Dario Argento takes sole writing credit for his directorial debut but The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is actually an unofficial adaptation of Fredric Brown's novel The Screaming Mimi. Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), an American novelist in Italy, is a helpless spectator to a vicious attack in an art gallery. Initially a suspect, Sam becomes the key witness to the attempted murder, the fourth in a month but the first survived by the victim. Something about the attack haunts him and so he launches his own investigation as the murders continue, the killer finally turning on Sam. Argento exhibits a sure hand in his first film, creating an easy to follow thriller spiced with tightly choreographed murder scenes and leavened with character humor (his colorful cast includes a genial stuttering pimp and an eccentric artist who lives in a house with no doors). But it's his gift for arresting images and cinematic inventiveness that gives this thriller its edge, from the opening murder where Sam impotently watches the bleeding victim while trapped in a veritable glass cage to the killer's naked eye peering through a peephole at Sam's girlfriend (Suzy Kendall) as she hysterically searches for an escape from the killer's pounding attempts to break into her apartment. Future Oscar winner Vittorio Storaro shot the film and Ennio Morricone provides an unusual, often eerie score arranged for human voices. While less baroque than Argento's later work, it's a fine first film and a standout in the giallo genre. -Sean Axmaker.

This late entry in Italian horror auteur Mario Bava's catalog is in keeping with much of his other work: a rather murky plot, inventive camera work and editing, gauzy lighting using red and blue gels, and an atmospheric, dreamlike feel throughout. Where it parts ways with many of his films is in the high body count-so high that many feel Bay of Blood was a likely influence on American slasher films such as Friday the l3th. The killing centers on a list of potential heirs to a piece of lakefront property ripe for development (a subplot involves camping teenagers who are also being slaughtered-sound familiar?). The slayings come fast and furious, with gunshots, chokings, stabbings, decapitations, and a two-for-the-price-of-one impalement, to name a few. Bava creates an off-kilter mood of melancholia for the film that makes it somewhat less fun than the mindless slasher flicks of the 1980s, but also renders it a more thought-provoking, cynical sort of movie. -Jerry Renshaw.

Mystery, science fiction and horror fuel this pulse-pounding supernatural thriller from Italian director Pupi Avati. Not your usual zombie film, but a thought-provoking puzzler steeped in ancient mysteries, "Zeder" will make you believe the dead can walk again. Stefano, a budding novelist, receives the innocent gift of a used typewriter from his wife on their wedding anniversary. While changing the ribbon, he discovers the typed imprint of writing left by the previous owner. Fascinated by this startling essay, Stefano uncovers the experiments of scientist Paolo Zeder whose claims of places where death ceases to exist intrigue the young writer. Obsessed with finding the truth about Zeder's theories, Stefano is led on a terrifying journey where he is confronted with an occult conspiracy to reanimate the dead! Pupi Avati's bizarre zombie film combines science fiction conspiracy and supernatural investigations with elements of Night of the Living Dead and Pet Semetary to create one of the most unusual horror films of the 1970s. Writer Gabriele Lavia discovers a strange story imprinted on the ribbon of a used typewriter and his investigations dig up the supposedly dead scientist Paolo Zeder (who appears very much alive) and a shadowy corporation monitoring graveyard caskets with video equipment, a twisted science project of the dead. Avati kicks the film off with a lively Exorcist-like sequence, where a priest channels the dead through a young girl and the house undulates as if coming to life, and concludes the film with an action-packed undead chase through a veritable necropolis, with hands stretching up through the earth and corpses bursting through floors. In between those poles the film takes a moodier approach, winding through the complicated, sometimes confusing story with a measured pace and ominous tone more suggestive than horrific. It periodically falters, due in part to Lavia's bland performance (his perpetual look of worried intensity appears to stand in for every emotion), but Avati overcomes his shortcomings with a strange plot that becomes increasing surreal the closer we get to the true secret of Zeder. [+]

The first half of Dario Argento's heady psycho-thriller is a mesmerizing merging of dream and reality. A beautiful young Italian detective (Asia Argento, who does little to convince us she's a tough, seasoned cop) investigating a serial rapist is suddenly overwhelmed when the paintings in an art museum erupt with life. According to the film, this is "the Stendhal Syndrome," an intense and overwhelming response to art that turns the viewer mad. As Anna steps in and out of fantasy worlds like Alice through the looking glass, she's kidnapped by her quarry, who repeatedly rapes and tortures her in a dark, dank underground cave. The delirious nightmare of shattered reality becomes a sadistic, mean-spirited spectacle of murder and degradation-perpetrated on, of all people, the director's own bound and beaten daughter!-and the thriller disintegrates into a paranoid mystery of amnesia, split psyches, and shadowy phantoms. At its best this is a mesmerizing vision of madness: paintings melt into the real world while objectivity disintegrates before our eyes. But before the unexpectedly sensitive conclusion, Argento puts the viewer through a bravura but brutal series of gory murders (a slow-motion bullet passes through both cheeks of a helpless victim, and another shooting is viewed from inside the body) and unsavory violence. The poetic beauty of Phenomenon and the craftsmanship of Suspiria and Deep Red are sorely missed. -Sean Axmaker.

One of Italy's most commercially successful films, Bitter Rice packed theaters around the world despite being banned by the Legion of Decency in the United States. Though intended as a scathing indictment of harsh conditions endured by women laboring in Italy's rice fields, the film's enormous popularity was largely attributed to the erotic appeal of young Silvana Mangano. The former Miss Rome became a star overnight for her sultry debut as an impoverished yet voluptuous laborer who turns down the chance to emigrate to a better life in South America in favor of a steamy affair with her best friend's lover. Ironically, Marxist writer and director Giuseppe De Santis, one of the founders of Italy's post-World War II neorealist movement, virtually brought the genre to an end with Bitter Rice by demonstrating that sex was a far greater draw than social criticism.

This late entry in Italian horror auteur Mario Bava's catalog is in keeping with much of his other work: a rather murky plot, inventive camera work and editing, gauzy lighting using red and blue gels, and an atmospheric, dreamlike feel throughout. Where it parts ways with many of his films is in the high body count-so high that many feel Bay of Blood was a likely influence on American slasher films such as Friday the l3th. The killing centers on a list of potential heirs to a piece of lakefront property ripe for development (a subplot involves camping teenagers who are also being slaughtered-sound familiar?). The slayings come fast and furious, with gunshots, chokings, stabbings, decapitations, and a two-for-the-price-of-one impalement, to name a few. Bava creates an off-kilter mood of melancholia for the film that makes it somewhat less fun than the mindless slasher flicks of the 1980s, but also renders it a more thought-provoking, cynical sort of movie. -Jerry Renshaw.