Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971)

LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN

WRITERS: Story by Lucio Fulci and Roberto Gianviti
Written by Lucio Fulci

DIRECTOR: Lucio Fulci

STARRING: Florinda Bolkan as Carol Hammond
Stanley Baker as Inspector Corvin
Jean Sorel as Frank Hammond

QUICK CUT: What are neighbours in an apartment building to do, when one of them just won’t keep the noise down at night?

THE MORGUE

Carol - A married woman with a troubled mind.

Frank - Carol’s husband, a lawyer, and with a mistress on the side.

Edmund - Carol’s father, and also a lawyer. He will go to great lengths to protect his family.

Jane - Frank’s daughter from another marriage, a bit of a wild child, hangs out with the occasional unsavory people, and while she loves her stepmom, her true loyalty lies with her father.

Julia Durer - A woman of ill repute who lives next door to Carol’s family. She throws wild parties, and is very much into the whole free love movement at the time.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! Our vacation continues as we head to Italy, or at least, Italian made cinema by way of London, for the movie Lizard in a Woman's Skin. It's been a long time since we've done a giallo...it can't be since Murder Mansion in the first year or two, can it?

Anyways...I feared I had put two subtitled movies back to back, because I hate myself, but I was pleased to discover my Blu Ray has English audio. So that's what I listened to. Because I'm a monster.

We open up watching our lead character, Carol, as she struggles to get through a literal orgy of people. She's then falling through a black void and is met by Julia. The woman disrobes Carol and they have lesbian fun times, making it very clear this is Italian cinema from jump.

If you haven't sussed it out already, Carol wakes up from this steamy fever dream of a love scene, and then she's recounting her erotic dreams to her therapist. He explains these dreams with stuff like how Carol has to disapprove of Julia's way of life, but subconsciously it intrigues her.

That night, Julia is throwing a wild sex party, as she does, and it can be heard all the way down the hall at Carol's apartment where her and her family are trying to have a peaceful dinner.

Carol's husband, Frank, works with her father at his London law firm, and they are both together in Edmund's office when he receives a call from someone claiming to have damaging evidence about someone in his family. He asks Frank if he's having an affair, which he flatly denies.

Cut immediately to Frank having an affair.

Then it's time for another nightmare of Carol's, but this one ends differently, as she takes out a letter opener and kills the free spirited Julia. But only in her dreams.

...But only in her dreams right?

The doctor decides this is a good thing, it's a liberating dream, and Carol has taken control of the situation! Oh, and there were two hippies in the dream as well, judging her as part of her subconscious.

Mmm, nothing quite like the red of 1970s era stage blood

But we then cut to some cops rushing to a scene of a murder and OOPS looks like Julia Durer is dead after all.

The police start questioning the other residents, but they give Edmund's family an easy go of it, since he's an important figure.

Carol hears when Julia was murdered, and it's the same night she had her nightmare of murdering Julia. She goes into a panic, unable to find the fur she wore in all her dreams about the neighbour.

Dinner that night is tense, as everyone is trying to protect Carol, and the cinematography is great. It's all shot handheld, and shaking like it's a found footage movie. It's full of a frantic and nervous energy, and conveys so much with so little.

Carol hears the details of the murder, and they of course match her nightmare exactly. She hurries around looking for the paper knife she used, and it is nowhere to be found. She has a minor breakdown on Frank's chest.

Frank heads down the hall to see the crime scene...and Julia's body is SOMEhow still there. Carol follows him to see for herself, and yes, it is an exact match for her nightmares.

Edmund and Frank are gobsmacked at the similarities, and can't explain them away, except maybe someone is trying to gaslight and frame Carol. And of course, there's people who blame Julia for her own death.

Inspector Corvin meets with his boss to discuss the case, and while he's sure it's a woman, oops, someone just showed up to confess! And it's a *man*! One of them filthy Irishmen, no less.

They question the suspect, and he goes into how he did it, how she was standing there, in the fur coat, the fur coat made for her, Julia Durer's fur coat. And as this goes on, it becomes pretty clear the guy knows nothing.

Later, Carol is out shopping with Frank's daughter, and she spots the two hippies from her nightmare.

She gives chase, with Joan in tow, and follows them straight to a hippie commune that's set up in a theatre somewhere. Probably also a crackhouse, but I won't judge.

Carol is too nervous to approach them herself, so Joan does the deed. But it seems the hippies don't recognise the woman, so it's all just in her head. She probably saw them going to Julia's and it got into her subconscious.

The inspectors show up and question the people around the apartment building again, handing out photographs to see if anyone recognises the person in them. But this was all a ruse to collect fingerprints, and uh oh, one of them matches; Carol's.

Carol is arrested, but that doesn't last long since her father is a lawyer, and he gets her released. But now everyone is trying to figure out what is real, what is a dream, what is Carol's psychosis...

While Carol is chilling at a sanitarium awaiting trial, one of the hippies shows up and chases her around the place.

There's a scene during this where Carol comes across a scene of doctors slicing up dogs that were so real, the director almost got in trouble for it. This and Cannibal Holocaust, man…

...What? Did you think I was gonna show the dogs?

Meanwhile, Edmund gets evidence of Frank's infidelity, and puts forth the theory that if Julia was the person who called him earlier, and if it was about Frank, that would be more than enough motive to kill her.

Also, Carol kept notes of her dreams, that Frank, or any of the family, could have easily read, and made the real murder match. It's a compelling case, or at least a solid enough one for a father trying to protect his daughter, and a philandering son in law.

So, Carol spends some time at her family's estate, and is met by the female hippie. She tells Carol she knows who killed Julia, and to meet her later.

The other hippie shows up, so he can chase her some more through basements and abandoned buildings. There's almost as much chasing and running as there is smoking in this movie.

Eventually he catches up with her, and slices her in the arm. She escapes onto the roof of a building, and passes out. The hippie is about to do her in, when she gets saved by a kindly older gentleman with a rifle on a neighbouring roof...wait what?!

Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot.

Meanwhile, Joan meets with the female hippie, and gets some information that she tries to pass on to Frank, but can't do it over the phone. Before she can tell her dad though, she gets murdered.

The inspectors finally catch the hippies, and the guy admits to stalking Carol and killing Joan, but they have no idea who killed Julia, as they were stoned out of their minds. All they can remember is what they describe as "a lizard in a woman's skin" in a solid title drop.

So the hippies were there the night Julia was murdered, but that night was before Carol wrote her dreams down, so no one could have copied it from the dreams. All the "dreams" were just Carol lying to her therapist to set up a future insanity defense.

That's when the call comes in that Edmund has killed himself, confessing to the murder, to protect his daughter, under the the belief that he was also in the apartment.

CAP: We really should bring back cloaks

However, Inspector Corvin knows something isn't right, and meets Carol, saying the only way she could have known about the phone call, is from "Mrs. Smith" herself. To keep this long story from getting too much longer, Julia and Carol were having an affair together, Julia threatened to bring it to light, and Carol took things into her own hands.

And with that, Corvin leads her to a waiting police car, and arrests her into the credits.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: It looks really good. You gotta have a good transfer to appreciate the delight of Italian cinema.

Audio: It’s a good track, with a solid mix.

Sound Bite: “There should be a law against finding bodies on a Saturday"

Body Count: A fairly small amount this time around, since it’s essentially a murder mystery.

1 - Only in a dream, but at 19 minutes Julia gets stabbed
2 - But then actual Julia is dead
3 - Joan has their throat slit
4 - Edmund kills himself

Best Corpse: I mean, there’s only the one choice to make here, right? How do you not say Julia? Poor girl got stabbed in the boob. TWICE.

Blood Type - C+: No much blood overall, but it’s pretty good, and with solid effects, and I am ignoring the gratuitous dog evisceration. From a quality and quantity standpoint, it would bump the score up to B+. But c’mon, man.

Sex Appeal: Much nudity.

Drink Up! Every time Inspector Corvin whistles.

Movie Review: So to sum up; Carol killed Julia, made her therapist think it was all a dream she had, to make it seem like maybe she did it in a fugue state or something like that. But she didn’t know the hippies were there until it was too late, but ALSO didn’t know they were fucking high as kites, so saw nothing useful. The hippies eventually figured it out thanks to the questioning Joan did, and tried to kill both of them out of revenge for Julia. But because of weird timing issues, the cops know it was all planned and not a psychotic break on Carol’s part. So we spend the entire movie going “No, it could not have been me!” and running around looking for a suspect, when it’s the original suspect the whole time? It feels like such a convoluted way to come right back to where you started. And you know what? The movie ALMOST gets away with it. I think a few more lines of dialogue might have smoothed things out a bit more. And there is something intriguing about a plot that comes back to where it started, after a wild ride to realise, nope, we had it right the first time! But let’s be real; you don’t come to Italian cinema, and especially not giallo, for coherent plots that make sense. These movies are almost always about the experience. Regardless of the quality of the story, the visuals pop, and the music bops. And this movie, like much of Italian cinema, has style for DAYS. It might be outshone by other giallos, but it's a solid effort. And as I pointed out several times, the cinematography in this movie is aces. I don’t have a deep bench of giallo knowledge to say where this lands, but it’s a solid movie in its own right, and worth seeing, even with those few seconds of dogs. Four out of five fur coats.

Entertainment Value: Just sit back and enjoy the ride, my dudes. Just relax and vibe with the movie. This isn’t quite on the level of being so bad to be entertaining, but it’s a treat to watch, and there’s a lot going on. The brief kills are well executed, and the acting is just that right level of Italian camp. Maybe a bit too much running and chasing, but they’re also the few breaks you get from the wild plot. Two out of five photographs.