torso

Even by the extremely lurid standards of the giallo genre, Torso (also known by its rather fabulous Italian title “The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence”) is noteworthy for its sordid sense of sleaze. Bare breasts are on display literally within seconds of the film starting, a group sex performance ebbing in-and-out of focus against the opening credits (the persistent click of a camera shutter implicating the audience in a form of self-conscious voyeurism that would seem to presage De Palma). This is very much a thriller in which the killer’s blade draws its sharpness from the male gaze.

Set in Perugia, the film follows a fetching group of university coeds who begin turning up dead, strangled to death and subsequently mutilated. With a madman on the loose, Dani (Tina Aumont) invites her friends Katia (Angela Covello), Ursula (Carla Brait), and the American Jane (Suzy Kendall) to lie low at her family villa in the countryside… but the violence soon follows them there. Director Sergio Martino - who’d established his giallo credentials with such Edwige Fenech collaborations as The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and the iconic but somewhat overrated Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key - flashes a bit of morbid wit early on, as art history lecturer Franz (John Richardson) notes how the Italian painter Pietro Perugino, constrained by “provincial formalism,” was queasy about incorporating blood into his depictions of martyrdom (“He was a painter, not a butcher” Dani remarks). It is, of course, a criticism that could not possibly be less germane to this particular film, nor to this traditionally gore-soaked genre as a whole.

Sex and violence continuously intersect in the seediest ways imaginable (a mud bog murder unfolds with the victim’s shirt ripped open and her breasts on full-blown display the entire time)… but it would be a mistake to dismiss the movie as mindless exploitation (well… sort of), as it actually has a slightly denser thematic center than the average giallo offering. Male voyeurism (and the implicit threat it carries) informs every aspect of the plot - from the impotent, kerchiefed Stefano (Roberto Bisacco) and his obsessive fixation on Dani, to Dani’s Uncle Nino casting a lecherous glance at Jane and his niece from the bedroom doorway, to the locals openly gawking at the ebony-skinned Ursula (one of them comments “Brother, from here you can see the source of the Nile” while leering at her crossed thighs). On-screen nudity (and there is a *lot* of it) is almost always linked to some form of predatory observation, which undercuts the potential titillation… such as when the local cobbler sneaks up to the villa and meets a gruesome fate while trying to catch a sweaty, slavering glimpse of Katia and Ursula’s lesbian canoodling (yes, it's *that* sort of movie). Martino might as well be incriminating male viewers in his misogynistic terrordome; the effect is genuinely unsettling.   ​

Under the circumstances, in which virtually every male character reeks of licentiousness and the capacity for physical violence, you’d think the film would have an impressive smorgasbord of suspects… but, oddly enough, it’s rather easy to suss out the killer’s identity. His motivations are the usual psychosexual buffoonery (if you’ve watched enough giallo movies, the payoffs all start to blend together after a while). Torso isn’t quite as taut as the very best of the genre - its grip constricts somewhat fitfully, its script hindered by a certain loose laziness - but the final half hour… in which Jane finds herself trapped in the villa with the hacksaw-wielding killer and the story shifts into cat-and-mouse suspense… gels appreciably (some have even gone so far as to suggest the movie could technically be considered the first slasher ever made). Most of the female characters fail to rise beyond a base level of carnal desire (which undermines Martino’s basic thematic approach, to an extent, as does the retrograde decision to have one of the formerly sketchy male characters swoop in to save the day - though, to be fair, a cheap Italian thriller from 1973 can only be so progressive), but Suzy Kendall at least has a bit of steel about her. If Torso could be viewed as a “proto-slasher,” then she definitely holds her own as a “proto-final girl.”