I skipped Giallo Month last year in favor of a Bruce Lee retrospective, but we’re back. We’ll begin with 1975’s Deep Red from Dario Argento because it’s the movie that got most of us interested in the genre to begin with. For me, however, it’s the American cut of Deep Red put out by Blue Underground so many years ago that got my attention. It’s 22 minutes shorter than the European cut, but with the gory bits that were originally trimmed from the international release. 

Our movie begins with a creepy children’s song and a bloody knife falling to the floor before being drowned out by the excellent score by Goblin. Moving right along, we’re then treated to a conference featuring a famous psychic named Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril). Helga demonstrates her powers to read people’s minds and the crowd is quite astonished. However, she freaks out when she reads the mind of a psychotic killer in the audience. I think Helga also lets it slip that she knows who the killer is. The target is now on her back.

We’re then introduced to Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), an English pianist in Rome who’s talking to a drunk colleague of his, Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), when he hears the screams of Helga in the distance. Yes, Helga is being murdered, quite brutally in fact. The black gloved killer is repeatedly hitting Helga with a meat cleaver. That might be one of the worst ways to die, but there are more to come in this movie. Seriously, this killer is one sick individual. Marcus dashes to the sound of the screaming, but when he discovers Helga’s body, it’s too late. The police are called, but like in many of these movies, they’re too incompetent to solve anything. Something nags at Marcus as he’s studying the crime scene. Something is not there that was there before, but he can’t quite put his finger on it.

A reporter named Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi) is also on the scene and she blasts Marcus’s photo all over the front page of the morning edition.  Her article describes him as a key witness to the murder. Now, Marcus has a target on his back and he’d better find out who the killer is before he meets a terrible fate. Gianna wants to work with Marcus, but he’s a bit of a chauvinist and wants to solve it on his own. His first clue is found in a local library to find a book on local legends. The author describes an abandoned house where a children’s song can be heard playing in the night. According to one of Helgs’s colleague’s, it’s the same song she had heard during her terrifying psychic reading at the conference. Marcus eventually finds the abandoned house and even decides to go there late at night all by himself. He discovers something awful after breaking through one of the walls, but I’ll stop there.

Deep Red features some truly horrific deaths from being drowned in scalding water to having teeth cracked against several hard objects. The worst is someone getting dragged behind a speeding garbage truck. Enough spoilers. This is a fun one on a hot summer night. 

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443,episode 444, episode 450,episode 477, episode 491, episode 492,episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, episode 599, episode 642, episode 643,episode 644, episode 645, episode 670, episode 686, episode 687,  688, and 689) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.