A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

Director: Lucio Fulci| Year: 1971
Genre: Giallo| Country: Italy| Language: English

Rating:★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (once upon a time marketed as Schizoid) is probably one of Lucio Fulci's more enjoyable giallo productions. You wouldn't want to call it mind-blowing, because none of Fulci's movies are, but unlike his Don't Torture a Duckling, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is never a mind-blowingly boring experience. Rather than blow your mind, it merely sucks on it for a couple of hours without its dentures in. But if taken for what it is, a piece of B-movie trash, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is well above average.

Carol Hammond, played by a tight-lipped Florinda Bolkan, is the young daughter of a wealthy English politician. Her repressive existence is quickly portrayed through a series of kitschy nightmares in which she has sex with her wild next door neighbor, a conversation with her eloquent psychoanalyst who tries to help cure her insomnia, and some mundane depictions of her shallow interactions with her family. The repression soon explodes, however, when one of Carol's recurring erotic dreams turn homicidal and her letter opener ends up lodged in her sexy neighbor's chest- but not just in her dream. Soon an uptight detective, played by a charmingly ugly Stanley Baker, comes around to look into the brutal stabbing of Carol's neighbor. Whistling compulsively and abusing his coworkers, Inspector Corvin laconically probes his list of suspects, which includes Carol herself, her philandering husband (played a stiff Jean Sorel), her domineeringly loving father, and a couple of morbidly burnt out hippies. His unraveling of the case leads to many a twist in the plot but, thank god, the twists are never totally improbable and ridiculous ((don't) see The Illusionist).

The one thing that's really missing from this movie, however, is good old fashioned Fulcian gore. According to some reviews I read online, a nasty little scene involving a couple mutilated doggies is supposed to transpire midway through the film. According to IMDb, it was considered such a graphic and realistic scene, Fulci and his effects people had to appear in court to prove the dead dogs weren't, in fact, real dead dogs. But for some inexplicable reason, this scene, which would have given a nice touch to this altogether gore-tame Fulci movie, was expurgated from the DVD I ordered through Netflix. Though the distributors still had the graciousness to leave in a scene in which a woman is attacked by a swarm of in-no-way-could-you-think-they're-real bats, I was pretty disappointed.

Though this is a giallo film and therefore inherently superficial, some relatively interesting perspectives on women seem to be at play in A Lizard in a Woman's Skin. Sex deviants were all the rage in 1970s mystery and horror films, but most of them were men. Here, however, sexual psychosis is portrayed in a woman. Though Carol's sexual fantasies turn out to not be all that they seem, her apparent derangement deserves a certain amount of pity: you can blame her repression for making her such a freak. Being pitiable, however, is almost never a quality of the male sex perverts of '70s horror/giallo movies, who, despite being a bit maladjusted, are usually way too vile and scary to be pitied. What does this say about Fulci's stance on women? I'm almost certain it doesn't say much of anything, but it's different nevertheless. What's also different about the portrayal of women in this movie is that the promiscuous ones aren't completely demonized. I say not completely because most of the women in the movie are, in fact, deceitful, blackmailing Jezebels. But, surprisingly, the most promiscuous women aren't necessarily the most “evil.” Furthermore, though female sexuality is in the spot light, and though Italian movies from the '70s tend to be as chauvinistic as possible, the women in A Lizard in a Woman's Skin are not punished for being whores. Whores are by necessity punished in A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, but more for their hypocrisy than for their sexual proclivities.

 

At a glance, parts of A Lizard in a Woman's Skin might suggest a moral objection to the '60s free love and drug culture. But if meant to be anti-psychedelia, its tripped-out sensitivities contradict that intent. While the film is concerned (as much as an exploitation-type movie can be “concerned” with anything besides provoking winces and erections) with the sordidness of the late 1960s and takes advantage of the post-Manson Family hysteria, the feel of that period is fetishized through ornately psychedelic tapestries and elaborate hallucination sequences. And though only a handful of A Lizard in a Woman's Skin's characters are doing drugs on screen, the film's aesthetic makes it seem like almost every character is high on at least one healthy dose of LSD.

All in all, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin has four things going for it. First, the cinematography has plenty of the hard zooms, disorienting angles, washed out colors, and odd depth of field that enrich the tastelessness of giallo films. Second, the soundtrack, by the illustrious Ennio Morricone, is jazzier than a porno soundtrack. Third, a consistent tension runs from scene to scene, which cannot be said for some of my favorite Fulci, such as The Beyond in which an inordinate amount of time is spent depicting a mass of slow-moving foam and a dozen tarantulas-on-strings crawling on top of a passed-out librarian. Third, the cheese meets all B-movie quality standards. The flimsy references to psychology are almost touching (I'm not kidding, its alternate title was actually Schizoid), the erotic scenes are like porn played in slow-motion with the genital shots omitted, the dialogue ranges from brain-dead hollow to clumsily artificial, the characters are no more than two dimensional cutouts, and Carol's neighbor is a pretty heavy breather for a lifeless corpse: an altogether delectable catalog of qualities.