Although not as well-known as the likes of Dario Argento or Mario Bava, Sergio Martino was a major player in the world of the giallo, responsible for many of the genre's most notorious offerings, including All the Colours of the Dark, Gently Before She Dies and Torso, as well as this 1971 thriller, entitled La Coda dello Scorpione, released to English-speaking audiences as Case of the Scorpion's Tail. With the credits listing the names of many of the genre's most familiar faces, including actors George Eastman, Anita Strindberg and Ida Galli, as well as writer Ernesto Gastaldi and composer Bruno Nicolai, this film certainly has the potential to be a stand-out, but does it ultimately deliver?

London resident Lisa Baumer (Ida Galli, credited, as was so often the case, as "Evelyn Stewart") is busy enjoying a little nocturnal romp with her lover when she receives word that her husband, Kurt, has died in an aeroplane explosion. Naturally, the news that she has inherited £1,000,000 from him sweetens the blow somewhat, but she soon finds herself accosted by a number of unsavoury characters, who all want their share of the money, including Kurt's mistress Lara Florakis (Janine Reynaud), who accuses her of having Kurt killed and threatens her with a similar fate unless she hands over the money. Lisa, who has travelled to Athens to pick up the money (in cash, naturally), is tailed by insurance investigator Peter Lynch (or "Linch", if you go by the DVD's subtitles; played by George Hilton), but she is fairly quickly murdered and relieved of her riches, and Peter finds himself teamed up with local ambulance-chaser (ie. tabloid reporter) Cleo Dupont (Anita Strindberg), trying to track the killer down. Unsurprisingly, their meddling soon makes them targets, but this doesn't stop them from getting down to some good old-fashioned canoodling.

This should all be fairly familiar stuff to anyone who has seen a few gialli, but director Sergio Martino and writers Ernesto Gastaldi, Eduardo M. Brochero and Sauro Scavolini manage to run with the conventions and create a thoroughly engaging and entertaining movie. The standard giallo trademarks are all there, not least the black-shirted, black-masked, black-gloved killer whose ability to wander the streets in daylight without getting strange looks simply has to be accepted. Indeed, it is the transposing of these elements into the less common locations of London and Athens that make this film so interesting. What Have You Done to Solange? it is not, but it is nonetheless a very enjoyable thriller. Martino's pacing is efficient and his photography is competent, with a couple of unusual ideas, such as an entire scene shot at a 180° angle. Other stand-out sequences inculde a well-orchestrated chase sequence involving a spiral staircase, and the tense climax involving a ship stranded in the ocean, scuba equipment and an underwater cave. The tour de force, however, is a tense scene in which Lara realizes that the killer is at her door and runs towards it to lock it before it is too late. As she heads towards the door in slow motion, the level of tension achieved is absolutely superb. The energetic, somewhat unsual score by Bruno Nicolai, complete with wails and what sounds at times like a Didgeridoo (although not being a music expert, I'm probably wrong), also adds a great deal of tension and atmosphere to the preceedings.

One extremely interesting spanner thrown into the works is the fact that there are in fact two killers with completely different motives. This adds a great deal of confusion to the narrative and, while the second killer is identified and ultimately dispatched fairly early in the film, it means that for the rest of the running time the audience is never really sure of anything. The actual identity of the killer is not entirely unexpected, but that is as much to do with the fact that he/she is played by an actor famous for his/her shifty demeanour and harbouring of dark secrets in gialli as anything else. Indeed, all the major players find themselves in reasonably familiar roles, and as a result they manage to nail them. Hilton and Strindberg are, after all, essentially the Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan of the giallo genre, although how well that analogy works once the blood starts to run is anyone's guess. It also helps that the Italian dubbing is quite good, even if, as usual, it doesn't synchronize with the actors' lip movements.

The film is marred slightly by a couple of rather clumsy special effects, the first involving an extremely obvious model aeroplane exploding as a stand-in for the real thing. It's not so much the plane itself that is the problem here so much as the laughably unrealistic moon that stands beside it. The second involves the death of one of the female characters, which features a stomach-stabbing where the stomach in question is clearly prosthetic, right down to the fact that it is white rather than skin-toned. That said, there are a number of very successful prosthetic effects, the strongest being the stabbing of one character's eye with a shard from a broken bottle.

Ultimately, where most gialli differ from Dario Argento's work is in their lack of subtext, and this film is no exception. While Argento is a serious artist who clearly puts a lot of thought into the substance behind the images he places on the screen, the same cannot be said for Martino, Lenzi and most of their contemporaries, whose primary concern seems usually to simply tell an engaging story with a sufficient number of plot twists. This is not necessarily a problem, and indeed light entertainment can often be a good thing, but it prevents films like these from being analyzed to the same degree as Argento's work. Case of the Scorpion's Tail is a well-plotted, elegant and engaging piece of work, but that's as far as it goes.

Trivia: Kurt Baumer, who only appears in photographs, is played by regular Argento bit player Fulvio Mingozzi.

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Picture

Presented anamorphically in an aspect ratio that works out at around 2.30:1 (the image is slightly windowboxed), this transfer is never going to win any awards but it is certainly adequate, and indeed is better than I was expecting. After some excessively letterboxed (closer to 2.60:1), badly damaged and slightly distorted credits, the image settles into a somewhat soft but reasonably film-like appearance, with no visible edge enhancement. The framing is at times overly tight, and the actors often look a little on the squashed side, suggesting that the image has in fact been stretched horizontally. There is a heavy amount of colour distortion that varies on a scene by scene basis but usually has an excessively blue tint, but some shots are so heavily colourised that at times I wondered if it was an intentional stylistic choice on the part of the director. There is also some noticeable colour bleed, especially on bright red hues. The blacks are never truly black, and many of the exterior shots have a washed-out look (although I was able to correct this to some extent through some tinkering with the brightness and contrast levels in PowerDVD). There are also a handful of instances of what look to me like magnetic tape drop-outs (thin horizontal lines breaking up the image).

Furthermore, when watching the film on my PC, I spotted occasional instances of a very bizarre compression artefact that I had never seen before, whereby rapid movement would cause large coloured blocks to appear on the screen - most noticeable in the scene around 14 minutes into the film, in the restaurant with the Greek dancers. An example is provided below:

When watching the film on my stand-alone DVD player (Pioneer DV-668AV), and indeed when I tested the DVD on another computer, these oddities did not appear. Therefore, this seems to simply be an problem with my video card rather than a specific fault on the disc itself. I still feel that this is worth mentioning, however, since I have no way of knowing whether or not it will manifest itself on any other setups.

Overall, the transfer is relatively watchable. I approached it expecting something much worse than I got, and while this is never going to rival Anchor Bay's giallo releases, it is preferable to the likes of VCI's release of Blood and Black Lace.

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Sound

Two audio tracks are included: Italian 2.0 mono and German 2.0 stereo. English subtitles are provided, and they are relatively easy to follow, although they do feature spelling and grammatical mistakes here and there. The translation is also very stilted at times. Sample dialogue: "You and your trained monster have killed Lisa!" "You are foolish!"

I listened primarily to the Italian track. The audio is, like the image, not great but pretty serviceable. It is certainly limited by its age, and sounds quite muffled, but there is relatively little distortion, and Bruno Nicolai's imaginative score is always clear. Interestingly, the German track is much crisper, but seems to have a directional problem whereby the audio is consistently louder in the left channel than in the right.

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Packaging

The packaging for this release is some of the most unusual I have ever come across. With a laminated cardboard cover and a white plastic inlay, this case is several centimetres taller than a standard amaray case and looks more like the clamshell cases often used for VHS tapes in the US than a DVD case. Two versions are available: Cover A, the one reviewed here, features stylish painted artwork on the front, whereas Cover B uses a photo montage. The contents of the discs are identical.

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Menu

The menus are in German only, but they should be reasonably easy for most people to figure out. Fairly stylish with background animation and music, the language and subtitle options and bonus materials are all featured on the root menu, with a separate sub-menu for chapter stops, of which only a meagre 12 are provided.

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Extras

This is more or less a bare-bones release, featuring only a short German trailer for the film, and trailers for various other releases from X-Rated Kult DVD. Absolutely nothing worth writing home about.

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Conclusion

Sergio Martino's films remain fairly uncommon on DVD in English-speaking territories, and while it is not perfect, this German release of Case of the Scorpion's Tail seems to be the only one in the world, so I would urge anyone with an interest in this film to buy it and accept its shortcomings as the unavoidable results of a small company doing their best to release an obscure title.

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