BoardChiri
Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay
Brendon Jones
It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.
Orla Zuniga
It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review
Tyreece Hulme
One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
Bezenby
Sergio Bergonzelli must have gone to a showing of Kill The Fatted Calf and Roast It and noted in his little giallo director book 'Family not weird enough...also...not enough dead dog action' and then went on to make this film, which contains enough twists for a hundred gialli as well as a barrage of weird imagery to boot. The films starts right away with a family confronted by a decapitated corpse and the problem of disposing of it, while an escaped convict (Sancho) happens to run by the estate and witness not only the burial of a corpse, but the suspicious sending of an abandoned boat out into the ocean. Apprehended, Sancho heads off thoughtfully for jail, taking in what he's witnessed. As far as super rich families who live in isolated huge villas are concerned, this one is by far the worst. There's Colin the artist, who has the hots for his step-sister Falesse, both of whom are kept in check by mother Lucille, who tries to keep them both from humping each other whilst also trying to cover up the horrific murders both of them seem to conduct on any stranger visiting the property. Falesse seems to do so because of some childhood trauma about being raped by her dad when she was a kid, plus Colin I guess strangled that dog because it discovered the shallow grave of their murdered dad. Except of course that none of that may be true at all! By the point we've established that this is not a family you wish to mess with, what with them killing folk and dissolving them in an acid bath, Fernando Sancho gets out of jail and is determined to extort money out of the family as he witnessed the burial of a murder victim. He doesn't get his way but as he has a gun I guess them chicks gonna have to give up something, especially seeing the grave he saw now contains a dead dog that's waved in his face!What I have described so far is only the first forty minutes of this weird, weird film, and from then on twists are thrown into the mix so often that I swear I hade a headache by the end of it. Characters aren't who they are, characters appear from nowhere claiming to be characters you though were dead, and there's a lengthy Holocaust flashback that leads to one of the most bizarre deaths in a giallo film. Worst of all, you get to see Fernando Sancho's arse! Here's comes that chilli I had for lunch!This is the first time I've seen Sancho outside of a spaghetti western but to be honest he still plays the same character - a cigar smoking jerk who threatens women, noisily eats food, and gets killed. This is one truly mental film with a trippy vibe that takes the weirdos in the mansion vibe to the ultimate extreme.
HumanoidOfFlesh
The plot of Sergio Bergonzelli's strange "In the Folds of the Flesh" is extremely convoluted,but basically it's about a family residing in an Italian villa who is involved in a series of bizarre sexual encounters and grisly murders.The inhabitants of the house are strikingly odd:Lucille(Eleonora Rossi Drago),her son,his friend Falesse(Anna Maria Pierangeli)and some pet vultures.Falesse was raped by her own father when she was the child.There are some shades of incest,decapitations and also gloriously exploitative flashback set in Nazi death camp.If you like gialli with bizarre narrative and truly off-beat atmosphere of perversion "In the Folds of the Flesh" is a must-see.7 out of 10.
cynema
This movie is completely over the top! Why and how it escaped getting played around the world, on the midnight circuit, is beyond me. It's like someone made a soup out of a Spanish Soap Opera, a Giallo, Gothic Thriller, and a Film Noir... It's loaded with ridiculous double crosses, kinky incest (is it incest?), countless decapitations, pet vultures, plot twists that make little to no sense, random Freudian Psychology, and extraneous WWII Concentration Camp flashbacks! The score is over-dramatic, as is the acting, and just about everything else. It certainly can't be taken seriously, but that's what's so appealing. Don't be fooled though, if it's the Classic Bava, Martino or Argento-esque formula you're looking for, that's not what you'll get. Despite that it is often listed and cited as a Giallo. This movie came out in 1970, when the genre was just beginning to take root, so while it's certainly got all of the necessary elements to be classified as 'Gialli', the elements are scattered, appearing in different places in the plot than is common to the traditional Giallo formula. That said, it could be of interest to hardcore fans in that respect. That's how I came upon it, and I'm not upset. Think something along the lines of Luciano Ercoli's "Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion" or even Lucio Fulci's "Perversion Story," only much more ridiculous! Wonderfully ridiculous, psychedelic and melodramatic. Wow.
dddvvv
This is another case of a movie which seems to have been highly underestimate. This is not the crap the score rate seems to testify. When you approach such a product a minimum of historical perspective should be the norm... we cannot judge a movie filmed in 1971 with standards of today's taste. This is a thriller with a weird plot,a definite stress on turbid sexual themes, some gore scenes, some Gothic and fetish elements that can make the joy of the true Italian b-movie lover. In my opinion this movie has everything a movie should have to let you spend an hour and a half before the screen and even enjoying your time. We are a few and we're happy, please let us dream alone.