Una lucertola con la pelle di donna (A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin). 1971. Italy/France/Spain/UK. Directed by Lucio Fulci. Screenplay by Fulci, Roberto Gianviti, José Luis Martínez, Mollá André Tranché. With Florinda Bolkan, Stanley Baker, Jean Sorel, Alberto de Mendoza, Silvia Monti, Anita Strindberg. In Italian, English; English subtitles. DCP. 95 min.
At once orgiastic and oneiric, Lucio Fulci’s psychedelic fantasmagoria about murder, sex, and the unknowability of truth features one of Ennio Morricone’s most appropriately schizoid scores, a collision among Edda dell Orso’s jazzy vocals, harp and harpsichord, electric guitar, and brassy Swinging London sounds. At the time of its release, the film’s producers were hauled into Italian court and charged with animal cruelty—exonerated only after the brilliantly convincing special effects designer Carlo Rambaldi, who would later create E.T. and work on Close Encounters and Alien, demonstrated his genuinely terrifying disemboweled mechanical dogs before the judges—and for decades cult enthusiasts had to settle for bootleg copies of the uncut version of this, Fulci’s most notorious film.