This particular title was purchased from a drug store (on a budget disc along with two other movies) in anticipation of a long bus ride ahead of me. An Italian production, The Embalmer was squeezed out in the earliest days of the Giallo sub-genre. For anyone who doesn’t know what a “Giallo” movie is or why the Italian word for “yellow” is given its own cinematic medium, here’s the quick and dirty: in early 1930s Italy, the big craze-of-the-day were detective mystery books imported and translated from those goofy-toothed would-be World War opponents the British. The company responsible for the push (Mondadori) released the books with yellow covers, hence where the “yellow” thing comes in. Italian writers followed suit, publishing their own detective novels to capitalize on the market and when film started to take off, well, you can pretty much figure out the rest for yourself. The term’s become far more obtuse in the 40+ years since Mario Bava made The Girl Who Knew Too Much (aka The Evil Eye, popularly considered the first real Giallo movie) and there are plenty of sticklers who would watch something like The Embalmer and spend an hour writing a five page hate letter to me about how stupid and wrong I am for even suggesting that it could be considered a Giallo flick, but to those detractors I suggest getting one of those cans of Raid that has the thin plastic tube attached to the nozzle and try fumigating your colon first. You may find that once you’ve laid waste to the colony of bugs that have crawled up through your rectum (“damn near killed ‘em!”), you might not be such an asshole. If that doesn’t work, then by all means type up your well thought out dissertation on my idiocy. If nothing else it will otherwise waste an hour or two of your time that might have been spent making somebody else’s life miserable. The Tomb of Anubis: making an hour of someone else’s life better because we’re taking you out of it!

I should get that printed on a tee shirt…

Our story takes place in Venice, Italy’s big open sewer where guys in funny mustaches, striped shirts and goofy hats push tourists through the muck and filth of the aquatic avenues in their gondolas and the disease of tourism runs rampant year round… because only tourists would fall for the city’s long standing ploy that boating around in open sewage is romantic. I can get the same effect by farting in a warm bath while eating a can of Spaghetti-Os and it won’t cost me twenty grand or violent jet lag to do so.

Anyway, it seems that butt cigars and last night’s rounds at the bar aren’t the only things contaminating the waterways in Venice because a sinister figure in a scuba gear is also prowling the night scene! Emerging from the canals (and smelling none-too-good I’m sure), the ghoul creeps upon his prey of pretty ladies (apparently keeping down wind so the don’t smell him coming) and drags them into the murky depths, drowning them amidst their own excretions and dragging their carcasses back to his subterranean lair. If this were a German movie, he would proceed to strip them nude and have creepy corpse sex with them. Since it’s not though, he simply puts on his Sunday fineries (a skull mask and druid robes), embalms them (yes, we have a title!) and locks them away in giant Barbie packages so he can admire their beauty forever. Kinky. Imagine Vincent D’Onofrio’s character in The Cell, only without all the really complicated stuff like suspending himself from the ceiling by metal rings implanted in his back so he can whack his Wilford Brimley over their corpses… I guess the storage boxes make for easier clean up and promote a longer shelf life for the ladies.

With the local police force convinced that Venice is simply experiencing an outbreak of women running away from home (for whatever reason, logical or illogical, we’re never told…), it’s up to part-time newspaper report slash part-time tour guide Andrea to go all vigilante and solve the case himself!... that’s “Andrea” pronounced in the apparently masculine manner of “An-dray-uh” and not the feminine “An-dree-uh” form, since our hero is indeed a man. The reporter job is to show us that Andrea’s the type of guy who uses his head to hunt down facts and has the determination needed to tackle something big like a serial killer. The tour guide job is just so Andrea can be the machismo oozing Italian guy who spends his nights plowing brain dead tourists who think that Italian men are so “exotic” just because they don’t sit around the house in their underwear brushing Cheeto dust out of their chest hair. Trust me, once you’ve lived in Brooklyn long enough, you discover there’s nothing more or less exotic about Italian people then there is about any other culturally stereotyped ethnic group in the world. Anyway, when Andrea’s crackpot theories about a depraved sex fiend kidnapping the women is laughed at by both his editor and the chief-of-police, Andrea’s only help is local sheriff Frank, who looks like John Waters’s Italian uncle. Wait, do they even have sheriffs in Italy? Well, besides Joe Don Baker of course...

To help pad out our cast a bit, Andrea also gets involved with a tourist named Maureen whom he winds up falling madly in love with by the finale. Maureen’s accompanied by an old lady (who claims she’s 42 but looks like she’s 62) and the old lady’s nephew who happens to be a professor researching the local myths about entire buildings that have sunk into the eroded earth on which the city stands... or floats… or whatever it does. Of course it turns out that one of the buildings the professor is researching, an old cathedral on top of which a restaurant now sits, happens to be the base of operations for our killer. Speaking of Scuba Joe, he may very well be the evening alter ego of local hotel manager Mr. Torre, who has a habit of playing peep show with unwitting residents, including Miss Maureen! He also carries a voice much like our Embalmer, but that could just be because their terrible voiceover work was done by the same half-assed jerk-off working for a handful of cold cuts and a half-bottle of gin. Our killer could also be Luigi, the hotel’s desk clerk, who has a very unsettling scene in which he has really bad phone sex with a local lady of loose morals, all while on the job! Could it be the killer is either the editor of the newspaper or the chief-of-police? That would explain why neither one wants to believe that the numerous reports of missing women could all be connected to a serial killer story. Hmmmm, kinda makes you think… not really, but I somehow enjoyed this movie and I’m trying to make it sound like it’s not the obvious guy they insist on pointing out to us with a giant neon finger sign flashing “THIS GUY’S THE KILLER!”.

Whatever the case, even Andrea’s apparently not as smart as we give him credit for. Sure, he’s the only one in the city who has enough gray matter knocking around his skull to figure out that somebody’s killing all of these girls and they’re not just “running away” like everyone else seems to satisfied with thinking, but it takes him so long to figure out that the killer is using the canals as his means of transportation that it’s pathetic and in no way becoming of what I expect a movie’s hero to be! The Embalmer gets over confident one night though and attacks one of three boats that are each carrying a number of female tourists… and, of course, Andrea. Two of the tipped boat’s passengers are drudged up into the other gondolas, but one girl never surfaces. THIS is when our lunk of a good guy finally realizes how the murderer’s been making off with his victims and THIS is what finally sets the hero on the path to capturing the killer: seeing a kidnapping happen right in front of his big stupid face! With the “how?” out of the way, what matters now is the “who?” and the pursuit. Can our hero-with-a-female-name stop the ghoul in time to keep none other than Maureen from becoming his next victim? And even if he does catch up to the man, is there any guarantee that he’ll be able to stop him and put an end to his rampage of misguided appreciation of the beauty of the female form? If I was a betting man, I’d bet my collection of Star Wars Burger King collectible drinking glasses that the answer is yes, but far be it from me to tell you how to invest your hard earned geek memorabilia.

I don’t know what it is that possesses me to say what I’m about to, but it’s oddly true: I had a good time watching this movie! Maybe I was just woke up on the right side of the bed this morning or maybe I cracked my neck just right and tapped into one of those abscesses of LSD that nest between your vertebrae for years after the fact, but whatever it is I enjoyed watching this movie! Common complaints I’ve read to the contrary include a cookie-cutter story, bad acting, and a murder mystery that doesn’t even give the audience enough credit to actually make anything about what’s happening here “mysterious”, and I really can’t argue any of these points. There’s nothing especially complicated or intriguing about the story (with the exception of a killer who spends 90% of his screen time in full scuba gear and the other 10% in robes and a bad skull mask), the voiceover work was deplorable (but in an entertaining, “why do these everyday Italian characters all sound like bad ‘70s kung-fu movie dubs?!” way), and yes, there’s really no mystery to be had whatsoever. I was kinda hoping we’d get a curveball thrown at us that would leave us gripping our bats in disbelief and wondering how the fuck we could’ve been so off the mark, but what we get is a big softball sitting on a batting tee that puts up no fight and almost insults our ability to reason and adapt to a challenge. Here’s a hint at how unimaginative it was: I’m using a fucking baseball analogy to explain it… yikes.

Upon further inspection it looks like the detractors are the correct ones in this argument, as almost no one involved in this production had any follow-up work. The director/writer did nothing, the co-writer did nothing, and the stars did nothing! It’s a cinematic black hole from which the careers of all involved never returned…

As further supporting evidence for the argument that this movie’s existence is totally unnecessary, several mystery murder clichés are shat into our hands and then smeared into our faces. Between the “insomniac who was out for a walk when one of the murders occurred” coincidental witness that helps to break the case wide open for the otherwise inept police force, the “the murderer breaks his previously successful pattern of killing lone women in unlit alleyways so he can grab one victim from an entire group of potential witnesses” scene that tries to teach us all a morality lesson about how criminals are stupid and eventually every one of them screws up and will pay for his or her actions, and the “a major character drops an item in the killer’s lair and, when picking said item up, notices something out-of-the-ordinary that he/she otherwise would not have noticed if he/she hadn’t happened to drop that item and look at the room from a different perspective” moment that plagues us all, you’ll start to think you’ve already seen this movie before when in actuality you’ve just seen the same things happen elsewhere a hundred different times in a hundred different movie. Thank Isis for fully functioning insomniacs, the inherent stupidity of overconfident criminals and peoples’ inabilities to keep hold of something as simple as a book at a key point in time, otherwise murderers like the scuba killer of Venice would be free to go on with their urges to kill innocents unabated!... You know, after typing up this review, I’m starting to wonder how it is that I actually had a good time watching the movie in the first place. Hmmm, let’s see here…

After skimming through my notes, I think I’ve pinpointed why I seemed to enjoy the movie so much: old people slam dancing, a killer scuba diver, and a soundtrack of goofy ass Scooby-Doo music! That’s right, old people slam dancing, a killer scuba diver, and a soundtrack of goofy ass Scooby-Doo music! Don’t make me say it again. The latter two parts of that statement speak for themselves, but at one point in the movie we get a scene of Andrea lounging at a fancy restaurant with his new friends. The professor is goaded into dancing with his aunt and this so-called “dancing” could only be described by witnesses of the incident as “two old people slam dancing in the irrepressible Sixties style”. In fact, if I have to watch that again, I need to make sure I do so on an empty stomach so as to avoid my lunch irrepressing itself against the insides of my teeth from all the laughter. It’s 1960s Italian cinema’s answer to the now classic Crispin Glover spazz dance sequence in Friday the 13th: the Final Chapter. You heard me. It’s truly a sight to behold and, provided I get my video capture box up and working again, I’ll treat everybody to a serving of good old fashioned toe-tapping insanity.

Overall, I don’t know, it just seems like The Embalmer doesn’t take itself too seriously. I’d like to think that it knows it’s a generic murder mystery and as such it just goes through the motions and does everything with a really relaxed attitude. Maybe the guys who adapted it for American audiences had a little fun with it and intentionally made the new music goofy? Maybe the cheap voiceover stuff was intended to be silly? I really can’t say for certain, but I think I can admit to liking this movie because I didn’t take it seriously, I just sat down, wrote it off as another wacky Italian flick and went along with it. Take it with that proverbial grain of salt that everyone talks about and you just might like it too. However, if you’re looking for a hidden gem of Italian crime suspense cinema that will gain you favor with all of your snobby foreign movie loving friends; you’re pushing the wrong gondola amigo. For now, let’s just pluck its brain, pack it’s skull with resin, eviscerate it (making sure to preserve the organs in their own separate urns), immerse it in sodium, dehydrate it, wrap it in bandages, and seal it away for a few centuries until an unsuspecting group of fashion photographers and models discover it and are ripped asunder by its hungry vengeance… or we can just go have a sandwich and discuss the finer points of how hideous Lindsey Lohan’s become. Uggh, meat curtains…