The Giallo Files: Jose Luis Madrid

The Crimes of Petiot

In this climate of intrigue, everyone seems suspicious.

A shadowy, black-coated killer is on the loose in Berlin's West Park neighborhood and he has a very specific pattern. Each time, he targets couples with a dark-haired woman and a blond haired man, shoots the man in the head with a Luger, leaves behind a Nazi emblem, and takes the woman to the abandoned tunnels beneath the city. There, he makes her listen to a bizarre tape recorded rant about vengeance against a woman named Madeline before shooting her. Reporter Vera (Patricia Loran) and her colleagues decide to catch the killer on their own, against the objections of Vera's boyfriend Boris (Paul Naschy) and Police Commissioner Rotwang (Anastasio Campoy). But when the reporters' trap goes horribly wrong, the killer sends a message that they will be his next targets. Could the killer actually be one of the reporters? And why does the killer strike in such a specific way? The police seem to be no help, so Vera and Boris must find the killer before he strikes again!

The Crimes of Petiot (not to be confused with The Crimes of the Black Cat) has a brilliant and engaging premise and would be a top-tier giallo if the tight storytelling springs didn't wind down in the second half. Once again, star and co-screenwriter Paul Naschy has crafted a high-body count vehicle for himself which, like Antonio Bido's Watch Me When I Kill, touches on the horrors of the Second World War for some somber gravity. If only more thought was put into the story logic and the killer's ultimate motive, this would have been a far better movie.

The Crimes of Petiot is director José Luis Madrid's follow-up to Seven Murders for Scotland Yard and he took the opportunity to re-assemble many of the same cast and crew.
Calculating the final body count of this movie is a little tricky. We're shown nine murders, most of which are by gunshot. But we soon discover that before the movie starts, there were at least six other victims. The film that the killer leaves behind appears to show the same killing as the opening of the movie, so that wouldn't count as a new murder. Also, two additional women are knocked unconscious and dragged away never to be seen again and, given the killer's modus operandi, we can presume that they were eventually killed. Adding all these up, I came to the final number of 17 - the highest body count of any giallo I've seen yet.
Special effects artist Antonio Molina would go on to work with famed director Pedro Almadovar on several films, often credited only as "Molina."

What the Hell Am I Watching?

There are plenty of opportunities for nudity here - gratuitous shower scenes, intimate moments - but the movie seems to actively avoid showing any actual nudity.

As a means of second-act exposition, the police show the reporters and Boris film of one of the victims getting shot - essentially a snuff film. Did civilians (and civilians who just received a serious death threat) really need to see that? It seems unnecessary at best and horribly irresponsible at worst.

Things get a little confusing at the end of the movie when Paul Naschy plays a completely different character during a flashback.

Fashion Moment

Dude loves his leather jackets. Here, Boris sports a chic brown leather overcoat:

And this black leather blazer is just for lounging around the house.

Seven Murders for Scotland Yard

"It's alarming how many crimes of a sexual nature are being committed at the moment."

A killer is stalking the red light district of London, murdering women and removing organs – just like Jack the Ripper did a hundred years ago. Commissioner Henry Campbell (Renzo Marignano) is on the case and his primary suspect is Pedro Dorian (Paul Naschy), a washed-up Spanish trapeze artist, prone to boozing and brawling, who was the husband of the second victim. As the list of murdered women grows, the killer taunts the police with escalating messages, from notes and threatening phone calls to his victim's severed body parts, all the while calling himself "Jack." Could Pedro be the killer or is he being framed? Could it be Campbell's friend, schoolteacher Winston Christian (Andres Resino), who sexually blackmails his own students? Or could it even be Commissioner Campbell himself, using his power at Scotland Yard to frame an innocent man?

Seven Murders for Scotland Yard is a crazy, bloody mess of a movie that exemplifies the low-budget, trash aesthetic of many gialli. It's poorly made but fun to watch. Just check out that body count! Paul Naschy (whom you may remember from The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll) is put to good use with three big fight scenes and the mystery is appropriately twisty.

The killer actually commits nine murders (the rest were either accidents or self defense).
In the first fight scene, please enjoy the sight of Paul Naschy beating up two hilariously wimpy street thugs.
You'd think that a movie featuring prostitutes being killed in a red light district would be racy, but not a single naked bewb is to be found in all of Seven Murders for Scotland Yard.

What the Hell Am I Watching?

For the better part of the film, Commissioner Campbell is perhaps the most inept police detective ever in a genre known to feature inept police detectives. Until the last 25 minutes, he spends exactly zero percent of his time in the field examining evidence and tracking down the culprit. Instead, Campbell can be found in fancy chairs in cozy wood-paneled drawing rooms with his fingers tented, discussing the case as if it were a hypothetical puzzle. Meanwhile, out on the street, the bodies stack up like cord wood.

Campbell refers to the surgical precision with which the killer slices open his victims, but all that stabbing looks pretty haphazard to me.

The scene where Winston Christian lures his female student into his office for a chat at 10pm is absolutely abhorrently creepy. The fact that she shows up in a nightgown makes it twice as difficult to watch.

At 17:14, a little kid runs into the frame and mugs at the camera. This might be my favorite thing in the entire film.

Fashion Moment

What's that, Winston? I can't hear you over your fancy silk robe and mismatched ascot.