Review: A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971)

(aka Una lucertola con la pelle di donna)
Directed by: Lucio Fulci
Starring: Florinda Bolkan, Stanley Baker, Jean Sorel
Written by: Lucio Fulci, Roberto Gianviti, José Luis Martínez Mollá, André Tranché
Music by: Ennio Morricone
Country: Italy
Available on: Blu-ray (Mondo Macabro), DVD (Studiocanal)
IMDb

A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is one of Lucio Fulci’s earliest giallo films, and marks the start of the most renown period of his career. It follows the conservative daughter of a wealthy lawyer, Carol, whose jealousy of her free-wheeling, drug-consuming, orgy-having liberal neighbor spurs wild fantasies of sex and murder. When the neighbor turns up dead, killed in much the same way Carol had dreamed, she becomes a prime suspect. Although Fulci is often hailed for his eccentric compositions and angles, Lizard is especially experimental and the camera feels like it’s hopped up on the same drugs as its hippie characters, jittery and bouncing across the set. This jagged, constant movement is very disorienting at first, but appreciation for Fulci’s nervous, prying lens grows as the film progresses. Appropriately, this is a very psychedelic and sensual piece of work, filled with phantasmagorical, often abstract imagery that really screws with you. In particular, a scene featuring writhing, screaming vivisected dogs fucks you right up. The gore, provided by Carlo Rambaldi (who created E.T.), is so realistic that Fulci and Rambaldi were dragged into a courtroom where they had to show the props to prove it wasn’t real. The maestro Ennio Morricone’s music is beautiful and very effective, providing a perfect accompaniment to Fulci’s torridly violent and erotic thrills. Like most gialli, the plot is overly convoluted and littered with talking head scenes, but the acting is more convincing than in most Italian genre films, with just a few exceptions from bit characters. Fulci’s fascinating directorial choices and unsettling set pieces keep things from ever getting boring. Unfortunately, gialli don’t have a great track record with satisfying endings, and that’s the main problem with Fulci’s best from the genre: it ends on an absolutely deflated whimper that’s just frustrating as hell considering how interesting the rest of the movie was. The tendency for these types of flicks to peter out on a long, explanatory “here’s whodunit!” monologue by a detective or similar investigative entity is a big reason I’ve never been able to fully invest in many of them. Still, Fulci really shines in A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and it, along with his follow-up giallo, Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972), are at the very top of the heap of Italian films concerning black gloves, brutal violence, smarmy men, beautifully dangerous women, and weird kink.

Overall rating: 8.5 out of 10