WATCH ME WHEN I KILL

Original Title- IL GATTO DAGLI OCCHI DI GIADA (The Cat with the Jade Eyes), 1977, Italy

Taglines: When I go berserk...you're better off dead!

The giallo genre of Italian films originated with the yellow paperbacked mystery novels of the 20^th century which later gave way to movies with elements of mystery, suspense, the gory horror and often the supernatural.

Over the years, there became established certain trademarks and patterns of these films- for instance the assailant with black trench coat and fedora hat, black leather gloves and his signature switchblade, the suspenseful stalk and chase sequence, lurid subject matter with fashionable under-clad and promiscuous women as well as illicit affairs between the unfortunate victims, uncomfortably close ups of eyeballs and shots from the point of view of the murderer, numerous side plots and red herrings, washed out but smart cops and wacky reporters. Importantly, in most of these films, the killer would be a deranged anti-social person whose motives were convoluted and arose from ‘repressed memories’ such as childhood trauma or sexual abuse, which resulted in insanity in their adult lives. The ending would more often prove to be disappointing and confusing.

Also, most of these films did not have straightforward narratives, rather they involved continuous or intermittent flashbacks or side-by-side narrative on the killer’s perspective. Watch Me When I Kill is however one of the few giallo films which have a linear story structure and a surprisingly credible ending with the killer’s motive sufficiently identified.  The plot is simple- a killer is attacking and murdering middle aged well to do persons with apparently no pattern. The first victim is a pharmacist (Dezzan) who immediately before his death had a conversation with a friend called Esmeralda and told her about three threatening letters he has received. As he prepares to pack up for the day, he is hit on the head with a blunt object and then the unseen killer slits his throat. The protagonist of the film, Mara, a bar dancer, attempts to enter the shop to purchase aspirin, and hears the voice of the killer. Immediately thereafter, the dead body is discovered and the dancer becomes the object of the killer’s murderous pursuit. He attempts to kill her twice-once at her apartment and another time in her dressing room at the studio.

Mara’s boyfriend Lukas, a sound recording artist, becomes involved in finding the killer, both because of Mara as also because his neighbour Bozzi has received threatening calls with strange background music, which the killer deliberately puts in order to frighten the victims.

Lukus’s research leads him to the trial of a convicted and escaped prisoner Ferrante in whose murder trial, the pharmacist, Bozzi and the woman Esmeralda had served as jury members. But Ferrari turns out to be innocent and instead Lukas discovers that the three victims (both Esmeralada and Bozzi are also killed later- the first by getting her face scalded in an oven, and the other by strangulation with a metal shower hose) all belonged to the city of Pedova. He heads there and finds that all three were Nazi sympathisers who had betrayed a young Jew woman and her two children into the hands of the Nazis and that they had perished after staying in a concentration camp for a month. Bozzi was the person in whose house the unfortunate woman was taking shelter, Esmeralda was his mistress who brainwashed Bozzi and convinced him to give them over to the Nazis and the pharmacist Dezzan was the one who got them arrested by collaborating with the Nazis.

In the last scene of confrontation between Lukas the killer, it is revealed that the murderer is the judge in the murder trial of Ferrani, and his son, and that they are the surviving family of the betrayed woman. The judge reveals that it took him twenty long years to find the culprits and bring them to book and that his son had escaped arrest from the Nazis. The old man however shows remorse for the killings, agreeing with Lukas that it serves little purpose to take revenge after such a long gap when in fact he could have forgiven and moved on. His son, however, is intractable, and demands that Lukas and his girlfriend be killed too as they knew too much. Instead, the judge decides to put an end to the whole episode and shoots his son dead before killing himself.

The movie was released in DVD by VCI Entertainment in 2002 and 2007, and in the UK by Shameless Films in 2009.