Rainey Dawn This film blew me away. It captured me right from the start of the movie. The longer you watch, the more is revealed but the more confusing and stranger it becomes... builds to a super climax into a bang up ending that will leave you wondering when the credits role.Is Alice really Alice? If not, is she Nichole? What in the heck does Alice/Nichole's nightmares of astronauts have to do with it? Has Alice/Nichole gone mad? Is all this real? And many more questions will arise during the viewing of this film.I acquired this film from the Sci-Fi Invasion 50-Pack. And this is most definitely one of the best films in the collection. The movie is worth watching if you like mystery-thrillers. I fell in-love with the movie the first time I watched it.9/10

Red-Barracuda Footprints on the Moon is an example of what could be described as a bloodless giallo. These were entries from the Italian sub-genre that were more directly psychological in approach. After the success of Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970, these more subtle gialli became scarcer on the ground and a host of serial killer flicks were the norm. Footprints harks back to the older style but adds a dash of 70's paranoid thriller into the mix. The result is a somewhat surreal film which has a decidedly enigmatic tone and effect. It was directed by Luigi Bazzoni and shot by Vittorio Storaro, who also was cinematographer on Crystal Plumage as well as the later Hollywood film Apocalypse Now (1979). This duo also worked together on the earlier classic style giallo The Fifth Cord (1971). Both their movies display restraint in terms of salacious material, while both look beautiful due to Storaro's consummate skill. The lunar material looks wonderfully off-kilter, the widescreen compositions are consistently great and the use of black and white to recall strange memories and dreams works extremely well.It starts fantastically well with a startling opening segment set on the moon, where we see astronauts drag an unconscious compatriot and then abandon him. It turns out a female translator is dreaming about this, when she wakes she discovers she has no memory of the last three days. She recalls a film she saw many years earlier called 'Footprints on the Moon', a film that recalls her dream, where a scientific experiment is carried out where astronauts are left stranded on the moon to test them. She discovers a torn postcard addressed to her of a place she is sure she knows but does not know why, she travels to this off-season tourist area and meets several people who know her but whom she does not know herself.This one is typified by a sustained atmosphere of dread and it really delves into the fragile psychology of the protagonist, who is very well played by Florinda Bolkan, who was one of the most talented of the performers to regularly appear in gialli. This role is a fairly complex one and benefits a lot from Bolkan's subtle skills. There is also an appearance from another giallo regular, Nicoletta Elmi, the little red headed girl who played oddball children in several films from the time. In this film, she is given a bit more to do and is a little more integral to the plot. Evelyn Stewart and Klaus Kinski appear briefly, the former as Bolkan's friend in Italy and the latter as the mad scientist Blackmann from the film-within-a-film. The location where most of the action occurs is the resort of Garma which is an otherworldly dream-like place, with a vaguely Arabic feel and ruins; it feels like a dying place. The film feels like a combination of dreams, reality and movies. The science fiction film-within-a-film is a strong idea and the image of the abandoned astronaut is a peculiar and compelling one. This sci-fi thread blends into the fabric of the main story and that by the unforgettable final moments it has encroached entirely into Bolkan's reality. It's a memorably surreal way to end one of the most distinctive films in the giallo sub-genre.

chaos-rampant I consider this a missed opportunity. I have very fond memories of the filmmaker's debut, an interesting psychosexual oddity called La Donna Del Lago, and watching this I'm inclined to think that earlier film worked so well because the giallo had not been mapped down yet; so he was free to travel where it was novel at the time. Polanski got there that same year, but he was already a name and had Deneuve with him and so made the bigger splash. Film history has noted Repulsion.This could have been even better. He has brought ambitious imagination with him, a visual palette of bright golden hues and relaxing blues, a sense of place and folded mysterious time with memory from Marienbad. He has Vittorio Storaro's eye behind the lens.The opening is more than promising. A woman wakes up with no memory of three days past. She has just seen a dream, a feverish vision of astronauts staggering on blasted moonscapes, which she remembers is from a movie called the same as the one we're watching; but a movie she left without watching the ending. She goes to Italy to investigate, in an effort to bring these images into focus.There it falls apart, in Italy incidentally. In the ten years since that first film that was in some ways a giallo ancestor the genre had come and was already on its way out. Between these two films Bazzoni had worked where it was the trend in the Italian industry, making a western and another giallo called The Fifth Chord. So when the more ambitious material for this came together, there were already footsteps he was expected to walk and had been trained to. The circumstances of a commercial movie industry were just so. So for the middle part of the film we get a giallo worked from convention. The convoluted plot where each character withholds crucial information until the time is right, and the protagonist has to cobble together a puzzle from clues and red herrings. Much ado.It comes full circle in the finale; the agents which she has imagined to be controlling her illusion return to pull her back into the fiction of the dream. It happens with extraordinary images of a stretch of empty cosmic beachside.Bazzoni never made another film after this. In the meantime, Polanski had rocketed into Hollywood orbit and was already on his way out. I reckon that Bazzoni was one of our sad losses, but alas he never made it to France where money didn't always expect to fill a double-bill.

matheusmarchetti Yet another forgotten, but nonetheless spellbinding 70's horror, and easily among my favorites of the genre, and a very unique one indeed. On the same vein of Peter Weir's eerie "Picinc at Hanging Rock" and paying tribute to Alain Resnais's equally enigmatic "Last Year in Marienbad", the film deals with an unsolved mystery left open to interpretation, with a character from the modern world finding herself trapped in an ancient, enigmatic setting. Unlike most Italian horror films of it's time, this one has hardly any blood at all, and relies mostly on creating a claustrophobic atmosphere and the horror of the unknown prowling every corner. The suspense builds up slowly to a terrifying and ultimately saddening finale. The film has many important names in Italian cinema working on it, such Vittorio Storaro (visually, this is one of the genre's most jaw dropping works), underrated writer/director Luigi Bazzoni, composer Nicola Piovani and giallo queen Florinda Bolkan, all doing wonderfully in what they are set out to do. The latter gives a stunning performance in the lead role, and we identify with her so much that even when you know she's actually crazy, we can't help to believe what she believes, that Klaus Kinski and his assistants are using her as a guinea pig for their sadistic experiments. Another bonus are the B&W nightmare sequences of the astronaut being left to die alone on the moon, which are very disturbing and scary. These dream sequences mirrors the protagonist's desperation as she too is trapped in a setting of which she is unfamiliar with, or is she? It's these sorts of questions that Bazzoni asks the audience, without always giving as answers, something that, in my humble opinion, makes the horror of it all the more effective. Overall, 10/10.