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A Lizard In A Woman's Skin
[Shriek Show]
1973; color
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Starring: Florinda Bolkan, Stanley Baker, Jean Sorel, Silvia Monti & Alberto de Mendoza
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A Lizard In A Woman's Skin was the first of three highly regarded giallo films Lucio Fulci made between 1970 and '77, before achieving his real fame as Europe's leading goremiester in the '80s and '90s. Shot in England, with a British cast (which is kind of a departure for both Fulci and the genre) the story centers around the murder of a wealthy woman with a wild lifestyle. At least that's where it starts. By the time it all unravels we've dipped into blackmail, affairs, hippies, acid trips, bizarre dreams, psychoanalysis… and more murder. (All to the tune of a great Ennio Morricone soundtrack for good measure.) A woman tells her psychiatrist about a dream where she sees a woman she's never met murdered. Coincidentally, the dead woman from the dream turns up dead in her apartment the night after a wild acid party in exactly the manner described in the woman's dream. Curious coincidence? The cops think so. And, wouldn't you know it, just as rapidly as mounting clues point to the dreaming woman being the actual murderer, even more layers of plot are peeled away to throw light onto even more potential suspects. The hippie and LSD angles alluded to previously really get played up in the back half of the film, as it turns out a hippie couple attending the party held at the murdered woman's apartment the night she was killed are the only witnesses to the crime. Only problem is that they were fried on acid at the time and only one of the two remembers seeing "a lizard in a woman's skin," which actually was the murderer slipping off a fur coat (revealing themselves to be naked underneath) and stabbing the victim. These two somehow think they might be implicated in the crime so they begin to go to various measures to insure no one can identify them as being there when it happened. (Read: killing the killer and anyone the killer talked to.) They succeed to an extent but they fail to get their main target and end up in police custody for their efforts. After a surprise suicide that pretty much ends all doubt as to who the killer is, all of the details get nicely laid out and it all seems to make perfectly linear sense. While giallos weren't Fulci's bread and butter he certainly did a damn good job making them; I wish he'd done more. This edition also has a bonus disc with the original edit of the movie (it's five minutes longer) and a featurette on the making of the film with members of the cast and crew recalling working with Fulci.
—Giallo Biafra
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