So, HG Lewis has earned his place in the pantheon of cinematic greats, because he was willing to colour the screen blood red in unflinching detail. And some gialli, particularly those made by Lewis' Italian soulmate, Lucio Fulci, did indeed wallow in grisly guts and entrails. Although most gialli contained relatively restrained gore sequences, they routinely press the pause switch on the story so we can spend several minutes watching a young woman (or man) be menaced in, say, an underground car park. These were analogous to musical numbers (ones which don't advance the plot or add to characterisation, at least), replacing frothy singing and dancing with frothier blood and gristle. It also contained several lengthy gore sequences, for which the narrative-such as it was-ground to a halt, to be replaced with spectacle, pure and simple. This film is a marked failure on every technical and narrative level, yet is simultaneously extremely watchable, and great fun. But the fact that they exist in this film, and gialli in general, can be at least partly attributed to HG Lewis's pioneering work in the early 1960s.Īlthough it wasn't his only cinematic innovation (he also made the first 'roughie' film), I refer here specifically to his 1963 effort Blood Feast. The murder scenes are completely devoid of suspense, straddle a line between gross-out and (knowing) humour, and, frankly, have to be seen to be believed. These set-pieces are Lewis at his most extreme, and the semi-permanent retirement into which he entered after this film (retirement from films, anyway) was likely at least partially motivated by a feeling that he had nowhere else to go as a filmmaker. You have the murder mystery involving a black-gloved killer, an amateur detective (well, a newspaper reporter who hires a professional PI), sexuality (well, tits) and (extremely) gory set-pieces. In the unlikely event that neither Lewis nor Dachman knew anything about gialli, they've still managed to make one. The ingredients are all there (apart from style and music, as we'll soon see), and it's quite likely that the film's writer, Alan Dachman, had seen at least some of Argento's gialli, which were making a bloody splash in the States at the beginning of the 70s. I've yet to come across anything which suggests that he considered the film a giallo, or was even aware of the existence of the filone, yet, as Stephen Thrower says on the supplemental materials of Arrow Video's 2016 release of the film, that's almost immaterial. Is a film a giallo if its maker doesn't know it's a giallo? It is if it's The Gore Gore Girls! Herschell Gordon Lewis had invented the gore film a decade before helming this movie, which proved to be his last for three decades.
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