Giallo is a weird genre, isn’t it? Like, it’s not enough to be part slasher, part whodunit, but it has to heap layers of psychosexual baggage onto matters while simultaneously creating an elegant, classy tone even as black gloved killers elaborately slaughter people because their kink got triggered. Of course, that’s something of a blunt generalisation as such filmmakers such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento have made genuine works of art out of genuinely sordid plots, but while they would often produce violent, bloody mysteries that feel like Agatha Christie got high on ketamine, The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave feels a little different.
Helmed by Emilio P. Miraglia, as the first of only two horrors he made during his short career, his first swing at a Giallo feels more like an episode of Roald Dahl’s Tales Of The Unexpected that’s completely comes right off the rails. Fancy an evening of camp murder plots and upper class sadism? Evelyn’s got your hook up.
Lord Alan Cunningham is an English aristocrat whose sanity has gone as far out as his extravagant dress sense as the recent death of his wife has seen him into something of a psychotic tailspin. You see, before his beloved Evelyn died during childbirth, Alan found out that his flame haired missus had been having an affair and the stress of both these devastating happenings sent Alan into the bosom of a mental institution under the watch of his friend Dr. Richard Timberlane. However, upon his release, it seems that Alan still isn’t in a particularly even keel and has taken to bringing home redheaded prostitutes back to his mostly dilapidated castle in order to torture and kill them in some sado-masochistic act of revenge against his deceased wife.
While Cunningham enacts his deranged fantasies, Richard suggests that the only way to break his obsession with his wife is to marry someone new – preferably not a triggering ginger – in order to move on with his life and not long after, Alan meets, woos and eventually marries Gladys, a blonde.
However, she soon finds that life on the Cunningham estate is a little weird. His staff are mostly made up of family such as Evelyn’s sullen brother and Alan’s invalid aunt who zooms around the grounds on an oddly zippy wheelchair and the two greet Gladys with paranoia inducing suspicion. In fact, the only half-normal member of Alan’s inner circle seems to be his cheerful cousin George – but when Alan suddenly starts having visions of his wife riding from the grave with a skeletal face, things go from weird to downright sinister. With a murderer stalking the grounds of the Cunningham estate and Alan’s mental health taking an alarming powder, it seems like some dodgy shit is afoot, but what truly is behind all the stage goings on – a supernatural haunting, or something far more human?
I have to say, compared to the haunting explosions of pop art style that other directors brought to the Giallo genre, Emilio P. Miraglia’s The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave feels a little restrained despite bearing a title that goes balls out on gothic camp. But to be honest, if you feel like TNECOOTG has to be compared to something, it feels less like the colourful phantasmagoria of Deep Red or Blood And Black Lace and more like a seventies take on the Edgar Allen Poe inspired movies that Roger Corman made in the 60s. It’s all there – lingering insanity lurking under the surface of a rich, handsome aristocrat, secret S&M rooms where whips and manacles lay waiting to be used, duplicitous relatives hoping to exploit rampant madness for financial gain and the movie even comes complete with a twist denouement that is somehow is both justified and hideously unfair.
Compared to the more iconic works of his peers, Miraglia’s first Giallo kind of feels a little bland as it eschews the fluid camerawork or stunning set design in favour of focusing more on the rather random feeling plot, however, if you can tear yourself from the eyeball frying wardrobe of its lead and the copious nudity of its female cast, it actually goes to some entertainingly strange places. The murders feel weirdly separated from the rest of the film as no one seems to realise that anyone is missing and are so eccentric they’re more confusingly complicated than horrific. One guy gets pumped full of snake venom and then gets buried alive while he writhes in agony and someone else has their head bashed in with a rock and then has their body fed to Cunningham’s fox collection – trust me, you haven’t lived until you seen a body ripped apart by adorable mamals.
Elsewhere, the early parts of the movie goes hard on Alan’s enraged sadism as he lures the likes of Erika Blanc and Maria Teresa Tafano into what feels like Andy Warhol’s Fifty Shades Of Grey. However, what really adds to the unhinged oddness is that Alan’s murderous hobby doesn’t actually seem to connect much to the rest of the plot and also the movie seems to suggest that all you need to do to your dump vicious urges to victimise women is to simply marry someone with a different hair colour.
Some may write this all off as iffy plotting, but then the majority of giallos usually tend to get by with some off the most illogical writing you’ve ever seen and while some of the more random antics may anger those who like their movies to make a modicum of sense, The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave seems to truly be enjoying giving those people the middle finger during the wild finale which brings the film to eccentric life.
To to spoil too much, it’s revealed that a fair amount of skullduggery has been going on and that double-crosses are being handed out much in the same way that Oprah used to deal out cars to a gobsmacked studio audience. In fact, the level of histrionic drama is dialed up to the levels of a Mexican telenovella when the full extent of the subterfuge is revealed and it almost takes on the tone of a really fucked up farce. There’s poisonings from strychnine laced champagne, there’a bloody knife attacks by dying accomplices, there’s someone who gets fucked up by a swimming pool transformed into a handy acid bath thanks to a couple of sacks of sulfur-based fertiliser and the film chooses to abruptly end on its most frenzied note leaving absolutely confused about what you’ve just seen.
In case you’re wondering – yes, one character does indeed completely get away with the crimes they’ve committed and if the film hadn’t just suddenly stopped dead to roll the credits, maybe The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave could have dug up a truly haunting ending that sees a misogynistic killer escape scott free thanks to the murder plot of some greedy opportunists – but as it stands, like most of the movie, it’s just fucking odd. Some have Evelyn pegged as some forgotten masterpiece of the Giallo genre, but if I have to be honest, it worked far better for me if I treated it as some messed up Benny Hill skit.
Still, dead Evelyn is still dead entertaining.
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