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DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING

SOMEONE IS HUNTING CHILDREN IN THIS DISTURBING GIALLO THRILLER



★★★★☆ (Worth the Watch)

Director: Lucio Fulci

1972


It takes a village. That’s the crux of Don’t Torture a Duckling, a murder mystery far better than anything else Fulci wrote and directed. Unlike films such as Zombi 2 (basically, I Walked with a Zombie meets Night of the Living Dead) and The House with the Cemetery (The Turning of the Screw lite), this feels personal and controlled. Fulci takes you to a rugged land that’s mystical and new while also showing off his brand of stylized ridiculousness people love him for. And unlike his other movies, it has a tangible message—and a warning.


The film starts with a shot of a highway that could be any highway familiar to us, filled with cars and people to help if we need it. Then the camera pans, taking us deeper into an Italian village overgrown with forest, cupped by mountainous hills. Though the story is supposed to take place in modern times, the town is separated from the modern world. One character even brags about owning a television.


Here, children run as wild as the chickens in the street, and the boys at the center of the mystery light cigarettes before spying on two hookers and their johns. Without supervision, the boys—easily under the age of ten—pay a prostitute to dance for them, are seduced by a naked young woman, and wind up irking a possible witch practicing dark magic with bones from the graves of infants. All the while, their only paternal comfort comes from a priest trying to keep his young charges from straying. Don’t Torture a Duckling is a literal fight against good and evil—the church and sin. Temptation is everywhere and even the protagonist reporter is able to tempt the priest with a cigarette as they’re talking about liberalism corrupting youth. When it comes to religion, Fulci’s message is a neon sign.


When the boys start turning up dead, my knee-jerk reaction to blame the parents eventually faded. It becomes clear that a chasm exists between the town’s haves and have-nots, as evidenced by one character driving a sports car around villagers cleaning sheets in a community well. These boys have parents who are too busy trying to put food on the table to watch them, leaving them vulnerable. Early in the film, a buxom young woman (Miss Patrizia) gets naked and teases one of the doomed children, and this scene is difficult to watch, but it makes a point: These kids are at the mercy of whoever is giving them attention.


After the first boy goes missing, a cocky reporter from Milan named Andrea Martelli breezes into a police interview to a smooth jazz theme that lets you know he’s the giallo protagonist. Trying to bed the local fox only cements it. By the time the second boy is found dead in the water, the reporter is just a helpless spectator like the townspeople, whose panic becomes vigilante bloodlust. None of the villagers in Don’t Torture a Duckling point the finger at themselves. Suspects become victims and all the while, bumbling cops drive past boys walking on deserted roads, ignoring them until there’s a body to dig up.


One of the suspects is the striking Magiara, doing voodoo spells and gnashing her teeth like a feral cat. Whoo boy, does Fulci love his hysterical females. Go ahead and pick any film and you’ll find a gorgeous woman who should be committed. I’m not going to go too hard on him because aside from this, he respected his actresses. Unlike some of his contemporaries (cough, Sergio Martino, cough, Paolo Cavara, cough) who peddled smut under the guise of giallo, he only used nudity or crazed ladies when plot or character development commanded it. So, I give him a pass on yet another woman diving off the deep end like a meth-head with a mouth full of Coke and Mentos.



But is Magiara the one killing the boys? There are other suspects. Is the killer the priest who watches over them or the town simpleton turned extortionist? Could it be the woman raising a mute child, the voodoo witch, or Miss Patrizia who was recently involved in a drug scandal? I thought I knew who the murderer was, and then I was right and then I was wrong and then I was right… Fulci does a tremendous job throwing you off balance with lots of blood, new witnesses, and a Donald Duck doll. You’ll keep guessing until the last scene.


And what a scene it is. That final death made me laugh—only Fulci could get away with such un-special special effects, only he could give us an excellent exposition overload in the last few minutes. If you’re going to watch anything in his large collection, make it Don’t Torture a Duckling, a personal film that asks its audience, “Who is watching your children?”





GENRES: Giallo, Serial Killer


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