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A Family That Sleeps Together Kills Together
Sergio Bergonzelli’s IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH (aka Nelle pieghe della carne) is nothing short of demented. Touted as one of the most over-the-top films in the giallo genre, ItFotF won’t disappoint anyone looking for an hour and a half of incest, murder and Freudian-influenced psycho babble.
The film’s plot, convoluted to the point of making even the most murky film noir seem straightforward by comparison, centers on an amazingly dysfunctional family who seem to go about their day to day existence in a never ending cycle that goes something like this:
– Family (composed of mother and son and daughter who are openly getting it on) receive unexpected male guest.
– Guest makes sexual advances towards daughter.
– The guest is murdered by either the son or daughter
– The mother, son and daughter destroy all evidence, including the body.
This whole process takes place 4 or 5 times throughout the film (I sort of lost count) and occurs as a direct result of a night depicted at the beginning of the film in which the daughter kills and decapitates her father after raping her. On the same night, a thief on the run winds up on this one family’s property and spots the mother burying the body. The film then jumps ahead 10 years later, when the family starts to get a slew of visitors, each triggering traumatic memories in the daughter’s mind and each resulting in murder. One visitor just happens to be the thief, fresh out of jail and hell bent on black-mailing the family.
As randy guys keep getting the axe, we learn more and more details about the fateful night, which was the genesis of all this violence. The more which is revealed, however, the more this film becomes completely baffling. Is the father really dead? Who was it that really raped the daughter? Is there another sibling locked up in a mental institution?
In my absolute favorite plot twist, the film launches into a full-blown black and white Nazi death camp flashback as the mother hands her son two cyanide tablets for the purposes of killing one of the surprise guests, remembering that “they worked well enough the first time [she] saw them used.”
As it turns out, the mother witnessed her own mother and sister killed in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Her own life was spared by a Nazi who presumably just wanted to use her as a sex slave. Perhaps the sleaziest moment in this film, it seems that this entire death camp sequence was worked in for the soul purpose of working in more fully nude women. SCHINDLER’S LIST, eat your heart out.
I suppose the argument could be made that the fractured nature of this film’s narrative is meant to reflect the fragile nature of the human psyche and the process of memory, but I feel that that would be far too generous an assessment. Rather, the ludicrous nature of this film’s plot seems more indicative of the lack of a decent editor and/or anyone who could have monitored little things like continuity.
Entertaining in a car crash kind of way, IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH is worth watching for it’s time-capsule value as it is a perfect example of the kind of lurid Italian cinema known as giallo which had pretensions of being artistic. Perhaps not as well known as works by Argento or Bava, ItFotF could easily be confused for a film by one of the two directors.
Available now on DVD from Severin Films, connoisseurs of the genre will appreciate adding this title to their library, although they may not appreciate the so-so transfer of this film, which retained many scratches and imperfections along with the headache-inducing mock-technocolor.
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