The Pyjama Girl Case (Flavio Mogherini, 1977)

Warning: The following fake dissertation may contain an inordinate amount of words and phrases that celebrate the innate foxiness that is Dalila Di Lazzaro. If this kind of untoward gushing rubs you wrong way, please, exit the premises immediately, 'cause it's about to get fabulous all up in this turnip patch. Looking over the cast of The Pyjama Girl Case (a.k.a. La ragazza dal pigiama giallo), an Italian giallo set in Sydney–hold on, Sydney, Australia?!? (I'll get to that in a minute)–I couldn't help but notice that the majority of the actors were male. You mean it's a total sausage festival? Yeah, you could say that. But I won't, as I don't care for that expression; male genitalia should never be reduced to a slab of ground up meat. Member semantics aside, I was genuinely alarmed by the gender inequality this film's cast was putting out there. I don't mind if the gender inequality goes the other way; in that, there are more women than men. In other words, that's a sexist double standard I can get behind. However, in the case of there being more men than women, unless the men dress in drag, I'm not going to have anything to write about. Discounting the all-girl marching band that appear at the end of the film, the con artist who dresses like an out of work fortune teller, and the film's prerequisite milfy goddess, we're looking at an eight to one ratio. I'm no math whiz. Seriously, I'm not; I can barely add and subtract. Oh, well, if that's the case. Let me break it down for you. No, wait, forget about that. There are more men in this film than there are women. End of story. Didn't you say earlier that this film is a "giallo"? Yeah, so? Um, don't giallos usually feature attractive women being slaughtered by killers wearing black gloves? You're absolutely right, they do. But this isn't your average giallo.

I know, what's the point of making, and, in turn, watching, a giallo if women aren't the one's being killed? It should be noted that men are killed in giallos as well. Yeah, assholes in lime green turtlenecks who get in the killer's way when they're trying stab an attractive woman at the end of a dark alleyway. No, what we want to see when we sit in front of a giallo are super-stylish set pieces that involve super-stylish women being murdered by faceless, not-so super-stylish psychopaths wearing black gloves.

Would it shock you to learn that Dalila Di Lazzaro (Flesh for Frankenstein) is more than enough woman? More than enough woman for what? What I mean is, you don't need anymore women when you have got Dalila Di Lazzaro in your movie. So, what you're saying she's good and junk? Good? Junk? What do you think I'm doing here? Of course, she's good and junk. She's the reason I get up in the morning. Yeah, but you get up in the middle of the afternoon. It's just an expression; stop taking everything I say so literally, dingus.

There was an idiom floating around last year that pertained to a binder that was purportedly full of women. Well, you can put that binder away, Dalila Di Lazzaro is the only woman I need. Call me deranged, but that's most romantic thing I have ever heard. Someone should slap that sucker on a greeting card.

You still haven't explained how this film can be called a giallo, yet not contain any stylish set pieces–don't you mean, "super-stylish" set pieces? yeah, those–that boast women being hacked and slashed by a maniac. Haven't you heard, The Pyjama Girl Case is a one body giallo. Who's the lucky body, you ask?

To quote the late great Brittany Murphy in the trailer for that movie I forget the title of, "I'll never tell."

Even though I could tell you now, there was a period of time when I didn't know the identity of the so-called "girl in the yellow pyjamas." And I'm not talking about the period of time before the movie started. No way, man. I didn't know who the girl in the yellow pyjamas was for most of the film's running time. Either that's a testament to the film's cleverness or my own stupidity.

In my defense, it's hard to concentrate on the plot when Dalila Di Lazzaro is wearing nothing but a white sweater. Sure, the sweater might seem a tad on the long side, but it has nagging habit of hiking up whenever the wearer is looking for their panties. I know, how many times can a person look for missing panties over the course of a ninety minute movie? It might not seem like a lot, but there are a total of three separate instances where Dalila Di Lazzaro's awol panties are integral to the plot. Okay, they might not be "integral," but they are the focus of the three scenes they're featured in.

Anyone want to guess what colour her panties are? Here's a hint... No, you know what? Instead of revealing the answer, I'll just post a picture of them somewhere down below. If you guess correctly, you have my permission to head over to the corner store to pick yourself up a lollipop.

As usual, it would seem that I was yet again sidetracked by Dalila Di Lazzaro's panties. Oh, well.

Opening to the sounds of "Your Yellow Pyjama," vocals by Amanda Lear (fuck yeah) and music by Riz Ortolani (double fuck yeah), a little girl stumbles upon the body of a woman without a face in an abandoned car on a beach in Sydney, Australia.

Despite the fact that two relatively young detectives, Inspector Ramsey (Ramiro Oliveros) and Inspector Morris (Rod Mullinar), have been assigned to the case, the supposedly retired Inspector Thompson (Ray Milland) has somehow managed to get involved with the investigation (he basically begs his former boss to be allowed to work the case). While his younger peers seem obsessed with forensics and psychological profiles, Inspector Thompson uses good old fashion police work to get things done.

Meanwhile, in a nearby apartment, Dalila Di Lazzaro, who plays a gorgeous Dutch immigrant who works as a ferry waitress, is busy searching high and low for her panties while her sugar daddy, Professor Douglas (Mel Ferrer), looks on with the kind of wide-eyed amusement one would expect from an elderly gentlemen who gets to fondle Dalila Di Lazzaro on a semi-regular basis.

To the surprise of no one, Inspector's Ramsey and Morris resent the presence of this washed up relic in a Columbo-style trench coat. Using one of his sources, Inspector Thompson learns about Quint (Giacomo Assandri), a hirsute loner who lives near where the body of the faceless woman in the yellow pyjamas was found.

He might live in a squalid hellhole, but you gotta love the view. What I mean is, Quint's neighbour, credited as "Quint's neighbour" (Vanessa Vitale), likes to do her laundry outside Quint's window in black hold-up stockings. And I don't have to tell you, but doing laundry in black hold-up stockings involves a lot of bending over, if you catch my drift. If my drift is currently out of reach to you, Quint uses the sight of his sexy neighbour's panties wedging snugly against her gloriously middle-aged ass crack as a direct result of laundry-based bending to accelerate the masturbation process.

In one of the film's more lighter moments, just as he's leaving his shack, Ray Milland instructs Quint to "Have a good time" while mimicking the jerking off motion with his right hand and then blowing him a snarky kiss.

On top of having a sugar daddy and a red toque, Dalila Di Lazzaro also has a boyfriend named Roy (Howard Ross), a macho fella who works at a steel mill. I have sneaking suspicion that Roy's the one whose been hiding Dalila Di Lazzaro's panties.

Now, this might sound like an overstatement, but "Il Corpo Di Linda" by Riz Ortolani might just be the greatest piece of music ever to be featured in a giallo thriller. And get this, it's used three times over the course of The Pyjama Girl Case. The first instance its used is when one of the younger detectives wanders aimlessly around downtown Sydney; what makes the scene work, besides the music, is the fact that the streets are deserted.

The second time its used is when the chief of police decides to display the nude body of the faceless woman for the public (the idea being that someone might be able to identify her). And whereas the scene with the young detective wandering alone downtown, this particular sequence is filled with people.

My favourite usage of "Il Corpo Di Linda" is when Dalila Di Lazzaro is left in the lurch by her sugar daddy and forced to prostitute herself at a truck stop/motel. The music kicks in just as Dalila De Lazzaro and her two unctuous clients hit the stairs that lead to their modest room overlooking the highway (their underage cousin or nephew is there as well, but he just watches). The combination of the tracks unrelenting techno beat and the sleazy nature of the sex (paunchy bellies covered sweat press against her delicate frame in a desperate attempt to attain corporeal satisfaction) are what make the scene the jewel in this film's convoluted crown.

When Roy and her Italian husband Antonio (Michele Placido) discover Dalila Di Lazzaro has runaway, they team up to find her. Wait, Dalila Di Lazzaro has a sugar daddy, a boyfriend named "Roy," and an Italian husband? What can I say? The gal likes to keep her options open.

Speaking of Italian husbands, what I found strange was the fact that no one in this film has an Australian accent. All the characters, including Quint's neighbour, seem to be immigrants. Instead of seeing this as some kind of negative, I have chosen to view as a positive, as we rarely ever see the Australian immigrant experience depicted on film; well, at least I haven't.

I'll leave you with a free tip: When watching The Pyjama Girl Case, make sure to pay close attention the girl in the yellow pyjama's ass. And, no, I'm just saying that to be lewd and lascivious. I'm serious, study her ass carefully when it's on display for public consumption, as its mild badonk is the key to unlocking this film's many secrets.

Oh, and in case you haven't figured it out yet, Dalila Di Lazzaro's panties are as black as the night sky. Funny enough, the panties attached to the well-oiled undercarriage of Quint's neighbour are black as well. I wonder if there's connection? You mean a black pantie connection? I doubt it. It's probably just a coincidence.

Flesh for Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey, 1973)

Even though I've seen his distinctive, panty-moistening, angular mug pop up in countless films over the years, I don't think I've ever seen him in a motion picture where his unique brand of European madness was the focal point from start to finish. In the wonderfully lurid Flesh for Frankenstein (a.k.a. Andy Warhol's Frankenstein), it's all Udo, all the time. I know, you're thinking to yourself, what's an Udo? Oh, you silly mongoose, he's not a what, he's a man, a flawless German man. And unlike a lot of folks out there, especially those you fidgeting in the dark, I never really bought into any of that depression era malarkey that stated that Germans were the so-called "master race." However, in the case of Udo Kier (Verführung: Die grausame Frau), I'm afraid to say it, but he is in fact better than everyone else. Well, at least when it comes to acting totally meshugana in a laboratory setting he is, as no-one comes close to touching the uncut crazy Udo puts out there in this Paul Morrissey-directed 3-D gore-fest (I'll take "Arterial Spray" for 2,000, Alex). Unflinching in his commitment to the deeply warped cause of his loopy character, Udo utters his deranged dialogue with an unwell grace. Sniveling, uncouth, and megalomaniacal, yet beautiful and alluring at the same time, Udo manages to make his mad scientist seem likable, even when he's penetrating the gallbladder of his girl zombie in full view of his bug-eyed lab assistant. What am I talking about? If anything, his unseemly encounter on the dissecting table with his "Serbian goddess" was probably one of the most romantic scenes I've ever seen. Of course, you should take everything I just said with a grain of salt; after all, I am on the cusp of being officially declared mentally ill in the province of Manitoba. Okay, maybe not "ill," but I'm definitely unstable.

The girl zombie (Dalila Di Lazzaro) with the perforated gallbladder languishing amongst the tubes and electrodes of the film's primary laboratory is a shining example of healthy womanhood. The boy zombie, however, is another story completely. Unsatisfied with the quality of the heads floating around in the towns and villages on the outskirts of his castle in Vojvodina, Baron Frankenstein (Udo Kier) and Otto (Arno Juerging), the Baron's sycophantic lab assistant, are determined to find a head worthy of their hunky torso. Hoping to complete his boy zombie so that it can mate with his already put together girl zombie, Frankenstein needs to find a head that boasts a Serbian nose ("the perfect nasum"), yet, at the same time, has the brain of a sex maniac (a head that contains the brain of a prudish blacksmith will not do).

Where will they find a head that is suitable for Baron's specific needs? How about a bordello? It just happens that the Baron knows the location of one. The Baron and his lab assistant stake out the entrance of a local bordello, and wait for a body sporting the right kind of head to walk out the door. Luckily for the Baron, Nicholas (Joe Dallesandro), a viral stableboy, and his friend Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic), a wannabe monk who despises sexual intercourse, are getting their orgy needs fulfilled by a gaggle of affable prostitutes, well, Nicholas is anyway; Sacha is basically sulking in the corner, pressing his unlicked penis against the modestly hairy surface of his Serbian inner thighs.

Unfortunately, though, it's Sacha's head that catches the attention of the picky Baron (he was rather taken by his pronounced Serbian nose). Removing it with a pair of specially designed head clippers, the Baron and his lab assistant leave Nicholas unconscious on the side of the road next to Sacha's now headless body. Groggy and confused (he was out cold before his pal's head was chopped off), Nicholas wanders off to meet with Baroness Katrin Frankenstein, an eyebrowless vixen played by Monique van Vooren (Sugar Cookies). Yeah, that's right, he has an appointment to see the Baron's wife and sister (they have two kids together) at their castle. You see, before the head lopping incident, Nicholas and the Baroness were constantly running into one another. And since her brother won't impale her vaginal tract with his aristocratic penis anymore, she decides to hire the strapping stableboy as her new man servant/boy-toy.

The Baroness, eager to show off her latest slice of chiseled man candy, and the Baron, itching to unveil his girl zombie and boy zombie (who have been dressed in orthopedic corsets and puffy shirts), the Frankenstein's sit down for supper. Suffice it to say, the awkwardness that transpires over the course of the meal is off the charts in terms of off-kilter one-upmanship. Since no-one is gonna come right out ask me who I thought came away from the bizarre show and tell victorious, I'll just go ahead and state that I thought the Baron won the day when it came to outdoing his spouse/sibling. He did, after all, make two people from scratch. All the Baroness did was hire a man to have sex with her on a semi-regular basis. The look on Nicholas' face when he sees that his friend's severed head has been transplanted onto the body of one of the Baron's zombies is pretty consistent with the trauma that normally accompanies that painful moment when you discover that the head of someone close to you has been relocated to a completely different torso.

While Nicholas tries to figure away to rescue Sacha's head from a life of ghoulish servitude, the Baron and Otto are down in the lab trying get their walking corpses to mate with one another. Repeatedly instructing his female zombie to kiss his male zombie, the Baron grows increasingly frustrated by the male zombie's lack of arousal after each command to "kiss him" fails to bare any erectile fruit. Unaware that Sacha's brain is not wired for sex, the Baron starts to loose it. Blaming everything from the blood they used to outside agitators, the Baron is determined to get his zombies to procreate, as it's his dream to create a race of superior beings with Serbian noses.

The way the Baroness went to town on Nicholas' armpit–and when I say "went to town," I mean to imply that she was practically inhaling his axillary cavity with the whole of her mouth–was vulgar and unladylike. Not only was her questionable dining etiquette setting a bad example for her children, the excessive slurping sound she made as she mock devoured his sweaty cavity was wrong on almost every imaginable level. Watching her irregular approach to lasciviousness via a two-way mirror, the Frankenstein children, a creepy brother and sister duo whose genitals have yet to reach the operational phase of their existence, will probably hump erratically as adults thanks to their mother's untoward display.

The same goes for Otto, whose thrusting outlook has, no doubt, been somewhat sullied by the Baron's proclivity for poking pulsating wounds. Wounds, pulsating or otherwise, should not, I repeat, should not be penetrated by foreign objects, especially when they're in the process of healing. The human body has been outfitted with an abundance of pre-cut wounds to penetrate, ones that have been designed to absorb a wide-array of physical entities, so the need to create new wounds is completely unnecessary.

However, the mind of your average mad scientist works differently than most people. The desire to insert things into places that weren't meant to have things inserted into them seems to consume the entirety of their being. After dismounting his female zombie (he pleasured himself utilizing her abdominal wound as a makeshift vagina), Baron Frankenstein says to Otto, "to know death, you have to fuck life in the gallbladder." Briefly removing the modesty patch that covers her actual vagina, as if to say, I have no interest in this puckered mound of opulent flesh, Otto, imitating his master, begins caressing the stitches that snake seductively along the female zombie's succulent stomach with his tongue. Once his misguided attempt at foreplay is over, he's ready to pierce her wound. Of course, all doesn't go as planned (he's not as experienced as the Baron when it comes to performing gash-based cunnilingus), and the dumbfounded lab assistant has nothing but a floor covered with vital organs to show for his oral trouble.

With his slicked back hair (floppy bangs are for charlatans and child molesters), his eyes, which are constantly oozing a steely brand of Teutonic determination, don't merely look at you, they devour every inch of your pathetic aura, whether you're a hunky stableboy with an anachronistic accent or a jealous underling with low self-esteem, and his exquisite bone structure is as sharp as the barbs on Gitane Demone's gag-style harness (its knifelike precision ridicules your uncouth lumpiness with every sauve glance), Udo Kier is a revelation as Baron Frankenstein, the dreamiest sociopath to ever don a lab coat.

Now, I've seen a lot of cinematic kooks over the years announce that they plan on creating an entire race of zombies whose sole purpose is to carry out their brainsick bidding, and, in most cases, you laugh at them. But when someone of Udo's stature uses a word, like, say, "bidding," you take them seriously.

While there's plenty of camp to savour in Udo's portrayal of the world's most famous unlicensed surgeon, and I use the word "camp" affectionately, it's not all self-parody. The genuine sense of surprise he shows when his male zombie's primary sex organ fails to become engorged with blood after being kissed by his female zombie was rather touching, and the manner in which he pimped out his male zombie to his cock-starved sister allowed the doctor to display his rarely seen tender side.

The statuesque Dalila Di Lazzaro (Phenomena) may not utter a single word as the repeatedly poked and prodded female zombie in Flesh for Frankenstein, but the profound length of her legs, the unequaled symmetry of her refined Italian features, and her overall gorgeousness more than made up for her lack of verbalized dialogue. Besides, what kind of dialogue would she have uttered anyway? Other than: "My nipples are chilly, could someone get me a sweater?" or "I was wondering, yeah, is there anyway I could get my modesty patch upgraded? It's making my pussy itch like a motherfucker," I can't think of anything her character might want to express orally. No, I think stone-faced and well-proportioned was the way to go for Miss Di Lazzaro, as it gave her female zombie a real sense of muted disquietude.

Oh, and one more thing, Di Lazzaro's performance reminded me of my acting debut when I played a guard in a grade five production of... (holy crap, I can't remember the name of the play). Anyway, I recall being so excited over the fact that they were gonna let me make my own costume, that I totally forgot that I was going have to stand in front the entire school. Sure, all I had to do was stand there while holding a spear (an old ski pole spray painted silver). Plus, I was going to be wearing a mask for the duration of my scene (a cardboard box covered in tinfoil). But still, I was terrified. Now imagine having Udo Kier lying on top you, finger-banging the bejesus out of your gallbladder, while Paul Morrissey and a bunch of Italians (the film was shot just outside of Rome) stand off to side watching. It makes my guard duty sound like a walk through a butterfly-infested estuary.

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