Say what you will about the Giallo genre, they certainly don’t hold back when naming a movie. Renamed to a shorter and more succinct “Torso” in the USA, Sergio Martino’s fifth entry in the realms of sex n’ slay Italian cinema was originally titled I Corpi Presento Tracce di Violenza Carnale (The Bodies Bear Traces Of Carnal Violence) which is an astonishingly flowery way to announce that your movie features a rampant sex murderer.
However, if you take a step beck and look at the cinematic psycho-killer timeline, you’ll see that there’s aspects of Torso that blatantly act as one of many Italian productions (Blood And Black Lace and A Bay Of Blood included) that act as a precursor to the American slasher craze that dominated throughout the early 80s.
However, bloody legacy aside, how does Torso manage to stand up in the pantheon of sex-obsessed, spaghetti slaughter films?
There’s a killer with an extreme psychosexual disorder on the prowl in Perugia who is stalking his prey in the hope of choking them to death with his stylish weapon of choice – a red-and-black scarf – and then gruesomely mutilating their dead, lifeless and often nude bodies. Everyone seems appropriately tense except for a clutch of atractive students who are currently studying art when they’re not going on about their carefree lives, but when one of their number is kilked, the wealthy Dani, realises that she’s seen such an item of clothing during her day.
As we all know, if you even think that you’re a danger to the killer’s identity in a Giallo film, he’s obviously going to target you very soon, so Dani starts to panic and soon understandably believes that fellow student – the scarf-wearing, impotent, Dani-obsessed Stefano – could very well be the culprit. However, the killer way more lose ends to tie off before he can get around to her, so while he wantonly slays those who could rumble his game, Dani, her friend Jane and the rest of their group unwisely head off to a secluded, cliffside villa until the heat dies down. Of course, the killer has followed them, but what eventually transpires isn’t exactly what you expect and it turns out that maybe Dani wasnt the killer’s main target after all…
If I can take a quick moment to be honest and mildly blasphemous; unless my Giallo is being directed by the likes of Dario Argento or Mario Bava – or at the very least, features camerawork and visuals that make your eyes bleed – I find that my attention starts to wander slightly, as beyond the sordid slaughters themselves and the discerning the killers twisted motives, I often find them a little dry.
Upon saying that, Torso is one of those Giallo movies that, like one of those lenticular pictures, subtly alters depending on what angle you look at it from. Take it from one angle and Torso is a grotty thriller that’s up to its eyeballs in relentless nudity at the drop of a hat and streak of misogyny a mile wide – and yet while Torso is admittedly all those things, an open mind reveals that there’s a little more going on.
While there’s the usual aspects of a textbook Giallo to deal with such as rubbery logic, one-note characters and a bluntly exploitative us of sexual trauma and lesbianism, there genuinely seems to be a method behind Martino’s sleazy madness that makes perfect sense from a certain point of view.
Obviously, your average Giallo is routinely disinterested in using its sexual content responsibly, but Torso sees to be making some pointed observations about the way women are viewed by all men whether we know it or not, and while it’s about as nuanced as removing plaque with a brick, the fact that almost every male in this film seems to be in a constant state of arousal all the time, does say something about the reduction of women into mere sexual objects. Even the killer, hopelessly triggered by the requisite childhood trauma, declares that women, especially promiscuous ones, are no better than just dolls and deserve to lie in pieces. But it’s not just only the view that sex has become as repellent and disposable as the Kleenex you’d use to clean up after yourself with (no one in the film seems to be enjoying any of the plentiful nudity that much), even the concept of love has curdled like milk in the sun thanks to the behavior of the constantly sweating Stefano, who perverts the emotion like a junkie begging for a fix.
Outside these broad themes, we find the majority of Torso to follow the Giallo playbook quite studiously, delivering magnificently atmospheric set pieces and brutal murders aplenty as the painfully bland “normal” people go about their daily lives. A murder that sees a victim wading through sludge-like mud in a mist forrest is like something out of a panic inducing dream and the look of the killer – all black gloves and grey mask, stylishly topped off by that chic red and black foulard – is simple but memorable.
The rest of the cast vary, with not a single “student” in this film looking even remotely south of thirty and matters are scuppered a little thank to Suzy Kendle’s lead being something of an incredibly shitty friend. Either being constantly late or, worse yet, blindly convincing Dani that Stafano is only harmless when he’s going around slapping whores who can’t trigger his flaccid manhood, Jane is simply the worst – which actually proves to be something of a plus when it comes to Torso’s big twist.
What helps this movie nail its classic reputation is the completely unorthodox way it handles its third reel that spectacularly goes against the grain if your average Giallo. Rather than carrying the whodunnit thread all the way to the final reveal while dropping more bodies along the way, Martino instead has Jane pass out due to a dose of painkillers required after a nasty fall and then – audaciously – has the killer burst in a slaughter everybody else off screen as we cut to the next day. Jane then awakens to find herself trapped upstairs while the murderer dismembers her dead friends with an enormous hacksaw and before you know it we’re in survival territory. While this twist may not carry the appropriate resonance today, where 90% of horror and thriller movies end in exactly the same way, for a 1970s Giallo, it’s a stroke of positive genius.
Once the tense Cat and mouse stuff is over, Torso then scrambles to get back to basics in order to wrap things up with the killer’s reveal suddenly occuring with him literally bursting into a room and immediately starts blurting out his psycho-pervert origin story before you even have a chance to realise who the hell it is.
Legitimately innovative at the time, Torso’s sharper edges have inevitably been dulled by the fact that its deviation from Giallo norms is now somewhat old hat. But that doesn’t stop it delivering the goods when it comes to some good old sleazy thrills.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 