Scarecrow-88 Psychosexual madness from director Renato Polselli regarding a psychotic impotent psychiatrist and his equally nutty wife who obsessively loves him to the point that she allows him to nearly strangle her to death! Mickey Hargitay stars as Herbert Lyutak who preys on young women, his demented eyes crawling up their legs, crotches and necks until the urge to strangle them proves too great to resist. We see in an opening scene where he offers a young woman, barely past her teenage years, a ride home, stopping on the way, pursuing her as she runs for her life. Catching up to her, he bashes her with a branch, while gripping her throat tightly, ripping away her clothes, with a look of sheer rage on his face..the inability to have sexual contact has created a madness beyond his control. We know right away what he's capable of. After this, he nearly murders his wife, Marcia(..the ridiculously sexy Rita Calderoni), who knows about his activities. Attempting to set himself up by tipping the police on alert for the perpetrator, someone else stabs a young woman in a telephone booth. Then, a whore, who was to be Herbert's target, gathers the knife used as the murder weapon wishing to talk to him, is drowned in the bathtub of her flat after being flogged repeatedly with a whip across the body. A suspect is a voyeuristic parking lot attendant, but he's merely an obvious red herring who actually eyewitnesses the Lyutaks' maid being put to sleep by a suspect off-camera. Living with the Lyutaks is relative Joaquine(Christa Barrymore)who may in fact be Marcia's lover.All sorts of sleazy, sordid shenanigans are on display in this crazy, violent giallo with a cast who lets it all hang out, holding nothing back, their wacky characters unrestrained. Bulging eyes, rough sexual violence, and harsh behavior using all sorts of tools add to the devious fun. To enjoy this, you need to have a degree of tolerance towards tasteless acts and outbursts of insanity. Hargitay's eyes, how they chillingly stare down potential young victims, are certainly hard to forget, as are his treatments towards those unlucky ones he treats harshly. The real star is Calderoni, whose love-crazed wife harbours an unhinged passion for her man, and the film highlights certain bizarre sadomasochistic fantasies she has regarding her husband and those who live within their home. The violence isn't gory but uncomfortable to watch at times because it deals mostly with naked(..or skimpily clothed) women being mistreated. Calderoni has quite a marvelous seductive presence and I couldn't take my eyes off of her. The mystery of who else, besides Hargitay, was killing, shouldn't be that hard to figure out. It's the outrageous behavior of the central characters which dominate this film. I watched the Italian version not the American one(..which alters the story regarding a violent tour through Vietnam which shaped Hargitay's dementia).

christopher-underwood Sensationally sleazy giallo with loads of fab 70's gear worn by the men as well as the women and stacks of lurid action. When it's not sex or death on the screen, then it's shades of S&M in the cellar with chains, whips and other implements. Great looking, well OTT, eyes wide open shocker. Vivid killing in waterfall at the start sets the tone and we never look back, even the dead must have their clothing arranged in the sexiest possible way. Delirious ending but then this movie is true to it's title all the way. Perhaps the directing is not as stylish as some giallo and the music is rather muted. Some of the performances, especially towards the end are a bit uncontrolled but this is undeniably a very wild ride from start to finish.

lazarillo Thanks to a certain gray market outfit in south Florida that searches for obscure videos, I got stuck with the shorn American print of this movie, but it does have some very ridiculous added "Vietnam" footage which might make it the first movie ever to deal with the fallout from that war. A deranged Vietnam vet and forensic psychologist is driven by his traumatic war experiences (and implied impotence) to murder mini-skirted Italian co-eds (just like he did in 'Nam I'm sure). His loyal wife tries to cover up for him the only way she knows how. Mickey Hargitay is the name star. After seeing "Bloody Pit of Horror" I had no trouble buying him as a deranged killer, but a police psychologist?--c'mon. Mickey had apparently been making bad movies in Italy for so long by this point that he'd started speaking with an Italian accent. (Seriously, why did they cast third-rate American actors in these movies and then dub them when they're speaking English?). Rita Calderoni plays the wife. She wasn't a bad actress, but the enjoyment of her performance varies inversely with the amount of clothes she is wearing, and she's a little overdressed here (if you want to see a lot more of her check out the appropriately named "Nude for Satan"). There are also a lot of anonymous Italian girls in impossibly short minis (unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of sleazy movie that looks up their skirts while they're being strangled or shows them topless after they're dead). There's also a strange, recurring dream sequence where a shirtless Mickey strangles himself with a chain while his naked wife, maid(!),and college-age niece(!!) all writhe around on the floor at his feet. Anchor Bay apparently has included both this version and the longer European version on their legitimate DVD and it costs half as much used as what the more unscrupulous bootleggers are charging. Avoid just getting the American version, but I would recommend this to moral degenerates who enjoy this kind of sleazy, Italian-made filth (you know who you are).

Maciste_Brother Major Spoilers!!!DELIRIUM is more like a trashy, super sleazy twisted soap opera than a giallo. The overwrought direction/script/acting/sleaze sends DELIRIUM in the irremediably silly and worthless category. If you thought BASIC INSTINCT was misogynistic in its view of women and lesbians, you have seen nothing yet compared to what DELIRIUM has to offer. Every woman is a "helpless" killer or a helpless victim. They're all lesbian, unfaithful, and insane. And more importantly, naked. This might sound shocking to some and some scenes do shock a little but it's because the film/scenes are more annoying than anything else. DELIRIUM is very typical 1970s Italian provincial style of film-making. The overacting and over everything is something more akin to the style of acting seen in cheap Italian soaps than movies, which is why DELIRIUM ends up looking like a twisted version of DAYS OF OUR LIVES.The story and direction are remarkably convoluted and confusing, and deliberately so. This in order to hide the obvious potboiler storyline: An important and rich doctor is married to a beautiful young woman. The problem is, the doctor is IMPOTENT and the wife is still a VIRGIN. The two have never consumed their marriage (gasp!). The frustration of being an impotent man married to a virginal wife is shown as the main reason for the doctor's dementia and why he goes around killing young women, as seen during the opening sequence when he brutally kills a young girl in river. After this murder, the doctor becomes a suspect and is interrogated by the police. The wife, who knows her husband is the killer, is madly in love with him, and will stand by him no matter what. As the police are interrogating him, another woman is strangled at a phone booth. Because of this one murder (and subsequent murders), the doctor is not seen as the main suspect anymore. Who is behind these new murders? Who doesn't want the doctor to be found guilty by the police? Who wants to protect him? Yes, you've guessed it. The wife, of course. The story is so melodramatic and stupid that the film actually tries to make the sick doctor look like the hero by the end of the movie by portraying every woman (the wife, her friend and the maid) as total nut cases and whores. The doctor's massive serial killing streak (at the beginning of the film, we are told that there had already been 17 murders) is suddenly trumped by the protective wife's recent serial killings. Needless to say, the end result makes it look like that it's okay if a man kills tons of whorish women because he's impotent, but it's wrong for whorish, insane women who kill for love. But the really funny thing about all of this is that even though the wife is shown to be totally devoted to her husband, to the point of wanting to kill in order to save him, she is having an affair with the maid AND her best friend. This begs the question: how much in love is she really with her husband if she's having sex with two women? I guess the virginal wife needed to get her kicks somewhere.So, the husband kills because he's impotent (what's with Italian movies and impotence anyway?). And the virginal but whorishly bisexual wife kills because she loves & wants to save her impotent, serial killer husband. Does that make any sense to anyone?!?! The storyline is so divorced from logic that it's pointless trying to make any sense of it. Throughout the movie, we see the wife crying because their marriage is less than perfect. Boo-hoo! Who freaking cares. I don't know what kind of message the movie tries to send (if any) but it seems to say that having a fulfilled marriage is the ultimate raison d'etre in life. Yeah, sure!And to think, all of this mayhem could have been prevented if viagra had existed back then.Anyway, to make things even worse, not only is the direction convoluted but, technically speaking, it's really terrible too. Some scenes are totally disjointed. In one scene, the husband is fully clothed. In the next scene, he's bare-chested and seemingly naked. The sloppy editing and direction reminds me of the style of direction seen in old Bollywood movies, where people would be seen entering an elevator with one type of clothes and leave the elevator with a totally different wardrobe. Those looking for sleaze might get a kick out of DELIRIUM but the trashy romance style of film-making might hinder any fun to be had from the shameless exhibitionism on display from time to time. Watching DELIRIUM is a more frustrating experience than an entertaining one, even in the "it's so bad it's good" way. I know, you can't take a film like this too seriously but that doesn't change the fact that it's almost totally worthless. The only good thing about this crappy, twisted soap-opera-disguised-as-a-giallo is the beautiful Rita Calderoni. She's one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. She even comes out looking pretty good from this stinking pile of crap, which is hard to believe!