In the Folds of the Flesh VHS giallo

Sergio Bergonsellin giallo vuodelta 1970, italialais-espanjalainen tuotanto. Yksi hulluimmista lajissaan. Psykoseksuaalisten irtiottojen ja irtopäiden splatter-juhla saippuagotiikan ja metagiallon tapaan. Salvation UK-VHS.

Mondo Macabro
Blu-ray Release: January 10, 2023 (website exclusive LE September 20, 2022)
Video: 1.85:1/1080p/Color
Audio: English and Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono
Subtitles: English
Run Time: 92:23
Director: Sergio Bergonzelli

Night-time, a peal of thunder, a castle by the sea, a severed head rolls across a carpeted floor, a blood-stained sword lies next to it… Meanwhile, police are in hot pursuit of a criminal who is evading capture on a speeding motorbike. He takes refuge in the overgrown castle grounds and he sees a dark-haired woman burying a corpse in a shallow grave. 13 years later, after being recaptured and serving his sentence, the man returns to the castle, intent on blackmail, and maybe a few other things. (From Mondo Macabro’s official synopsis)



In the period between Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (Italian: 6 donne per l'assassino, 1964) and Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970), the giallo scene was a Wild West of ideas and possibilities. Massimo Dallamano’s A Black Veil for Lisa (Italian: La morte non ha sesso, 1968) stuck to a tried and true police procedural formula, Umberto Lenzi’s Orgasmo (aka: Paranoia, 1968) reinvented the Italian psychosexual drama, Luigi Bazzoni & Franco Rossellini’s The Possessed (Italian: La donna del lago, 1965) took an arthouse noir approach, and Giulio Questi made a politically-charged dark comedy called Death Laid an Egg (Italian: La morte ha fatto l'uovo, 1968). Released about a month before Argento’s film, Sergio Bergonzelli’s In the Folds of the Flesh (Italian: Nelle pieghe della carne, 1970) was the kitchen sink giallo of the era, shoveling as much exploitation movie madness as physically allowed into its swift, 92-minute runtime.

Essentially a macabre Gothic soap opera of never-ending climaxes, In the Folds of the Flesh features all matter of insanity, including incest, homicidal Electra complexes, baffling police detective plots, brainwashing, pet vultures, Etruscan tombs, sharply dressed mental patients, cuckoo clock cyanide traps, and black & white flashbacks to concentration camp gas chambers. The Nazi angle, which comes out of nowhere, is particularly astonishing, because Nazisploitation movies weren’t yet a fad in 1970. Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Lee Frost’s Love Camp 7 (1969) – both of the key sources of the Nazisploitation genre – had barely hit theaters and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Italian: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodom, 1975) was still five years away. It’s also exceptional, because, after an hour of lunacy, the gas chamber reveal is so sobering. As far as on-screen violence is concerned, it’s all a bit harmless by modern standards, but there are four somewhat convincing beheadings and two separate acid bath scenes (looks more like bubble bath, but still), so conceptually it would’ve been a lot for audiences in 1970.



In the Folds of the Flesh’s extreme convolution is by design, of course. Not only is there an excess of bewildering plots and subplots, but events are further obfuscated by sudden flashbacks, the context of which won’t be exposed until later in the film. Furthermore, some of the flashbacks are false memories. Paired with the extreme content, this deliberately nonsensical approach to storytelling plays out like a spoof of giallo’s silliest conventions, which is fascinating, because, as I mentioned, In the Folds of the Flesh was released before the genre peaked. It took Argento until 1982’s Tenebrae (aka: Tenebre and Unsane) to really start poking fun at his own filmmaking habits and other giallo spoofs, like Sergio Corbucci’s Giallo Napoletano (aka: Atrocious Tales of Love and Death, 1979) and Mario Gariazzo’s dreadful Play Motel (also 1979), didn’t pop up until the very end of the decade, when general audiences had begun to move on.

Bergonzelli wasn’t as acclaimed or famous as Argento or Lenzi, but as a writer, director, producer, and, initially, actor, his contributions to Italian cult cinema are considerable. His second movie as director was The Last Gun (Italian: Jim il primo, 1964), a western released one month after Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (Italian: Per un pugno di dollari, 1964) and one month before Sergio Corbucci’s Minnesota Clay (1964), with which it shares star Cameron Mitchell. He continued making C-list westerns and Eurospy movies, then found his niche making erotic dramas and comedies. In the Folds of the Flesh was released during this period and remains his only giallo, though he did make a giallo-esque slasher called Blood Delirium (Italian: Delirio di sangue) in 1988. That film isn’t as over-the-top as In the Folds of the Flesh, but it is almost as strange, as it follows a necrophilic madman who believes that he is Vincent Van Gogh reincarnated. It’s sort of a late ‘80s combination of Joe D’Amato’s Beyond the Darkness (Italian: Buio Omega, 1979) and Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Color Me Blood Red (1965). Co-writer Mario Caiano (credited as having the idea) continued working the Nazisploitation angle in Nazi Love Camp 27 (Italian: La svastica nel ventre, 1977), which he also directed.

Bibliography:
La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film by Mikel J. Koven (Scarecrow Press, 2006)
Anatomy of the Irrational: An Attempt to Explain In the Folds of the Flesh by Joseph E. Dwyer (Diabolique Magazine, 2016)