Storyline: Testa in giu, gambe in aria 1972 This is surely one of the most obscure giallo titles out there apparently solely available via a singularly battered, non English friendly print that belies its relatively young 40 years in retrospect, given its mediocre quality, not to mention the tenuous link it has with the genre to begin with, this is not at all surprising Comedy has always been uneasily incorporated into what amounts to a violent, garishly coloured form not that the film under review has much of either, and this certainly does not prove the exception to the rule here involving the moody heros hotcold rapport with his burly pal at work voiced by Enrico Maria Salerno There are also a number of gratuitous nude scenes including protagonist Corrado Panis butt, appalling costumes that scream 1970s especially an outrageously revealing one worn at a party by leading lady Marina Malfatti and an incongruously cheerful score we even get the obligatory nightclub dance floor sequence, where the male lead unwisely attempts to explain his current predicament to his dancing partner amid the blaring noise Incidentally, the title which translates to Head Down, Feet Up refers to the heros half hearted attempts to practice yoga I wonder whether it could have been inspired by Sergio Leones Spaghetti Western GIU LA TESTA aka DUCK, YOU SUCKER 1972The plot basically deals with a graphic artist who gets entangled in a wave of killings of university professors he becomes quite obsessed copiously collecting newspaper cut outs related to it after dreaming about himself as an adult turning up for an exam in an open air venue filmed for maximum disorienting effect with a fish eye lens and actually resembling more a job interview, in which not only the assessors are the murder victims but he personally starts bleeding at the wrist One of them, however, he runs into at a barwho turns out to be gay and invites him to walk home together, but he obviously draws the line at the doorstep the handsome Pani has a girl, Malfatti, but also dallies with an attractive work colleague and even carries on an affair with a middle aged female patron With respect to this general freewheeling attitude to love, when Malfatti becomes pregnant by him and decides to abort because a child would obviously be inconvenient to her modeling career without even bothering to inform her lover, Pani gives her a good thrashing and dumps her hypocritically, though, he had earlier been rendered jealous by the undue attentions given to his girl by an ex buddy being feted for having made it as a full fledged artistAnyway, when the professor is found dead the morning after the meeting with the hero, the latter decides to follow the tracks of a man the victim had himself indicated as a possible suspect indeed, he begins to see him everywhere he goes outside the school and, most distressingly, in front of his own house So paranoid does he become that, when this person finally approaches him in a dark alley, Pani turns on him and strangles the manwho is revealed the next day to be yet another tutor Given the protagonists constantly brooding countenance, it is fair to assume that the film makers with whose work I am unfamiliar intended misleading the viewer into thinking he would emerge as the unwitting serial killer but, ultimately, they do not even display the courage of their lack of convictions, as the film just peters out without offering so much as a hint of a solution the nods to BLOW UP 1966 are palpable throughout but, in this case, it feels like the scriptwriters simply ran into a brick wallapart from having Pani succeed at the titular yoga position at long last In the end, if it were not for the ultra modern trimmings, one would be excused in thinking this emanated from the early days of the giallo, so timid is its approach to the genres mechanics
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