more like a real movie.

Even better, the LSD shenanigans allow Fulci to cram in lots of wacko style and filmmaking bravura. At one point, he pays homage to Francis Bacon's famous portrait of Pope Innocent X. At another, a trip through a crowded train becomes a crowded orgy! The hippie LSD party is a particular highlight. And you also have plenty of female flesh on display. What else could you want? (Maybe a bit less talking and police procedural stuff, but otherwise it's fun.)

Savage Intruder (1970)

The Savage Intruder starts with a great credit sequence of the decrepit and rotting Hollywood sign panning down to a severed head and hands lying in the dirt below. It's a nice visual commentary on a Hollywood studio system that knows where to bury its bodies. Also, it introduces us to a serial killer who is slashing up older women in the Hollywood Hills, which makes sense because the young ones run away a lot faster in the usual slasher flick. It's a wonder nobody thought of this before. He's played by David Garfield, son of screen legend John Garfield, and we see him follow an old lady home from a bad and cut her up in her bathroom early in the film so there's no mystery about that. The opening scenes, though, are both pretty grim and gruesome, setting up a tone that the movie doesn't really maintain.

Instead, the film shifts into Hollywood Boulevard/Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? mode as the young punk slasher, Vic, turns his attentions to aged former movie star Katherine Parker, played by real life elderly ex-movie star Miriam Hopkins (from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde among others). Her glory days solidly behind her, now she spends her days in a vast and creepy mansion drinking heavily and imagining she's at the gala balls that have since ended. Introducing himself as Laurel N. Hardy, the hippie slasher gets a job as a personal assistant for the old biddy, which we know won't go well.

The movie plays up the arrogance of the 60s generation against the decrepit glamour of 1930s Hollywood. Vic gets under the skin of the house matron played by Gale Sondergaard and into the panties of the Asian maid Greta who he calls "my little fortune cookie". He also shoots up and hallucinates about running down a cool endless day-glo checkerboard hallway to a room where his mother is having a sexual rendezvous with five guys before the child Vic chops her hand off with a hatchet. Mamma was a whore and a lush and now Vic kills older matronly women- Freud would get it. Throwing a spanner in the works, Katherine jumps his bones and falls in love with the young punk. Cue the acid rock!

So psycho Vic's plan is to turn the old bat into a sugar mamma and he's willing to kill anyone who gets in his way. Instead of being a "savage intruder", he's really more of an opportunist with a psycho streak and a genuinely creepy character. Katherine, meanwhile, is a delusional alcoholic in the Gloria Swanson mode. She was always big; it was the killer hippies that got small! Things get sufficiently gory in spots and really weird in others. In one great sequence, Vic takes Katherine to a hippie drug party where she encounters a drug pushing midget, black and gay stereotypes, crazy wallpaper, and the cast of Laugh-In basically. In another, she gets drunk at the late night Christmas parade and bitches to a television reporter about the "queers" on Hollywood Boulevard.

For about the first hour, this contrast between the psychedelic generation and the older lonely booze hound works pretty well. Like The Night God Screamed, the older set's fears about the hippie creeps are totally justified here! The gore effects are surprisingly good, considering it was filmed in 1969. Eventually, though, it starts to run out of steam, right about the point Vic starts holding Katherine hostage. The last half hour really repeats itself. One also the unmistakable feeling of having seen all of this before in some classic movies. Also the last half hour really repeats itself. (Ba-dum-tish!) Anyway, it's still worth a rental if you've ever wanted to see a gorier drug era version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. Actually, it's not on DVD, so you'd have to find a place that rents VHS, or rents movies at all anymore. God, now I feel like an old timer!