Don't Torture A Duckling (1972)

A reporter and a promiscuous young woman try to solve a series of child killings in a remote southern Italian town that's rife with superstition and distrust of outsiders.

Don't Torture a Duckling is a 1972 Italian giallo film directed by Lucio Fulci. It is significant within Fulci's filmography as it is one of the first in which he began using violent gore effects, something he would continue to do in his later films.  The soundtrack was composed by Riz Ortolani and features vocals by Ornella Vanoni.

This film has all the elements of the Italian mystery/thriller genre known as the giallo, but really pulls the viewers in by having each key character with a skeleton in his/her own closet. This keeps the viewer doing as much detective work as the detectives in the film itself. Who is killing the young boys in town?  There is a long list of suspects and there are many twists and turns along the way.  Trust me.  You won´t know who the killer is until the last moments of the film.  The long list of kooky characters include the towns police force, a small-time reporter, a beautiful and rich ex-drug addict, a young priest and his mother, An old man who practices witchcraft and his female protégé, a mentally handicapped townsman, and a deaf/mute little girl.

A drowned fine young Christian boy

This is not a  typical Fulci gore film.  Although it does contain elements of both - it is more of an old-fashioned murder mystery, with darker subject matter and a few scenes of graphic violence. (although nothing nearly as strong as some of Fulci's later works)  The background music is effective, and ranges from jarringly creepy at the beginning to low-key jazz, to indigenous Italian songs. Acting is generally average, though in a couple of cases, it's a bit overdone.  The film is actually a thoughtful and disturbing examination of the dangers of superstition.

One rather strange and disturbing part of the film is the beautiful young woman who flirts and makes sexual advances to the young boys. At one point she's hanging out butt ass naked and asks a boy if he'd like to sleep with her. And these aren't 16 and 17 years old boys...they appear to be in the 10-12 year range. Awkward.

I enjoy young boys

While this film may not feature loads of gore, it does have two of Fulci's nastiest sequences to make up for it. The nastiest involves a woman being brutally slaughtered by a group of men in a cemetery, while the image of a man falling from a cliff and hitting any number of rocks on the way down is liable to turn some stomachs. 

This film is not quite as easy to get hold of as most other Fulci flicks, but I assure that searching it will pay off.  Overall, it's a shame that Fulci didn't make more films like this. Don't Torture a Duckling is one of his best works and every Giallo fan should see it. 

This bitch is crazy.

Trivia:

Because of the film's controversial storyline, which criticized the Catholic Church, the movie was blacklisted and received a limited theatrical run throughout Europe and was never released in theaters in the United States. In 2000, Anchor Bay secured the rights and released the film for the first time in the United States on DVD.

Composer Riz Ortolani reused a small segment of music from this film in his later composition for Cannibal Holocaust. 

Lucio Fulci has said in numerous interviews that he ranks this movie as his most personal favorite of all the movies he directed in his career.

While talking to Andrea (Tomas Milian), Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet) at a certain point says "A rose, by any other name". This is a quotation of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", but also the name of the episode of Star Trek where Barbara Bouchet has appeared in 1968: "By any other name" (Season 2, Episode 22) 

Voodoo dolls even make an appearance.

Cat In The Brain (1990)

Dr. Lucio Fulci is a director of splatterfilms. He stages a gestapo-orgy like it was any other movie scene. But he is influenced by these things more than he likes. He is hunted by bloody visions day by day. Is Fulci still normal? He asks a psychatrist. He doesn't know that the psychatrist has much bigger problems than Fulci himself. The psychatrist uses Fulci's visions for brutal murders in real life.

Are you ready for a cavalcade of craziness and chaos?  Just one insane scene after another?  This is the film for you then dear friend.  Lucio Fulci plays himself and after years of making horror movies, he thinks he's going insane.  Basically he starts seeing the craziest shit you can imagine. He goes and sees a shrink who hypnotizes him into thinking he's committing terrible murders when in fact it's the doctor that's getting off on butchering people.  That's the film.  It's as if Fulci decided that he was going to take every crazy death scene he had stored in his mind and somehow get them in a film.  He did....it's just one violent sequence after another and it's very entertaining.  Don't get me wrong....it's a mess.....but an entertaining mess. 

Fulci throws an insane amount of violence into this film and it surpasses any other film he's ever made.  Just some fun decapitation, child murder, cannibalism and some heads getting chainsawed off.  Oh did I mention the Nazi Orgy. But in reality, I think this was a personal statement film for Fulci and was an attack against censorship.

The acting in the film is awful.  Fulci is no actor himself but he's actually the best one in the film.  The budget is of course almost non existent but as usual Lucio works around that and creates his demented artistry.  Also after seeing the movie, I don't think it's a stretch to say that Wes Craven stole this idea of a "film within a film within a film" for "New Nightmare".   Granted, I think Craven's film is much better overall...but hey...Fulci deserves some credit for the idea at least.

The shrink needs a fucking shrink.

This is a Fulci film.  If you're a fan....you'll love it.  If you're not...you will think it's trash.  I like Fulci and I approve this message.  The film is way underrated by most horror fans.

Bitch, I said cook dinner.....

Trivia:

This film was refused a video classification in 1999 by the British Board of Film Classification, but was finally passed uncut with an '18' rating in mid-2003.

Many events in the film are based on Lucio Fulci's experiences as a filmmaker.

The original script was 49 pages long and contained no dialogue. It consisted of descriptions of bodily mutilations/imagery and sound effects that would compliment them on screen.

How about a little Nazi Orgy fun?