Eugene Walter Movies
This frightening horror-thriller stars Giancarlo Giannini as Inspector Tellini, chasing a killer whose victims are paralyzed with a poisoned acupuncture needle, forcing them to watch helplessly as their stomachs are ripped open with a sharp knife. This method duplicates the habits of the black wasp in slaying tarantulas, explaining the title. Much of the film is spent on a wild goose chase involving Silvano Tranquilli, the husband of the first victim (Barbara Bouchet). All of the suspects soon turn up dead and Giannini turns his attention to an upscale health spa, frequented by each victim, which is a front for blackmail and cocaine smuggling. The mystery itself is fairly obvious, but director Paolo Cavara includes a good deal of action and Ennio Morricone's score is effectively chilling. Among the cast are such genre favorites as Annabella Incontrera, Stefania Sandrelli, Claudine Auger, Rossella Falk, and Giancarlo Priete, and --as in many Italian thrillers of the period -- voyeurism is the primary motif. Barbara Bach and Carla Mancini appear briefly. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
- 1969
Giordano (Lino Capolicchio) is a young man from Milan who accepts a ride from a married American couple sightseeing in Italy. The husband is an older and worldly professor of archaeology while his wife is interested in exploring living things. The young hitchhiker is seduced by the beautiful wife, while her husband continues to gaze at ancient ruins. Giordano is also scrutinized by a local homosexual who would love to take him home. When he reaches his destination, he sees the couple drive off with another man on the following day in this mildly erotic travel tale. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lino Capolicchio, Janet Agren, (more)
Fresh off of the international success of La Dolce Vita, master director Federico Fellini moved into the realm of self-reflexive autobiography with what is widely believed to be his finest and most personal work. Marcello Mastroianni delivers a brilliant performance as Fellini's alter ego Guido Anselmi, a film director overwhelmed by the large-scale production he has undertaken. He finds himself harangued by producers, his wife, and his mistress while he struggles to find the inspiration to finish his film. The stress plunges Guido into an interior world where fantasy and memory impinge on reality. Fellini jumbles narrative logic by freely cutting from flashbacks to dream sequences to the present until it becomes impossible to pry them apart, creating both a psychological portrait of Guido's interior world and the surrealistic, circus-like exterior world that came to be known as "Felliniesque." 8 1/2 won an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, as well as the grand prize at the Moscow Film Festival, and was one of the most influential and commercially successful European art movies of the 1960s, inspiring such later films as Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), and even Lucio Fulci's Italian splatter film Un Gatto nel Cervello (1990). ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, (more)
