Bruno Nicolai’s theme to The Case of the Bloody Iris is a jaunty, joyful number I never tired of hearing, even when it is not appropriate to the flavor of the scene, which is to say each and every one of its appearances, opening credits included. I hardly minded.

The film itself hits another of my pleasure centers: high-rise settings. In this case, it’s an apartment building home to a couple of recent tenant murders committed by a man in black — and that includes his hat and panty-hosed head, making him look like the DC Comics character The Question, if dipped in India ink. One poor woman was offed in the elevator; the next, tied up and drowned in her own bathtub.

On the plus side: Hey, ladies, a vacancy! And in moves Jennifer (Edwige Fenech, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key), a lovely young model trying to escape her abusive ex. Making a play for her is the building’s architect (George Hilton, I Am Sartana, Trade Your Guns for a Coffin), a real gentleman, but a real wuss when it comes to the sight of blood. However, when Jennifer’s daffy roommate (Paola Quattrini) becomes the killer’s next victim, the architect is offered up as one of many likely suspects.

For once, the mystery’s solution was not startlingly obvious to me, but maybe I was too busy soaking up the film’s groovy, dreamy visuals to notice. Alternately known by the utterly incredible title of What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer’s Body?, this giallo from Giuliano Carnimeo (Exterminators of the Year 3000) is eye-popping in its Pop Art veneer, its moments of shock and its leading lady, who has the worst luck in keeping her clothes from being torn by the greedy hands of others. —Rod Lott

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While driving through a tunnel, wealthy newlywed Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O’Neill, Scanners) experiences a terrifying vision of a woman being walled up, “Cask of Amontillado”-style, by a man with a limp. It’s hardly Virginia’s first brush with clairvoyance, having “seen” her own mother’s cliffside plunge to suicide 18 years earlier. (Never does The Psychic top that prologue sequence in shocks.)

As a surprise for her husband (Gianni Garko, Devil Fish), Virginia plans to restore a mansion he hasn’t used since bedding babe after babe in his playboy bachelor days. To her horror, she recognizes a wall there as the one from her blackout dream; sure enough, inside is the skeleton of a female believed to have been in her 20s. When it’s revealed that the mystery woman was one of Mr. Ducci’s numerous conquests, Virginia works with her shrink and authorities to prove her spouse’s innocence and find the true killer, not to mention decipher the remainder of her clue-filled hallucination.

That’s the problem with The Psychic, a mostly mainstream effort from excess specialist Lucio Fulci (The Beyond): It spells out its own denouement with alarming simplicity. If viewers pay any reasonable degree of attention, they’ll have the ending solved by the second scene — not an exaggeration. I thought surely Fulci’s story would have more to it than that. It did not.

While she is quite the knockout, O’Neill’s abilities as an actress stand in indirect proportion to her looks. Fulci’s camera asks little of her but to stand still with eyes widened and mouth agape, so he can zoom in for a close-up. Over. And over. And over. Just because his film is about a psychic and titled after a psychic doesn’t mean it should settle for predictability. —Rod Lott

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Twenty years after the death of tortured painter Legnani (Tonino Corazzari, Le strelle nel fosso), a restorer is hired to complete the artist’s mural on a church wall in a small, picturesque Italian village. Stefano (Lino Capolicchio, The Bloodstained Shadow) arrives to find a disturbing portrait of a saint whose naked, tied-down body bears seeping wounds from being daggered several times over.

Not for nothing was Legnani known around town as the “Painter of Agony,” for he liked to depict men and women at the precipice of meeting their maker. Stefano finds a tape recording of Legnani droning on, near-orgasmically, about the “purity of death,” which leaves our protagonist with an eerie feeling that he’s not being told everything surrounding this temporary gig. Of course, his inclination is spot-on.

As Stefano sets out to stick his nose into Legnani’s legacy and history, not to mention the story behind this unfinished fresco, death rears its head — suicide or murder? The path of Stefano’s unofficial investigation is paved with an elderly paraplegic woman, two hot-to-trot teachers, a rat-eating altar boy, a fridge full of live snails, untold numbers of shadows and secrets, and eventually, The House of the Laughing Windows.

At one point, Stefano’s love interest (Francesca Marciano, Seven Beauties) remarks, “The gloomy darkness is romantic. Right?” — a line which nails much of the appeal of the Gothic film by Pupi Avati (Revenge of the Dead), which takes a turn toward horror in its final moments. There’s not much to the easily solvable mystery, but it’s fun to watch it unfold — or flop out, as the case may be. As with many Euro shockers of the period, atmosphere mitigates shortcomings. —Rod Lott

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On the night of a full moon, poor Arlene is murdered. One of her socks is missing from the scene, proving we live in such a Mundo Depravados — that is, depraved world. Need further proof? Before the crime photographer snaps his pic, Arlene’s dress is lowered to bare a nipple. Say “cheese,” ya hot corpse!

Then our nonsensical, Naked City-wannabe narration kicks in: “Yes, this is your city. It has more than a million eyes. … But tonight, all these eyes are blind. They listen, but they do not hear. They touch, but they do not feel.” Whatever. All viewers need to know is that a killer of lovely ladies is on the loose; all of his victims belong to the Temple of Beauty Health Club; and everyone refers to him as “the sex monster.”

The good news is that two police detectives (“comedy cops” Johnnie Decker and Larry Reed, reunited from Al Adamson’s Psycho a Go-Go) are on the case. The bad news is that the two police detectives exhibit as much horndoggedness as the film’s multiple Peeping Toms, so of course they’re eager to partner with Tango, a stripper pal of Arlene played by real-life stripper Tempest Storm, whose pendulous breasts keep Mundo Depravados from being completely inert. They cannot distract, however, from her emotionless line readings.

Who would give her such a plum role? Singing cowboy Herb Jeffries, in his one and only attempt at writing and directing. He was married to Storm at the time — but just barely, as their union dissolved the year of Mundo Depravados’ release. Semi-sleazy for its time, the movie plays rather static today, peekaboo nudity and all. —Rod Lott

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If “giallo” could be translated to Español, the term applies to 7 Murders for Scotland Yard, a Spanish-language film set in London, but primarily shot in Italy — home of the violent whodunits whose formula director José Luis Madrid wishes to replicate.

His star is Paul Naschy (who co-wrote the screenplay) as Pedro, a former circus acrobat now saddled with a limp, a drinking problem, abject poverty and a girlfriend who makes her living on her back. No sooner do we meet her than she becomes the latest prostitute to be murdered by an out-of-retirement Jack the Ripper, or perhaps merely a fan of the legendary serial killer. Either way, each lady has a vital organ removed from her newly expired body, and Pedro is unfairly pegged by police as their prime suspect.

The mystery as obvious as Naschy is mutton-chopped and barrel-chested; even viewers paying only half-attention will finger the culprit correctly. Of course, in movies like these, “who” takes second (or third) chair to “how,” and Madrid stages the Ripper’s stabbings up-close. The penetration of the blades into pink latex skin likely was more convincing in its day; the red stuff spills regardless.

No matter the vehicle, Naschy is fun to watch. I love that the slightly lumpy man was unafraid to show off that he was not in tiptop shape; it gives him more empathy than already comes built-in. Matching his groovy duds is the prolific Piero Piccioni’s music score, driven into the ground. Finally, while on the subject of driving, the exposition-heavy ending concludes with an injured character in the backseat attempting to deliver a joke: “Stop at the next hospital, Tom … because I don’t want to be Jack the Ripper’s last victim!” ¡Ja-ja! —Rod Lott

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