cinema history class: yellow fever: the rise and fall of the giallo

Session: Documentaries, Week 3
Movie: Yellow Fever: The Rise and Fall of the Giallo (2016)
Directed by Calum Waddell 

As I did last year for documentary month, I am temporarily abandoning my usual format.

Giallo is a genre of lurid Italian crime movie, often seen as a an ancestor of the American slasher movie. The term, derived from the Italian word for yellow, came about because of the yellow wrappers of similar Italian slasher novels. Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento are among the most notable directors of gialli.

Yellow Fever is full of interesting material and clips, and good meaty interviews. But, rather than tell a coherent story, it kind of jumps all over the place. It also devotes an outsized amount of attention on Dario Argento.* Of course, that makes sense in the context that this documentary was made for release as an extra on a Blu-ray reissue of Tenebrae, which is one of Argento's best-known films. Incidentally, we saw that one in class three and a half years ago -- I wrote about that session here. I think I would have better-appreciated this if it had either done a better job of focusing on Argento (and been billed as a documentary about him) or if it had done a better job of covering the entire genre. The halfway approach threw me off.

Bottom line? This was a documentary that was good enough to make me wish it were better.

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*Not for nothing, but he kind of looks like a half-melted wax figure.