A Dragonfly For Each Corpse seems at first glance to be a by-the-numbers copy of the Italian type of giallo, incorporating most of its tropes, but there are enough deviations from the formula that make it one of the better films in its genre. At the center of this film lies the cliché of the puritan-killer, a negative altruist who believes he or she is making the world a better place by ridding it of the morally impure. Akin to the antagonist in Lucio Fulci's 1972 masterpiece Don't Torture a Duckling, the murderer in Dragonfly is even more vicious, although the psychological motivation ultimately isn't as rich, layered or political as in Duckling. Naschy portrays the police investigator assigned to the case, and his character is about as far from Waldemar Daninsky as you're ever likely to see. It's wonderful to see Naschy portraying the cop in one giallo immediately after playing the red herring in the previous one (Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll). Donning a big bushy mustache (hubba-hubba!) and perpetually puffing a fat cigar, Naschy plays Inspector Scaporella to the hilt; and as screenwriter, Naschy serves up a slice of Milanese life that runs the gamut from the posh high-end aristocrats to the low-life street scum, and the red light districts that they frequent. Even though it's a trope of the genre as a whole, Naschy and Klimovsky display a particularly strong contempt for humanity in this giallo – no strata of people are left unscathed, unlike in the films of uber-Marxist Fulci, whose compassion always lies with the salt of the earth. But what Naschy does that I've never seen in an Italian giallo is give so much life to the protagonist's love interest. Mrs. Scaporella, played by genre-icon Erika Blanc, decides to try and solve the murders on her own, but what's Mrs. Scaporella's motivation to solve the crimes before her husband does? Could she be involved in the murders in some way? Though certainly no Nick and Nora Charles, Inspector and Mrs. Scaporella make a great pair, and it's ultimately the performances of Naschy and Blanc that qualify Dragonfly as a good movie. They and their banter help elevate this bloody body count of a film to one of the best Naschy (and Klimovsky) ever made. Very hard to find a copy of this, but it's out there and worth searching for.
Review of A Dragonfly for Each Corpse
