Well, that was pleasant viewing. Sergio Martino is considered one of the major giallo directors, despite only really making five of them and those all within the first three or so years of his directorial career, and despite also not really being considered an auteur like Dario Argento (at least according to Kat Ellinger on the blu-ray commentary). He made other films after this that don’t seem to be considered “proper” gialli as such, so this was his last “real” one, and what an… unclean film it is. Plotwise, we’re in the rather delightful-looking (if dangerously paved) town of Perugia, where a female student has been found strangled, with the murder weapon soon being revealed as a distinctive black and red scarf. When another student is killed, a group of female students heads out of town to a villa owned by one of the girls’ uncles, but that’s not going to be far enough away… Torso is regarded in some quarters as a proto-slasher, which I can kind of see, and Ellinger characterises it a few times as “cynical”, which, yeah. There’s something vaguely dirty about it, as I said, something kind of leering about it when it comes to the more sexual stuff (including an interesting bit of interracial lesbian business), particularly the kind of revolting villagers in the town around the villa. It’s well enough made, particularly in the last third or so, and the score is really good, but it’s also deeply unpleasant in a way that I haven’t often felt when watching gialli in the past… interestingly, Ellinger says Martino was fairly uncomfortable with sex in his films, so I’m not sure what to make of that after seeing this. I’m not sure what I make of the ultimate reveal of the killer, who turns out to be pretty much the only male character that the film doesn’t try to make you think could be the one; I suppose I see a certain logic to it but I’m not sure how well it actually works. So that’s Torso, perfectly well made but also pretty hard to like as such.
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