 Thanks for checking out this movie review video. This is for the 1972 Italian giallo film, The Case of the Bloody Iris. And if you know me, if you've been following my channel enough, you know that I really love the subgenre of giallo. Specifically, I'm also just loving old Italian horror films, so you'll see a lot of these reviews on my channel. So much so that I have a playlist for giallo specifically. I also have a playlist for Dario Argento, Luchio Fulci, and Mario Bava at the moment, so you can check out all that stuff. Not to say that I've hit everything, but you know. So anyway, The Case of the Bloody Iris, the title itself, and spoilers for all this, the title itself isn't the Bloody Iris as in in your eye, but it's a Bloody Iris as in a flower. And I believe in this film from what I saw is that the Iris is symbolizing Jennifer, the character of Jennifer in this film. And I say that because Adam, who's the person she was in the relationship with in that kind of like free love sex cult basically that she got out of, that she obviously wanted to get away from, because she desired to be with one man instead of just being passed around even though Adam wanted to force people to just be passed around is what I gleaned from the movie. He shows up all the time and has those irises, I think he refers to her as a flower at one point, maybe even an actual Iris. And then that one point where it becomes obvious that he's going to start to go after her when he actually tears the Iris flower up. So it's all about her and it's called the Bloody Iris, The Case of the Bloody Iris I believe because of someone coming after her. Now in the end we find out it's not Adam that's coming after her because Adam ends up being dead in her bedroom and I think that it was David who actually you know the guy with all the burns on him. I believe it was actually David who ended up killing Adam but that's kind of unconfirmed in the film I believe. But anyway, that's my theory on where the name comes from. Decent name for the film. This is directed by Giuliano Carnomeo who did other films such as Anna, The Pleasure of the Torment, Ratman and a lot of Western films because yes, Italian Westerns were definitely a thing. This is written by Ernesto Gestaldi who did the scripts for films The Vampire and the Ballerina, Werewolf and a Girl's Dormitory, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Ward which also stars Edwidge Fennec and George Hilton who are also in this film as Jennifer and Andrea. The Case of the Scorpion's Tale, All the Colors of the Dark, The Whip in the Body, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only Eye of the Key which is an insanely long title. Torso, The Suspicious Death of a Minor and the Scorpion with Two Tales. So a lot of giallo being written by Ernesto Gestaldi. Edwidge Fennec who I was saying was in which one was it? The Strange Vice of Mrs. Ward was also in All the Colors of the Dark. Now this is my third film seeing her in it and she's kind of my new giallo crush. I mean she's a really good actress and she is beautiful. I usually don't comment on that in my videos because I feel like it's kind of like a reductive thing to do to an actor or actress but in this instance there's just something about her. I'm just like very taken by her performance and her looks. So anyway she stars in other films such as Five Dolls for an August Moon, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Ward, All the Colors of the Dark, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only Eye of the Key, Anna, The Pleasure of the Torment, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Phantom of Death and apparently she even had a very small role in Hostel Part 2 which I own so I'm going to have to go back and look for her in that. Plus I just need to do a rewatch of those films anyway, do a review. George Hilton is also in this one as Andrea working with Fennec again like he did in The Strange Vice of Mrs. Ward and yet again they have a prolonged sex scene like in that other film. A lot of sex in this and it just oozes sexuality and I think there's really a point to that obviously because of who the killer ends up being in the end, that old professor and the fact that he's going after these women and killing them because they have corrupted his daughter and corruption meaning her dressing the way she does and being very sexual and doing modeling or at least wanting to be doing modeling and he views that as corruption. He views sexuality as corruption. Now I'll comment a little bit more about that later and how that's kind of like a social commentary in this film but yeah just a little bit of it right now. In 2015 a novelization of this film was released in the United States along with a bunch of other novels that are based on Gestalti scripts. I found that quite interesting. Note getting in the actual film, note that while on the crowded elevator the music goes away for a little bit and then goes from nothing and gradually builds up to the point where the stabbing happens for that first woman in the apartment complex. Very interesting choice there. I like that because it having no music at all kind of starts a little bit of tension because you don't really know what's going to happen or where it's going but with how crowded the elevator is at first it seems like something's going to go down and then they kind of build that music up to a crescendo of the actual stabbing happening which is really quick and then she's dead. The people then finding the dead body seem very very much less concerned than they actually should be with finding a dead body now we know by the end why the professor didn't really react that much because he did it but he probably should have reacted a little more strongly if he's trying to kind of cover up his tracks which he obviously is throughout the film but the older lady she should have you know had more of a reaction for sure especially because she had no tie to that stuff but I think that was probably an intentional choice by the director because they wanted to throw as much suspicion around in this film as possible which you know that's just something they do with Jialo films you know you want people to look in as many directions as possible to kind of throw red herrings out there and misdirect so when the end comes and you find out who it actually was all along you're surprised which I actually did figure this one out before the end came with the reveal and I'll tell you how as it and when I get to the end of this the photographer is pretty funny in this because he's this short kind of weird-looking quirky dude really looks wise reminded me of a young Woody Allen I don't know if anyone else felt that but I liked his character because he's just this weird quirky dude like the way he was acting the way he talked he was just very over the top interesting character I like them yeah the whole thing about Jennifer being in that weird kind of sex cult with Adam and then she escaped it and she had kind of like this traumatic flashback to it in the beginning that is obviously there to kind of set up a past for her showing that she was in this situation she was in this corrupt situation yet she didn't really want to be there and she's running away from that she's getting away from that in life because she wants to be with one man and she's a better person than you would think basically or that even the professor would end up thanking but it's also there to set up Adam as the main person that people are supposed to focus on early on as wow this guy is very controlling he's obviously coming after her he obviously wants her back and wants to control her but obviously also he's very aggressive every time you see him and he has all the traits of a person who would do the killing but as we know if we watch giallo the person who is most obvious is never going to be the killer so if you know giallo and you're watching this film you will know watching it Adam is definitely not the one like I said it oozes sexuality which makes you think that the sexuality actually does have a role in the murders in my opinion that's kind of what I picked up on early on and it does as we found out with the whole corruption thing with the professor I did get fooled into thinking that Marilyn would end up dead earlier than she ended up being dead I mean I thought for sure she would end up being dead but the part when she was in the bathtub and you know the door was locked and the water was coming under and George and Jennifer were there and then they had to kind of bust in I thought for sure at that point she was going to be dead so they did get me on that misdirection right there if you know giallo then you watch this knowing Adam won't be the killer yeah like I already said but they make him so aggressive every time he shows up every time he shows up it's very over the top it's it's so much over the top that you would just be like a handle thing so so I feel like Marilyn as a character is there to poke fun at everything she pokes fun at the deaths the people who got killed at Jennifer's group sex cult that she was in that is obviously was kind of a sore point for her and you know traumatic and then she also makes jokes about like the person who broke into the bedroom which looking back after the end of the film I think the masked person who broke in was not the professor at that point I think that was actually David and the reason I say that is because the voice sounded different when he actually spoke when he broke in also he said he had no intention of harming her and that is not something that professor would have done and the other thing is obviously David was very much into that type of stuff because as we saw later his mother was going out and picking up his horror tales as I call them at the newsstand and bringing them to him because you see like when she goes to look for him in his room and he's not there because he's dead the professors killed him which I don't understand why he's got like a bunch of them a bunch of like the covers for it all over the walls and it looks like some are giallo actually like they have that yellow which you know by the way giallo actually means yellow and I'll talk a little bit more about that later and it's significance in the film but yeah so I think that he was inspired by those horror tales which were giallo tales and that's why he dressed up the way he did that's why he decided to go in you know infiltrate Jennifer in Marilyn's room and so that's why I think it was him at that point because it was a professor they would have been dead in my opinion but the fact that Marilyn makes fun of that situation once again just she's an over the top character unfortunately because of the time this film was made there's actually some pretty racist dialogue in it and that's just one of the things that we have to deal with nowadays with watching some of these older films it's hard to watch nowadays and you look at it and you're just you kind of cringe at least I do when I hear stuff like that and I'm like yeah if this film was made more recently that would not be in there rightfully so but we do need to keep in mind that this was a different time and that stuff was more acceptable sadly but that's you know that's a time these films are time capsules and they're a look into how things were whether they were good or bad and then that aspect obviously bad I like how the commissioner asked Jennifer to stay in her place and act as he as bait after you know the whole room invasion thing and then he says sometimes we get things right which really doesn't exactly instill confidence in what they're doing there in my opinion I just find that kind of funny the commissioner general general's a little bit funny his assistant commissioner I think is even more funny just because of how he's tailing George I'm sorry Andrea the whole time and he's just so disinterested in doing it he's yawning all the time he's just like making a sandwich when the murder of Marilyn happens so he didn't even see what happened and you know he's just so disinterested and he's just kind he makes some funny comments here and there too they try to cast suspicion on the old lady in the building when she's buying the horror tales especially because when she's buying them the person the the assistant commissioner then goes up and talks about what she bought with the proprietor and they kind of make a comment about I don't know people who can read this stuff and buy this stuff it's sick it you know they have to be twisted basically and that's supposed to kind of enter your brain as an audience member to be like oh well then maybe she's the one so the way Marilyn says hi to the person when she's about to die before she gets stabbed does make you believe that she knew the person and she did obviously because Marilyn knew the professor she had talked about the professor at 1.2 Jennifer and about how he would play the violin which obviously as we find out later he kind of used as a ruse a recording of the violin to make people think he was still there when he was out doing murders good alibi for him the old lady's son David was hinted at when Marilyn at one point said that you could hear the old lady talking to herself through the wall when that little bit of dialogue came up I thought for sure now I think there's someone actually in in that room with her because otherwise why would they really talk about that well I guess maybe for the aspect of trying to make people think even more that she's kind of like lost her marble she's crazy she could kill people the dark junkyard with all the cars in it is an awesome shooting location it's great for for you know making it scary making it tense and especially with you know how dark it is and when Jennifer's walking through it all the the parts of the cars that just kind of like fall open like the door and the hoods hood falling down and all that stuff good sort of jump scares no way things will be okay when the elevator lights go out and it takes you to the basement this is when Jennifer runs into Sheila and they get into the elevator and they're about to go up but the elevator just selects the basement and then the power goes out or at least the lights go out in the elevator and they go down and I was just like there is absolutely no way in this situation that something's gonna be good and Jennifer knows that because once they get to the basement she's kind of like I don't know if I want to go out and walk into the basement so yeah but if you notice during that scene Sheila and Jennifer look familiar the way their hair is done the way their makeups done they look familiar at that point when they're leaving the elevator and when once I saw that that made me believe that when Sheila got nailed with all the hot steam and she ends up dying that that was probably a mistake and I say that because they focused a lot on the two of them in the elevator standing next to each other and you could clearly see that they were looking very very similar and the fact that it was kind of dark in the basement at that point so obviously that's when the professor accidentally kills his daughter and I mean he was mad at these other people corrupting her and going out and killing them but then he kills his own daughter which is worse than her having been actually even corrupted crazy so that's got to be harder for him to to deal with the professor being angry that his daughter was corrupted makes sense for how much focus there is on sexuality in the film which I already said but does bear repeating the professor falling down the atrium of the building to his death looked pretty good and brutal especially because he kind of hit some things on the way down I assume they threw a dummy down I was actually doing research for another giallo film that I will post a review on once I watch it I can't remember which one it was but there is also a scene where they you know someone falls and they did use a dummy so I'm assuming they did the same thing in this it looked great though it really did the professor's knife design is really cool it's kind of like a more sinister looking larger on steroid scalpel I really like that and also if you think about it that kind of invokes a bit of a professor type aura to it because scalpel PhD you know all that stuff this is one of the less gory giallo films I've actually seen to be honest less violent and less gory a lot of the kills are very simplistic and quick and some of them are bloodless like the woman who was tied up and drowned in the bathtub and obviously Sheila when she just gets steamed to death those are not that violent and there's no blood but then when there is blood it's just kind of like a just a stabbing like a quick stabbing and then you just see some blood coming out on the hand probably the worst death would have been David's but that's not even on camera you just see the aftermath of this that where his throat was slit and then all the blood had come down so this is definitely one of the least violent and least gory giallo films I've ever seen which is interesting because they're usually they usually really go for the Goren violence so when I think back I believe David was the one oh yeah I was I was talking already talked about that David being the one who broke into the room earlier the camera work in this at a lot of points is very unstable there's a lot of movement and shakiness with it which has a tendency to really distract me when I'm watching films that do that so I didn't really like that aspect of the film there's often at least one character in every giallo film that's a man trying to have control over a woman this film's no exception obviously Adam being the main one but then also David trying to come in and be with Jennifer or have Jennifer and then also the professor because he really in in this sense is trying to control Sheila he's not wanting her to be corrupted you know he's trying to control who she is of as a person she's still even living with him when she's old enough that she shouldn't need to be living with him this film could actually be seen as a generational divide commentary in there since the older man views sexual freedom as corruption and not just you know having sexual freedom but also you know dressing sexy and doing modeling and stuff like that it definitely feels like a generational divide and even early on when the first body is found you see it's this young beautiful sexy woman in the elevator dead and who's looking at her it's another model who ends up being dead later and the two elderly people who are kind of looking like oh that's a shame so it kind of shows this dichotomy of the old versus the young and then here we go about you know how I was figuring out who it was before they revealed it notice all the use of the mustard yellow color that is the same color as the killer's gloves in this film and I'll tell you I keyed in on the color of the killer's gloves immediately because the majority of giallo films the killer's gloves are black and the fact that they were they were that it was this mustard yellow I was like that's weird and I wonder if there's a significance to that color and then when I saw that color show up other places in the film I thought this has to be significant now the other places they show up are Sheila's hat when she's in the restaurant and Marilyn goes up and meets her for the first time which that's a hint at getting you following the trail of the color to who the actual killer is because obviously Sheila is the daughter of the killer so Sheila's hat has that mustard on it that's the first one you see then you see when Jennifer runs over to the professor's professor slash Sheila's apartment and is let in after David had broken into the bedroom you see that the professor eventually walks in and he's holding a violin case the violin case is that mustard yellow color and that when I saw that I thought okay this is the next breadcrumb and it is settling on him he has got to be it and it even says the case of the bloody iris and maybe that was a reference to his violin case as a bit of a hint maybe I'm stretching that but maybe I'm right I don't know it's hard to know for real but then the other thing to note is that in the basement at the part where Sheila gets you know steamed and then Jennifer's running away in the dark the one of the walls in the basement is that mustard yellow color now what is the significance of this overall not only do I think it was being used as the hints at who the killer was but it was also an homage a tie to giallo in general because giallo like I said is Italian for yellow and the giallo films ended up being called giallo meaning yellow because they were based on these stories these books that were bound with yellow covers so I think that all the the use of the yellow in it is kind of tying it to giallo and its history of how it got started the other thing is if you look up the case of the bloody irises poster art it has that same mustard yellow background to it so very heavily featured in it so overall how did I feel about this film I enjoyed it one of the things about giallo is a lot of the times it can feel very slow and not all that interesting until you actually get to the twist at the end because that's what it's all about and then that makes you think back you see oh now I see this differently and I see this differently and I this was going on here so then the film becomes a lot better and I feel like that with pretty much every giallo I've seen except the exception of a few maybe like you know deep red to knee brace stuff like that but yeah so I did enjoy this one so so out of five stars possible with half stars in play it's not like my favorite I think it was pretty solid I'm gonna give it a very solid three and a half stars I did enjoy it it is good but it's not like the best so anyway if you've seen it let's talk down in the comments and just talk about giallo in general because I love it like I said love this subgenre so let's get nerdy about it do me a quick favor though hit that subscribe button if you like this review or any video you've ever seen not even reviews if you've seen my unboxings my talks about books you know whatever which the books I don't do as much because I'm a slow reader but anyway 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