Giallo is Italian for ‘yellow’ and refers to the bright yellow covers for books that dealt with lurid criminal plots, sort of the Italian answer to pulps but with far less content moderation. As these books were adapted into films the term carried over and Giallo is a sub-genre of Italian cinema dealing with lurid, sexual, and criminal themes.

This week my sweetie-wife and I watched a 1970 Italian/Spanish Giallo ‘In the Folds of the Flesh.’ This was a very challenging movie to view. With a scant running time of a mere 88 minutes In the Folds tries to pack in a number or reveals, reversals, and shocking twists that would be more suitable for a couple of seasons of any daytime soap opera. In short, the story is about Lucille the much younger couple Colin and Falaise dealing with Falaise’s uncontrollable urges to murder any man who is sexually forward with her. Ladled onto this are plot elements of incest, mafia revenge murders, deeply undercover police investigations, and even exploitive flashbacks to Nazi death camps bonus gratuitous nudity.

The camera work seems to have been performed by a spastic chimpanzee with sudden and unmotivated crash zooms, indecipherable close-ups, and rapid circling pans that induce motion sickness. While the editing is reminiscent of a goldfish on acid with unestablished leaps in time and place that are terrible disorienting.

There are quite a few Giallos that I have thoroughly enjoyed since I discovered the genre a few years ago but In the Folds of the Flesh is not one of them and I cannot recommend this movie to anyone who is not currently dosing with hallucinogens.