All the Colours of the Dark (1972)

The moral of the story is 'don't believe everything you read'! When the programme for the current season at the BFI arrived, we both noticed the blurb for a showing of the above film, which I will quote in full:
   "Although not as widely known as Bava or Argento, giallo stalwart Sergio Martino provided  the sub-genre with some of its most enduring classics, and this tale of a London-based woman drawn into a satanic cult remains one of his most enjoyable efforts. Putting a sly supernatural spin on the classic formula, this is vintage giallo: gorgeous to look at and weird as hell".

In a pig's eye! as we say over here. I booked the tickets before we viewed "Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I have the Key" at last month's FrightFest, but doubt that I would have done so after seeing that mouthful of a title. Mind you, in comparison with the movie we viewed last night, the restored copy of 'Your Vice...' was a masterpiece. For a start, after booking, I received an email from the box office saying that they had been 'fortunate' enough to locate an original print from the U.S. and would be showing that copy...

So we ended up viewing a dubbed movie titled "They're Coming to Get You" which was six minutes shorter than the advertised feature -- I have no idea what if anything was cut, although there were some very abrupt jumps in the action. The second problem was that the print on obviously inferior colour stock had deteriorated to barely watchable footage at times, and was hardly the 'sumptuous Scope photography' promised in the programme notes. To cap things off, the film was something of a muddled potboiler.

Like "Your Vice..." this film also stars Edwige Fenech, who looks even more gorgeous and delectable here; at the time she was the girlfriend of Luciano Martino, the director's brother, hence the rash of their collaborations. However little can save the mishmash of the storyline. Fenech plays Jane the mixed-up girlfriend of another Giallo stalwart George Hilton -- the actors of the period has a great penchant for anglicizing their Italianate names -- whose child she has recently miscarried. He is away too often on business and she is afraid to confide her growing panic, her frightening dreams, and the increasingly recurrent glimpses of the blonde, icy, blue-eyed fellow who she thinks wants to kill her. Is she losing her grip on reality??? Her sister has arranged psychiatric counselling for her which isn't doing much good, while a new glamorous neighbour thinks that joining her local satanic coven might do the trick. All together now, yeah, yeah, yeah.

While one is used to the genre having gaping plot holes, they are broader than ever in this film. Of course Jane is happy to be sexually abused by all of the coven, and of course she may have murdered her neighbour as part of the ritual, and of course her psychiatrist will offer her sanctuary at his little 'summer house' (more of a country mansion) where she awakens to find the caretakers bloody and dead, and of course she will end up killing her boyfriend. Or perhaps these were all figments of her tortured mind. In the wake of "Rosemary's Baby', satanic cults were all the rage and the Italian directors were never averse to borrowing the odd story line. However I would be hard pressed to even classify this movie as a classic giallo, which has its own rules all of which are totally ignored here, or even as a successful merging of two fashionable genres.

Perhaps if we had seen a better (or restored and undubbed) print, the film might have had some redeeming features. Certainly the pictorial insights into Jane's confused brain were occasionally shot with a certain bravura, and Martino's use of swirling camera movements, skewed angles, and stylized surrealistic tableaux produce further indications of an auteur at work. However the additional programme note which claimed that Fenech's performance succeeds in turning the ridiculous into the sublime is a case of film criticism soaring off into cloud-cuckoo land -- says Pretty Pink Patty.