A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Pretty Good

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

If you were a well-to-do woman in Italy in the 1970s, chances are — based on the movies that I have seen — that you are about to killed, have killed someone, are having a lesbian affair, are on drugs or all of the above.Carol (Florinda Bolkan, Don't Torture a Duckling) is one of those wealthy women. She lives with her father, rich lawyer and politician Edmund Brighton, husband Frank and step-daughter Joan (Edy Gall, Baba Yaga, The Devil is a Woman). Carol's been having dreams that cause her to see a doctor. It seems next door neighbor, Julia (Anita Strindberg, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, The Antichrist) is having all night sex and drug orgies that at once repulses and excites Carol.All sorts of rich people shenanigans are going on — Frank is having an affair with his secretary. And Carol may or may not be having a lesbian affair with her neighbor. Her dreams have become so intense, she can't tell fact from fiction. What worries her the most is that her latest dream ends with her stabbing Julia in vivid Fulci splendor while two hippies watch. That dream turns out to perhaps be true, as Julia is dead and Scotland Yard is on the case. The room and condition of the dead body match Carol's dream. The hippies that she remembers from her dream don't remember seeing her kill Julia. But Carol's prints are on the murder weapon. As she waits for her trial in an insane asylum, one of the hippies breaks in and chases her. What follows is an infamous scene where she happens upon a room full of vivisected, still alive dogs. It's a dream sequence unconnected to the rest of the film, but it landed Fulci in prison. Carlo Rambaldi, the amazing special effects artist of E.T., Alien and more, saved the director from a two-year jail sentence by bringing the fake dog props to the courtroom.Read more at http://bit.ly/2xfNe5K

How can there possibly be anything comforting about a giallo film, that cold, ruthless and brutal world in which 'Lizard in a Woman's Skin' is a shining example? Could it be the haze of nostalgia for the period in which such films were made, the lush and vivacious production values that belies the lack of a huge budget? Could it even be the game of spotting the actress uncomfortable with cigarettes playing the part of an awkwardly casual smoker? Whatever it is, 'giallo' is a fairly stylised genre that straddles murder/thriller/horror with much success.Familiar British face Stanley Baker here plays Inspector Corvin. Baker gives his usual exemplary performance (Corvin's habit of – dubbed - whistling isn't convincing, however), despite this being a period in his life when his own financial challenges required him to appear in films that diminished his star-billed status. His son Glyn later described 'Lizard…' as 'a movie which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.' Stanley himself declared that he enjoyed everything he worked on, 'including the bad pictures'.I love the look Director Lucio Fulci gives this. Trippy psychedelia contrasts with some very sombre, often rainy locations to great effect: the false sense of safety in the warmly lit indoors, fighting with the sinister frostiness outside. The comfort of sex against some truly disturbing, if not always convincing, special gore effects (a shocking sequence involving dismembered canines required the makers to prove no real animals were hurt at the time). These things conspire to transport the audience into a dangerous world that is rarely quite real, and all the more effectively unnerving for that. This dreamy, druggy atmosphere doesn't serve to make the complex plot any clearer, however! As is often the way, revelations come thick and fast during the latter moments, and whilst it is true to say that another viewing may well help me make total sense of developments, the finale is a visual tour-de-force and stays in the mind for a good while after the credits have rolled. A word too for Ennio Morricone's score; whilst it is a given that he produces some incredible melodious soundtracks, this has certain similarities to my favourite of all his works, that of his music for 'Maddalena (1971)'. Beautiful.

"Lizard in a Woman's Skin" is part giallo whodunit, part striking, hallucinatory nightmare. Only one of these parts in successful.Those who have had to suffer through some of Fulci's later garbage such as "City of the Living Dead", "Manhattan Baby" or "The Beyond" might be surprised to find that he could actually direct. The dream sequences are filled with startling imagery made all the more striking for their auteurism. Who could forget the dissected canines? Even the giallo parts, the "real" aspect of the movie, feature inventive camera angles that take you by surprise.But when the movie leaves the dreams behind, as it must, we are left with a not terribly interesting mystery. I didn't much care who did it, and the ending scenes, where we are supposed to be surprised, and kept guessing, by sudden revelations, felt needlessly drawn out and tiresome.Who did do it? I wasn't paying attention.The movie has some nudity, and a stabbing during a lesbian liaison. We only see the stabbing, not the bit before.

(Second review: pertains to the recent DVD release that clocks in at 103 minutes--allegedly the most complete version available.)To those--such as myself--who were weaned on Lucio Fulci's post-"Zombie" gorefests, looking back at his earlier work can be a jarring experience. Films like "Don't Torture a Duckling" and "The Psychic" show a filmmaker bringing a sense of macabre mystery to the mainstream; the same can be said for "Lizard in a Woman's Skin," his first foray into the 'giallo' subgenre...though the result is terribly disappointing.It's hard to ignore the cue Fulci takes from Dario Argento, making an animal-themed (and relatively restrained) film in the footsteps of "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage." There are glimpses of the frenetic (almost invasive) camera tricks and stylistic techniques Fulci would mine with more confidence (and effect) in his gritty horror outings. While he stages an impressive extended chase through Alexandra Palace (beginning in the underground tunnels and finishing on the rooftop), piques our interest with a smattering of sex, violence, and psychedelics at the very beginning, and gives us a dog-vivisection dream sequence that foreshadows his later work (and is still gruesomely effective today), what lies in between is talky and largely uninteresting.The plot is simple enough: Carol Hammond (Florinda Bolkan--"Don't Torture a Duckling"), daughter of a prominent politician in Great Britain, is afflicted with strange hallucinations that literally bleed over into reality when her next-door neighbor, Julia Durer (sexy Anita Strindberg) is stabbed to death. Meanwhile, Carol's husband Frank (Jean Sorel) is carrying on an affair with a family friend, and Carol's daughter-in-law, Joan (Edy Gall) is somehow involved with a bunch of hippie types who know something about the murder.I consider Fulci's "Don't Torture a Duckling" one of the finer examples of a giallo done right--it wasn't so heavily stylized that it detracted from character or story, and at times invoked a sense of realism-through-restraint. "Lizard" is almost the total opposite--the characters tend to become dancing puppets within a plot that's constantly twisting itself into a pretzel; indeed, much like Argento's style-drenched films, the best method of viewing is to just drink in the look and feel of things, and wait for the inevitable Closing Revelation, in which all the convoluted plot points are explained. Yet "Lizard"--save for its experimental, color-soaked LSD scenes--isn't even that much fun to watch; taking place in a perpetually gloomy Britain, one feels Fulci stretching for legitimacy and falling short. The dialog scenes are endless to the point of tedium, and produce more confusion than intrigue.In short, "Lizard" is required viewing for the Fulci completist, but otherwise not worth the bother.