The Black Belly of the Tarantula

The Black Belly of the Tarantula

Blue Underground, $19.95

Italian director Paolo Cavara is these days best remembered as the man who, along with Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, unleashed the seminal exploitation shock doc Mondo Cane on an unsuspecting world way back in 1962. That film was adroitly scandalous enough to elicit howls from Pauline Kael while generating scads of profits for its producers and spawning a pair of non-Cavara sequels. (It's somehow comforting to note that the wildly gamey Mondo Cane landed in theatres dead center between Antonioni's La Notte in 1961 and Fellini's 81Ú2 two years later.) The filmmaker had more important things to do, and a decade later he blew minds yet again with this hypnotic, hyperstylized, and deliciously elegant giallo, one of the best that suspense-laden genre has to offer. The traditional giallo tropes are all given a wild polish by Cavara and cinematographer Marcello Gatti, who had lensed The Battle of Algiers five years previous and would go on to shoot Polanski's What? after wrapping The Black Belly of the Tarantula. It wouldn't be a giallo without a black-clad killer committing unspeakable acts with gloved hands (here clutching wickedly lengthy needles and glinting, slashing blades), an oppressive and dissociative pop-art sensualism, a tormented cop (the great Giancarlo Giannini), and the feeling that only in Italy do maniacs routinely manage to craft a steely sort of haute couture out of blood and shadows, but Cavara elevates even the obvious to high, bloody art. That's thanks in large part to a genuinely engrossing and disturbing story by Lucile Laks and Marcello Danon, which gives Giannini, as the uncomfortably married police inspector assigned to track down the killer of Stefania Sandrelli, much to do in terms of both despondent, nuanced characterization and hesitant, hamstrung cop-action. As a kicky bonus, Tarantula features no less than three pretty Bond girls all in a row: Barbara Bouchet, Claudine Auger, and Barbara Bach quiver throughout, awash in giddy anxiety, anticipating everything bad and very little good with the utmost justification. The whole gloriously sordid enterprise is overlaid with one of Ennio Morricone's more sumptuous scores, which consistently underscores Tarantula's creepy, high-end delirium like a piano-wire garrote worn loose about the throat. After a fresh spurt from Dario Argento's warped mind, among others in the Seventies, the giallo as Italy's last great film export is currently as moribund as its late sometime-practioner Lucio Fulci, having come in a distant second to the steady and soul-deadening horrors of daily life. Which is a shame. Fetishistic fashion sense notwithstanding, a psychopath with panache – and an existential, angst-ridden cop – will always be preferable to the slavering curs of this dog's world.