La gatta in calore (1972)

7/10

Bezenby28 February 2018

In this off-beat giallo Silvano Tranquili plays a workaholic husband who returns home from yet another long trip away from his wife to find a dead body lying in his front garden, and his wife sitting at a dining table with a gun in front of her. Curiously, he wants to know what's happened, and when his wife declares she still loves the dead guy lying in the garden, it makes for a lengthy flashback that makes up a lot of the film.

You see, Silvano is so engrossed in his work that he's been neglecting his wife Anna, even to the point when he falls asleep during one of their 'special nights', right before he heads off for another business trip. Anna feels a bit put out, and finds herself increasingly attracted to her jerk neighbour, a drug-filled hippy artist who regularly has vocal, naked arguments with his various girlfriends. As she keeps spying on him getting it on in his sparse living room, it also becomes apparent that he knows she's watching him.

Interspersed with this story unfolding is Silvano's reaction to all this, and his attempts to hide the body from various nosy neighbours, especially the caretaker who is always mooching about. For a story that involves two people sitting across from each other talking, this is all bizarrely engaging.

Back pre-dead guy, we see Anna and her neighbour Massimo hit it off big style, getting it on and doing that romantic thing people do in seventies films where they chase after each other on a beach while giggling. This is all nice until Massimo starts displaying a really dark side which is aggravated by booze and drugs, which has him have two of his stinking hippy girlfriends strip Anna while he thinks of a novel use for an empty coke bottle...

Indeed, by this point I was thinking Anna wasn't very good in her choice of men as she now has to get away from Massimo while hiding all this nonsense from her husband. This leads to some very tense scenes as Massimo begins to psychologically torture Anna, branding her a cat in heat while his stinking, jobless, mooching, drug addicted, clap-ridden, flea bitten, rag-wearing, flag-burning, toothless, stained, sullied, snot-caked, jaundiced, shoeless, uppity, idealistic, opportunistic, hypocritical hippy friends howl like cats.

Folks who reckon gialli plots exclusively belong to the 'people getting stabbed up by a mystery killer' will be tragically let down by this and may even attempt suicide, but those who can't be bothered creating sub-genres for every single minute deviation will realise that the mystery element to this one is rather good, if you can take that crazy ending. I've been after this one for ages, so who knows how I missed it as it's been sitting on Youtube since 2016!

Those who want blood and gore might want to skip this one, however.

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6/10

Giallo fans beware

melvelvit-117 August 2014

Warning: Spoilers

I saw this advertised as a "giallo" in a DVD catalog (and the lone review on IMDb seemed to back that up) and it begins like Bette Davis' THE LETTER when a wealthy businessman (THE SEXORCIST's Silvano Tranquilli) comes home to find his handsome neighbor shot dead on the front lawn and his wife at the kitchen table staring down at a gun. Despite the fact she tells him "I still love the man I killed", he covers the body with leaves and demands to know everything as flashbacks show how she became "a cat in heat" after the hippie artist next door seduces her with the help of LSD and orgies. When the body disappeared from under the pile of leaves (and the car her husband parks over it), I figured here we go with DIABOLIQUE but, no,

***SPOILER***the bullet only grazed the hippie's forehead and he comes to tell the couple he doesn't belong in this tony neighborhood before easing on down the road. ***SPOILER***

WTF?? At first I was miffed because what looked like emulsion on the print would appear at key moments in the plot but then I realized it was done on purpose to give the goings-on a psychedelic patina and to give this foolishness even more pretensions, the credits call it "a film by Nello Rossati". Lamberto Bava was also listed in the credits but I have no idea what he did. It's a time-waster, I suppose, and beautiful Eva Czemerys gets naked a lot, but it's definitely a waste of time for giallo geeks.

Yes, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The rich are different from you and me" but the other end of the capitalist spectrum struck terror and fomented distrust in the hearts of moviegoers as well. Like the decadent, blood-sucking rich, the rebellious counterculture was also a sinister presence in '70s Eurotrash and the fear and loathing showered on hippies in Italian gialli following the Charles Manson/Sharon Tate massacre can be seen in such diversely-plotted films as A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN, ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT, TRAGEDY AT THE VILLA Alexander, and OASIS OF FEAR. THE BLOODSTAINED LAWN, where the hitchhiking young couple were more-or-less the protagonists and escaped with their lives, was an exception that only proved the rule but even there, their "sex, drugs & rock-n-roll" milieu spawned evil.

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7/10

Food for the head.

parry_na29 August 2018

Warning: Spoilers

Directed and written by Nello Rossati, this entry into the giallo genre concentrates on a core cast of three. The location is limited to two houses and the surrounding grounds. It has a similarity to Roald Dahl's UK television show 'Tales of the Unexpected' about it, in that we are lead to believe something, given reasons for it, and then pummeled by a head-scratching twist at the end.

Silvano Tranquilli is excellent as Antonio, a successful businessman and workaholic, who leaves his wife once too often to go on another interminable business trip. Anna, played very distinctively by Eva Czemerys, feels fairly aggrieved by this, yet is content to live in the very comfortable surroundings her husband's lifestyle provides. Neighbour Massimo (Anthony Fontaine) and his wild, anti-social ways, prove an unwise distraction for the lonely housewife, and soon she is embroiled in his drunken, delirious, drug-fuelled parties filled with other like-minded low-lives.

The first Antonio knows about this is when he returns from his trip to find a body in his garden. It is Massimo, and it seems his wife is responsible for his apparent death; this is where the film begins - the rest is told in interspersed flashbacks. It is a refreshing way of presenting a story which, on paper, seems pretty thin plot-wise. But to Rossati's credit, it never drags, not for one of its 86 minutes.

My only problem is toward the very end. In a big SPOILER, the husband and wife find the body of Massimo has disappeared. He was not dead, only grazed by Anna's bullet. And yet, for such an irredeemable trouble-maker, his newfound (apparent) repentance smacks of 'why, that bullet to the head has made me have a long, hard look at myself' - which is something that simply doesn't ring true. I wouldn't say the ending spoils the whole film by any means, but this is definitely a case of the journey being far more satisfying than the destination.

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5/10

A strange little giallo

BandSAboutMovies6 September 2021

Warning: Spoilers

Writer/director Nello Rossati isn't an Italian filmmaker that gets brought up all that often. He does have some interesting films in his resume, including 1987's Django Strikes Again, the only official sequel to a western genre all on its own. He also made Bona parte di Paolina, one of the few Napoleon-sploitation films that I can think of, as well as Ursula Andress making a comeback by slumming it in a commedia sexy all'italiana called The Sensuous Nurse, a poliziotteschi with the wild name of Don't Touch the Children!, a movie called Io zombo, tu zombi, lei zomba that I really need to track down as its a sex comedy horror movie about four zombies running a hotel, a giallo-adjacent called Le mani di una donna sola in which a lesbian countess seduces married women until insane asylum escapees chop her hands off, an I Spit On Your Grave-esque film called Fuga scabrosamente pericolosa that stars Andy Sidaris villain Rodrigo Obregón, the all over the place genre buffet that is Top Line and this movie, which is a giallo from right in the middle of the golden era of the form.

Antonio (Silvano Tranquilli, who has been in plenty of giallo, like Black Belly of the Tarantula, The Bloodstained Butterfly and So Sweet, So Dead) is the kind of workaholic husband that falls asleep on date night before fulfilling his duties as a husband. Is it any surprise then that he comes home, finds a dead body in his yard and his wife Anna (Eva Czemerys, The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive; The Killer Reserved Nine Seats; Women in Cell Block 7) has a gun on the dining room table?

As she tells the story of how she left her husband's bed for their neighbor Massimo, who is always surrounded by other women, loud classical music and a Satanic air. After he abuses her for being rich and continually calls her a cat in heat, then starts abusing her and luring her into all manner of kinks.

The whole time that his wife is telling this story, Antonio is trying to hide the body from neighbors. Yet what if the body is still alive? And how would this couple make it all work after a night of revelations like this? More importantly, is it a giallo when no one really dies?

You may think to yourself while watching this that it looks way better than you'd think, particularly during the LSD orgy sequences. That would be because the director of photography was Aristide Massaccesi, who you may know by one of his many, many names. I often just use the name Joe D'Amato and soon enough, he'd be making movies that put the sex quotient of this movie to shame. You may also notice that the assistant director is someone of some renown: Lamberto Bava.

If you're new to the giallo, maybe start somewhere else. If you're starting to think you've seen it all, check this one out.

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4/10

All work and no adultery make Anna a dull kitty...

Coventry9 March 2024

There exist, generally speaking, two types of Gialli. The type with the black-gloved serial killer butchering scantily clad fashion models or lewd women, and the type revolving around a bickering and adulterous couples conspiring to murder each other. The classics of the genre are to be found in the first category, while the other type contains a few hidden gems but no real masterpieces.

"La Gatta in Calore" resides in the second category (the adultery/conspiracy category), and despite a few intriguing elements and a compelling narrative structure, I can't refer to it as a hidden treasure, unfortunately. A workaholic man (Silvano Tranquilo - "The Bloodstained Butterfly") neglects his beautiful young wife to the point that he even falls asleep on their one and only romantic night before another business trip. When he returns home again, he finds the dead body of an attractive young man in their garden, and his wife Anna at the kitchen table with a gun in front of her. What has happened here and isn't the husband partially to blame?

The main reason why "La Gatta in Calore" kept my attention is because the story is largely told in flashback-format, and because Eva Czemerys is an attractive and sexy lady! The erotic games she plays with her lover are quite enticing, and there's also a very interesting sequence that explains the peculiar title (Cat in Heat). The pacing is incredibly slow, though, and there nearly isn't enough action. The climax is beyond ridiculous.

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8/10

a wonderful discovery

christopher-underwood28 November 2012

Splendid and unusual giallo with a statuesque performance from Eva Czemerys who is the lady who 'descends into hell', well gets off with the guy next door and then into more than she can cope with.

Cue a dose of LSD and the subsequent trip and 'descent' into a fantastically realised orgy and more. The film is not like this all the time, indeed it is a very measured affair with not that much happening, but it is a brooding, mournful piece, helped enormously by great, if not that original, score from Gianfranco Plenizio.

By turns, creepy, amusing, sexy and thrilling, this is a wonderful discovery.

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