Italy’s 1990s Answer to ‘Cruising’? The Forgotten Giallo ‘The Final Stop’

It’s a good month for fans of Italian exploitation movies. Hot on the heels of Severin‘s new 4K UHD edition of Antonio Margheriti’s “Indiana Jonesploitation” trilogy (“Antonio Margheriti & the Jungles of Doom”), Vinegar Syndrome is releasing the ninth volume in its “Forgotten Gialli” collection. In keeping with the series’ tradition, “Forgotten Gialli: Volume Nine” showcases several compelling obscurities, in this case from a period (the 1990s) thought to be past giallo‘s prime — but which in fact yielded several fine late entries in the genre.

In Bruno Mattei’s “Madness” (1993), a comic book artist known for her violent imagery becomes the target of a stalker posing as one of her creations. Alfonso Brescia’s 1991 giallo “Murder in Blue Light” is a New York-set slasher film with “Last House on the Left” star David Hess as a cynical detective protecting a model with a naughty secret. Last but certainly not least, Pierfrancesco Campanella’s “Bugie Rosse” (1993) follows a reporter who goes undercover in the gay underworld to catch a killer — when all the evidence points to the reporter himself.

All these films are of interest to any self-respecting giallo enthusiast, but “Bugie Rosse,” released in English-speaking territories as “The Final Scoop,” is particularly intriguing, not only for its own strengths but for its relationship to a key giallo text — even if that “giallo” isn’t typically thought of as one and comes from an American director rather than an Italian. Campanella may have claimed to be inspired by a news story about an actual murder when he came up with the idea for “The Final Scoop,” but it’s hard to imagine his movie existing without William Friedkin’s “Cruising” as a precursor.

‘Cruising’©United Artists/Courtesy Everett Collection

Released in 1980, “Cruising” came out at about the midpoint of giallo’s heyday, 10 years after Dario Argento’s “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage” and 10 years before the titles included in Vinegar Syndrome’s package. Friedkin’s movie about an undercover cop (Al Pacino) who poses as a gay S&M enthusiast in order to catch a serial killer isn’t typically categorized as a giallo, but its provocative juxtaposition of graphic sex with graphic violence, its morally complex murder mystery in which the hero and killer share a lot in common, and much of its iconography come straight out of the Italian subgenre popularized by Argento, Mario Bava, Sergio Martino and others.

Like the less lurid but still kinky “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” a few years earlier, “Cruising” appropriated the imagery and narrative conventions of both gialli and slasher films to create a new American genre: the erotic thriller. Along with Paul Schrader’s “American Gigolo” and Brian De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill,” these movies established the template for the hundreds of erotic thrillers that exploded onto movie screens and video store shelves in the late 1980s and early 1990s, movies that ranged in production value from scrappy Roger Corman programmers like “Body Chemistry” to the big-budget versions of the formula as refined and popularized by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (“Basic Instinct,” “Jade”).

“Cruising” is central to the evolution of the erotic thriller in a number of ways, which is fascinating given the genre’s tendency to lean heterosexual (the murderous lesbians of “Basic Instinct” notwithstanding). As Pacino’s character in “Cruising” goes deeper into the gay club scene to try to catch a killer, he discovers both his own homosexual urges and the dark side that links him to the murderer. This notion of erotic adventure as a transformative experience becomes a go-to motif in straight erotic thrillers as varied as Katt Shea’s Corman-produced feminist spin on the genre, “Stripped to Kill,” and the more mainstream Pacino vehicle “Sea of Love” — not to mention the tantalizingly ambiguous Clint Eastwood thriller “Tightrope,” in which Eastwood plays with his image of unassailable masculinity by implying that his character not only likes to be handcuffed and dominated during sex, but might swing both ways if given the opportunity.

“Cruising” and “Tightrope” get a lot of mileage out of the premise of an investigator chasing their own mirror image, an idea that existed as a staple of giallo at least as far back as Luigi Bazzoni’s “The Fifth Cord” and Sergio Martino’s “The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail,” both released in 1971. With “The Final Scoop,” the wheel of influence spins back around — just as “Cruising” absorbed giallo’s influence and transformed it into something new (the American erotic thriller), “The Final Scoop” riffs on “Cruising” and its many imitators to create a giallo for the 1990s.

‘The Final Scoop’Vinegar Syndrome

The story “The Final Scoop” tells of a happily committed heterosexual (Tomas Arana) discovering his homosexual impulses as he becomes what he pretends to be is straight (no pun intended) out of “Cruising,” but unlike that movie, “The Final Scoop” is also pretty loaded with explicit heterosexual activity. Campanella bounces back and forth between the reporter’s nocturnal adventures in the gay cruising world and his escapades with women, making “The Final Scoop” less a gay giallo like “Cruising” than a hybrid of Friedkin’s movie and all the straight erotic thrillers that imitated it in the years that followed, and which were still flooding theaters and video stores as “The Final Scoop” was released in 1993.

Meanwhile, although “The Final Scoop” is far more restrained than “Cruising,” both in its violence and its leering look at a gay subculture, it still inspired vocal opposition from the gay community, just as Friedkin’s film had in 1980. Viewed today, many of the more extreme characterizations that drew criticism at the time — like a prospective lover who forces a plastic bag over the hero’s head and tells him asphyxiation is “like yoga” — are part of the movie’s outrageous appeal. If the gay characters are all presented as twisted or tragic in some way, well, so are most of the straight characters.

Campanella was so stung by the negative criticism that he hid in his house for a month after “The Final Scoop” came out, but in an interview on the Vinegar Syndrome disc, he comes off as fairly at peace with the movie — as he should, since as with “Cruising,” the film plays better and better the further removed it is from its original cultural moment. It’s also a solid showcase for Arana, an actor who was ubiquitous in small supporting roles in major American movies (“The Last Temptation of Christ,” “The Bodyguard,” “The Hunt for Red October”) for decades, but tended to get significant leading roles only when he worked in Europe. His casting here just adds to the cross-cultural pollination that makes “The Final Scoop” so memorable.

In a serendipitous bit of timing, Vinegar Syndrome also has a new special edition of one of the best and most notorious of those early 1990s erotic thrillers, “Body of Evidence,” hitting 4K UHD and Blu-ray this month. One of the most sexually graphic movies ever to be released by a major studio, the movie follows the erotic thriller genre to its logical conclusion — Madonna plays a woman accused of murdering a man by inducing a heart attack during strenuous sex. The murder weapon is the femme fatale’s body, giving the title a fun double meaning and providing the characters with a lot of very inventive and profane sexually inflected dialogue.

“Forgotten Gialli: Volume Nine” and “Body of Evidence” are now available from Vinegar Syndrome.