TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Kodie Bird True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Michael_Elliott A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971) *** 1/2 (out of 4) The mentally unstable Carol Hammond (Florinda Bolkan) lives a rather good life considering her father and husband are both quite rich. Carol is seeing a therapist because of feverish sexual dreams that she has been having about her more sexually liberated neighbor Julia (Anita Strindberg). One day Carol has a dream of where she brutally murders Julia and sure enough a few days later the police find her body. Was it all a dream or did Carol have something to do with it? A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN comes from director Lucio Fulci and if you're only familiar with his horror films then I think you're going to be in for quite a shock. Look, I really enjoy Fulci's films including some of the ones that he made in the later days of his career but at the same time there's no question that they were all "B" movies that depended on gore and a little style.This giallo is amazingly beautiful to look at and the style that the director captured here is something that I would think was the greatest of his career. The film starts off with a very acid-inspired sequence where the visuals and camera shots just leap off the screen at you. There's a lesbian scene between the women that is captured from about three different points of view and the way it's all edited together is something really great to look at.The film also benefits from a terrific score by Ennio Morricone, which perfectly captures the spirit and mood of the picture. The cinematography is exceptionally good as well. The performances are also another major plus with Bolkan easily stealing the picture as she gets across the mental breakdown of this woman. Her scenes of the sexual pleasure is also performed quite well. Jean Sorel, Stanley Baker and the rest of the cast are impressive as well.If you're expecting a lot of gore and non-stop violence then you certainly won't find it here. Whereas some of the director's later pictures had more gore than story or style, this one here is all about the story, the mental state of the lead character and all sorts of style. A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN is certainly one of the best looking giallos that you're ever going to see.

Finfrosk86 Oh my god, I hate this damn genre. It is so mind-numbingly boring.The only redeeming quality in this movie is the cheesiness. No wait, the audience's reaction to the cheesiness. There was a lot of laughing at a lot of the stupid dialogue and cinematography. And for a change the audience laughing at stuff not meant to be funny, didn't p*** me off. (I usually hate when people laugh because they think something is stupid)There is one actor that has a real good presence, and the scenes with him in them are not boring. Only because of him. Pretty much everything else here is boring. Annoyingly boring. I don't remember much from this, as I saw it some years ago, but I do remember being bored.I guess I don't have to sum it up for ya, but if I were to, I would use one word. It starts with the blessed letter b.

Bezenby The first five minutes of this film will determine whether or not this film is for you. The always solid Florinda Balkan walks down a carriage on a train filled with old people, that quickly turns into a corridor filled with naked hippies, which in turn becomes a wind blown crimson bed in limbo, where she meets Anita Strinberg for a bit of Sapphic love, in reverse. This turns out to be one of Balkan's dreams, which she relates to her psychiatrist. Balkan is stuck in a stuffy relationship with her lawyer husband (who works for her lawyer father), and Strinberg is the free living neighbour who has drugged fuelled orgies most nights next door. After dreaming she's being chased by a giant swan with a fanny for a stomach, Balkan dreams she stabs Strinberg to death with a paper knife. So when Strinberg is found dead the same way, Balkan's sense of reality is thrown into doubt. Did she really kill her neighbour or is someone trying to pin the murder on her? Perhaps her husband, who's having an affair with a yet unknown woman? And who are the two hippies who seemingly have arrived in the flesh from Balkan's dreams? Only Stanley Baker of Zulu fame can figure things out…Lizard is yet another brilliant vision from a misunderstood director. This time round, Fulci plays around with visuals (split screen, psychedelics) and reality itself to create a giallo where everyone's got some sort of secret. For a Fulci film, there's only two actual murders, but still plenty of the red stuff, including a vision of Ely Galliani holding her own intestines, and a bewildering vision of whining dogs split open at the torso. "Trippy" would be a good description of this film, quite literally in places, and there's plenty of set pieces, like Balkan being stalked around an empty church by a knife wielding biker, the dream sequences, and Baker's habit of whistling a creepy tune all the time. Those expecting the demented gore and surrealism of the late seventies/early eighties Fulci will be let down, but the building blocks are there for sure. Whereas those films (The Beyond, City of the Living Dead) are classics in their own right, Lizard in a Woman's Skin is much more cerebral and one of the highlights of the giallo genre (who's highlights for me at least seem to be the more atypical examples of the genre). Hippies sure are annoying though, or at least those that turn up in European films.

gridoon2018 "Lizard In A Woman's Skin" is a film that has developed, over the years, a cult reputation as being one of the very best Lucio Fulci films, an opinion shared especially among those who prefer Fulci's less gory films (not that there aren't some very graphic scenes here, but they are few in number). It is a reputation that the film mostly lives up to. It's very stylishly shot around London (BTW, Fulci seems to have invented the "you-are-there / shaky-cam" style long before it became fashionable), the story is unpredictable and loaded with red herrings, and the cast is unusually competent for the genre - Florinda Bolkan may very well be the best giallo actress of them all (she's great to look at as well, and so are the other women in the film). But the film also drags at times, and the opening 10 minutes in particular come dangerously close to Jess Franco territory. Overall I think Fulci's later mystery "Seven Notes In Black" is superior to this one; I'll also have to watch "Don't Torture A Duckling" one of these days. **1/2 out of 4.P.S. Although the film appears to have been shot in English, the Italian version actually sounds more natural!