Arabella The Black Angel/Arabella l'angelo nero/ 1989/Italy

Deliriously trashy thriller about a buxom brunette who is an incorrigible nymphomaniac. Arabella is a beautiful 30 something woman, rich and married but unfortunately suffering from a void in her marriage. It turns out that her husband Francesco Veronese is paralyzed beneath the waist due to a romantic scene gone awry (Arabella went down on her husband after their marriage while he has driving a car and in the ensuing 20 seconds of ecstasy, her husband rammed into another car). Though she seems to care for him, she needs lot of sex too and thus heads out every night to a local S & M bar where participants engage in bizarre and kinky acts. Arabella joins in a threesome with two dudes in tight leather pants and moans that she’d do anything for them. Unbeknownst to her, a sleazy reporter is following and clicking pictures of Arabella as she goes about her secret mission.

The same night, the club is raided and a vice cop viciously rapes Arabella calling her a  whore. She retaliates by calling him a bastard and then dropping her purse as she heads back home. Just another night for Arabella I would say !

The cop returns to see her the next day, apologising for calling her a whore as she's actually rich and cultured. But he's clear on his terms that either Arabella give him a second helping or he goes report to her husband. Arabella accedes to the former term and takes him to a utility shed where they start getting off pretty hard. The husband however catches them and in a fit of shock, Arabella clubs the cop to death and they both bury the body in the backyard. Afterwards they make love and Arabella apologies for her indescretion and promises to be never unfaithful again. He however encourages her to fool around with other men so as to provide fodder for his latest novel which is well past its promised publication date. 

Meanwhile, a black gloved killer is goring people to death with a pair of scissors-first is the reporter who figures a connection between Arabella and the missing cop as he had witnessed the rape, and he leaves a message for a mystery correspondent about her possible involvement. Then Arabella's latest lover is dispatched by being castrated by the killer (ouch !) and the next day's paper is full of lurid details and the picture of the dead man (the castration included, mind). Arabella becomes a little worried about the news and begins to think she carries doom around her. Her husband however consoles her and asks her not to worry but continue on her affairs undeterred. 

The inspector investigating the crimes has ghosts of her own past-when she was little, her mother had similarly castrated the father, a repressed secret that brings forth nightmares. When she reveals her disturbing story to her lesbian lover and ambitious assistant in office, the latter woman publishes a scandalous story in the papers which leads to inspector losing the case and being humiliated. The killer calls the inspector and sets up an interview promising hints on the victims and the crime. The assistant masked as inspector goes to a park, where after fighting with her former lover (what a cat fight they have, rolling in dust, pulling each other's hair out and calling beautiful names-"You filthy bull dyke" and "I won't take you back even if you begged on your knees" ) she is viciously slashed in the neck and her body is bloodily (and lovingly) caressed by the killer in black gloves and the infamous scissors.

Shifting track to Arabella, it is shown that her husband mail orders black lingerie for her and calling her "black angel" requests her to conduct another sexual encounter at a seedy joint called Freak Boy's Town so that she can recount her experiences to him later and help him in completing his novel. She agrees reluctantly and finds a young man with whom she proceeds to have sex. Her husband meanwhile is shown to have been lying about his handicap and in fact has fully recovered. He follows Arabella every night and watches her torrid conduct in order to get a first hand account and pen his ideas more realistically in the book. As Arabella leaves her lover for that night, her husband confronts her and maddened with lust on seeing the vicarious scene of pleasure, he almost forces himself on her. Then the killer attacks Francesco and is finally revealed to be his mother Marta. She has stabbed her son by mistake, imagining him to one of Arabella's lover instead and stunned with shock, she spares Arabella who is institutionalised. The motive behind her crimes is as inane as the movie itself-the mother wants to "protect" her delicate son from the depravity surrounding him (his wife is a nympho and his step-sister, the inspector called Gina Fowler is a lesbian), so she goes about killing all her lovers. Nothing is mentioned about what happened to the mother, but in the last scene it is shown that the freshly released Arabella goes back to her wild nympho ways, completely unaffected by her family tragedy or her recent institutionalisation !

The movie doesn't make a dint of sense and the acting and dubbing is so awful that I couldn't help chuckle now and then especially when Arabella went all solemn and tried to show concern for her dead lovers. In all other scenes, she's perfectly content to striptease in black lacy lingerie and satiate her husband or her other myriad lovers. Anyhow, the good thing is that Arabella is a devoted creature as her focus is really on her husband's welfare and success and her rape or sexual humiliation or the death of her lovers are only ordinary hurdles she encounters everyday. Maybe there's emancipation for Arabella too as in the end she not only has a clean chit for the ugly events surrounding the murders, but also gets to enjoy her earlier rich lifestyle with loads of fooling around left to do !