Get in My Arachnid Black Belly!

There's something doped up and jet lagged in the giallo tropes of La Tarantola dal ventre nero (1971), one of the many "commercially minded" animal-titled films to come out in the wake of Argento's big hit, The Bird with Crystal Plumage (1970). Everything good La Tarantola has going for it seems borrowed from Plumage, including the use of a heavy breathing avant garde percussive Ennio Morricone score. Well, sometimes a heavy breathing avant garde percussive Ennio Morricone score is enough! Add some Bond girls and... well, even if nobody goes home happy, nobody goes home hurt, psychically speaking.

Our cop lead (Giancarlo Giannini--"Inspector Mathis" in Casino Royale & Quantum of Solace) gets the most screen time, with the hot starlets (Claudine Auger, Barbara Bouchet! Barbara Bach!) barely registering as characters before they are set up and knocked down like screaming, whining, puling bowling pins. Too bad, because while he's very expressive--with big doleful eyes that define "puppy dog"--Giannini lacks his future self's gravitas and instead acts like he's strung out on a benzodiazepam bender. He lets prime suspects go if they sass or stall him and-- though he's clearly way out of his depth--never thinks to ask for a partner or back up to helps solve this multiple homicide case that gets new victims nightly. There's: a fetishistic serial killer, blackmailers, acupuncturist accessories; red sports cars; musty offices and plush love nests; stamps on envelopes in the jacket of the murder victims; nature films (the wasp paralyzes the tarantula then lays eggs in its big black belly!), and loads of tracking shots through the moist leaves of trees in the park and the hustle bustle of the city. Naturally the cops of Italy would think Giannini can handle all this by himself. Running over sewer grates (shot from below) and up and down twisting outdoor staircases, past little dingy gray polizia cars, he fits the bill in body but not in spirit. He needs a handsome bland photographer or musician--inexplicably linked to the killer--to play cat and mouse games with.

Without such a foil, Giannini has no one to spar with but himself: yards of film flow by depicting his subtly rendered internal struggle --usually via sitting in his car staring blankly out the side window, or buttoning his drab attire. When he's not moping around, however, which isn't often, Tarantola is giallo right down to its kinky gold curtains and fetishistic toys and latex gloves of the killer... and mannequins, naturally.

It would all be just much ado about nothing, except for the aforementioned Morricone score, which provides a cacophonic counterpoint whenever it can. You don't even need a story when Ennio is at the top of his game like he is here. All crumbling electric guitars, atonal mashes of the keyboard, deep breathing and and wheezy organs, he catches and balances the woozy mise-en-scene the way a patient friend might help a stumbling drunk to his car.

Considering the by-the-numbers direction of journeyman-hack Paolo Cavara (Mondo Cane) and the fact that Tarantolo's screenplay was written by woman (Lucille Lans) it's perhaps no surprise that a) the film is lacking the drive and momentum that Catholic male guilt and sexual frustration can provide male auteur-driven films like this and b) its strengths lie in its 'weaknesses,' in its swooning, feminine sexuality,  which feminist horror studies fans will note is almost completely free of voyeuristic "eye"-conography. The stripping nude of the female victims and the paralysis method seem to set the stage for kinky sexual torture, rape, etc., but censors or soft stomachs mercilessly (or--if you prefer--mercifully) make these scenes short, as if the killer, after going through all the trouble of getting victim set up for torture, wimps out and just stabs and runs (though this also serves to keep the killer's gender open to question).

Dull as the film can be in stretches, the great disc from Blue Underground is so crisp and uniformly strong in color--the music so boldly reproduced--that a discerning trash film fan has little choice but to embrace it. I can imagine really hating The Black Belly of the Tarantula on a faded badly cropped and edited VHS, but seeing it on a good widescreen TV or projector is like being part of a glorious archeological excavation, digging a window back to a long gone world of macho mustaches, shoulder-length hair, drab white raincoats, shiny shoes, drizzle, bohemians, cocaine smuggled in tarantula aquariums, and Barbara Bach, who sports some of the longest, straightest, shiniest hair in all of gialli land.

The most off-putting aspect of this film, which makes the murders more a relief than a source of tension, is the sleepwalker idiocy of all the characters (not just our Ritalin-deprived sheriff, all of them). Most notably dumb is a woman who, after running into her apartment building while being chased, rushes inside her door and then refuses to lock the bolt or chain behind her, leaving the big heavy chain just hanging down as she stands panting by the door, dazed, perhaps struggling to remember her lines or to hear our shouts at the screen from the presumed audience of the future: "Lock the damn door!" All the victims of our maniac rush to their deaths like lemmings (note to giallo characters: if you want to rat out your friends to the cops, don't boldly announce your intentions to them in a darkened, deserted, cavernous health spa).

In the way that would become de rigueur for the slasher films of the 1980s the slack-jawed dumbness of the victims not only lightens the load for the screenwriter but allows the audience to retire to that dubious place of moral safety so cherished by repressive cultures (like Catholic Italy): the she was "asking for it" defense -- i.e. "a girl that stupid deserves to die" since she abuses the audience-character identification trust. But while this can enable our emotional distancing so the violence is more bearable it also makes us lose interest; I found myself sighing in relief once each murder was done, knowing I'd have at least a few minutes to relax and go get a drink before having to endure watching another eloi passively bow her head to receive the morlock needle.

With so little suspense or empathy generated by the killings, the big mystery becomes how a cop as incompetent, foggy and strung out as Giannini's Inspector Tellini ever made it to homicide in the first place, even in Italia. He should be pounding the pavement, handing out parking tickets, at best. When you see him first step into a strange, perhaps abandoned house where the killer might be hiding you know you have time to go to the bathroom and mix a round of cocktails for your guests, flip through your phone message, and he'll still only have investigated a few feet farther inside the front hallway than when you left. No wonder all these sex killers ran so rampant in 1970s cinematic Italy with homicide detectives as lost in Valium fog as Tellini! This guy couldn't find a door in a door store. Thank God he's handing in his resignation at the end of the case, or at least considering it: "I was unable to save a woman last night," he groans to his wife/girlfriend, who is too busy selling and buying new furniture to have much of an inkling what he's talking about. Meanwhile the heavy sighs on the soundtrack begin to resonate less with feminine lust and more with resigned exacerbation. He was unable to save a woman? No shit, he's barely able to save a penny -- if pennies only come for thoughts, he's surely penniless.

From a surrealist standpoint his confusion puts him in the rarefied realm of somnambulist shamuses inhabited by Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart; Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense; Asia Argento in The Stendahl Syndrome; and Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly--characters who may or may not be already dead, as if they awoke from a dream into the film and don't really remember a damn thing about investigative protocol. But at least in those films the target always turns out to be someone or something intrinsically tied up with the pursuer. In Belly the final disconnect becomes more of a Dirty Harry sort of "this time it's personal!" punch out, which illuminates our hero's dark path not a watt. Oh well, if you don't know where or who you are, it helps to have some really weird Morricone to help you home. One psychedelically twisted note of discordant guitar and you know that you're safe in the beloved giallo genre, where druggy amnesia isn't only forgiven, it's practically essential.