Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972)

Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key may be the longest title of a film I’ve ever seen.  Here we have yet another giallo from the underrated Sergio Martino (Torso, All the Colors of the Dark, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh), and this time he focuses more on the story unlike Torso which focussed more on viscous murders.  What you get is a pretty solid giallo (for giallo standards), with a decent story, cheesy dialogue, decent (yet, pretty gore-less) death scenes, and plenty of nudity to keep the horn dogs happy.  While it’s not an amazing film, by any stretch of the imagination, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is a great time killer; an above average giallo to add to any completists’ collection.

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The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971)

Sergio Martino has directed many, many giallo films, (Case of the Scorpion’s Tale, All the Colors of Dark, and Torso – which I love, to name a few) but, everyone has to start somewhere, and one of his first films was The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh. If you think the name’s strange well, the film is even stranger. The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh is the story of an American ambassador’s wife, Julie Wardh (played by the beautiful Edwige Fenech) who believes she is the target of a sex maniac who hunts, and kills women around the hotel where she and her husband are staying.

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Bay of Blood (1971)

What if I told you that once upon a time slasher films weren’t generic and some even had a point to their story? You’d probably call me a liar and smack me upside the head with a brick. But, I swear it was true. Some might say these early slasher films are giallos, but at their heart the still have that body-count that we all know and love. Bay of Blood is considered the Godfather of slasher films, and I would partially agree with that, as it was one of the first modern slasher flicks, but it also has a solid story running beneath the surface of greed and double-crossing.

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Opera (1987)

You know that dream where everything is finally going right, and then…BAM!…you’re falling into a black pit, sinking deeper and deeper while racing into the unknown, and, just before you splat into a mess on the ground below…you wake up? The visceral experience is so real that you jerk awake drenched in sweat, screaming, or just terrified. Every muscle in your body tenses up, and breathing becomes akin to having a boulder set atop your chest. The crushing sensation of a nightmare is something that rarely translates to screen. Most directors try, and fail miserably at bringing true terror to the form of film, but Dario Argento achieves this brilliantly in Opera.

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What Have You Done to Solange? (1972)

What Have You Done to Solange? (or WHYDtS?) may be one of my favorite Giallo films I’ve ever seen. Not only is the film made extremely well, but the score is performed by none other than Ennio Morricone (the man behind some of the greatest Spaghetti western themes ever). This mystery has all the twists and turns that one could hope for, without all the generic mess that comes standard with many of the lesser Giallos. I can usually figure these things out near the beginning of the film, but I didn’t see that ending coming…at all.

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