Review #639: 'A Lizard in a Woman's Skin' (1971)

Carol Hammond (Florinda Bolkan), the daughter of a wealthy politician and lawyer, sees a psychiatrist to help deal with her increasingly bizarre and possibly prophetic dreams. In the dream, she is running down a corridor filled with naked, writhing young bodies to meet her neighbour Julia (Anita Strindberg), only to stab her to death. When Julia is found dead for real, stabbed repeatedly with a letter opener, chain-smoking Detective Corvin (Stanley Baker) is brought in, and pulls Carol's prints off Julia's bed and corpse. In what at first becomes an open and shut case, soon develops into a complex mystery where everyone is a suspect.

Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci is better known for his splatter-fest horror and zombie films, some of which are excellent, some of which are distinctively below par. But his early giallo output is where he seemed to excel most, and A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is one of the finest of the early giallo's, showing Fulci's (and the genre's) flair for beautiful Italian women, gorgeous cinematography, paint-red gore and a mysterious killer. But here there is only one murder, which in itself sets the film aside from most other giallo's, which more often than not revel in their blood-letting. This is slow-building and driven by atmosphere and mystery above all else.

With a jazzy score by the great Ennio Morricone, the film dazzles with two beautifully realised dream sequences, which show Fulci's unrecognised eye for the visual. With the naked flesh of beautiful women combined with the bold colours of the set design and splashings of blood, evoke an LSD trip - with Fulci here dabbling in the hippy scene. But behind it all there is a gripping mystery, one that will keep you guessing until the very, very end. Red herrings pile on top of red herrings, and alibi's are proven and then disproven. It all gets a bit too much, up to the point where you wonder whether the baffled Corvin is just going to give up and arrest himself. But that is the joy of the giallo, pushing things so far to the extreme that they go beyond ridiculous and into sublime surrealism, and A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is one of the finest examples.


Directed by: Lucio Fulci
Starring: Florinda Bolkan, Stanley Baker, Jean Sorel, Silvia Monti
Country: Italy/Spain/France

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie