Celluloid Dreams
4K UHD Release: June 25, 2024
Video: 2.35:1/2160p (HDR10)/Color
Audio: English and Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 Mono
Subtitles: English, English SDH
Run Time: 94:57
Director: Giuliano Carnimeo
The gruesome murders of two young women send a shockwave of fear through the tenants of a high-rise apartment building. For photo models Jennifer (Edwige Fenech) and Marylin (Paola Quattrini), it presents a welcome opportunity to move in together in one of the emptied flats. But the aura of terror catches up with everyone and Jennifer soon feels like prey, stalked and targeted by the gloved killer. As her paranoia grows, Jennifer suspects everyone – her fanatic ex-husband, her spinster neighbor, the lesbian from down the hall, and even her boyfriend – but she is determined to stay one step ahead of the depraved killer. (From Celluloid Dreams’ official synopsis)
By 1972, the Italian-made thrillers known as gialli had already crested in popularity locally. The genre would continue thriving into the early ‘80s, but the field was getting crowded, following 1971 when more than 40 gialli flooded theaters. The largest success to come out of the period was probably Dario Argento, who became a household name off the back of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970), but the most consistent contributor was Sergio Martino, who made (arguably seven gialli in total, two of which – All the Colors of the Dark (Italian: Tutti i Colori del Duio, 1972) and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (Italian: Il Tuo Vizio è Una Stanza Chiusa e Solo Io ne ho la Chiave, 1972) – were released in 1972.
Martino often worked with his producer brother, Luciano, but was apparently too busy to take on Luciano’s third giallo that year, so The Case of the Bloody Iris (Italian: Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer?) was handed off to Giuliano Carnimeo. It was probably for the best, as Sergio’s gialli had become increasingly esoteric and The Case of the Bloody Iris was designed to be a crowd-pleaser, bursting with melodrama, chic fashion, sex, and violence. Carnimeo had never made a thriller, but was a skillful action director responsible for four solid sequels to Gianfranco Parolini’s If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death (Italian: Se incontri Sartana prega per la tua morte, 1968), among other spaghetti westerns.
For basic setups and scenes, Carnimeo opts to impersonate Martino, in order to keep things on-brand (including the use of Sergio’s beloved kaleidoscopic lens filter and crash zooms), while also injecting everything with his own brand of slick theatricality and sultry sex appeal. His experience directing tough guys in westerns transfers well to directing asshole cops and his action credentials help immensely during an early, uniquely unexpected scene, where actress Carla Brait, playing an exotic dancer, invites a macho patron onstage to assault her sexually, only to beat the shit out of him. The murder set-pieces might be lacking Martino’s special touch, but are still dynamic. A couple seem to have inspired similar scenes from later, more famous thrillers. The opening elevator attack, for example, is regularly compared to a similar scene in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) by fans and, in a later attack, the killer grabs a woman’s hands as she lifts them over her head to remove a shirt, almost identically to the tee-shirt murder from Argento’s Tenebrae (aka: Unsane, 1982), minus the coup de grace*.
Another key contributor was writer Ernesto Gastaldi, who had already written The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Italian: Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh, 1971), The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (Italian: La coda dello scorpione, 1971), All the Colors of the Dark, and Your Vice is a Locked Room for the Martino Brothers. Gastaldi was already the most prolific writer of Italian horror in the early ‘60s when he became an instrumental part of the early giallo formula, having scripted not only a number of Martino’s entries, but also other pre-Crystal Plumage entries, like Libido (1965), which he co-directed with Vittorio Salerno, Luigi Bazzoni & Franco Rossellini’s The Possessed (Italian: La donna del lago, 1965), Elio Scardamaglia & Lionello De Felice’s The Murder Clinic (Italian: La lama nel corpo, 1966), and Umberto Lenzi’s So Sweet… So Perverse (Italian: Così dolce... così perversa, 1969).
Gastaldi recycles several ideas from the earlier gialli he wrote for the Martinos. While the plots differed, those films (and a few yet to come) were generally about women navigating a world of abusive men, be they strangers, current partners, or former lovers**. In The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, a woman is stalked by a violent ex she thought she escaped by remarrying a diplomat. In The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, a woman is stalked by a violent ex when she travels to Greece to collect an inheritance. In Your Vice is a Locked Room, an abusive husband tries to clear his name after his mistress is found dead. The Case of the Bloody Iris is about a woman who is, among other things, stalked by a jealous, abusive ex that once forced her to perform in drug-induced orgies. The orgy cult itself sort of combines motifs from All the Colors of the Dark, which introduces an occult sect into the mix, and Your Vice is a Locked Room, where the antagonist throws salacious parties for local hippies out of boredom***.
The final piece of this particular puzzle was French-born actress Edwige Fenech – sex goddess, star of the three previous Martino Brothers giallo films, and Luciano’s then romantic partner. Her career as a giallo scream queen began a few years prior, when she appeared in Mario Bava’s Five Dolls for an August Moon (Italian: 5 bambole per la luna d'agosto, 1970). She’s doing a sort of variation on characters she’d already played in Mrs. Wardh and All the Colors of the Dark, though with a lot of the emotional/psychological abuse delegated to flashbacks. This gives her a higher degree of agency that ended up carrying over into Your Vice is a Locked Room (shot later in the year) and also affords her the chance to mix her giallo persona’s vulnerability with the confidence of one of her commedia sexy all'italiana characters.
The male lead, George Hilton, was a giallo superstar in his own right and plays a Hilton-esque version of Dario Argento’s ‘artist moonlighting as an amateur detective’ archetype. He had already worked with Carnimeo on a number of westerns and appeared in the first three Martino Brothers’ gialli, which also makes The Case of the Bloody Iris his third collaboration with Fenech. The supporting cast is rounded out by the aforementioned Brait, who had considerably more screentime in Martino’s Torso (Italian: I Corpi Pesentano Tracce di Violenza Carnale, 1973) the following year, Double Face (Italian: A doppia faccia, 1969) and Black Belly of the Tarantula (Italian: La tarantola dal ventre nero, 1971) player Annabella Incontrera and Paola Quattrini, who didn’t appear in another giallo film, but was the official Italian voice of Daphne on the occasionally gialloesque children’s cartoon show known as Scooby Doo, Where Are You? (1969).
Carnimeo returned to westerns after The Case of the Bloody Iris and closed out his career with comedies and his only horror film, 1988’s Rat Man (Italian: Quella villa in fondo al parco). Martino returned to working with his brother on a variety of genres, including poliziotteschi, apocalypse movies, two star-studded exploitation adventures – Slave of the Cannibal God (Italian title: La montagna del dio cannibale, 1978) and Island of the Fishmen (Italian: L'isola degli uomini pesce, 1979). He also hooked up with Lamberto Bava, Ruggero Deodato, and produced two of Umberto Lenzi’s most notorious cannibal movies, Eaten Alive! (Italian: Mangiati vivi!, 1980) and Cannibal Ferox (aka: Make Them Die Slowly, 1981). Gastaldi continued working with both Martinos on films, including Torso, The Suspicious Death of a Minor (Italian: Morte sospetta di una minorenne, 1975), and the team’s final giallo-ish film, The Scorpion with Two Tails (Italian: Assassinio al cimitero etrusco, 1982).
* Another murder occurs on a crowded street in broad daylight, which is also very similar to a scene in Tenebrae. It’s only fair that Argento stole a few ideas from Carnimeo and Gastaldi, though. Afterall, The Case of the Bloody Iris had already lifted a murder set-piece from Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (Italian: 6 donne per l'assassino, 1964).
** I haven’t seen every film Gastaldi ever wrote (a near impossibility, since he wasn’t always credited), but this theme seems to date back to Mario Bava’s Gothic romance The Whip and the Body (Italian: La frusta e il corpo, 1963). Gastaldi’s script concerns a love triangle between a woman, her husband, and the ghost of her sadomasochistic lover. The abusive partners/exes in the Martino Brothers’ gialli also tend to be red herrings or part of a larger conspiracy, solidifying the idea that all men pose a danger to these women.
*** It’s not really related to any of the prevalent, repeated themes, but it’s probably worth noting that an awful lot of Gastaldi’s giallo scripts end with someone falling or being thrown from a great height.
Bibliography:
La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film by Mikel J. Koven (Scarecrow Press, 2006)
Giallo & Thrilling All’Italiana (1931-1983) by Antonio Bruschini & Stefano Piselli (Glittering Image, 2010)
The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (McFarland, 2021)
Video
The Case of the Bloody Iris isn’t a super-obscure title, but it never had an official VHS release in the US. The first stateside DVD came via Anchor Bay Entertainment as part of a 2002 Giallo Collection set, alongside Antonio Bido’s The Bloodstained Shadow (Italian: Solamente Nero, 1978) and Aldo Lado’s Who Saw Her Die? (Italian: Chi l'ha vista morire?, 1972) and Short Night of Glass Dolls (Italian: La Corta notte delle bambole di vetro, 1971). All of those titles were then reissued solo via Blue Underground in 2008. The first English-friendly Blu-ray was released by Shameless Entertainment in the UK in 2018 and featured a then-new 2K scan (note that I do not have a copy of that disc for comparison).
New boutique distributor Celluloid Dreams has come out swinging with this collection, which includes the film’s US Blu-ray and world 4K UHD debut. According to the liner notes, the 2-perf Techniscope camera negative was scanned in 4K by Cinema Communications Services in Rome. Extensive clean-up and regrading was then performed at Celluloid Dreams’ studios in California. The results are fantastic, better than the somewhat soft 1080p Blu-ray caps I’ve included on this page for illustrative purposes. I always fear that these kinds of extensive remasters will either oversharpen or over-DNR the footage, but, in this case, the transfer looks its age without being too messy with print damage or digital tinkering. Grain seems accurate (with perhaps a hint of digital noise) and the loss of detail is typically tied to the loss of focus during handheld sequences.
The grading appears to have preserved cinematographer Stelvio Massi’s original intentions and is, at the very least, not overly orange or yellow, as tends to happen with L’Immagine Ritrovata’s scans (an issue that has admittedly been mitigated more recently). The HDR support arguably over-boosts occasional highlights, but is otherwise tastefully applied and makes a real difference during the darkest, moodiest sequences, which tend to appear almost entirely black on DVDs and even Celluloid Dreams’ own remastered 1080p transfer.
Audio
The Case of the Bloody Iris is presented with Italian and English dub options, both in uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono. The original optical sound negatives were scanned alongside the film footage and cleaned up specifically for this release. Once again, I’d like to remind readers that these movies were shot largely without sound, so every language track is dubbed. The two options here are similar in terms of sound quality. The English dub has a richer overall sound when it comes to music and dialogue, but is a bit muffled in the effects department. It appears that some cast members were speaking English on set, but none have dubbed their own performances. That said, I quite like the English language cast. Bruno Nicolai’s music is underutilized and sounds perhaps a bit too familiar, but it’s still a Bruno Nicolai giallo score, so there’s little reason to complain.
Extras
Commentary by Guido Henkel – In this well-balanced and consistent new commentary, the author and film historian explores the careers of the cast & crew, the production history, Gastaldi’s direction, various Genoese filming locations, Fenech’s wardrobe, repeating themes (which he notes as drawing from the Gothic tradition as well as the gialli), and connections between The Case of the Bloody Iris and the other Martino-produced gialli.
Drops of Giallo (29:26, HD) – Separate interviews with screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi and director Giuliano Carnimeo are combined into one featurette that covers their careers, collaborations, the making of The Case of the Bloody Iris, and the ingredients necessary to create a successful giallo. Gastaldi, who is a bit critical of the final film’s scare quotient and whose interview is the longer of the two, verifies that he wrote the script assuming that Sergio Martino would direct. Carnimeo brings up the interesting point that his first solo-directed western, The Moment to Kill (Italian: Il momento di uccidere, 1968), does have some murder mystery elements.
Flowers of Blood (20:43, HD) – This interview with actor George Hilton is taken from the French label Le Chat Qui Fume’s 2018 Blu-ray. The actor discusses his giallo work in general, previous collaborations with the cast and director, his character, shooting in Genoa, and his other work with the Martinos.
Marilyn (11:51, HD) – A second Le Chat Qui Fume holdover with actress Paola Quattrini, who wraps things up with a sweet look back on her performance (which is better than she remembers), her character, being afraid of shooting the scene where she pretends to drown, being less bothered by nude scenes, filming in Genoa, and working with the cast & crew.
International and Italian trailers
Outtakes reel (1:44, 4K) – This collage of short clips was also taken directly from the negatives and is presented in full 4K.
Image gallery
The images on this page are taken from the included BD copy – NOT the 4K UHD – and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.
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