Una lucertola con la pelle di donna

Plot synopsis:
Carol Hammond (Bolkan) is the daughter of a wealthy lawyer and politician named Edmund Brighton (Leo Genn). Her husband Frank (Jean Sorel) is a lawyer working for Brighton's practice. They all live together in a large apartment with Joan (Edy Gall), Frank's teenage daughter from a previous marriage. Carol has been visiting a psychoanalyst (George Rigaud) because of a string of disturbing dreams she's been having featuring her decadent neighbor, Julia Durer (Anita Strindberg). Julia's frequent, late-night parties infuriate and yet excite Carol, evoking images of wild sex-and-drug orgies.
During a meeting between Edmund and Frank, they talk about their recent court cases in which Edmund asks Frank if he has been unfaithful to Carol, which Frank denies. Then a phone call is made by an anonymous woman who claims to Edmund that she has damaging information about his family. But unknown to everyone, Frank is indeed having an affair with his personal secretary Deborah whom he meets after work at her country house for some romantic tryst.
Carol's dreams continue which become more complicated during scenes that appear to be dreams or hallucinations. Describing her latest one to her psychoanalyst, they depict a lesbian encounter between the two women, culminating in Carol grisly stabbing the seductive Julia to death. In an enigmatic coda to the dream sequence, Carol sees two kaftan-clad hippies (Mike Kennedy and Penny Brown) who have apparently witnessed the whole thing without intervening.
The following day, it's revealed that Julia Durer has indeed been murdered. Inspector Corvin (Stanley Baker) from Scotland Yard arrives to take charge of the investigation. The room and condition of the dead body are identical to their depiction in the dream sequence. To make matters even more incriminating, there is a discarded fur coat near the body. Learning of the murder, Carol insists that she see the scene of the crime and when she enters Julia's apartment and sees the body, she faints.
After weeding out a false and self-serving confession from a delirious regular at the Durer parties, Corvin focuses on Carol Hammond. In the meanwhile, Carol, during a shopping excursion with her step-daughter Joan, see the two hippies from her dream sequence. Following them to an abandoned theater where other hippies hang out, Joan asks them if they know Carol or have ever seen her before. Neither the hippy man or woman claim that they haven't. As the evidence against Carol mounts, the police surreptitiously obtain her fingerprints, which match those found on the murder weapon, and Carol is soon arrested and charged with murdering Julia. However, doubts begin to circulate with Corvin as he wonders if she is the killer when was she describing the murder to her psychoanalyst in detail before it actually took place. Could it be that someone has read her dream diary that she kept and modeled the killing on dream images she described in order to frame her for something she fantasized about? Corvin also wonders who the two hippies are that she claims to have witnessed her crime without intervening.
As Carol is awaiting trial in the grounds of a maximum security sanitorium, she sees one of the hippies break in and chase her through the grounds. Carol flees into the building and in trying to hide she enters a room containing a hideous experiment: four live dogs, clamped in an upright position, whimper helplessly, their abdomens sliced open and pinned with surgical clamps exposing their glistening innards and still beating hearts. Carol faints in horror. When she comes around, there is no trace of the threatening man. The sanitorium director thinks that Carol's ramblings about the intruder, and the disemboweled dogs, must have been another one of her elaborate hallucinations.
Meanwhile, Carol's father swings into overdrive with her case and manages to elaborate a suspicion that appeals to the police. Edmund Brighton discovers Frank's affair with Deborah and that Julia Durer had been blackmailing him for money as not to expose his extramarital affair. Brighton's argument is enough to get Carol released on bail, but Frank remains free and desperately tries to prove his innocence.
While relaxing at Brighton's country estate, Carol is contacted by the hippy woman and agrees to meet with them at a secret rendezvous, at the Alexandra Palace in North London. Once there, Carol is attacked by the hippy man in the cellar and chased through the building where she gets attacked by bats in the attic and gets brutally stabbed as the hippy catches up to her on the rooftop. But Carol is rescued by the police, forcing the hippy man to flee. Another red herring emerges when Joan meets with the hippy woman concerning her stepmother's wellbeing and agreeing to meet. The next day, Joan is found murdered in a field with her throat cut. Inspector Corvin meets with Carol recovering at her father's estate to ask about the hippie couple and of the blackmail that Julia Durer may have been planning for Frank. Corvin finally tracks down and arrests the hippie couple, Hubert and Jenny, whom he takes to the scene of the crime to interrogate them about the Durer murder. Although Hubert admits to have stalked Carol and murdered Joan, they protest their innocence claiming not to remember anything about that night except for recalling "a lizard in a woman's skin". Then a phone call comes informing the police that Brighton has been found dead at his estate, the victim of a suicide, and leaving behind a note confessing to the murder of Julia Durer which seems to wrap up the case.
A few days later, Carol is at her father's grave when Corvin arrives to offer his condolences to her. When Corvin asks Carol about the phone call that her father got from Julia Durer which Carol admits that she knew about, he asks how did she know that Julia Durer phoned Mr. Brighton on the day before she was murdered since he never told anybody about it. Too late to realize her slip, Corvin deduces Carol's guilt as she was with Julia Durer during that day the phone call was made. As it turns out, Carol Hammond really did kill Julia Durer after she threatened to go public with their lesbian relationship which they've been having for several months. Carol did break into Julia's apartment and stabbed her to death, only to realize that two hippies saw her, which made her panic and leave the scene of the crime. Carol had felt certain that the two hippies would describe her to the police. The murderous, but sane, Carol entered the event in her dream diary immediately afterwards so by combining details of the murder with images from the recurring nightmares for which she had sought treatment, she hoped to avoid a murder sentence and get off with guilt by temporary insanity that the dream diary would provide plausible evidence in court of a split personality. But Carol did not realize that both hippies were high on LSD and unable to register the significance of what they saw that night. Carol is then led away by Inspector Corvin from her father's grave to a waiting police car.

Tags: murder, cult, horror, violence, flashback, insanity

Review:
Unlike other genre efforts that leave the viewer baffled with ludicrous plot twists and impossible endings, "Lizard...", convoluted as it may be, ranks among the most solid crime mysteries the Italian scene produced.Of course that doesn't mean the final 20 minutes aren't bound to give you a headache as the plot unfolds its myriad twists and turns.
Coupled with a languid jazzy score by the maestro, Ennio Morricone, solid performances, intriguing set pieces and delirious dream sequences, Fulci here weaves a beautiful tappestry that will leave no fan of bizarre Italo-horror disappointed.
A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is a very fine example of this most Italian of exploitation sub-genres and is possibly the best film that Lucio Fulci ever made.This is an atypical giallo in that it only has one on screen murder to speak of.
Aside from this opening murder there is a scene later in the film that is not recommended for dog lovers (although seeing that this is an Italian movie I feel I should point out that these aren't real dogs folks, thank God).Lizard – along with Don't Torture a Duckling - proves that given the right resources, Fulci was more than capable of producing stylish, suspenseful and highly polished films.
Like a considerable number of gialli from the early 70's, Lizard benefits from the great pool of talent that was evidently working in the Italian film industry at the time; there seems to have been an abundance of great cinematographers, composers, set designers and wardrobe people, alongside some great directors and appealing actors (not too sure about the writers though!).
Acting-wise Florinda Bolkan turns in a great central performance and she is ably supported by an ensemble that is a whose-who of Italian genre cinema of the time.This is essential stuff for giallo completists.
All the evidences point out to Carol, but was a dream or reality?"Una lucertola con la pelle di donna", a.k.a "A Lizard in Woman's Skin", is a great giallo by Lucio Fulci.
A troubled rich woman Carol Hammond played by Florinda Bolkan is suffering from a series of bizarre sexual dreams where she indulges in lesbian activities with her neighbor Julia Durer(Anita Strindberg).Unfortunately one morning after another perverse sex dream culminating in a gory knifing of Julia,Carol is shocked to find that Julia was murdered in her apartment the stormy night before.When all evidence points to Carol being the culprit she must not only investigate the crime but determine what is dream and what is reality."Lizard in a Woman's Skin" is perhaps the most bizarre and puzzling Fulci's giallo.The cinematography by Luigi Kuvellier is splendid with some gorgeous visuals and the dream scenes are appropriately psychedelic.The eviscerated dogs sequence still shocks unprepared viewers drawn into the murder mystery aspect of the film.8 out of 10..
If you want to see the 'great' Fulci films, you need to go back to his Giallo days with films like Don't Torture a Duckling and indeed this film; A Lizard in Woman's Skin.
Events take a turn for the worse when the young woman dreams that she's killed the hippy, who then turns up dead; brutally murdered in her apartment, in exactly the way that the woman dreamt...While this film isn't as brutal as some of the later Giallo efforts, Fulci succeeds in creating a foreboding atmosphere and manages to keep his audience on the edge of their seats.
This is both a good and a bad thing as I, personally, like seeing brutal murders in Giallo's; but on the other hand it allows Fulci to keep the focus firmly on the central murder and he doesn't get sidetracked with lots of blood and gore, which does the film itself lots of favours.
Although Lucio Fulci is most famous for the atmospheric and very gory series of zombie movies he made in the late 70's and early 80's, this early 70's giallo might very well be his best film.
It has all the strengths of Fulci's best work--great cinematography, brilliant editing, and a powerful sense of atmosphere (although the decadent, garish portrait he creates here of "Swinging London" is quite distinct from oozing sense of dread he conjures up in the rural American settings of his zombie films).
This movie, however, has two things his zombie films do not have: first, a script that is both genuinely suspenseful and that actually makes sense (rather than merely functioning as a means to tie various interesting scenes together), and, second, Florinda Balkan.
That being said, this is one of Fulci's best, if somewhat dated, Giallos It keeps you guessing, and is never boring.My Grade: B Anchor Bay 2-DVD set Extras: Disc 1) USA "Schizoid" version; Radio spots; US Trailer; Trailers for "Zombi 2", "City of the Living Dead", "Touch of Death", "House of Clocks", "Sweet House of Horrors", "Demonia", and "Death Trance" Disc 2) 98 minute Italian version, 33 minute "Shedding the Skin" documentary, and Photo Gallery 1 Easter Egg: go to the 'Scene access', Go to chapter 4, then press right, in the lower-left of the screen you'll see a highlighted bat.Press play for 2 deleted scenes.Eye Candy: Florida Bolken, Anita Strindberg; various extras show boobs and butts.
"Lizard In A Woman's Skin" (1971) is doubtlessly also a very intense, beautiful and creepy Giallo that impresses with a wonderfully uncanny, fever-dream-like atmosphere and a wonderful Florinda Bolkan in the lead.
While "Lizard in a Woman's Skin" is doubtlessly highly atmospheric and furthermore has an ingeniously convoluted plot, it does have its lengths, and, even in regards of atmosphere, it cannot possibly compete with "Don't Torture a Duckling", in my opinion.Tormented by bizarre lesbian dreams about her seductive neighbor (Anita Strindberg), the respectable lawyer's wife Carol Hammond (Florinda Bolkan) regularly visits a psychotherapist.
Carol Hammond(Florinda Balkan)lives in London and is the daughter of a very important Lawyer(Leo Genn), she is haunted by some very strange psychedelic dreams about her noisy and party loving neighbour, Julia Durer (Anita Strindberg),these dreams always contain drug fuelled sexual depravity ,and while she is seeing her Psychiatrist, she tells him of her latest dream in which she has Lesbian sex and then brutally murders Durer.
Carol is reassured by her shrink that this is all quite normal, but when Durer is found murdered in exactly the same way as she described, Carol soon becomes the No1 suspect for Inspector Corvin(Stanley Baker),and when her fingerprints are found on the murder weapon and her fur coat found beside the body.well its cased closed?...or is it?....is Carol going mad or is she being set up?...Soon after being released on Police bail, Carol is hunted by some drugged up Hippies that she saw in her dream and soon people begin to die.
Lizard is full of red herrings and endless plot possibilities, that adds to the mystery, its trippy psychedelic dream sequences fully capture the feel of the swinging sixties,add to that some gore as only Fulci can do and you have a fine Giallo.incidentally one particular gory scene involving dogs caused controversy at the time and Fulci had to prove in court on four occasions that the effects were fake.
Lucio Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is a very solid giallo but not the best from him.
The hallucinations/dream sequences are well done, creepy and suspenseful and set the tone for an original mystery that unfolds mostly well and peppered with some solid set pieces along the way, two of which involve mutilated dogs and an array of nasty bats.Fulci is a talented giallo filmmaker, his films Seven Notes in Black (aka The Psychic) and particularly Don't Torture a Duckling show he can effortlessly handle murder mysteries with relatively straight forward narratives and create much suspense without his trademark gore set pieces that characterized his later nonsensical Gothic horror films.
Now I'm giving his giallos a go; they're supposed to be good, aren't they?Lizard in a Woman's Skin is a trippy hippy early-70s thriller which sees a woman accused of murdering her promiscuous neighbour.
and plenty of scenes depicting boring police procedure, Lizard in a Woman's Skin is yet another disappointment from the Italian 'godfather of gore'.In true Fulci fashion, the film manages to shock (most notably with a scene featuring several dissected, but still living, dogs; with their bloody organs and guts on display, these whining canines are very effective and are the highlight of the film), but it also bores.And even when Fulci manages to occasionally impress, his hard work is blown with some truly awful moments.
This rarely seen Fulci offering brings to mind many comparisons with Dario Argento's earlier works.A woman (Monti) dreams in slow motion of murdering her somewhat libertine neighbor and relates it all back to her therapist; some time later, her neighbor indeed turns up dead, and the details all match those in the dream.
The line between reality and hallucination becomes increasingly blurred throughout the whole film, as the mentally unbalanced Monti tries to reconcile her shifts in perception.The strength of the movie lies in the visuals, however; Fulci's wild camera work helps reinforce the sense of illusion throughout.Ennio Morricone's score complements the picture's strange mood perfectly.Fulci found himself in court over an unusually ugly scene of vivisected dogs (during a hallucination); his SFX man Carlo Rambaldi had to bring in the animatronic models of the dogs to get him off the hook.At times it's a bit slow, but at other times Lizard in a Woman's Skin is a very wild ride indeed..
I've seen a lot of giallos, but Lucio Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's Skin is way up there with the best!
Films like "Don't Torture a Duckling" and "The Psychic" show a filmmaker bringing a sense of macabre mystery to the mainstream; the same can be said for "Lizard in a Woman's Skin," his first foray into the 'giallo' subgenre...though the result is terribly disappointing.It's hard to ignore the cue Fulci takes from Dario Argento, making an animal-themed (and relatively restrained) film in the footsteps of "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage." There are glimpses of the frenetic (almost invasive) camera tricks and stylistic techniques Fulci would mine with more confidence (and effect) in his gritty horror outings.
While he stages an impressive extended chase through Alexandra Palace (beginning in the underground tunnels and finishing on the rooftop), piques our interest with a smattering of sex, violence, and psychedelics at the very beginning, and gives us a dog-vivisection dream sequence that foreshadows his later work (and is still gruesomely effective today), what lies in between is talky and largely uninteresting.The plot is simple enough: Carol Hammond (Florinda Bolkan--"Don't Torture a Duckling"), daughter of a prominent politician in Great Britain, is afflicted with strange hallucinations that literally bleed over into reality when her next-door neighbor, Julia Durer (sexy Anita Strindberg) is stabbed to death.
Meanwhile, Carol's husband Frank (Jean Sorel) is carrying on an affair with a family friend, and Carol's daughter-in-law, Joan (Edy Gall) is somehow involved with a bunch of hippie types who know something about the murder.I consider Fulci's "Don't Torture a Duckling" one of the finer examples of a giallo done right--it wasn't so heavily stylized that it detracted from character or story, and at times invoked a sense of realism-through-restraint.
"Lizard" is almost the total opposite--the characters tend to become dancing puppets within a plot that's constantly twisting itself into a pretzel; indeed, much like Argento's style-drenched films, the best method of viewing is to just drink in the look and feel of things, and wait for the inevitable Closing Revelation, in which all the convoluted plot points are explained.
After having seen the stylish crime drama "One on top of the Other", followed by this wonderfully psychedelic giallo, it actually becomes difficult to believe that Lucio Fulci went on making so many eyeball-stabbing & gut-spilling gore flicks!
I've been familiar with the films of Italian director Lucio Fulci since I saw his House by the Cemetery in around 1990, then progressed to Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Beyond, New York Ripper, etc, but I have just watched Lizard for the first time.
Yes, I have seen Don't Torture A Duckling, another early giallo, but with Lizard I feel that I have seen Fulci at his best.
Like many of his films there's plenty of sex and very graphic gore here (apparently they had to prove that they didn't use real dogs in a scene that shows them live, cut open with their hearts & guts still pumping by producing the effects in court).
But Fulci also demonstrates great skill in making an incredibly beautiful and stylish giallo movie, coupled with an Ennio Morricone score.
If you were a well-to-do woman in Italy in the 1970s, chances are — based on the movies that I have seen — that you are about to killed, have killed someone, are having a lesbian affair, are on drugs or all of the above.Carol (Florinda Bolkan, Don't Torture a Duckling) is one of those wealthy women.
Suspicion passes from one suspect to another while the dedicated Inspector Corvin (Stanley Baker) works the case.The much admired director Lucio Fulci does well with this sometimes trippy addition to that genre of Italian murder mysteries known as the Giallo.
Penny Brown and Mike Kennedy (as the hippie characters), lovely Ely Galleani (as Franks' headstrong daughter), George Rigaud (as Carols' psychiatrist), and Leo Genn (as Edmond Brighton), all leave favourable impressions.There's one sequence right before the one hour mark that's distressing (and the special effects creators were obliged to prove in court that these were just effects), but overall this is a solid Giallo that newcomers to the genre should take a look at.Seven out of 10..
"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.
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).
If Carol wasn't crazy before, she certainly would be after that scene.As is usual in Giallo, there is always a twist at the end when elaborate plans are revealed and mistakes found.Great Fulci thriller..
"Lizard in a Woman's Skin" (1971) is an early, comparatively goreless giallo from Italian master Lucio Fulci.
In it, Florinda Bolkan (who would go on to play the epileptic voodoo woman so memorably chain-whipped to death in Fulci's 1972 effort "Don't Torture a Duckling") portrays Carol Hammond, a well-to-do wife living in London who suffers from dreams of a very startling nature.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, Carol's state of mind is worsening quickly, with dreams involving the rotten corpses of family members, swarms of bats, and a hostile giant swan...Few films use London locations as well as this one does, and Fulci demonstrates a talent and virtuosity that he'd never achieve again, even though he'd work with much of the same crew on later movies.
But Fulci has actually created a genuinely effective suspense movie, and the dream scenes and chase through Alexandra Palace in particular, are among the best moments in European thriller cinema.Even in its cut version released in the States, it garnished good reviews but was unseen for many years.
Co-written and directed by Lucio Fulci and known more commonly under the title of A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, I thought this was a pretty good murder mystery who dun-nit, probably one of Fulci's better films.
It takes a unique premise using dream logic, the mind's subconscious, blackmail, adultery, lesbianism, and a murder of a hippie socialite and Fulci weaves a web of unpredictability any giallo or horror fan would dream of.The film opens with a dream from Carol Hammond(Florinda Bolkan)concerning her delirious trip through an orgy of naked people standing trying to flee but finding herself in the arms of a woman(the always luscious Anita Strindberg).
But, one such dream shows Carol murdering the woman and it turns out that this occurrence actually happens to the very next door neighbor for whom she speaks of.
His son Glyn later described 'Lizard' as 'a movie which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.' Stanley himself declared that he enjoyed everything he worked on, 'including the bad pictures'.I love the look Director Lucio Fulci gives this.
An early effort from Italian goremeister Lucio Fulci, this slow-moving giallo has a really odd dream-like atmosphere to commend it.
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).