Arrow Video
Blu-ray Release: March 25, 2025
Video: 2.35:1/2160p (HDR10/Dolby Vision)/Color
Audio: English and Italian LPCM 1.0 mono
Subtitles: English SDH, English
Run Time: 105:07
Director: Lucio Fulci
Note: This review recycles elements from my older Blu-ray review. I have changed and refined things, so I hope you’ll read it, but, if you're only interested in my opinion on the 4K UHD’s exclusive elements, feel free to skip to the red areas of the Video section.
A big city journalist named Andrea (Tomás Milián) journeys to a sleepy rural village in order to investigate a gruesome series of child murders. When he arrives, he discovers that the superstitious locals – including the police force – have laid the blame on a local witch, Maciara (Florinda Bolkan), who confesses to the crimes. When it becomes clear that Maciara isn’t the guilty party, Andrea teams up with another community outsider, a spoiled rich debutante named Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet), to unravel a mystery that is tied to the very heart of the small town.
Don’t Torture a Duckling (Italian: Non si Sevizia un Paperino; aka: The Long Night of Exorcism, 1972), was Lucio Fulci’s third giallo and the second made after Dario Argento’s Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970) established the genre’s blockbuster potential. Like Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (Italian: Una lucertola con la pelle di donna, 1971), it utilizes long-winded, animal-themed naming conventions along with Argento’s basic murder mystery template, but applies Fulci’s own fixations to the formula. A few of Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’s plot elements popped up in the director’s later work – Fulci’s fear and mistrust of psychoanalysis, for example – but Don’t Torture a Duckling anticipates so much of his post-Zombie (Italian: Zombi 2, 1979) output that it might as well be a dry run.
Unlike Argento’s jet-set, pop-art, psychosexual thrillers, which were often as funny as they were frightening, Don’t Torture a Duckling is a bleak melodrama set outside in the countryside. Instead of stylish, sexy adults, the victims are children wearing third generation clothes. Sexuality is dangerous, but only because the superstitious believe it’s a sin. Violence is painful and death is a grim reality, not a lavish spectacle to behold.
Throughout his career, Fulci had an axe to grind concerning the moralistic and conservative sides of Italian society and expressed discomfort at his own lapsing Catholic faith. This transgressive mindset first manifested in a lighthearted fashion in his earliest comedies, then in his a more serious fashion for his ultra-violent period melodrama, Beatrice Cenci (aka: The Conspiracy of Torture, 1969), and his first western, Massacre Time (Italian: Le colt cantarono la morte e fu...tempo di massacro, 1966), both of films that deal directly with the consequences of corrupt class systems. But his horror films were usually too wrapped up in atmosphere to clearly state any social/political opinions.
Aside from the same generalized fear of Catholic theology seen in hundreds of supernatural horror movies, only City of the Living Dead (Italian: Paura nella città dei morti viventi; aka: The Gates of Hell, 1980) makes any kind of explicit point. In that film, the literal evils of Hell are unleashed upon a small coastal town after a priest commits suicide and the locals blame a social misfit named Bob (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) for every impossibly violent event therafter. Bob meets his end when a worried father assaults him and slams him headfirst into a power drill. Bob’s scapegoatism may seem absolutely absurd on its own merits (made more absurd when Fulci claimed that the drill scene was a "a cry [he] wanted to launch against a certain kind of fascism”), but only if you lack the context of its roots in Beatrice Cenci, Massacre Time, and Don’t Torture a Duckling.
Spoiler warning from here until the Video section.
Reporter Andrea (portrayed by Tomás Milián, who also worked with Fulci on Beatrice Cenci and Four of the Apocalypse [Italian: I quattro dell'apocalisse, 1975]) arrives from the city (Rome, in this case) to investigate a series of child murders in an isolated southern Italian village (according to Argento’s model, Milián would be from America or the UK). The only suspects are people that don’t meet the town’s archaic ethical standards – a mentally impaired man, a celebrity socialite with ‘loose morals,’ and an innocuous, but disturbed pagan witch.
The “imbecile” (as the authorities dub him) barely escapes mob justice as he is moved from police custody to jail, but the witch is less lucky. After she’s released due to a complete lack of evidence (she originally confessed to the crimes, because she truly believed that she had killed the boys with her magic), outraged townsfolk murder her in cold blood. The reporter and socialite combine their efforts and discover that the actual culprit is a beloved Catholic priest, who is killing the children as a mercy, in order to prevent them from growing into morally corrupt adults. In short, an enduring culture of righteous indignation killed the children and a blind spot for religious malfeasance allowed the killing to continue.
Fulci’s portrait of the countryside as a bastion of superstition and ignorance is tied to his anti-Catholic, anti-bigotry sentiment, but is also fueled by his less compassionate sense of classism. Just because he was comparatively progressive didn’t mean he wasn’t also a snob. Don’t Torture a Duckling is a kind of rural horror film and developed alongside other early ‘70s films that contrasted the stark, natural beauty of the countryside with cruel violence and cultural warfair. To his credit, Fulci’s film predates two of the greatest, canonized rural horror classics: Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). The possibility that either film was inspired by Don’t Torture a Duckling is minimal, but they were all tapping into a similar post-Summer of Love, counterculture angst.
Despite its reputation, a lot of Don’t Torture a Duckling’s violence occurs between the frames. To maintain the mystery, most of the crimes are only revealed after they’ve been committed. This serves a thematic function for Fulci, who reserves graphic mayhem for the deaths of the witch and the killer himself, and neither death is fun or shot in a typically attractive giallo fashion. In the first, the innocent woman is savagely beaten with chains and clubs as the camera’s lens crash-zooms into her blistering, oozing skin. In the second, jagged rocks scrape chunks of flesh from the depraved priest’s face as he tumbles down a high cliff (the effect is a bit ropey, but its the thought that counts).
Both scenes still rate high on the list of Fulci's most vivid depictions of brutality and both were reproduced for later films. The Psychic (Italian: Sette note in nero; aka: Seven Notes in Black, 1977) reused the cliff death with a bit less juice and The Beyond (Italian: ...E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà; aka: Seven Doors of Death, 1981) stretched the chain-beating into a protracted pre-credit sequence, complete with a crucifixion and a skin-peeling lye bath. Arguably, each sequence has more impact in the context of Don’t Torture a Duckling, because that film is at once more violent than the nearly gore-free The Psychic and more realistic than The Beyond, which is ostensibly a surrealistic exploration of different forms of decay.
Bibliography:
Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci by Stephen Thrower (FAB Press, 1999)
Video
Don’t Torture a Duckling was not released on North American VHS until Anchor Bay premiered it on DVD during that brief period where VHS and DVD were still overlapping (2000, to be precise). Its lack of availability made it legendary among Fulci fans for most of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Like many, I was originally forced to suffer through grainy, full-frame, fourth-generation dupe tapes, so AB’s anamorphic, widescreen DVD was a revelation at the time. That transfer was recycled when Bill Lustig took the film with him to Blue Underground. The first Blu-ray versions were released by Happinet in Japan and 84 Entertainment in Germany. I don’t know anything about the Happinet disc, but the German transfer was definitely based on a new and exclusive remaster.
Arrow Video used the same remaster for their first Blu-ray, but there were complications (for a full rundown of the process and its problems, see the included Blu-ray booklet and various discussion threads linked from DVDBeaver’s Blu-ray comparison). Fulci shot Don’t Torture a Duckling using Techniscope, which itself creates 35mm formating issues, and Eastman Kodak stock, but then the film was then printed onto Technicolor stock. Additionally, the 2K Italian scans were deemed insufficient and Germany’s TELFilms was forced to perform extensive manual restoration. Then the company mistakenly included extra frames from the ends of each reel, which caused sync problems. Arrow corrected the runtime and made changes to the grading/colour timing.
Arrow’s Blu-ray was a massive upgrade over DVD versions. It was cleaner, more vivid, had better texture, tighter details, and so on, but it wasn’t without its problems. Black levels were overly crushed and, more importantly, like so many similar remasters from the period, the color timing skewed way too yellow and teal. I apologize, because I still can’t get screencaps from a UHD, so the images on this page are taken from the ‘problematic’ Blu-ray and are only here for editorial purposes.
This new UHD disc features a brand new 4K restoration of the original 2-perf Techniscope camera negative, seemingly bypassing the previous master’s insufficient material issues. The new color timing is much closer to the DVD and bootlegable VHS versions. Flesh tones are pinker, the sky is blue, and whites, greys, and other neutral hues no longer appear so irreparably sun-baked. The grading actually has a bit of a Technicolor sheen, I suppose due to the original attempt at printing Technicolor stock. It’s not as extreme as a full-bore ‘50s Technicolor showcase, but the primary palette has a similarly uncanny consistency and vibrancy. It’s a pleasant effect that is boosted by the HDR/Dolby Vision upgrade.
There is minor print damage, mostly reserved to the opening and closing credit sequence, but everything is notably cleaner than the cobbled 2K scan. Grain appears natural, including inconsistent upticks during wide-angle shots and zoom shots. The 2160p transfer squeezes plenty of fine detail and grain out of cinematographer Sergio D'Offizi’s photography, but doesn’t ruin the diffusion or soft focus effects by oversharpening everything. Black levels are dark without absorbing necessary details and night shots don’t have a weird day-for-night quality as seen on the older DVDs (one issue that the Blu-ray had already corrected). If we’re really nitpicking, some white clothing and shimmering highlights disappear into the white stucco walls during daylight scenes, but this doesn’t seem like an error to me.
Audio
Like the Blu-ray, this 4K includes both the English and Italian dubs in lossless LPCM 1.0 sound. As per usual, Italian films from this era were shot without sound, so no audio was recorded on set and all language tracks were dubbed in post. The sound quality between the tracks is consistent with matching effects and similarly tuned music. The non-Italian stars – Bolkan, Milián, Bouchet, and Marc Porel – are all dubbed by other actors on both the Italian and English tracks. The only English performance that doesn’t quite work for me is Michael Forest, whose vocal qualities don’t really match Milián’s.
The score was written by the late Riz Ortolani, who was sort of stuck playing catch-up after Ennio Morricone set the unofficial tone for gialli with Bird with the Crystal Plumage, despite Ortolani composing for Umberto Lenzi’s So Sweet... So Perverse (Italian: Così dolce... così perversa, 1969) a year before Argento’s film hit theaters. His string-heavy motifs are supported by folk songs (supposedly sung by characters just off screen), Wess & The Airedales’ funk/soul-infused “Crazy,” and a mournful pop song called “Quei giorni insieme a te” (“Those Days Together with You”), co-written by Ortolani and sung by Ornella Vanoni. The joyful, toe-tapping hooks and Vanoni’s woeful vocals are both used to eerily contrast the brutality of the chain-beating sequence.
Extras
Commentary with Troy Howarth – The author of So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Giallo Films (Midnight Marquee Press. 2015) jumps right in and delves deeply into Don’t Torture a Duckling during this info-packed and personable Arrow exclusive commentary.
Giallo á la Campagna (27:44, HD) – Mikel J. Koven, the author of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (Scarecrow, 2006), discusses the history of post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage gialli, the social habits of Italian cinema-going audiences in the ‘60s/’70s, the development of ‘vernacular cinema’ (his more precise term for cult genre films), and how these things relate to Don’t Torture a Duckling.
Hell is Already in Us (20:30, HD) – Critic and editor-in-chief of Diabolique Magazine Kat Ellinger addresses the prevalent misogyny seen in many of Fulci’s horror films and thrillers. She believes that the director was making statements about the violent nature of men and bases some of her assumptions on his personal plights and experiences, as well as the movies themselves.
Lucio Fulci Remembers (Part 1: 20:13; Part 2: 13:13, HD) – A two part archival audio interview with the director from 1988, in which he answers questions written to him by journalist and co-writer of Spaghetti Nightmares: Italian Fantasy-Horrors As Seen Through The Eyes Of Their Protagonists (Fantasma Books,1996), Gaetano Mistretta. It covers a wide swath of his film career and offers him a chance to talk a little shit about Dario Argento.
Cast & crew interviews
Who Killed Donald Duck? (18:31, HD) – Actress Barbara Bouchet, who made eight films in 1972 alone, recalls the making of Don’t Torture a Duckling, her co-stars, and working with Fulci.
Those Days with Lucio (28:20, HD) – Actress Florinda Bolkan talks about her work on Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Don’t Torture a Duckling.
The DP’s Eye (46:21, HD) – Cinematographer Sergio D’Offizi runs down his many collaborations with Fulci (as cinematographer and camera operator), which began with his spoof movies back in the ‘60s.
From the Cutting Table (25:38, HD) – Assistant editor Bruno Micheli looks back at his early career at Technicolor in Italy and his contributions to a number of Fulci’s movies (their relationship also extends back to the spoof days).
Endless Torture (16:03, HD) – Assistant makeup artist Maurizio Trani finishes off the new interviews by discussing the challenges of competing with Hollywood on tiny Italian B-movie budgets and outlining some of Don’t Torture a Duckling’s special effects work.
Theatrical trailer
The images on this page are taken from the 2017 BD – NOT the remastered 4K UHD – and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.