DVD: BLOOD, BABES AND BOOBS

The Black Belly of the Tarantula

Directed by Paolo Cavara

If you've seen enough of them, you know how gialli-those stylish Italian thrillers from the '60s, '70s and '80s-operate. Usually there's a serial killer on the loose, driven by some twisted sexual dysfunction. As a result, he (or she) usually kills beautiful women in some ghastly, bloody manner. It also follows that there's a lot of nudity involved. Although every character introduced throughout the film is an obvious suspect, when the killer is revealed in the final scene, it's always the one person you never considered. If there's a priest in the film, it's the priest. The plot is often a confounding tangle, but plots aren't the issue. Using the above as a guide, Paolo Cavara's 1972 giallo, The Black Belly of the Tarantula, plays strictly by the rules. Murder, blood. boobs, confounding plot, surprise revelation.

In this case, the killer paralyzes his victims with a carefully applied acupuncture needle, leaving them conscious but immobile while he eviscerates them.

(It's the acupuncturist! The acupuncturist!)

While a detective (Giancarlo Giannini) struggles to draw some connection between the growing number of victims, we run into a mess of fill-in-the-blank subplots involving voyeurism, blackmail, rampant infidelity, a luxury spa and drug smuggling.

(It's the cuckold! It's the spa lady! It's the scientist with the coke!)

We also get the rare presence of three Bond girls: Barbara Bach (The Spy Who Loved Me), Claudine Auger (Thunderball) and Barbara Bouchet (Casino Royale)-not all of whom make it to the end of the film.

Cavara was best known for co-directing the groundbreaking Mondo Cane 10 years earlier. While in that case he helped forge an entirely new genre of quasi documentaries (which would be known as "mondo films"), here he was stepping into a ready-made genre with some fairly strict rules. Little groundbreaking occurs.

Oh, I've seen a lot of people out there refer to Black Belly as one of the finest examples of the form, but it struck me as fairly standard. Not particularly awful, certainly. It does what it sets out to do, but I didn't see much going on here that would distinguish it from the dozens of other gialli I've seen. Maybe I'm an idiot and am missing the subtleties (entirely possible). Fact is, you watch enough of these and they start blending together. There are exceptions of course-like the films of Dario Argento, Mario Bava and Sergio Martino. But this lacks the style and intelligence of Argento and Bava, and the pure nastiness of Martino.

I mean, there is an interminable foot chase in this film that, just editing-wise, makes little sense and comes to very little conclusion. And the supposed "clues" used to lead the audience in one direction or another are obvious and cheap. And the climax is, well, less than satisfying.

Then again, that's a fairly harsh conclusion that comes from comparing this film to other gialli. If you compare it to most American thrillers from the past few decades, there's no competition-even a mediocre giallo is a more interesting than, say, Seven. It's got more boobs, too.