One female student drives off with her boyfriend for a little car sex in the woods. The killer, his face hidden behind a white stocking mask, strangles her with his own scarf (which he gently wraps back around his own neck with slow satisfaction) and then sinks a knife into her chest (a jarringly unconvincing effect with a pasty dummy that cracks open like a shell and oozes red paint). The killer, intimidating under black leather jacket and gloves and a ratty mask, straddles two clichés, the haunted psychos of the Norman Bates variety and the hooded zombie-like automatons of Halloween and Friday the 13th.
And so begins the spectacle. For the next hour or so the audience is treated to scenes of topless dancing, languid make-outs at a hippie hangout, Sapphic seduction, nude sunbathing and skinny dipping, inevitably followed, sooner or later, by the killer strangling said lovelies, removing their tops for a little post-murder findling and then hacking up their bodies. It's familiar slasher movie territory, right down to a cadre smirking and suspicious men constantly hanging around and peeping in, and there's no shortage of suspects - a stalker boyfriend, a creepy professor, an ogling scarf salesman, an older lover who is always "traveling." It gets even more familiar when four female friends, headed by British art history student Jane (Suzy Kendall of Bird With the Crystal Plumage fame) and her Italian friend Daniela (French actress Tina Aumont, Fellini's Casanova), head out to a villa in the country and the killer follows. Meanwhile, the girls make quite a splash in the small town; they lounge around the village square looking like supermodels in a rustic shoot and the men all but gape in stunned silence at these international beauties.
Just when it looks like film is about to trade one cliché for another, Martino radically downshifts from spectacle to suspense. A sudden burst of terror is followed by a long, well-orchestrated sequence of the sole survivor creeping around the villa as the killer disposes of the bodies (a scene more gruesome in suggestion than in execution). Martino hasn't the ingenuity and imagination of Mario Bava or the cinematic elegance and style of Argento -- his violence can be blunt, direct, and vicious (see the killer smash one victim's skull into a brick wall with his car, not once but twice, with appropriate close-up) -- but for this sequence he screws down the tension quite nicely. Our surviving girl finds that the villa, barred up to protect from intruders, has effectively become her prison and all she can do is hide from her jailer in an eerie dance that segues into a game of cat and mouse.
The rest falls back on the usual psycho-sexual tensions: sexually uninhibited (and often naked) women, frustrated and/or impotent men, and the violent violation of flesh by knives and blades and other tools, including the hacksaw promised in the film poster and DVD/Blu-ray cover art. The motivation is right out of the Psycho playbook, only not quite as convincing. But give Martino credit: the child's doll of those assaulting flashbacks is weirdly creepy, especially as hands close in to poke out the dead plastic eyes.
The Blu-ray debut features both the "uncensored English Version" (which carries the title Carnal Violence with Torso below in brackets) and the full-length Italian Director's Cut, which runs three minutes longer and carries a title that the English subtitles translate into The Bodies Show Signs of Carnal Violence. The Italian cut is presented with both the Italian soundtrack with English subtitles and an English dub soundtrack.
The disc features the new ten-minute interview featurette Murders in Perugia with co-writer/director Sergio Martino. The interview is conducted in English but you may want to switch on the subtitles to cut through his thick accent. While he doesn't share a lot of detail on the production, he discusses how he got into the film industry and how the production came about (including the casting), and he reveals the film's working title was the gorgeous "Black Like Terror, Red Like Love." Producer Carlo Ponti insisted on changing it to something more, let's say, commercial for the grindhouse market. Also features alternate U.S. credits, trailers, TV spots, a radio spot and a gallery of posters and stills, plus an unadvertised extra: A new video introduction by director Eli Roth, who acknowledges the influence of the film on his own Hostel II.
For more information about Torso, visit Blue Underground. To order Torso, go to TCM Shopping.
by Sean Axmaker
