Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods

Another Giallo that takes the unusual approach of having two simultaneous storylines taking place: One in the present, involving an old professor who rents an abandoned villa from a shifty administrator to take some field recordings like the Hafler Trio and ends up finding some crumpled cassette tape hidden underneath a tree. It's on these tapes that the other story unfolds: that of Erika Blanc in psychotherapy sessions with her doctor regarding why she decided to attempt suicide (a scene we see at the start of the film).

Erika once lived in the huge villa the professor now finds himself in and has a bit of a strange set up going on. She lives with her drunken husband but also seems to continually be playing mind games with her friend Manfredi, including teasing him on her wedding day, rejecting him, slapping him around, and throwing in the odd snog for good measure. It's only later she reveals that Manfredi is her brother! Incest, eh?

Yes - it's one of those "In the Folds Of The Flesh" type films that seem sick to us outsiders but are very common to those rich folks who can afford giant villas in Italy. Be warned, although this film does eventually fit into the giallo mould, it also has leaning towards to the artful too, which means a lot of symbolism, characters looking moody, and staring.

That said, it's still a giallo, as we don't get the full story from the cassettes and the old man suddenly finds himself listening to a cassette made by a past character while he was out in town! The last half an hour is where this film gets going, with a sudden outburst of bloody violence and a grim ending we've all come to expect at this point. You've got to be in the mood for a film of this pace, however, but luckily, I was. The beautiful (once again!) giallo cinematography certainly helps.

Peter Lee Lawrence stands out here as Manfredi. Up until this I thought he was just some kind of Germanic bland spaghetti western actor, but there you go.

Token possession of an old "villa", a German ornithologist casually discovers some old tapes on which a psychologist has recorded the mysterious doings happened into those isolated walls. So he learns about a gloomy story of incestuous loves and trivial betrayals that will lead to a bloodbath orchestrated by an unexpected crazy character. A love drama disguised in a "giallo" movie that moves too much slowly; but has the regard to show a beautiful and skilled Erica Blank and an intense Peter Lee Lawrence. Romano Scavolini pays much attention in directing the cast and orchestrating the shot, but seems to forget completely the pacing, transforming an otherwise interesting story in a soporific black fable, which hardly someone can go thoroughly.

The Italian Giallo is, without any doubt or discussion, THE horror/cult subgenre that brings forward the movies with the most sensationally sounding and imaginative titles! Just think of examples like "Your Vice is a Locked Room and only I have the Key", "Forbidden Photos of a Lady above Suspicion", or "What are those strange drops of blood doing on Jennifer's Body?". The downright fantastically titled "Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods" belongs in this list as well, but there's one unfortunate - but major - difference with the rest.

The others are great and massively entertaining horror movies, with awesome titles as a sort of cherry on the cake. "Love and Death etc." has an awesome title but fails to deliver in every other department. Writer/director Sauro Scavoline came up with a detailed and convoluted story, but there's one issue ... it's completely and utterly uninteresting! It's the story of an ornithologist who, via recordings of therapeutic sessions, becomes intrigued by the triangular relationship between the people that previously lived in the villa he's renting. We know straight from the start that the flashbacks will end in tragedy, as the film opens with images of Erika Blanc lying dead in a bathtub, so what's the point?

The first hour is incredibly slow-paced, dull, and extremely difficult to sit through. Too little too late the film turns into a much more enjoyable cocktail full of sex and vicious murders, but the connection with - or the empathy for - the lead characters never comes. Beautiful photography, music, and the ravishing naked bodies of Erica Blanc & Orchidea De Santis (lovely name, by the way) make this nevertheless a collector's item for fans of rare gialli.

Nice style but boring structure.

The director, Romano Scavolini, has a nice style. The are a number of inspiring shots. The use of color, lighting, and cinematography are all above-average. The acting is good across the board. Peter Lee Lawrence stood out to me as being particularly good.

However, the script and the structure of the story held this one back. It's a story within a story told with multiple flashbacks and shifting in and out of narration with too much exposition. This robs it of a lot of suspense. Plus, it takes like an hour for any murder to happen so it's not much in the way of a thriller or giallo. This had potential, and a better script would have made a big difference.

This wonderfully atmospheric, teasingly twisted psychodrama from talented director, Sauro Scavolini is a brooding, elegiac tale of emotional violence, starring two of the most luminescent Euro-starlets, that deliciously intoxicating redhead, Erika Blanc, and the voluptuous, Orchidea 'Devil in The Brain' De Santis! Masterfully exotic cinema that reminded me of the equally skewed neo-Gothic piece 'Anima Persa', whereby an octogenarian professor hires an ostensibly deserted, dilapidated mansion to further his study of rare bird call, and soon discovers, in true-blue, kooky Gialli-style, a stone-cold, hyper-sexualized, obsidian dark tale of incest, infidelity and escalating madness! There is a decidedly decadent whiff of Hitchcockian diabolism about this deadly tale of twisted desire and dreadful deceit; and it is rendered with considerably more moral restraint than cinematic rabble-rouser Umberto Lenzi! I happily discovered that maestro, Suaro Scavolini also wrote 'The Case of The Scorpions Tale', 'Your vice is a locked room, and only I have the key' and 'All the colours of the Dark' - so his pristine Giallo genius credentials are somewhat unimpeachable! The darkly fascinating Giallo, 'Love & Death in The Garden of the Gods' is most certainly worthy of rediscovery, especially in its handsomely restored Blu-ray edition.