Leofwine_draca What's immediately noticeable to the viewer is that definitely isn't your run-of-the-mill giallo. For a start, the film has little nudity and there's nary a black-gloved killer to be seen. Perhaps most obvious of all is the singular lack of a body count; there are no brutal murders here, no sinister knifings, in fact the film feels quite wholesome. Instead this is a giallo that focuses around a mysterious blackmailer and has one of those "is she mad or isn't she?" plot evolutions in which the heroine is being secretly terrorised only to have nobody, including her husband, believing her.Much of the film centres on Dagmar Lassander's character, a wife forced into sex with a stranger who then realises that she's been tricked. Unfortunately, Lassander is the weakest actor in the film, and she's pretty unconvincing in the emoting scenes. Far better is the sexy, sassy Susan Scott, who unfortunately is relegated to a minor supporting role as the female friend. Swap these two around and the film would have been far better.Director Luciano Ercoli delivers the proceedings from a script by giallo veteran Ernesto Gastaldi; thankfully, the plotting is more convincing than most entries in the genre and the benefit of a decent English dub makes things easier to bear. What the film lacks in action it makes up for in style; this movie shows the height of (dated) fashion, with the women frequently donning blonde wigs and hanging around in local haunts. A swinging, annoyingly catchy score by Ennio Morricone adds to the experience. The rest of the cast is good, with Pier Paolo Capponi as the loving husband, veteran Osvaldo Genazzani as the detective and Simon Andreu as the suitably sleazy villain of the piece. Ladling on the mystery and suspense throughout while also investing proceedings with a typically sexual flavour, Ercoli's first film as a director is a low budget success.

Scott LeBrun "The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion" is a good entry into the Giallo genre, with a plot (concocted by Ernesto Gastaldi and Mahnahen Velasco) that's actually pretty easy to follow. It does have some twists along the way, but never gets overly convoluted. Director Luciano Ercoli takes full advantage of the Techniscope aspect ratio (2.35:1) to fill the screen with colour and detail. Some devotees of the Giallo may not find it to be completely satisfying as it really isn't all that sleazy, and it certainly isn't ever gory. Mostly, Ercoli uses the film as a means of showcasing the charms of his dynamic and luscious actresses, Dagmar Lassander and Nieves Navarro (Ms. Navarro would become Ms. Ercoli two years later).Lassander plays Minou, the bored wife of businessman Peter (Pier Paolo Capponi), who is accosted by a stranger (Simon Andreu) on a beach one night. It seems as if he intends to rape her (and indeed, this depraved man does have sex on the brain), but what he does is he warns Minou that her husband is a killer and is not to be trusted. Minou ends up caught in his blackmailing scheme, and when she tries later to convince people of what has been happening to her, there's no evidence to back up her claims.Lassander is a pleasure to look at, and delivers a sympathetic performance as well; Navarro is a saucy delight as her friend Dominique. Capponi is engaging as Peter, and Andreu does look like he is having a good time playing the creepy blackmailer. Osvaldo Genazzani as the police inspector and Salvador Huguet as Peters' associate George round out the principal cast. These performers and filmmakers do a creditable job of holding your attention and interested in how things will develop, although some viewers might predict where it's going on prior to its resolution.With outfits and music that strongly evoke this era (Ennio Morricone composes a nicely mellow score), this is worthy of viewing for lovers of the more exploitative side of Italian cinema.Seven out of 10.

Coventry This is another sublime Italian giallo with a fascinating plot that you surely haven't seen or heard about before in any other movie. Whilst waiting for her husband to come home from another business trip, lovely Minou (Dagmar Lassander) has a frightening encounter with an assaulter on the beach. Instead of raping her, however, he tells her that her beloved husband Peter relentlessly killed a major creditor and made it look like suicide. Minou begins to notice Peter's increasingly suspicious business methods but does everything she can to avoid that the mysterious blackmailer tells his story to the police...and that includes sleeping with him. Is her husband really a murderer? Is he just messing with her mind? Is her oh-so-helpful friend Dominique, who reputed to be a nymphomaniac, really as honest as she claims? Good luck guessing for the answers to all these questions and more, as the mystery in "Forbidden Photos of a Lady above Suspicion" is subtly and elegantly built up, leading to a tense finale that actually makes sense for a change. Without ever resorting to graphic violence or pure sleaze, director Luciano Ercoli tells a story that is full of perversion, blackmail and sexual decadence. Quite an achievement if you bear in mind that nearly every other Italian director requires at least a handful of bloody murders to illustrate the exact same topics. "Forbidden Photos..." uses great dialogues, atmospheric music and adequate acting performances instead. Fans of the gialli milestones directed by Sergio Martino or Dario Argento will probably regret the lack of explicit bloodshed, but surely everyone will appreciate a tightly woven plot of intrigues like this? Wonderful giallo, highly recommended to the more experienced fans of Italian crime cinema.

lazarillo This film is rather unusual for a giallo. It's well-filmed but not particularly stylized. The plot is rather strange, but generally makes sense. It has no graphic violence, and although it has plenty of perverse sexual situations, it barely has even the circumspect nudity of the earliest Caroll Baker gialli ("Sweet Body of Deborah", "Orgasmo", etc.). A society woman (played by Dagmar Lassender) is nearly raped on the beach by a sinister man who tells her that her industrialist husband has murdered one of his colleagues. The man blackmails her into sleeping with him by threatening to expose her husband, and then blackmails her again with graphic photos of their affair. The husband meanwhile is himself involved with her sexually voracious best friend (played by Nieves Navarro aka Susan Scott), and the whole thing might be some kind of plot to drive her mad.This movie works mainly because of the acting. Dagmar Lassander was one of the better actresses to appear in gialli, second only to Edwige Fenech and the aforementioned Carroll Baker at playing these hysterical, beleaguered victim roles. Even better is Nieves Navarro as her sex-hungry best friend who has pornographic pictures taken of herself and says at one point, after Lassender's character confides about her near rape, that she would have "adored being violated" (there's a kind of refreshingly politically incorrectness to the ridiculous dubbed dialogue of these movies). She is such a dubious and ambiguous character that even at the end it is not clear whether she is a loyal friend to the protagonist or an unexposed villain.The director, Luciano Ercoli, is the Italian husband of former Spanish model Navarro. He made several other gialli, all featuring his wife, but this is probably the one where he made the best use of her. He is no Dario Argento or even Sergio Martino, but his direction is certainly adequate. The screenwriter, Ernesto Gastaldi, contributed scripts for any number of these pictures and he puts forth a pretty decent and suspenseful one here. This movie is kind of hard to find right now, but it is worth seeing if you like these kind of movies.