Welcome to a brand new B-Movie Enema review!

This week, we’re going back to the world of Italian cinema and, for the first time in quite a while, the horror subgenre of said Italian cinema – giallo. Not only are we going back to those realms but this week is for something kind of new too. This week’s feature, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, was made by Italian horror/thriller/giallo master Dario Argento.

Now, true, I did cover a couple movies he produced, namely Demons and Demons 2. I also talked about him tangentially when I looked at Shock because it starred his ex-wife, Daria Nicolodi, as well as his daughter, Asia Argento, when she appeared in xXx. However, for nearly 60 years, Argento has been known for being a writer, director, and producer of mostly horror films. But… that’s not exactly where he started. When he was working his way up the ladder, he began as a writer. In the mid-60s, Argento worked on scripts for several different movies of different genres. The biggest film he worked on the script for, without a doubt, was 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

In 1970, Argento stepped into the director’s chair with the brilliant giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. From that point forward, it was almost entirely horror for Argento. In 1971, he followed Plumage up with The Cat o’ Nine Tails and the film we’re about to review, Four Flies on Grey Velvet. In 1973, he deviated for two films, one he wrote, the Spaghetti Western Man Called Amen, and the comedy-drama Le cinque giornate. But when he came back with 1975’s Deep Red, it was horror and giallo from there on out.

Argento is traditionally known as a director of a certain style. Maybe not every movie looks the same, but there’s something in the film or in the set design that tips the film’s hat to it being Argento’s hand guiding it. There are certain ways information is delivered to the audience through mirrors, something that is part of the setting like a painting, or how characters are framed that are always present in his films but your brain doesn’t fully realize it’s seeing it until the recall moment later in the film’s climax.

Without a doubt, though, my favorite film of his is Suspiria. To me, every frame is a piece of art, and every scene is loaded with tension or different emotions you are basically being subjected to along with Jessica Harper’s character. It’s one of my favorite movies to just… look at. I can’t really describe how I feel when I have Suspiria on the TV, but I do know it’s a movie that I can talk to someone about for hours, scene-by-scene, and almost hardly touch upon the actual plot of the movie.

This movie was co-written by Luigi Cozzi. Cozzi and Argento worked for the first time on this film, but what’s interesting is that Cozzi is often directly tied to Argento, but they really only worked on a few movies together. This was the first, then Cozzi went off and worked on his own films and other directors, but he’s probably best known for his own films, all of which are typically panned. I’ve covered a couple of these films already – specifically Hercules and The Adventure of Hercules. Another film of his that is universally thought of as an all-time fun-bad movie is 1979’s Starcrash.

But the reason behind people thinking Cozzi is attached to Argento’s hip has less to do with their film careers and more with Cozzi’s current career. If you go to Rome, you will find a store called Profondo Rosso, which was the Italian title for Deep Red. Inside, you will find all sorts of movie memorabilia. You’ll also find a whole bunch of props from Argento’s films. While Argento owns the store, Profondo Rosso is run by Luigi Cozzi. If you go there and strike up a conversation with Cozzi, you will likely make a friend and learn a whole lot about Italian cinema of the 70s and 80s.

Right out of the gate, we look down on a frenzied drum solo as the drummer pounds on the drums and the cymbals until it abruptly stops to show us the title with a beating heart next to it in what appears to be a clear plastic casing. This is a cool music store. Not only can you go to town on the drums right there in the store, but you can also buy guitars. Not only that… but you can also get spied on by weird dudes in sunglasses, a black suit, and a mustache.

We then follow our drummer, Roberto, to the recording studio where he and his band rock out on a new track. However, things are still kind of weird. In the studio, he’s bothered by a fly that won’t leave him alone. On the way to the studio, he sees the man in black with the sunglasses following him. First, the man is on foot. Then, he’s following him in a car.

Already, there are some great shots at play here to let you know this is indeed a Dario Argento movie. The first picture I put above you can see the man in black way off in the distance on the other side of the storefront window. There was that shot down onto Roberto’s drums to start. Then we go to the music shop and then some close-ups of the various instruments from his bandmates. In fact, it’s so close, the camera is looking out of the hole in the guitar! There’s the really ominous shot of the kid who got some confetti on the mysterious man and we look over his shoulder onto the kid’s face. That kid looks pretty damn scared of the man in black. Roberto is driving down the street and we can tell the man is following him just by looking into his rearview mirror. We have the bothersome fly that lands between the cymbals, and it all wraps up with the mysterious man looking from behind the corner with his shadow on the wall after darkness falls and Roberto is leaving the rehearsal. It’s already a beautiful movie and we’re not even five minutes in!

In fact, I’m already blown away by the visuals, let’s look at examples of each of those shots I mentioned:

The man watching him from around the corner as Roberto leaves the recording studio is the last straw. Roberto decides to find out more about this guy. As he steps toward him, the man walks away toward a performance hall. Roberto follows him all the way inside. He catches up to the guy and asks him what his damage is because all that stuff we saw in those wonderful shots took place over the course of a whole week! The guy pulls a knife on Roberto and says he has not been following anyone and he means business.

Now, I really gotta give it to Roberto in this moment. Me? If a guy pulls a switchblade on me and tells me he means business, I’m… I’m probably gonna leave him be and just accept his following me around the city. But this Roberto fella approaches him with what I assume to be plans to disarm him. Meanwhile, there’s a guy with a VERY creepy mask in the mezzanine who is planning on taking pictures of what’s happening by the stage. As Roberto lunges for the knife, which ends up in the mysterious man’s stomach, the guy in the mask turns on some stage lights and starts snapping pictures. This gets Roberto’s attention so when he turns to look at what’s going on above him, the man in the creep mask gets pictures of Roberto’s face.

Seriously… That’s one hell of a creepy mask. Honestly, it looks like a hamburger joint mascot. There are things about this movie that instantly remind me of Deep Red. You’ve got a musician. If you’ve seen the director’s cut of that film, you start out with the musician performing. When Roberto goes into the performance hall following the mysterious man, we push through curtains with the camera. There’s a similar shot in Deep Red leading into the presentation of the psychic medium. Of course, that movie has the crazy spooky puppet-like thing that busts out of the closet. In this movie, you have the spooky mask guy.

Of course, the camera work is just marvelous.

Later that night, someone calls Roberto’s apartment but says nothing when his wife, Nina, answers. The next day, a letter is delivered to Roberto. The only thing in it is the identification of the mysterious man who had been stalking him – Carlo Marosi. Later, at a dinner party with friends, Roberto is looking through his records. I’ll be damned if there isn’t one of the pictures the burger mascot took sitting in between two albums!

Later, Roberto wakes up from a nightmare based on a ghastly tale of an execution in Saudi Arabia that one of his friends told at the party. He hears someone in the apartment and he stumbles around in the dark only to find the fuse box has been shut off. Oh, that and the burger mascot ties some twine around Roberto’s throat. The burger mascot whispers into his ear that he could kill him right now, but he’s going to wait. After all, no one is going to help Roberto because it looks like he murdered Marosi. Maybe he can go to the police but… Well. It’s likely not going to do him any good.

After the mascot beats cheeks, Nina tries to learn more about what’s going on with Roberto. He seems pretty antsy and she heard some noises in the apartment. In the other bedroom, their live-in maid seems kind of apprehensive too. She started acting strange around the time Roberto found the picture in his albums. He eventually fesses up to killing a man. This gets the maid out of her bed to listen more intently. Roberto tells Nina about how the burger mascot never asks for money. He just leaves pictures and sends stuff to him, but tonight? He was inside the apartment and had a garotte around his throat with the promise that he could have killed Roberto, but… for some reason… did not.

Nina, Roberto’s wife, is played by Mimsy Farmer. Mimsy Farmer was born in Chicago, but her family relocated to Los Angeles a few years later. Her first movie was as an uncredited extra in Gidget Goes Hawaiian. Then she got a role in a Henry Fonda family film called Spencer’s Mountain and followed that up with an Ann-Margaret film called Bus Riley’s Back in Town. Mimsy’s not a bad lookin’ lady, but one look at the poster for that Bus Riley flick and you can see who was really bringing the guys to the theater. Or, well, would have brought people to the theater because I doubt that was a very successful movie. After that, it was mostly biker and rebellious teen exploitation films before Farmer went to Europe for pretty much the remainder of her career. She quit acting in the early 90s, but recently has done art department stuff for some pretty major movies as a sculptor.

Nina wants one of two things: Roberto and her to leave town or for Roberto to go to the police. He refuses the latter, but does find someone who can provide some help – Godfrey. Godfrey’s played by Bud Spencer. Spencer was the first Italian to swim the 100-meter freestyle in less than a minute. He was also a water polo player. But Spencer would turn actor in the mid-50s and ended up becoming a pretty big star in Italian cinema. He is also quite well known for partnering with Terence Hill in movies.

Roberto explains everything to Godfrey. Roberto says it has to be someone who knows him. The picture that showed up between the records wasn’t there 30 minutes before and he would have seen someone sneak in and out. So Godfrey says get a private investigator. Also, he hires Godfrey’s friend called The Professor. This guy is mostly just a layabout who hangs out in a hammock all day near the little river that Godfrey fishes out of and lives next to in his shabby shack.

Remember I said that Nina and Roberto’s live-in maid, Amelia, was acting kinda strange and apprehensive? Well, it’s time for her to thicken the plot a bit. When we see her next, she is making her own threats to someone on the other end of a phone line. She says she saw the guy in Roberto’s apartment. She has all the evidence she needs to make some trouble. She tells the person on the other end of the line she wants money and tells him where to meet. So she sits in a park that has a playground for the children and some bushes for lovers to make out near.

Before long, everyone suddenly leaves at the same time. Amelia leaves but is soon walking through a walkway with rows of bushes on either side at night. She hears someone whispering her name. Then it’s a frightening chase through a hedge maze at night with someone stalking her. She attempts to squeeze her way through a narrow passage between two cement structures which forces her to crawl through spiderwebs. Fuck that… Just kill me, Frisch’s Big Boy. I ain’t crawling through spiderwebs. She tries to get help from the lovers who were making out on the other side of the wall, but the guy can’t get to her before they hear her screaming and dying. Later, Nina gets a call from the police saying Amelia was found with her throat slit.

As soon as we cross Amelia off the suspect list, a new challenger steps in to take her place. Somewhat to Roberto’s frustration, Nina’s cousin Dalia arrives unannounced. As one of his friends tells her some story about Frankenstein’s monster getting a sex drive and attempts to fuck anything that moves, Dalia occasionally glances over to Roberto and has very obvious suspicious looks to throw his way.

Allow me to bring in my very good friend, Chuckie Sullivan, to explain how I feel about Dalia. Chuckie, take it away…

Just after Roberto, again, states that he killed a man named Carlo Marosi, which Dalia walks in on to hear, we cut to an Italian restaurant. There, we see that Carlo Marosi is not actually dead. It was faked. He calls the man who wears the mascot head and tells him he wants to meet and he’s tired of all this stuff. He wants more money for his part in the whole thing. He was fine with the fake knife that oozed blood to fake his death. He was fine with messing around with Roberto. He was fine with the burger mascot’s weirdness. He’s not so fine with the kidnapping and assumed killing of Roberto and Nina’s cat, and he’s not especially pleased with the killing of Amelia the Maid.

I’m guessing he’s less pleased with being domed by a candlestick and then strangled by a thin piece of metal by our mysterious killer.

Roberto goes to the office of private investigator Gianni Arrosio to hire him to help with his whole stalker business. Arrosio is gay and Roberto is not exactly sure he’s the right guy for the job. The first thing he does to hire the P.I. is to feed him. You see, Arrosio is quite bad at his job. Sure, he kind of knows stuff, but he has never successfully solved a case. He says such an impressive record of failure will surely come to an end soon.

However, one thing the P.I. is quite interested in is that Nina is rather wealthy thanks to some inheritance she received not long ago.

Speaking of, after he drops Arrosio off to begin his work, the Professor approaches Roberto and says that the police have been inside with Nina for a long time. When she comes out, she says they were there to ask questions about the maid, but she wants to go with them. She’s scared about what’s going on and needs to feel safe. She’s irritated that Roberto is staying behind to see this through. Besides… her hot cousin is still here and she’ll draw Roberto a bath and massage his shoulders while barely keeping her top buttoned.

Despite Dalia saying it is out of the question for them to fuck around, the movie smash cuts to the two of them in the bath fucking around. Am I to guess that Mimsy Farmer was not interested in doing the naked bath thing? So, we bring in the actress who will do that? Eh, doesn’t really matter. She’s Francine Racette, the third and current wife of Donald Sutherland. They married in 1972.

Things are starting to ramp up toward kooky, so hold on tight, Enemaniacs. First of all, we’ve been occasionally shown some flashbacks that feature a padded room, a straightjacket, and a father verbally abusing his kid. We’ve also seen the image of a dog hanging having been tortured and killed by whoever it was put into that asylum. Along the way in his investigation, Arrosio discovered mention of Villa Rapidi, the asylum we saw in those flashbacks. The doctor at the asylum discusses a former patient who was there after being diagnosed as a homicidal maniac. However, this condition mysteriously cured itself when the patient’s father died suddenly. With the symptoms having disappeared, the patient was released, however, it was also possible the patient’s father wasn’t the biological father.

However, learning some key information about this released patient from the asylum that was part of the notes and information he got about Nina and Roberto lands Arrosio in some hot water. He discovers someone is watching him from an apartment window. After flirting with the equally gay landlord about the person in that apartment, they notice the possible killer has left. Arrosio follows, but the killer has already out-maneuvered him by using a crowded subway train to double back on him at a stop to inject poison into him with a syringe.

This is a pretty good scene. For one, it does show that Arrosio is actually good at his job. Sure, he hasn’t yet solved a case, but he took notes, he followed up on them, and he figured it out. Unfortunately, his greatest success is rewarded with his death. He dies with a sort of happy realization that he solved the case. The other great thing this scene does is retain the secret of the identity of the killer. We never clearly see who Arrosio is following. Granted, the suspect list is running rather thin, and the whispers of the killer are starting to become more obvious of who it is, but we don’t see what Arrosio is doing or who he is following and that’s good to keep that good ol’ fashioned giallo surprise reveal alive.

However, Arrosio is no longer alive and Roberto is no closer to feeling safe. Godfrey and the Professor meet with Roberto in a very specific place – a convention for people who sell caskets. Godfrey says this is way more serious than he originally thought. He thinks this killer is purposely trying to torture Roberto. Godfrey first suggests Roberto go to the police, but Roberto refuses saying he will definitely be arrested for the first killing. He then says he should take Nina’s advice to leave town. Roberto thinks that will solve nothing.

Dalia is packing to leave for home after spending weeks(?) fucking Roberto. As she packs, she hears some of those lines from that father who talked down to the kid thrown into the asylum. She seems specifically bothered by this. Why would she know what was said to the kid? I suppose she could be the kid who was tossed into the asylum… Or…

Well, anyway, she tries calling Roberto at the recording studio but can’t get through to him. Seemingly hours pass and soon, she hears sounds in the apartment. She tries to escape the apartment by taking off her shoes to not make sounds as she goes up the stairs to the attic so she can get out of a window. Apparently, the killer expected her to do this because they follow her. Dalia thinks she successfully hid out in a wardrobe but the killer surprises her, slashes her forehead, causing her to fall down the stairs, and drops a knife into her stabbing her to death.

After her death, Nina is approached by the police pathologist requesting the approval to do a test. She’s like, “Nah, I ain’t in the mood for this. Ask my husband.” So, the pathologist does! What’s he want to do? He wants to try out what’s called an opography. What is optography? That’s the study of taking the retina from the eye to see if it recorded the last image it saw before death. Yeah, kooky shit, ain’t it? But in 1971, it was still a semi-serious thing to try out. Some past tests had proven somewhat successful in spotting something recorded on the retina. It’s hard to say that it really is anything that you can really make out, but yeah…

Most importantly, though, the use of optography is where the title of the movie comes from. When they look at the image gathered from Dalia’s eye, it’s said that the blurry image looks like four flies on grey velvet.

Roberto loads a gun and prepares for a final showdown with whoever the killer is. Godfrey recommends he not leave the house. Basically, hunker down and, eventually, the killer will come to him. Late that night, Godfrey calls Roberto and offers to come over to make it easier for him to watch out for the killer, but the phone call is cut off. There’s a very simple, but awesome long shot of a scared Roberto looking out the window of his living room at the trees being blown about by the late night wind. It’s such a simple shot and such a simple thing but it’s so effective.

You know why I think I’m somewhat insane? I could have looked at that shot of the big windows looking out at trees that are blowing back and forth and thought about how cool the shot is and how evocative it is of a movie taking place around Halloween season and the killer that could be hiding in the treeline. To be sure, I did think about that for a split second. Then, I thought about how cool that living room is. I started thinking about whether or not someone currently lives in that house (if it was a real house used to shoot the movie and not a set). Does that house look the same? Has it been modernized since 1970/71? I hope not. That seems almost criminal to undo the cool mod design of that place.

Where was I? Oh yeah… the fuckin’ movie. Important shit is about to happen. So Roberto is right. Someone is outside. He sees a figure come to the front door and he readies his gun, but he realizes that whoever it is has a key. In walks Nina. She says that she’s changed her mind and someone needs to stay with him. He tells her to beat cheeks. That’s when her necklace swings out from under her shirt. A necklace that has a medallion of a fly encased in glass. As it swings from right to left, he thinks back to that optograph of the four flies.

Using the necklace, Roberto pulls Nina back into the apartment and begins slapping her around accusing her of killing her cousin and everyone else. But, uh oh spaghettios, Nina has Roberto’s gun. She holds it to his head and admits to killing everyone. Her reason for killing people and initially setting him up as a killer is because she thinks Roberto is just like her father. Her father was pissed that his child was a girl and not the boy he expected. So, he raised her as a boy, dressed her as a boy, and beat her. This drove her mad and turned her into a homicidal maniac.

So take that, you woke moralists and gender ideologues…? I… I guess?

So yeah… Her father was the real crazy one, but he drove Nina insane by being an abusive dick shit. He also apparently drove her mother insane as she also died in an asylum. Her anger also came from the fact that she didn’t get her revenge on her father. He died before she could get that satisfaction.

She was happy to meet Roberto, though, because he was so much like her father that she could get her chance to kill the man who drove her insane by killing him instead. She is about to pull the trigger to kill Roberto when Godfrey storms in and distracts her. Roberto throws something at her hand forcing her to drop the gun. She takes off as Godfrey tends to his friend. She is not paying attention when a truck turns in front of her and she runs into the back of the truck. It all plays out in glorious slow motion as the back of the truck slides up over the hood of her car, into the windshield, and decapitated her before the whole damn car explodes and our movie ends on a freeze frame of the remaining part of Nina’s body burns to a crisp.

Again, I must utter the title Deep Red as this movie rushes to that conclusion. There’s the family strife. You’ve got the killer (or, as is the case with Deep Red, an associate of the killer) right under your nose pretty much the entire time. A killer seemingly is going to get away but runs afoul of a truck on the road… It’s all here. However, it might be a situation where Argento just used some similar ideas in two different movies.

But damn… You cannot top a movie that freeze frames on an explosion. Here I thought the only movie with the balls to do that was Blood Debt.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet is a pretty good movie. Is it Deep Red or Suspiria? No. But I can put it in the league of the tier just below those in Argento’s filmography. That means it compares nicely to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Tenebrae. It doesn’t quite take very long to figure out who the killer is here, but that’s not so much the point as it is the construction and the composition of the movie’s set pieces. This is a movie that is beautifully shot from start to finish and it has some really great moments like with Arrosio tailing the killer only to be outsmarted and jumped in in the end.

If you’re an Argento fan or a fan of top-tier giallo films, this is a strong recommend. I also recommend you check out tomorrow’s new episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series. Why’s that? Well, that’s because I’m staying in Italy for this week’s movie. Join me and my partner in crime, Nurse Disembaudee, as we watch and discuss the 1969 spaghetti western, Gunman of Ave Maria. Then, next Friday, my next review takes us down under for an action-packed musical mockumentary from Brian Trenchard-Smith. Suit up because we’re going to jam to Stunt Rock!

So, don’t lose your head before checking out those upcoming B-Movie Enema goodies!