A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services - Fidani Book Club

I've been having lots of fun with my pals at Eurotrash Paradise on a monthly book club project where I'm taking on some Demofilo Fidani / Miles Deem movies.  I will archive the posts at the end of the month, but this one really jumped out at me.  

Fidani gets a terrible reputation, and I blame Tom Weisser and his proven to be semi-useless book SPAGHETTI WESTERNS for a bulk of it.  Stunt oriented, idiosyncratic and never afraid to be quirky, these movies may not be standard, or even excellent-but they are also unique.  People call Ed Wood quirky instead of incompetent, but we let the one time owner of Video Search of Miami  influence fandom forever?  Try these yourself.  

Now then, here is the entry on the weird sex / giallo hybrid A.A.A...

A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services is a very very DAMN YOU DAVEY
Z film if I've ever met one. Fidani takes his unique approach, that is NOT incompetence in my book by the way, and grafts it to the Giallo genre. But it isn't much of a Giallo for much of the running time at all, it's a fun sex film loaded with red herrings and an occasional murder scene that all comes together in the final reel.

The killer wears YELLOW gloves. Yep, I DEEM this film very much a Fidani film already.

We meet Paola Senatore as the young girl that looks like she pretty much looked for most of her career. Down for anything, but especially dirty EuroSex. Bless her breasts, I love this woman. After a little bit of back and forth with her parents (including Hunt Powers as the nerdy DAD-which doesn't work at all) she
decides that her family doesn't give her enough money. She is apparently rich and Dad works his ass off, but she would rather go whore it up and make that money. I have no idea what she wants to spend it on. She has a humble boyfriend who notices an uptick in her oral and vaginal skillset pretty quickly after we see her take a few clients that have her do funny stuff. My favorite is her first run where a muscle dude pretty much has us ready to lead into her big gig when she strips down (did I say I love those breasts?) and he brings in
his elderly mom and introduces her as the gal that is going to work on her back! HAH, he fucks her anyways. Thankfully mom isn't there. That would be a boner buster.

But every single client gets wacked by Yellow Gloves in semi graphic fashion. What is strange about these scenes is that they are actually really well done. The flip from sex flick to straight ahead thriller is jarring. Fidani. Totally Fidani.

So who could it be? The room mate (Simone Blondell, Fidani's daughter in real life, hot 70s Eurochick in the films)? The sleazy pimp who is actually not all that bad in the pantheon of peddlers? The Nerd Dad who seems to have temper issues (and knows where his daughter is by her friends and figures out what she
is doing)? Hmmm.... maybe Ettore Manni? Nah, he is the cop.

The ending is awesome, Fidani throws in a few extra red herrings before doing the stunt oriented (could the killer really keep falling down those stairs, even around turns??) finish. There are tears, there are deaths and there is a awesome groovetastic score to boot.

Also, look for some weirdness in not one, but two weirdly edited "chase" scenes that I love. I have to snag them out of the film and post them up online for everyone to check out-they really keep the film flowing between breasts and blood.

Now, I mentioned this is a DYDZ flick, and it is. I'm really taken with it, but if you are a giallo fan you'll be bummed out by the somewhat flaccid approach taken to the thrilling elements. If you want tons of EuroTrashSex you'll get some-with additional plot and even a few comedy moments. But it always feels
like it is building to the thriller, because you get sex and stalk right on each other. That would slow my in theater masturbation moments right the hell down if I was an average fella lured in by the title. In a raincoat.
 

But it all adds up in my own Abacus of Zee Asylum way-it is off balance and kept me guessing. Blondell is easy to look at and does a great job in a role that is off to the side for much of the film, but when she pops up it is always important.

I love reading that the film isn't entirely hopeless despite it's director.  Sure, if you want to take that attitude before you watch it, then of course you'll be surprised. But as a weird little hybrid film that seemed to want to
follow the spazmo bouncing ball to commercial success it is a glorious little slab of confusion!


The big finale...what is interesting about this is that we are actually watching a flash forward and a flash back at the same time. The narrative starts to lead into this scene, then jumps forward as Paola Senatore reacts to the newspaper printing the story, and then back into the scene.  I love it!!  Did the killer really need to roll down TWO flights of stairs?  Yep. YEP!