3. Don't Torture a Duckling (1972)
An excellent Giallo directed by Lucio Fulci, it is good to see this film being given the attention and loving care it deserves (a release on Shameless Screen Entertainment although my copy is from Blue Underground). A seemingly strong anti-clerical indictment, nevertheless, Fulci declared himself a staunch Catholic throughout his life. A series of young boys are being slaughtered in a small rural Italian mountainside village. Fulci turned genre conventions on its head with this twist - usually it is women in peril. The wonderful Eurosleaze actress Florinda Balkan is flayed to death by village idiots because she is a witch and therefore must have had a hand in the deaths. But the murders keep coming... This is such an excellent movie I could never be bored talking about it, writing about it or watching it. As I said in my Lucio Fulci article - definitely the director's best work and it was indeed the film Fulci was proudest of. I particularly love the final confrontation on a mountaintop and the subsequent slow motion falling to death, bouncing off the rocks, Homer Simpson stylee demise. Can we have an "Ooh! Eeh! Aah! Son of a! Ooh! Eeh! Aah!"