Florinda Bolkan excels at the role of a woman losing her mind. She's a force of nature in A Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Footprints on the Moon, two films that are placed in the giallo genre but that are centered around her and her fragmented psyche.
She plays Flavia, a young girl who watched her father - who loudly complains that he didn't have a son but instead a daughter, a curse as he says - cut a man's head off his shoulders. He locks her up in a convent where she's abused by the other nuns. Things get worse when she tries to escape. But when she meets Ahmed (Anthony Higgins), the Muslim warrior who has taken over the city, she decides to get her horrific revenge on her former sisters.
This being an Italian movie, there's an actual horse castration and a naked man climbing inside the hung and torn-apart body of a dead cow as well as a fake nipple slicing that's pretty stomach upsetting. The real nausea comes from the fact that nearly every man in this movie is the worst person ever. And then Flavia gets skinned alive and we learn, well, that humanity is uniformly terrible.
Director Gianfranco Mingozzi was the second unit director on La Dolce Vita, so this is a bit artier than you may be expecting. It's still repellant, however. And women have never had a fair shake but hopefully they don't have to go through all this for much longer to get what's only right.
She plays Flavia, a young girl who watched her father - who loudly complains that he didn't have a son but instead a daughter, a curse as he says - cut a man's head off his shoulders. He locks her up in a convent where she's abused by the other nuns. Things get worse when she tries to escape. But when she meets Ahmed (Anthony Higgins), the Muslim warrior who has taken over the city, she decides to get her horrific revenge on her former sisters.
This being an Italian movie, there's an actual horse castration and a naked man climbing inside the hung and torn-apart body of a dead cow as well as a fake nipple slicing that's pretty stomach upsetting. The real nausea comes from the fact that nearly every man in this movie is the worst person ever. And then Flavia gets skinned alive and we learn, well, that humanity is uniformly terrible.
Director Gianfranco Mingozzi was the second unit director on La Dolce Vita, so this is a bit artier than you may be expecting. It's still repellant, however. And women have never had a fair shake but hopefully they don't have to go through all this for much longer to get what's only right.