Don't Torture A Duckling

Saw Don't Torture A Duckling, a so-called Italian Giallo film. Originally the film was titled Non si Sevizia un Paperino - Paperino being the Italian alias of Donald Duck who is greatly popular in Italy and features in this film as a plot point. Anyway, the film is a true-to-form Giallo, involving elements of horror, mystery, police procedural, and psychodrama.

The plot is that boys in this small village are being killed. Who's the murderer? The rich, idle woman? The crazy lady everyone calls a witch? The creepy groundskeeper? One of the sinister kids? The weirdly attractive priest? Who knows!? The film sets up the characters and then becomes a procedural. A mustachioed journalist pries and asks questions and eventually solves the mystery (uh... spoiler alert I guess.)

There's a theme of evil women. In addition to the witch lady, the bored rich woman jokingly propositions one of the boys. This film was made in the 70s, so it's just meant to be provocative and sexy, but simultaneously the boy is obviously intimidated and scared. In modern times of course this reads as frank harassment (if not abuse) but even in the context of the film it's portrayed as a kind of cruel thing to do. Women are often the subject of the film. Remote, untouchable, taunting, teasing. This ties into the killer's motives, but this sort of bothered me.

This film is very lurid. There's tits within the first 10 minutes or so and at one point a pretty lady is murdered by an angry mob. Her murder is filmed in a series of soft-focus close-ups, her head thrashing from side to side as blood splashes down her face. The violence is extreme but also obviously fake, halloween-tier stuff. The wounds are obviously painted on, but not a drop of red paint was spared. At one point someone falls down a mountain. We see what is obviously a dummy falling and then get a close-up of what is very very obviously a dummy. Later the dummy's head explodes. If it were realistic it would be disturbing but it's obviously wax, so the whole thing feels kind of formal, like seeing an actor take a sword to the armpit.

The film was a little clumsy. The payoff is good and there are themes at all which is always nice. I have a few Giallo films to see now. I wonder if they'll all be as silly and lurid. One can only hope!